During World War II, I loved reading 10-cent comic books and trading them with friends. I was especially infatuated with Superman, Batman, and Robin because they were fervent American patriots and fiercely anti-Nazi in their extraordinary exploits.

My fascination with those superheroes grew when I learned that two young Jewish men, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, created Superman in 1938 and gave him the Hebrew-sounding birth name “Kal-El.” A year later, another Jewish duo, Bob Kane and Bill Finger, became the literary and artistic creators of Batman.

After the war, my comic book heroes pivoted toward combatting criminals and other villains menacing Superman’s “Metropolis” and Batman’s “Gotham City.” The motives of these two fearless fighters were pure, their morality unquestioned, their emotional lives unexamined. Consequently, their stories became all too predictable.
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That squeaky-clean image of the superhero changed in the 1960s, when New Yorker Stanley Lieber (a.k.a. Stan Lee) transformed the comic book genre by co-creating edgy, sensitive, morose, emotionally challenged characters such as Spider-Man, Iron Man, X-Men, and Fantastic Four for Marvel Comics. As their chief writer, editor, director, and producer for decades, he helped to turn Marvel into an economic and cultural powerhouse.

The modern state of Israel came into existence in 1948, but the forces that led to Jewish sovereignty after nearly 2,000 years of exile were set in motion 70 years earlier.


​Here are 10 major historical events that culminated in Jewish statehood.

1. Leon Pinkser writes Auto-Emancipation (1879)A number of Eastern European Jews reacted to the Russian tsar’s virulent antisemitism by forming Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion), which envisioned the return of Jews to their rightful biblical homeland with Jewish settlement in Palestine as their number one priority.
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They were officially constituted as an organization in 1884 at conference led by Leon Pinsker, a Hovevei Zion leader and author of Auto-Emancipation (1879), which historians regard as the founding document of the modern Zionist movement.

A widely believed myth is that Adolf Hitler was a unique personal aberration in history and his Nazi movement with its reign of terror was a one and done occurrence that lacked any real foundational ideology.

Such a belief is not only false, but is dangerous thinking argues Robert Gellately in his new book Hitler’s True Believers: How Ordinary People Became Nazis (Oxford University Press).

Gellately, a Florida State University history professor, describes in 428 carefully researched pages how Hitler cunningly drew upon three “preexisting conditions” within the German body politic to first legally gain political power in 1933 and then quickly move to bend the overwhelming majority of Germans to his will.
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The weak and little-loved post-WWI Weimar Republic provided few democratic “guardrails” during Hitler’s rise to power. Gellately argues that three long extant forces in Germany – rabid nationalism, a right-wing form of socialism, and virulent antisemitism – paved the path for Hitler’s rise to power. Each force was deeply embedded within pre-Nazi German life and was systematically weaponized by Hitler.

Nearly a century after his death, the name Harry Houdini still evokes in biographer Adam Begley’s words: a  “…spellbinding performer who carved out for himself a niche in show business history by escaping from every conceivable restraint and … mystify millions of people who still cannot solve the mystery of how he did it.”

The “it” was the extraordinary number of times that Houdini, in death defying feats, extricated himself from of a combination of body restraints, including straitjackets, handcuffs, metal chains, body manacles, and diving bells.
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In Houdini: The Elusive American, Adam Begley, the former books editor for the New York Observer and a Guggenheim Fellow, tells the remarkable story of how a Hungarian-born rabbi’s son achieved global fame as the world’s greatest magician and the master of “self liberation.”