SUPERMAN, the red caped comic book and Hollywood hero engaged in an unending fight for truth and justice, is a typically Jewish mythical figure, a newspaper report in Jerusalem yesterday.
The character of Kal-el (God in Hebrew) from the planet Krypton, invented by Jerry Siegel in the 1930s, resonates with Jewish themes, cultural commentators were quoted as saying in the Jerusalem Post.
They point to the Hebrew name, Superman's obligation to leave the planet of his birth after its destruction, the concealment of his character behind the figure of a journalist, Clark Kent, and his mission, which is similar to the old Jewish concept of "Tikkun olam" - restoring the world's wrongs.
"The older I got the more I saw there was something profoundly Jewish to Superman, that he somehow was one of us," said Mr Daniel Schifrin of the US National Foundation for Jewish Culture.
"Like Clark Kent we've been diaspora Jews for so long, being viewed as timid and bookish when underneath there are fierce Hebrew warriors doing God's work," he said.
Jerry Siegel died earlier this year at the age of 81, but his wife, Joanne, said that she had often heard about the Jewish connection to Superman.
Siegel is listed in the Jewish 100, a book ranking the 100 most influential Jews of all time. It includes Moses, the former Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, the ex US secretary of state, Dr Henry Kissinger and Steven Spielberg, the film maker.