Superman and The Real Punk Rockers of History

By: Aaron Silverstein

In a scene from the James Gunn reboot of Superman, Clark Kent muses to Lois Lane about his favorite childhood band, The Mighty Crabjoys, believing them to be “punk rock”. Lois scoffs: “They’re just another pop group.” Later, when she challenges Superman’s hopelessly earnest outlook, “You think everyone is beautiful,” he replies, “Maybe that’s the real punk rock.”

It’s a throwaway line, but one loaded with unexpected weight. Because if “punk” is about defying the dominant culture, challenging the powers that be, and choosing principle over popularity, then perhaps no group in history has embodied that ethos more consistently than the Jewish people.

Created by two Jewish teenagers from Cleveland, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in 1938, Superman himself is a quintessentially Jewish myth. He’s a parallel Moses: launched from a dying world, raised by adoptive parents in a foreign land, and gifted with power not to dominate but to protect. More than just a comic book fantasy, Superman is a defiant answer to Nietzsche’s übermensch - a Jewish response to the 20th century’s obsession with power, purity, and bloodline. The real Superman doesn’t conquer the weak, rather, he uplifts them.

This idea, that immense power should be used for restraint, mercy, and moral clarity, is not new to Jewish thought. Yosef in the Torah was sold into slavery by his brothers, imprisoned in Egypt, then rose to become Pharaoh’s second-in-command. When his brothers come begging for food during a famine, he holds their fate in his hands. He could’ve taken revenge. Instead, he forgives. Power wielded with restraint: that is Jewish punk rock.

The Torah itself is a blueprint for rebellion, not against morality, but against moral relativism. Long before the Magna Carta or Enlightenment philosophers, the Torah articulated laws that modern liberal societies now consider foundational (besides the Ten Commandments):

•Workers’ rights: “You shall not oppress a hired servant who is poor and needy... you shall give him his wages the same day” (Deut. 24:14-15).

•Animal welfare: “You shall not muzzle an ox while it is threshing” (Deut. 25:4).

•Environmental care: “When you besiege a city... do not destroy its trees by swinging an axe against them” (Deut. 20:19).

•Universal dignity: All people, Jew and stranger alike, are “created in the image of God.”

•Rest for all: Even slaves and animals must rest on Shabbat. A radical demand for universal rest and reflection.

•Judicial integrity: “Do not pervert justice... do not show favoritism to the poor or to the rich” (Lev. 19:15).

These laws and morals were civilizational outliers, millennia ahead of their time. And yet, for all that Judaism has given the world, Jews remain perennial outsiders. Christianity and Islam emerged as adaptations of Jewish principles, monotheism, ethical law, prophetic tradition, yet both have often turned their hostility toward the source.

Why? Why, after centuries of Jewish persecution, does antisemitism persist?

Because Jews remain the punk rockers of civilization.

Not with spiked chokers or stage-dives, but in stubborn moral clarity. In the refusal to bow to empires. In clinging to covenant over convenience. We don’t always succeed, far from it. But our aspiration is the most radical of all: to bring Divine wisdom down into the grit of human life, and to fix ourselves, and the world, with it.

That agitates people, as punk rock always does. It refuses to flatter the status quo. It calls humanity to a higher moral calling. It reminds the world that we are not beasts with instincts, but something more: souls with agency.

That’s why Superman’s response to Lois is the hardest hitting line in the film. In a world of cynicism, the belief that everyone is beautiful, that every person bears infinite dignity and the possibility of redemption, is the most subversive idea there is.

Maybe that’s the real punk rock.