can you make a post about peter parker being jewish. i’ve already seen people trying to argue that it’s just a headcanon with no basis, and they’re even trying to say that into the spider-verse wasn’t trying to portray peter as a jewish man. you’re just so good at making organized and well-informed posts, and i know that you know peter is and always has been meant to be a jewish man even if certain writers over the years didn’t think it should be canon.

I can absolutely do that, and thank you for thinking I am in any way organized instead of just from a family that knows how to argue. (A little Jewish joke courtesy of Spider-Ham’s John Mulaney to start us off right.)

So I’ve talked before about how Peter Parker is clearly Jewish even if we have yet to directly address that within the page of an actual Marvel comic – Star of David shaped confetti raining down, a neon sign blinking PETER PARKER IS JEWISH, and taped footage of his bris, since sometimes it seems like that’s what it would take to convince people, and even then you know there’d be people saying it didn’t count. I can re-address everything I’ve gone into in that post and others: Stan Lee’s own Jewish background, the fact that Peter Parker’s childhood home in set in Forest Hills, Queens, a famously Jewish neighborhood, the concept of wit as a weapon, the character’s own values and moral code. The fast talk, the Yiddish, him namedropping Jewish holidays from Hanukkah to Shavuot (or as he, like the nice Jewish boy from Queens he is, says, “Shavuos.”). We can get into Spider-Man as the embodiment of New York City, and the inherent subtext of that. I can pull up Andrew Garfield’s interview, where he states that he’s Jewish on his father’s side and recognized the Jewishness in Peter Parker and used that in his performance. I can and have and will again at some point pull specific panels and point out things, both little and big. I can pull up Brian Michael Bendis saying that every Peter Parker is Jewish.

However, let’s shove all of that aside for the moment and focus specifically on Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and how any assertion that the film didn’t specifically and purposefully portray a Jewish Peter Parker is either ignorant of Jewish custom, pedantic nitpicking that tramples representation, or spiteful anti-semitic trolling. I’m going to explain why in two points.

First, the actual movie. Spoilers from this point on, obviously, although I’m talking about a half second’s worth of footage. At about the half hour mark, as Peter B. Parker’s life story is rolling by and as he says he got married, we see his foot crush a glass wrapped in a white napkin. It’s a split-second blink and you’ll miss it scene, and it rocked my entire world. The groom breaking the glass is an important Jewish wedding custom that takes place at the end of the ceremony. This scene isn’t in there by accident (in a film as intricate and dense as Into the Spider-Verse, I’d argue that very little could be) – no one slipped this in last moment. This was a planned and very well constructed statement about this specific Peter’s identity. That it made it into the final product at all blows my mind and I am so incredibly thankful to everyone who made sure it did. I think it’s beautiful and amazing that in the movie that marked Miles Morales’ debut in cinema, Spider-Verse also took the time to make a statement about Peter Parker’s Jewish identity – neither of the main Spider-Men in the movie are white Christian men. (And Spider-Man Noir likes fighting nazis. A lot.) In a year like 2018, with a rise in antisemitic attacks, that’s incredible. It made me cry. 

“Couldn’t Mary Jane be Jewish and that’s why Peter stepped on the glass?” some people might try to argue, perhaps in good faith but most likely just to be pedantic and nitpicky. And like, sure. Yeah, that could be a possibility. (It could also be a possibility that they’re both Jewish. You can have more than one.) Either way, this specific Peter Parker had a Jewish wedding, and while Mary Jane’s presence plays an important role in the film, she herself (and specifically this Peter’s her) has very limited screentime. Those intros were meant to tell us things about the characters they were introducing: Peter was the subject. He was the narrator. This was an important image of the wedding to him. Again, this scene wasn’t accidental: Spider-Verse was telling us that this specific Peter, at the very least, is Jewish. It’s a clear, direct tribute to Peter Parker, to the Jewish roots of superheroes, to Stan Lee and all the other Jewish creators who created the foundation for superhero comics as we know them, and to what a down to Earth hero born out of New York culture, who comes from Queens, might really be. 

Reason the second: there is actual taped interview footage of Phil Lord saying the words “he’s a Jewish kid from Queens.” Rodney Rothman, the scene’s director, also addressed basically everything I just said up there in this interview, joking about his own insistence that Peter Parker is Jewish. And yes, of course, you could nitpick, you could come up with all the excuses why it could not count, why it could mean something else, but at the end of the day it’s clear that the intention of these creators was to get a Jewish Peter Parker onto the big screen. The intention was for you to see him step on the glass and for it to click with you, oh hey, Spider-Man’s Jewish! And for people who are bothered by that, who feel the need to nitpick, so say “well, actually,” to insist that Peter Parker isn’t Jewish because blah blah blah – why? Why not embrace this added piece of diversity to a movie that was in part a love letter to New York, and to the parts of it and the marginalized cultures Peter and Miles both represent within the film? The notion of a Jewish Peter Parker should do nothing but delight and inspire. 

I don’t know the current state of what the contracts in place over portrayals of Peter Parker look like. I’m sure some of us remember Sony’s infamous contract that stated Peter Parker could never be portrayed as anything other than white, Christian, and heterosexual and have no idea if its existence could have impacted Spider-Verse in any way or if it was even possible at the current moment to be more direct about the character’s Jewishness than Spider-Verse’s stepping on a glass scene. I do know that the joy and excitement I’ve seen over Spider-Verse’s stepping on the glass scene has been overwhelming and it has made me and I’m sure many other Jewish fans of Peter Parker, who have long seen this aspect of our own identity reflected back in him, very happy. I do know that making noise about this and lifting it up and saying this is good, we want to see more of this will let people know that the concept of a Jewish Peter Parker is marketable, and that people would embrace this character with that part of his history brought into the light and made explicitly canon. It took decades for another famously Jewish Marvel superhero, Ben Grimm, to be allowed to have that aspect of his identity openly addressed on the page despite the heavy Jewish coding woven into the character’s history, and I believe Spider-Verse’s breaking the glass scene and the reactions I’ve seen towards it are a big step in doing the same for Peter Parker. Pun fully intended.

(Also as someone with a complicated relationship with the concept of the Jewish nose – I want to thank the Into the Spider-Verse artists for the schnoz. It looks good on him.)