In October 1991, Saddam Hussein had been defeated but a new villain threatened the world of Marvel Comics: Max Meer, a blond boy from “Draburg” with mind-control powers. The comic-book issue was titled “Stan Lee presents… The Incredible Hulk: ‘Little Hitler’.” Now, who would you call in to stop him but a superhuman Mossad agent named Sabra?
Although Ruth Bat-Seraph, aka Sabra, had been introduced to fans of the Incredible Hulk already, she finally got her own two-issue story in 1991, and it wasn’t exactly the most original plot: A future almost-literal Hitler appears, and this time there is a State of Israel to stop him. Sabra is the Hebrew word for Israeli-born Jew. Have I mentioned the character also works for the Mossad?
It’s all a bit on-the-nose, yes. Which is probably why Marvel never had any plans to turn the story into one of its gazillion big-screen adaptations. Nevertheless, the studio is bringing Ruth Bat-Seraph into the Marvel cinematic universe. A teaser trailer for the next Captain America movie gives us a glimpse of Israeli actress Shira Haas as Bat-Seraph.
Unfortunately, when this was first announced two years ago, the great many anti-Semites in the nerdosphere threw an extremely pale hissy fit, vowing to restore mankind to a future without those pesky Jews on screen. And it became clear early on that Marvel, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, was susceptible to this pressure.
When Variety reported on the “controversy” at the time, Marvel tried to reassure its Jew-fearing readers: “While our characters and stories are inspired by the comics, they are always freshly imagined for the screen and today’s audience, and the filmmakers are taking a new approach with the character Sabra who was first introduced in the comics over 40 years ago.”
At the time, I speculated that perhaps this “new approach” would be, a la Steven Spielberg’s Munich, to make Sabra a self-hating AsAJew who is just sick of the occupation blah blah blah. But according to Marvel’s own website, I gave the company too much credit. I never expected that they would make Ruth Bat-Seraph a non-Israeli: “New to the cast is Shira Haas,” the company says, “who joins as Ruth Bat-Seraph. A former Black Widow, Ruth is now a high-ranking U.S. government official who has the trust of President Ross.”
So she’s Russian. Without an original back story.
According to the Jewish Chronicle, this change was made partially in response to “early screentests of the film.” Apparently viewers could stand a character from a country currently involved in a controversial war so long as that country wasn’t the Jewish one. Stan Lee—Marvel’s beloved brain until he died in 2018—was born to Romanian Jewish immigrants in New York, by the way.
As I had noted in 2022, Marvel’s initial response to the Sabra objectors was not encouraging. Disney properties tend to revel in the chance to make public shows of support to actors subject to race-based criticism. When the company launched the Star Wars: Andor series with a black female star, it told its Twitter followers: “There are more than 20 million sentient species in the Star Wars galaxy, don’t choose to be racist.” Disney also hit back at social-media users who jeered at its casting of a black actress to play the mermaid Ariel.
Objections to its Israeli character, meanwhile, somehow never elicited a defense. Obviously Disney and Marvel had already decided to let the anti-Semites have this one.
It’s too bad they won’t go with the original story from the comics. As a kid, I enjoyed seeing Sabra call the Incredible Hulk a chamor (donkey) while they battled around Jerusalem trying to avoid destroying any historical sites or artifacts. Another Marvel character involved in that storyline was Ulysses, who reveals to Sabra—who is trying to protect Meer, who she thinks is the harmless son of a foreign diplomat—that as a child he and his family were deported to the Dachau concentration camp. When they tried to tattoo a number on him, the needle broke, revealing his possession of some kind of superpower. A Holocaust survivor and a superhuman Mossad agent tangled up in the ethical riddles presented by a vision of a future Hitler while he’s still a child? Quentin Tarantino would know what to do with this.
Of course, it’s possible the Disney/Marvel Studios adaptation of Sabra’s character will change again. But one suspects they will face insufficient backlash to make that happen.