You can always count on the Daily Mail to be cringe-inducing, and its coverage of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is no exception. Although it must be said that Andrew Garfield doesn’t really help matters by insisting he’s playing Spider-Jesus.
To give you an idea of how much pain this will bring, the headline is “Oy vey! Spider-Man is Jewish – he’s a neurotic New Yorker who lives with his aunt, says actor who plays him.” And yes, it gets worse from there, from both Garfield and the Mail:
‘He is misunderstood, like Jesus. I don’t mind the Jesus parallel for Spider-man. Jesus is an awesome guy. When Pontius Pilate said: “They say you’re the son of God. If you’re the son of God tell me.” Jesus was like: “I know who I am, bitch”.’
As for Spidey being Jewish, that’s not exactly a new idea, but leave it to the Mail to be moronic about it:
Rabbis in New York have claimed for years that Spidey was part of ‘the tribe’. Indeed, the character was created in 1962 by Stan Lee, a Jewish-American.
Actually, guys, that’s pretty much everybody. My dad was making jokes about Spider-Man being Jewish when I was a kid, and that’s not without reason.
Honestly, there’s actually a fairly fascinating intersection between the history of comics and the history of Judaism in America that the Mail is completely ignoring here. A fair chunk of the men and women who created superhero comics and shepherded the art form for decades were Jewish. Spider-Man’s religion never explicitly comes up in the comics, largely thanks to the Comics Code, but it’s fairly clear what Lee intended. It’s just one of those things that everybody knows even if the company won’t acknowledge it, like the fact that the Joker is gay.
Then again, it’s probably expecting too much for the Mail to hit Wikipedia. Although if we see Spidey nailed to a cross in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, at least we’ll know whose idea it was.