The Dybbuk vs. the Golem, decided by Jewish scholars of every kind

polygon.com:

When my father was a middle school kid at the West Hartford Yeshiva, his preoccupations were relatively simple: He imagined being one of the few great Jewish baseball stars, and thought a lot about comic books. He rode his bike down the street to the drugstore and bought mostly Marvel comics for 20 cents (25 for some special editions), and organized them by relative fighting power of each protagonist. The Avengers comics, for example, would be higher up in the pile than the books just featuring Thor, who, by himself, was obviously less powerful than the Avengers as a group.

My dad didn’t go on to be one of the great Jewish baseball stars, but he did hold on to his passion for comics. Growing up, he filled lulls in our conversations with “who would win, Superman or Batman?” And “so, listen, if the Hulk and Godzilla got into a fight … ” And in those early hero versus hero discussions, he made sure to tell me how fundamentally Jewish comic books were. He was right: Superman’s Kryptonian name came from Hebrew, and most of the early Marvel authors were immigrant Jews and their children. The history of American comics is inseparable from the history of Jews in America. My father was sure to tell me this, and I remembered.

“I just wanted to teach you Yiddishkeit … teach you a certain amount of pride in the Jewish contributions to American culture,” he told me.

I didn’t really start seeing my culture in comics in a way that excited me until years later, when I learned about the Golem and the Dybbuk.

The Golem and the Dybbuk are the two creatures of Jewish myth that have made it most conclusively into American popular culture today. As such, I think it’s an essential investigation that I apply my father’s “hero versus hero”