It appears as though Moon Knight will be Jewish. After all the controversy swirling around whether the character would be Jewish in the Disney+ Moon Knight series, it has now seemingly been confirmed by the show’s lead director that the character will be Jewish—and it could happen how it does in Marvel Comics.
When a person said on Twitter, “this whole moon knight situation continued to prove to me that MCU fandoms have never been safe for Jewish people, or really any marginalized group.” However, in a response sent in reply to the MCU fan on Twitter, Moon Knight lead director Mohamed Diab apparently confirmed that the character of Marc Spector will be Jewish, fans just need to “wait until the end of the show.”
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Why does Diab specify that it may be necessary for the Twitter user to wait until the final episode of the season before they are happy? The answer to this question may lie in the character’s complex personalities.
The nature of Moon Knight’s various identities has changed over the five decades that the character has appeared in the panels of Marvel Comics, and it’s unclear just which interpretation of the character will most closely align with the version that will be played by Oscar Isaac in the Disney+ series, the first episode of which arrives for streaming on Wednesday, March 30th.
In the character’s earliest Marvel Comics appearances, the storyline sometimes made it appear as though Steven Grant and Jake Lockley were aliases intentionally created by Marc Spector. At this early point in the comics, it was sometimes unclear whether Khonshu was an actual entity or simply a delusion created by Marc’s mind, and the surrounding characters openly voiced their doubts regarding the validity of the deity who “resurrected” mercenary Spector.
However, in later runs, it was clearly established that Khonshu was a legitimate extra-dimensional entity that did indeed have the ability to bring the late Spector back to life. This process was confirmed to have “re-mapped” Spector’s brain, leading to the manifestation of four different “aspects,” each one of which was assigned a personality by Spector’s mind—although the personalities sometimes changed (and during a twelve-issue 2011 run by Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev they included Spider-Man, Captain America, and Wolverine).
Comic History Holds the Key to Jewish Confirmation
Marvel Comics
A more recent 2016 run by Jeff Lemire, Greg Smallwood, Francesco Francavilla, James Stokoe, Wilfredo Torres, and others may hold the key to Diab’s somewhat enigmatic confirmation. In that run, Spector awakes in a mental hospital… or does he? Throughout the series, the character’s grasp on reality is questioned, not just by himself but also by the perspective of the book. Featuring a rotating roster of artists who each brought a very different style to the perspectives of Moon Knight’s various personalities, this series sometimes plunged the protagonist and the reader into a world where, say, Moon Knight was actually the star of a movie being produced by Marvel Studios.
In Moon Knight #10 of the 2016 run, we see a flashback to Spector’s childhood. In scenes that run parallel to a “present day” storyline, we witness an incident in Spector’s early life in which his father, a Rabbi, comes upon his son having a conversation with another boy named “Steven Grant,” who is not Jewish, but from the father’s perspective, young Marc is the only child in the room.
A combination of the elements from these stories could see a situation in which Spector’s personality has been totally eclipsed by Grant’s, and as viewers, fans are “along for the ride” as far as Grant’s perspective is concerned. If he eventually “recovers” the Spector personality, and the memories that come with it, he might “discover” he’s Jewish. As such, and because of the reality-warping perspective that characterizes many of Moon Knight’s comic book stories, it’s possible that the audience will not be made privy to this information until later episodes of the season (even though Spector has been Jewish all along).
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About The Author
Rebecca Kaplan
(127 Articles Published)
Rebecca Kaplan (she/he) has a JD and an MS but believes comics do more good than law. His work can be found at Prism Comics, MovieWeb, Geek Girl Authority, PanelxPanel, StarTrek.com and Comics Bookcase, and in Double Challenge: Being LGBTQ and a Minority, which she co-authored with his wife, Avery Kaplan.
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