Storytelling as a Weapon Against Hate: A NextGen Leaders Talk on Superman, Science Fiction, and Jewish Values

The Simon Wiesenthal Center believes in the power of storytelling so deeply it runs its own film division—Moriah Media. That same conviction shapes how it trains the next generation, as a recent NextGen Leaders seminar with writer Joshua Sky made clear.

Most human rights organizations don't have their own film division. The Simon Wiesenthal Center does—Moriah Media, its Academy Award-winning storytelling arm, which develops and distributes mission-aligned films and television that inform, enlighten, and inspire empathy and tolerance. It's a reflection of a conviction that runs through everything the Center does: that stories are among the most powerful weapons against hatred, and that stories can shape what a culture believes. Fighting antisemitism has never been only about policy and law. It's also about narrative—about who gets to be the hero, and whose humanity a story asks you to feel.

Storytelling as a tool to fight hate is one of the lessons the Simon Wiesenthal Center is passing on to the next generation. Through its NextGen Leaders Program, the Center prepares young advocates and change-makers with hands-on experience in public policy, diplomacy, and advocacy, equipping them with the tools to combat antisemitism, challenge bigotry, and promote tolerance. Alongside their placements, interns learn from a range of Jewish leaders and thinkers—and this summer, writer Joshua Sky joined them for a conversation about the Jewish creators and values behind some of modern culture’s most enduring stories.

A Maui-born writer whose credits run from Marvel Entertainment to Hollywood campaigns for The Post, Deadpool 2, and Birds of Prey, and who is now a fellow at the Jewish Writers Institute, Sky opened with a deceptively simple question—who created Superman?—and used it to introduce the interns to the remarkable influence Jewish writers and creators have had on modern popular culture, and how storytelling has long been used to confront hate and imagine a better world. 

Why science fiction is a Jewish tradition

Science fiction, according to Sky, is an aspirational genre—and Judaism is an aspirational faith. Both are preoccupied with a better tomorrow.

"Judaism is, in a sense, the stuff of cosmic mythology," he told the group. "Think about the story: a supreme being chooses a people and gives them a code of ethics, for which they are then persecuted. They're exiled from the land they came from, and for 2,000 years they endure persecution. At the climax of that persecution—the Holocaust—people from that same tribe help develop a superweapon, the atomic bomb, which ends the conflict poised to destroy them, and they return to the land they were exiled from. That's more epic than The Lord of the Rings."

The habit of imagining a better future from the middle of terrible conditions (next year in Jerusalem) is, in Sky's telling, exactly what drew Jewish writers toward these genres. Even the modern idea of Israel began as something science-fictional: Theodor Herzl wrote a utopian novel imagining how a Jewish state might work before any such state existed. "Israel started as an idea," Sky said, "and it was made into reality."  

For a room of young leaders asked to imagine a better future themselves, the point landed close to home.

The Jewish kids who invented the superhero 

Sky traced modern science fiction to Hugo Gernsback, a Jewish immigrant who published Amazing Stories, the first American science fiction magazine. His influence on the genre was so significant that science fiction’s prestigious Hugo Awards were named in his honor. From that world came a Brooklyn candy-shop kid named Isaac Asimov, who would write I, Robot and coin both the word "robotics" and his famous Three Laws—a code of ethics for machines we're now genuinely grappling with in the age of AI.

Then came the superheroes. Two Jewish teenagers from Cleveland, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, created Superman and sold the rights for roughly $130—a deal so lopsided it's often called the "original sin" of the comics industry. Batman followed, created by Bob Kane and the long-uncredited writer Bill Finger.

Captain America was created to fight antisemitism

The most resonant part of the talk, for the Simon Wiesenthal Center NextGen Interns, was Captain America.

The character was created in the early 1940s by Jewish artists Jack Kirby and Joe Simon—before the United States entered World War II, at a moment when pro-Nazi rallies were being held in Madison Square Garden. His debut cover showed him punching Hitler, a radical and openly political image at a time when even Superman's publishers avoided depicting him fighting Nazis so directly.

This is the whole idea in a single image. Captain America was a Jewish creation built expressly to confront antisemitism when much of American culture was still looking away—storytelling doing the work of advocacy, years ahead of the politics. It's exactly the lesson the Center wants its NextGen interns to carry: that the fight against hate is waged in culture as much as in legislation, and that a well-told story can move a public before a law ever can.

"Something Jewish in everything"

Kirby once said there was "something Jewish" in everything he illustrated: the struggle for justice, the experience of being different.

That's the heart of it. Twentieth-century Jewish creators, Sky said, built "what amounted to a new, secular mythology rooted in Jewish ethics, but detached from any specific religious requirement—so that anyone, regardless of faith, could connect with those values through characters that, in a sense, have become bigger than the Greek gods." The outsider who fights for the powerless, the refugee from a destroyed world who chooses to protect his new one: that moral DNA, Sky suggested, is a gift from a persecuted people to everyone—the very ethic of tolerance the Center exists to advance.

From science fiction to Silicon Valley 

The same imaginative impulse that moved from pulp magazines to comics to film has now moved into technology itself: the concepts of early science fiction—artificial intelligence, robotics, networked minds—are being built into real products, generating enormous wealth and, with it, enormous ethical questions. The race to market, he cautioned, leaves little room to think consequences through. The frontier now, in Sky's view, is about who embeds ethics into this new, real-world science fiction, much as Jewish creators once did through Marvel and DC.

This is what the Simon Wiesenthal Center is building through the program—and why an organization with a division like Moriah Media makes room for a conversation like this. It isn't raising only advocates who know how policy is made; it's raising storytellers who understand that narrative is a form of power, and who take responsibility for putting good values at the center of whatever mythology comes next. The tradition Sky described isn't really about superheroes. It's about the refusal to stop imagining a better tomorrow—and the Center is making sure the next generation is ready, and equipped, to keep telling that story.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the NextGen Leaders Program? The Simon Wiesenthal Center's NextGen Leaders Program prepares the next generation of advocates, leaders, and change-makers through hands-on experience in public policy, legislation, international diplomacy, and advocacy. It equips students with the tools to combat antisemitism, challenge bigotry, and promote tolerance across communities worldwide, pairing each intern with a mentor and offering government and international advocacy tracks.

Why were so many early comic book creators Jewish? Many founding figures of American comics—including the creators of Superman, Batman, and Captain America—were children of Jewish immigrants. Writer Joshua Sky argues that a tradition of imagining a better future, and of embedding values like justice and empathy for the outsider, drew Jewish creators to science fiction and comics.

Was Captain America created to fight antisemitism? Captain America was created by Jewish artists Jack Kirby and Joe Simon in the early 1940s, before the U.S. entered World War II. His first cover depicted him punching Hitler—an openly anti-Nazi statement at a time when pro-Nazi rallies were held in Madison Square Garden. 

Who created Superman? Superman was created by two Jewish teenagers from Cleveland, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who sold the rights for roughly $130—a deal often described as the "original sin" of the comics industry.