He’s still Benny from the block.
In the new trailer for The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Ben Grimm — aka the Thing — makes a homecoming to Yancy Street, the fictitious Lower East Side enclave that pays homage to the real-world Delancey Street. He, (super)naturally, looks a bit different, having recently been transformed into Marvel’s most famous golem.
As Grimm makes his rounds in the neighborhood, a group of school children gather at a gate and chant for him to lift a Volkswagen Beetle. He heaves it over his head and we get a glimpse of the street in all its 1960s period detail. If you look closely, you’ll even see evidence of its Yiddishkeit.
One of the signs near Thing’s old stomping grounds is for a tailor named H. Stern, with Hebrew lettering spelling out “tikunim” (repairs). And later, in a montage of New Yorkers thanking the Fantastic Four for their heroism, we see a woman standing outside a bakery, with luscious babkas and challahs in the window.
Ben Grimm, whom co-creator Jack Kirby (né Jacob Kurtzberg) was known to include on Hanukkah cards, is one of Marvel Comics’ most notable Jewish heroes, having had a Jewish wedding and even a bar mitzvah to mark his 13 years of living as a moving rock formation. While Grimm was the Lower East Side-raised Kirby’s alter ego, for most of the character’s history his Jewishness was subtextual. He was canonically initiated into the covenant of Abraham in a 2002 comic, timed to Yom Kippur, in which he finally returned to the old block to give back a Star of David necklace he stole from a pawn shop as a kid — part of his initiation to the Yancy Street Gang.
While previous film versions of the Fantastic Four haven’t made mention of Thing’s Jewishness, in Spidey and His Amazing Friends, a show for the preschool set, he has celebrated Rosh Hashanah and Hanukkah.
The casting of Ebon Moss-Bachrach, a Jewish actor known for his role as Cousin Richie in The Bear, has many curious about just how much of the character’s background will make it into the film. But there could be an even richer Jewish angle.
It’s possible that the words on the tailor sign we see in passing hold thematic significance. The word tikunim, also used in Yiddish, seems to be a rare word for tailoring in the vernacular of Lower East Side residents, but it surely rings bells for those familiar with the concept of tikkun olam.
If there’s one thing Marvel’s first family seems poised to do in the film, as the planet-consuming Galactus descends, it’s repair the world. They just have to save it first.
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