http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/06/13/superman-saving-his-jewish-creators/#
JNS.org – Millions of Americans will flock to movie theaters this week to see “Man of Steel,” in which Superman will once again be called upon to save the world from some menace. But back in 1975, Superman’s Jewish creators found themselves broke, nearly homeless, and desperately in need a hero of their own. It’s a story with the pathos and drama of a comic book adventure—and it has a happy ending.
As teenagers growing up in Cleveland’s mostly-Jewish Glenville neighborhood in the 1930s, writer Jerry Siegel and his artist friend Joe Shuster created Superman, the mighty costumed hero who has been a fixture of American pop culture ever since.
Siegel later wrote that he and Shuster were influenced by a combination of “being unemployed and worried during the Depression and knowing hopelessness and fear,” and “hearing and reading of the oppression and slaughter of helpless, oppressed Jews in Nazi Germany.” The Superman character emerged from their “great urge to help the downtrodden masses, somehow.”
Comics historians have compared Superman’s origins to both the Jewish immigrant experience and the biblical story of young Moses. With the planet Krypton on the verge of destruction, desperate parents send their infant off in a rocket ship to Earth, where heis raised by strangers—Jonathan and Martha Kent taking the role of Pharoah’s daughter. Whether disguised as the Midwestern newspaper reporter Clark Kent, or as an Egyptian prince whose Jewish roots are hidden, our hero would prefer to quietly assimilate into his surroundings but his outrage at injustice propels him into the role of rescuer.
Not realizing the fortune Superman would reap, Siegel and Shuster sold their first 13-page Superman comic strip, and the rights to the character to National Periodicals (later known as DC Comics) for $130.