Jewish identity is historically about the push and pull toward and away from that very identity. As immigrants with a history of persecution, Jews came to America with their heads down but their eyes open, finding themselves presented with unprecedented freedom and opportunity.<BR>Still, there were limits, spoken and unspoken, which often pushed Jews into fields with a hint of "second-class-ness" to them. Among these was the comic-book industry, until then minus the breakout hit that would put the medium on the map. That phenomenon would be the superhero - specifically Superman - and the flood of others that followed, including Batman and Spider-Man.<BR>In Disguised as Clark Kent, Danny Fingeroth explores how the creators' Jewish backgrounds helped make superheroes the most familiar popular-culture icons of all, far beyond the comic books that spawned them - on TV, in movies, in electronic media - and in our very ideas about what it means to be a hero.