#it’s canon because Kate Kane is Jewish and her dad is also Jewish which means Martha Wayne is Jewish which makes Bruce Jewish

[ednygmasbowlerhat]

Bruce Wayne is canonically Jewish and we don’t talk about this enough. Obviously the representation would be amazing and as a Jew i would love my favorite hero to be Jewish but also it would just add so much to the character. Just like cultural flavor and personality. And of course plot lines. Like just imagine the entire bat family getting together for Jewish holidays or like batman making torah or rabbinic references all the time. Like what if he’s giving one of the bat kids a lecture and is just like “that reminds me of this story I learned about hillel and shammai in hebrew school blah blah blah”.

Also this just makes so much sense because superheroes were created by Jews like Superman literally has the most Jewish story ever but aliens can’t be born Jews and the kents aren’t Jewish so he’s not canon Jewish so having bats as Jewish is just too iconic.

[frownyalfred]

im all here for jewish bruce so please dont take this as me disagreeing with you or anything because canon doesnt even matter in the first place and mostly im just a little confused but if kate is bruce's cousin from his moms side and being jewish comes from your mom doesnt that mean kates mom is jewish and it doesnt have anything to do w. her dad who would be the kane part of the equation unlesd her dad is also jewish idk i dont really go here im just creeping on the sidelines rn yanno

Sure! Anon, this is a question that comes up a lot, and I’m not expert, but here’s what I know:

-Martha Kane and Jacob Kane were siblings

-The Kanes are established as Jewish in canon (including Jacob)

-Kate is Jewish, which, according to halachic interpretation, assumes that her mother was Jewish at the bare minimum (but that her father likely was Jewish as well)

-Martha, being Jacob’s sister, would also be Jewish (barring a weird half-brother situation, or that he converted at some point)

-The above exceptions would be unlikely considering the Jewishness of the Kane name, “Jacob”, etc. 

-At the bare minimum again, since Judaism is technically matrilineal (more about this later) and the Kane family line is Jewish, any of Martha’s children would also be Jewish

-Bruce Wayne would halachically be Jewish

Now, all of this hinges on Jacob Kane being Jewish by birth and the Kane family being Jewish overall. But there are also some additional clues:

-Kate’s family was intentionally made Jewish, in a nod to Jewish creator Bob Kane, whose family was also Jewish

-Martha and Jacob’s generation usually married within Judaism by tradition (this has changed a lot in the last few decades) and marriage into another faith was generally frowned upon. 

-The above makes it unlikely Jacob married into a Jewish family unintentionally (i.e., Kate’s mother being Jewish was important to Jacob as a Jewish man)

-Jacob is a commonly-given name to Jewish men

-Martha marrying outside the faith would explain why Bruce was not necessarily raised Jewish (in this retcon, at least)

Hey? Everyone keeps arguing about matrilineal Judaism. What does that even mean?

-This comes up a lot in Jewish Batman discourse. Matrilineal Judaism is a remnant of Biblical times, where Judaism could only be confirmed if the mother was Jewish (assuming the father was not present, etc)

-Certain sections of Judaism hold this strongly, including Conservative, Orthodox, Reform (to an extent) and some other traditions

-For a long time, and still somewhat to this day, it was frowned upon to marry a non-Jewish man (i.e., Jews tended to marry Jews)

-Patrilineal Judaism (Judaism passed down by the father)  is slowly being more accepted, as well as other discrepancies (adoption, Jewish grandparent, etc)

-Some traditions still don’t necessarily view someone as Jewish unless they practice Judaism (had a bar mitzvah, converted, etc) but this is rare, largely because of the “one drop” rule in the Holocaust, and modern aliyah standards of Israel. 

-When folks in the fandom talk about Batman in the context of matrilineal Judaism, they’re usually referring to the fact that, if Martha Kane was Jewish in any way when she had Bruce, he would technically be Jewish by birth in the eyes of many rabbis, regardless of his own practiced religion or atheism. 

-Like I said earlier, all of this hinges on if Jacob Kane was Jewish by birth. I.e., that Martha and Jacob’s mother was Jewish. 

I believe that canon has been established enough where we can assume that Jacob Kane was in fact Jewish by birth, that he married a Jewish woman, and had a Jewish child (Kate). 

I don’t believe this retcon intentionally made Bruce Jewish. Again, some would argue that he’s not really Jewish, as he’s never practiced or recognized the religion in canon. 

However, Judaism is tricky. It’s an ethnic group, a religion, and a cultural tradition, all amassed into one messy blob. It’s likely, if Martha was raised Jewish, that there were still some vestiges of Jewish cultural practices in how she raised Bruce (celebrating some holidays, traditions, or observances) unless she explicitly chose to ignore them. 

All in all, I would say it is very likely that Bruce is technically Jewish. More likely than not. An accident? Yes. But a good one for all of us Jewish fans. 

[dancedance-resolution]

Why Batwoman 2x01 was so good:

1. The writers managed to strike a great balance between paying respect to Kate Kane and introducing Ryan. Kate Kane as a character is, of course, significant to DC. She’s an important source of representation as a Jewish lesbian, and she has a large legacy/mythos within the larger DC Comics history. Batwoman first showed respect to Kate as a character by wisely chosing to not kill her off. Next, there’s one scene where Ryan is reading up on Kate, developing new understanding and respect in the process, and every few seconds the camera cuts over to where Mary and Luke are reading up on Ryan, similarly gaining understanding and respect for Ryan. I think this scene effectively facilitate the batsuit’s—as a mantle, as a symbol, and as a mythos—being passed on to Ryan. It paid a large amount of respect to Kate as a character, pointing out some of the most significant aspects of her character, and sort of drew Ryan into Kate’s mythos as Batwoman in a way that helps facilitate her becoming Batwoman - she comes to learn and respect the history and the gravity of Batwoman as a person, as an entity, as a figure of justice, and as an icon; and as a result, she can now carry on that legacy and expand it, using it to bring even more good to the world.

But even before she learned about Kate, Ryan respected her. When Ryan first met Mary and Luke, she offers genuine condolences for their loss. She doesn’t disrespect them or make light of their grief. Even though these two people are strangers,

In the process of paying due respect to Kate, however, Batwoman did not minimize Ryan or treat her as “second” to Kate. Ryan got a significant amount of screentime and focus—as she should—and her time on screen was all truly meaningful. We’ve begun to see her backstory, see who she is as a person, and see what that will mean for her as Batwoman.

2. Ryan is a lovable character, and Javicia did an excellent job portraying her. I love Ryan a lot, guys. She’s passionate, earnest, and driven. She’s down-to-earth and has a strong sense of justice that leads her through life. And at the same time, she’s a charming dork - the type of charming dork who yells “I’m bulletproof, bitches!” after dangling helplessly from the sky by a grappling hook. I, obviously, fucking love her for it.

I also think that the writers did a great job of keeping the vibe of season 1 to a good extent. The way Ryan was introduced felt like a proper introduction considering what we know about this show’s Gotham and considering how things were done in season 1. It worked well. Additionally, it is not lost on me how meaningful it is that from Ryan’s very first scene, we see that her instinct is to selflessly help victims to the best of her ability, and it is because she went out to help them that she stumbled upon the Batsuit. Furthermore, in that scene where she does discover the suit, the flashbacks establish that this moment in meaningful beyond just this one moment of time - it has connection to Ryan’s history and motivations for becoming Batwoman. During the DC Fandome this past summer, Caroline Dries said this season would deal with destiny. I think that that first scene was a great way to introduce it as a concept without taking away any of the sense that Ryan truly deserves this mantle as well. (One last side note - the use of music and sound effects in that first scene was excellent.)

While the writers certainly deserve a good bit of credit for creating this amazing character from scratch, I think Javicia also deserves a lot of credit here - she did an absolutely stunning job as Ryan. The charm I saw in Ryan was very similar to the goofy charm she brought to Ali in God Friended Me (which I loved, by the way), and those lighter scenes were played with the same adeptness as the dark, intense, and gutwrenchingly emotional scenes.

3. Batwoman acknowledged Alice’s grief and trauma in a way that also gave viewers some closure regarding season 1 matters. I think that Alice’s grief process was written pretty well considering her already existing trauma. And that succinct summary of Alice’s plan to get her dad to kill Kate was pretty clever on the writer’s part, as it gave us some closure regarding season 1’s goings on that were interrupted by COVID (and that were unable to be seen to completion since Kate Kane is no longer Batwoman).

4. The episode had many powerful moments. Some quotes that really struck me:

“You make it sound like these are all my choices...You wanna know why I haven’t paid my fines? Because I can’t find a job. Because I don’t have a home. Because no land lord wants to rent to an ex-con on post-release. You see how this works? No one cares that the dope wasn’t mine or that the Crows were dirty. Or that I’m actually a decent human. I am a file in your cabinet. That is not having power. That is thr very definition of powerless.” This line is made all the more powerful by the fact that Ryan’s first words upon donning the Batsuit are “Time to be powerful.”

“Trust me, I know I’m not a symbol, or a name, or a legacy...I am a number. I am the 327th baby of a Black woman who died of childbirth that year. I am a twenty-dollar-a-day check to a group home. I’m Inmate 4075 serving eighteen months for a crime I didn’t commit. But I can live with all those numbers because the mama who adopted me? I was her number one. But it turns out she’s just one of a quarter million murders in this country who have not seen justice. And that is a number I can’t live with.”

“I’m bulletproof, bitches!”

5. Batwoman has a truly excellent supporting cast. I know that a significant portion of the Batwoman fandom has been in love with Mary, Luke, and Alice since day one. One common fear within the fandom was that season 2 would feel like a completely different show, but at least in this episode, that wasn’t the case. The supporting characters were all prominently featured and given a good amount of emotional depth to cover - and seeing their journey helped the show feel familiar and helped carry us viewers over into this new era of Batwoman. And because the transition from Kate to Ryan was so well done, as I discussed in point 1, I didn’t feel like there was any absence or lacking in the show.

6. They did a great job carrying over that Kryptonite storyline from last season. In fact, it makes a lot more sense to me now. I was admittedly a bit confused by the whole Kryptonite storyline last season (it felt a bit like a mere device to facilitate Kate’s relationship with Kara - which, hey, I’m not complaining; I loved that friendship and think they should have hooked up once). Perhaps it was confusing since COVID cut it short. But whatever the reason, I’m glad that I now understand the deeper purpose behind this Kryptonite storyline. And, wow, this has the potential to be super cool and interesting!

7. They called out the Crows in a meaningful way. I think I’m not the only person who is a bit uncomfortable with the Crows in both concept and practice (yes, I do understand that they’re based on the comics, though). So I really appreciated—and found it super powerful—that it was Ryan who delivered the line “The Crows were dirty.” Sometimes I get confused as to whether Batwoman is portraying the Crows as good or bad, so lines like that give me comfort in knowing that the show at the very least acknowledges the problematic nature of an overmilitarized private police force that has been contracted out to have dominion over a city whose population includes a significant amount of low income people.

8. Bonus: They did good by the shippers. Batmoore shippers got some closure by observing Sophie’s grief process and hearing the letter Kate left her. Pennymoore shippers are certainly getting emotional and significant content for their ship. And for clowns like me, the show introduced a great new ship, Mary/Ryan, that I adore even though I know it won’t be canoning, lol.

[kiintsugi]

Batwoman should have used the Bad Blood story line: Fight me

Arrowverse has always been a strange entity for me. On the one hand, it gives screen time and recognition to (at times) underrepresented comics and comic characters under the DC banner, especially to groups of people who might otherwise never pick up an interest in comics. On the other hand, Arrowverse really loves two things: queerbaiting and ignoring comic-canon. 

So with 5 intertwined shows currently airing on the CW, it was no surprise to me to know that their most recent lore expansion comes in the shape of Gotham’s Batwoman.

There is a lot that The Batwoman show is restricted by; not only in the sense that DC has declared Bruce Wayne/Batman as “off-limits” to the CW, but because of how the entirety of the CW universe has unfolded over the past – what – eight or so years? 

Now, this isn’t a ‘Felicity Smoak doesn’t exist’ type of rant. It’s a show, on a low budget network whose target audience is women ages 18 to 34. I get that there will be changes, new characters, and storylines will be manipulated however the team feels best to tell the story they’re trying to tell. This is me yelling about the changes they made that they really didn’t need to make at all in order to tell an origin story they don’t need to tell because they already had the perfect storyline for the “no batman allowed” problem.

But before I get into that. We need to talk about the core differences established between the two universes as I believe that without understanding Comic Kate, this argument i’ve decided to make has little ground to stand on.

(source:https://www.dcuniverse.com/encyclopedia/batwoman/)

In the Silver Age, Batwoman (known as Kathy Kane) was introduced as a sort of hybrid between Batman and the first Robin. She was wealthy, she was acrobatic, and most importantly, she proved that Bruce Wayne was not gay.

She has since made appearances in four essential storylines and timeline reboots as Kate Kane starting in 2006.

Her introduction as Kate Kane came at a time in which DC was rebooting series with the intention to diversify their character roster, and it is here we see the “I’m just here to make homophobes feel better" crime fighter come into her own,  badass, identity

The basis of her background goes like this: Kate and her twin sister are born into a military family of which her father is the brother of Martha Wayne, Bruce’s mother. One year, on her birthday, Kate, her sister, and her mother are taken captive by enemy agents and despite her father’s best efforts, only Kate was saved.

Later, in an attempt to please her father, Kate enrolls at West Point where she fell in love with her roommate, Sophie. When caught, Kate protects Sophie and avoids outing her, earning herself a dishonorable discharge. Despite this, her father is nothing but supportive and Kate’s life (now boosted thanks to her father’s marriage to Catherine Hamilton) becomes that of a hard-partying socialite. She is eventually apprehended by Renee Montoya, a GCPD officer. They begin a relationship, but it eventually ends with Renee dumping Kate after she learns that Kate, still with no direction or life goals, has dropped out of school.

It isn’t until she is rescued by Batman from a mugger that she finds her purpose. She operated for a year at this point by using stolen military equipment before her father discovered what she had been doing. It takes some convincing but her father, still, the most supportive and loving father any superhero has ever had, arranges for her to train with some of his contacts to hone her skills. When she returns, he presents her not only with the Batwoman suit, but with a headquarters of her own, where he offers tactical support to his daughter in the field.

For Arrowverse, this has changed quite a bit.

Kate lost her sister and mother in a car crash gone wrong in which Batman failed to rescue them. This failure to rescue his only living family is noted by Luke Fox later in the episode as something that haunts Bruce to this day. 

We haven’t seen a whole lot into Kate’s time at West Point, but we know the CW plans to expand on this. So far, the main thing worth noting is when the academy finds out about their relationship, Kate defies the orders of her superior officers and quits the academy while Sophie agrees to the terms and the two break up.

It is also hinted several times that Kate’s father isn’t nearly as supportive of Kate as he is in the comic. It is pretty clear that they want her best family relationship at this point to be to with Bruce, not her dad, but that’s beside the point. The strain on her relationship with her father is marked by him sending her away to train with survival specialists with a promise (later revealed to be a lie) to enlist her in his private security, CROWS, upon her return.

Her foray into crime-fighting comes only when Sophie is reported to have been taken hostage and Kate, determined to help, stumbles into the Batcave and arms herself with her cousin’s gear that he has for some reason left behind.

Obviously, these storylines are very different from one another. 

Where Kate in the comics had to earn her place in the Batfamily, Kate in Arrowverse finds herself operating as the only member of the family in a Gotham on the brink of collapse without Batman. This is supposed to be because The CW can’t use Batman and their desire to tell something along the lines of an Origin story for Batwoman. 

But, the thing is, we had Batman: Bad Blood (based off the Leviathan arc)  where, you guessed it, Batman isn’t around and the remaining members of the Batman Family are left to pick up the pieces.

It doesn’t make sense to me that they would have introduced Kate already operating as a vigilante last season only to backtrack track to a newbie a year later where they then proceed to tear apart her origins for the sake of their own story. One that, quite frankly, doesn’t hold up as well by comparison.

Bad Blood is different from the comics too, but it has a solid backbone that could have made a perfect skeleton for the Arrowverse storyline

Kate is already established as a crime fighter. Bruce knows who she is, is keeping tabs on her and doesn't want her getting involved in anything that can get her hurt. Kate doesn't care and does whatever she wants. They don't get along. But Bruce still saves Batwoman and is hit with an explosion that seemingly takes his life. There is so much story potential for a TV series here that could span one really good season and be sprinkled in throughout several more revolving around her blaming herself for his disappearance/death.

There is more pressure on Kate from the beginning to succeed. At first, Batwoman will be placed up a pedestal for filling the gap created by Batman's disappearance. Tieing in her guilt for her hand in this takes that away, giving her the underdog effect often found in origin stories and encourages us to root for her.

It’s a better explanation for why Bruce isn’t around. There’s no logical reason as to why Bruce would up and disappear or why Batman would apparently abandon Gotham. At least one that doesn't involve people believing he’s dead.

We don’t have any of this ‘unsupportive’ father garbage. We get a good supportive father/daughter relationship. We could have happy family holidays of Kate and her dad celebrating Jewish traditions together, we have great representation of a military man fully embracing his daughter despite being dishonorably discharged because of DADT, also lots of potential scenes of him being worried/helping her out in the field instead of doing his own thing with the CROWS.

Also why CROWS and not MCU? MCU means Maggie and anyone who read the comics back in 2013 and remembers the bullshit DiDio pulled would appreciate Kate being that much closer to meeting Maggie Sawyer (who was very well received by the arrowverse fandom) and idk...maybe not doing Kate dirty this time around.

And i mean, if not, Renee is badass and we like her too, and she’s actually in the Bad Blood storyline.

The entire concept of making Kate the ‘female Bruce Wayne’ is dumb. Especially since she’s spent her entire vigilante career forging her own path and doing her own thing bc batman is a narcissist and a control freak and she has no intention of mindlessly following his orders.

Bad Blood introduces Luke Fox as Batwing so there’s a whole storyline to follow there since he’s in the pilot episode and we know they have the ability to use him.

It allows for Talia to cross over from Arrow to Batwoman and introduce Damien if they feel like it.

It doesn’t interfere with Arrowverse Canon. They can very easily tell a story about how Batwoman goes from a relatively new vigilante under Batman’s shadow to a fully realized crime fighter without contradicting any of the arrowverse continuity. 

I get that they’re limited and that’s totally fine. You can’t expect things to be perfect. But CW is really missing an opportunity for good storytelling all for the sake of “she’s the female Bruce Wayne” concept and its extremely disrespectful to the character to equate her to nothing more than being a female version of another character when she has already established herself as her own person and her own hero.

Thank you for coming to my ted talk.