Li Zhou is a politics reporter at Vox, where she covers Congress and elections. Previously, she was a tech policy reporter at Politico and an editorial fellow at the Atlantic.
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A new trailer has reignited controversy over a comic book character Marvel Studios intends to introduce onscreen in next year’s Captain America: Brave New World, the fourth installment of the franchise.
The upcoming film will feature Ruth Bat-Seraph, also known by her alter ego, Sabra. In the comics, Sabra is an agent for Mossad, Israel’s intelligence organization, as well as a police officer in Tel Aviv. The press release for the film, however, describes her as a “high-ranking US government official,” an apparent departure from her identity in the source material. Marvel will also not be using the name Sabra in the film, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
The announcement of Bat-Seraph’s character and the updated description that Marvel released have spurred major pushback.
In 2022, when Bat-Seraph’s role in the next Captain America film was publicized, pro-Palestinian activists urged a boycott of the film — one that they’re still calling for — over its inclusion of a superhero synonymous with the Israeli government. For those who are pro-Israel, the recently revealed choice to seemingly alter Bat-Seraph’s backstory as a Mossad agent felt like an attempt to erase her Israeli heritage, though it’s not clear that Marvel plans to do that.
What does seem evident is that Marvel wants “to have mass appeal,” says Shama Rangwala, a York University assistant professor of humanities, “but will likely end up pleasing no one” due to the concerns expressed by a range of viewers.
Who is Sabra?
Sabra made her debut in the Marvel comics in 1980 and has been in roughly 50 comic books, says Kent Worcester, a Marvel expert who’s written a book on the Punisher, a former Marine-turned-antihero.
From the get-go, Sabra was closely tied to Israel, in the same way that World War II veteran Captain America was to the US. Her original uniform was based on the Israeli flag, and in her role as a Mossad agent, she helped carry out missions on the government’s behalf. In the comics, she’s dubbed “Sabra, super heroine of the state of Israel.”
An image from one of Sabra’s early appearances in Marvel comics, from Issue 256 of the Incredible Hulk.
Marvel Comics
Sabra’s storylines were often “racist,” says Tariq Ra’ouf, a culture writer who’s examined the character’s addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or MCU. “She represents this idea of trying to fight for good and trying to ‘fight terrorism,’ but then the terrorism that she’s always fighting, it’s just happened to be Arabs and Muslims.”
In an early comic book appearance, Sabra confronts the Hulk because she thinks he’s aiding Arab terrorists whose attack has killed civilians, including a Palestinian child. After she tracks him down — and it becomes evident he wasn’t aiding terrorists — the Hulk notes that Israel and Palestine’s battle over the same land is fueling needless casualties. “Boy died because boy’s people and yours both want to own land! Boy died because you wouldn’t share!” Hulk exclaims.
As Ra’ouf writes, Sabra appears to have a realization about the consequences of war, though that doesn’t necessarily change her actions in subsequent stories.
Those comics often included problematic exchanges between Sabra and fellow superhero Arabian Knight — a character who embodies a mishmash of racist stereotypes and with whom Sabra clashed and worked. They also featured animus from Sabra toward other Arab characters, seemingly driven by a Palestinian terrorist group killing her son, a tragedy revealed in a later comic.
Sabra’s name is contentious as well. While it was chosen as a nod to a native-born person in Israel, a nickname born of a prickly fruit of a cactus common in the area, it’s also the name of a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon where a horrific massacre took place in 1982. Though she was created as a character prior to the massacre, the name nevertheless carries negative associations for many Palestinians and their supporters.
Marvel has said the forthcoming Captain America movie will feature a “new approach” to the character. That appears to include a decision to omit the name of the character’s alter ego. The brief description in the trailer release also states that she was a “former Black Widow” prior to becoming a US government official. Some viewers have interpreted that to mean that she’s now of Russian descent, given the country’s “Black Widow” program in the MCU, which spawned actress Scarlett Johansson’s Avengers character and was central to the plot of an eponymous 2021 film.
However, characters of other nationalities have been trained in the program, too. The character will be played by Shira Haas, an Israeli actress who reportedly speaks with an Israeli accent in the film. And reporting from The Wrap suggests that she’ll be a Black Widow agent of Israeli descent.
“If true, we are glad that Marvel recognized how essential Sabra’s Israeli identity is to her character,” the American Jewish Committee wrote in a statement to the publication after previously expressing concerns about changes that may have been made to her nationality. “Superheroes have enough things to worry about. Identity politics shouldn’t be one of them.”
The controversy, briefly explained
The original decision to incorporate Sabra into the cinematic universe was a shocking one, says Ra’ouf. The outcry was swift, with Palestinian advocates saying it was the latest cultural effort to glorify Israel’s policies and deeming the character #CaptainApartheid. Marvel’s Sabra announcement also came at a tense time in 2022, shortly after heightened fighting between Hamas and the Israeli military the year prior.
“I can’t quite wrap my mind around what Marvel’s cinema universe executives were thinking when they thought this was a good idea,” says Worcester. “The Marvel universe is full of characters, as is the DC universe, some of them dating back to the ’40s and ’50s, who for contemporary audiences raise all kinds of problems.” There are tens of thousands of Marvel comics, and Sabra is a relatively minor character, he notes.
The trailer release this month has only added to the initial response, with pro-Israel advocacy groups expressing their concerns when it appeared as if her Israeli heritage had been cut from her backstory.
The “decision to strip the Israeli identity of Sabra is a betrayal of the character’s creators and fans and a capitulation to intimidation,” the American Jewish Committee, a pro-Israel organization, said in an initial social media post. “Sabra is a proud Israeli hero, and should be portrayed as such. Taking away such a central part of her identity would be like making Captain America Canadian.”
Thomas Doherty, an American studies professor at Brandeis University, notes that there’s a long history of censoring Jewish characters in films in order to facilitate these movies’ distribution in markets like Nazi Germany. There are worries that alterations to Sabra’s character add to that. He said, too, that Jewish American creators and writers, like Stan Lee, Jerry Siegel, and Joe Shuster, have played a central role in establishing Marvel and creating many of the country’s most beloved superheroes.
Ra’ouf said that he understood where many of these concerns stemmed from and supported adding more Jewish characters to the MCU. But he also called for a consideration of how featuring this specific character is particularly harmful due to Israel’s brutal offensive in Gaza in the wake of Hamas’s devastating October 7 attack, as well as its past policies toward Palestinians. Israel’s current incursion has left tens of thousands dead, displaced thousands of families, and spurred a severe hunger crisis.
He also noted that the particularly concerning issue was the original character’s ties to Mossad, an “agency [that] has been harming and killing Palestinian civilians for decades.”
Marvel films have often contained political messaging
Marvel films have regularly sent messages glorifying the US’s standing in the world and its ability to take down potential enemies. See: Captain America’s confrontation of the Red Skull and defeat of the Nazis during World War II in the original 2011 film or the pro-America iconography in the first two Iron Man movies.
“Marvel really does tend to romanticize the military and romanticize US imperialism,” says Ra’ouf.
Some observers view the decision to add Sabra as yet another extension of such ideas, and an effort that stresses the closeness of the US’s relationship with Israel, something that’s been evident in the ongoing military aid America has provided despite progressive protests.
“Most major studios in Hollywood are toeing the imperialist American company line,” says Jeremy Meckler, a University of Minnesota scholar who’s studied Marvel’s influence. “They tend to have a not very nuanced view of crime, terrorism, and bad guys — and to sort of promote a binaristic understanding in which there are good guys, and there are bad guys, and the good guys represent us.”
