Weekly Kibbitz
Jewish Superhero Liberty Fights Antisemites in New Comics Anthology
Daniel Kalban is a 33-year-old law fi rm assistant
who lives in Flatbush, Brooklyn. But when he’s
not working his day job, he moonlights as a
comic book writer, in a sort of double-life sce-
nario that’s reminiscent of the caped crusaders
he’s invented.

In 2016, Kalban created “American Dreams,”
a comic book series centered on Jake Gold, a
Jewish New Yorker in 1900 who, thanks to “a
Thomas Edison experiment gone awry,” gains
the ability to fl y, as well as super strength to fi ght
monstrous antisemites and other bad guys.

“I was dozing off listening to the score of
‘Ragtime’ the musical,” Kalban told the New York
Jewish Week about his inspiration. “I was in a
daze, and I was wondering what if superheroes
like Batman and Robin were in that same tumultu-
ous time period.”
Jewishness permeates the entire “American
Dreams” storyline — the protagonist, who comes
to be known as Liberty, escaped the pogroms in
Russia, for example, and now works at a sweat-
shop in the Lower East Side. As a superhero, he
fi ghts a “bruiser” named Amalek, a biblical enemy
of the Israelites. As he makes his way through
turn-of-the-20th-century New York, he works for
Brooklyn writer Daniel Kalban is the creator of the comic book
series American Dreams, which features a Jewish superhero as
its main protagonist.

Courtesy of JTA.org
legendary Jewish magician Harry Houdini and
is encouraged by Jewish activist and anarchist
Emma Goldman to use his powers for good.

As a response to the positive feedback the
comic has received over the years, Kalban plans
to release an “American Dreams” book, which
combines an anthology of the fi rst fi ve issues of
the comic with brand-new material. He is funding
the project through a Kickstarter campaign.

— Jacob Henry
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