Note: This article contains spoilers for the TV show The Boys.

There is only one explicitly Jewish character in The Boys, Amazon Prime Video’s popular, audacious, insane, sometimes downright stupid satire of superheroes and modern politics. He is an invisible man called Translucent. His skin is not human skin, but rather some kind of indestructible material that can refract light or something—the details aren’t important. What is important is that, because his clothes can’t become invisible, he must be nude to remain fully incognito. Which results in him hanging out naked in women’s bathrooms a lot. 

No, Translucent is not the best onscreen representation of a Jew. But The Boys, which follows a team of human vigilantes trying to stop an Avengers-style group of corrupt superheroes (of which Translucent is one), does not shine a pleasant light on any culture. The Superman-esque leader is called Homelander, an Aryan Übermensch with electric blonde hair, blue eyes that shoot laser beams at innocent people, and a racist mentality that denigrates measly humans as fragile toys for his own amusement. There’s also A-Train, who is Black, the fastest man alive, and also a murderous and emotionally stunted drug addict; an aquatic “Lord of the Seven Seas,” The Deep, who has graphic sex with numerous sea creatures after outright raping a woman in the pilot episode; and a literal Nazi called “Stormfront”—a nod to the infamous far-right web forum—who has ties to the secret German origins of the malevolent corporation for which they all work. 

The Boys has been spearheaded and executive produced by the Canadian Jewish superteam of Seth........

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