“Chosen Heroes: The Jewish Comics Experience” opened Oct. 16 at the museum, 1360 N. Prospect Ave., and runs through Feb. 14. The show features work by creators including Superman’s Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Captain America’s Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, and other artists whose characters helped define the superhero genre.

The exhibition considers how the experiences of immigrant families and the pressures of antisemitism shaped the work of Jewish creators. Molly Dubin, the museum’s curator, said many of the industry’s early Jewish pioneers found opportunity in comics, then a fledgling business with room for new voices.

“Jewish artists invented the modern superhero,” Dubin said, describing the creators as second-generation Americans. She said the comics often championed people facing oppression, while their heroes’ secret identities could echo the experience of navigating heritage and assimilation.

The displays connect that history to events beyond the comic-book page. A 1940 cartoon included in the exhibition depicts Superman capturing Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin for trial before an international tribunal. Captain America’s first issue, created by Kirby and Simon, showed the hero punching Hitler a year before the United States entered World War II. The exhibition also includes a Superman public-service advertisement against racial and religious prejudice.

The show ranges beyond the best-known superheroes, with material on Yiddish newspaper cartoons, Hebrew-language comics and Milwaukee cartoonist Jim Kitchen of Krupp Comic Works. It also links the Fantastic Four’s Thing to the golem of Jewish folklore and features Shaloman, an explicitly Jewish superhero who emerged late in the 20th century.

Bright primary colors, comic-panel-style text and a painted cityscape evoke the fictional urban settings of Metropolis and Gotham. The exhibition places those familiar worlds alongside the creators’ histories, showing how a once-disparaged popular art form became a lasting part of American culture.