It gets worse if you read the source article at Entertainment Weekly. >Kirby had a generational imagination, but it was rooted in his upbringing in the Jewish slums of New York's Lower East Side (where he was born Jacob Kurtzberg in 1917). Just a little farther from the Fantasticar workshop on the Pinewood lot stands a built-out set replicating Ben's native block of Yancy Street, a fictionalized version of Kirby's own childhood neighborhood, complete with kosher groceries and a synagogue.