The Golem of Brooklyn

by Adam Mansbach

In Ashkenazi Jewish folklore, a golem is a humanoid being created out of mud or clay and animated through secret prayers. Its sole purpose is to defend the Jewish people against the immediate threat of violence. It is always a rabbi who makes a golem, and always in a time of crisis.

But Len Bronstein is no rabbi—he’s a Brooklyn art teacher who steals a large quantity of clay from his school, gets extremely stoned, and manages to bring his creation to life despite knowing little about Judaism and even less about golems. Unable to communicate with his nine-foot-six, four hundred–pound, Yiddish-speaking guest, Len enlists a bodega clerk and ex-Hasid named Miri Apfelbaum to translate.

Eventually, the golem learns English by binge-watching Curb Your Enthusiasm after ingesting a massive amount of LSD and reveals that he is a creature with an ancestral memory; he recalls every previous iteration of himself, proving to be a repository of Jewish history and trauma. He demands to know what crisis has prompted his re-creation and whom he must destroy. When Miri shows him a video of white nationalists marching and chanting “Jews will not replace us,” the answer becomes clear.

The Golem of Brooklyn is an epic romp through Jewish history and the American present that wrestles with the deepest questions of our humanity—the conflicts between faith and skepticism, tribalism and interdependence, and vengeance and healing.

Genres: Fiction, Fantasy, Jewish, Magical Realism, Humor, Audiobook, Mythology

272 pages, Paperback

First published September 26, 2023

About the author

Adam Mansbach is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Go the Fuck to Sleep, as well as the novels Rage is Back, The End of the Jews (winner of the California Book Award), and Angry Black White Boy, and the memoir-in-verse I Had a Brother Once. With Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel, he co-authored For This We Left Egypt, a finalist for the Thurber Award for American Humor, and the bestselling A Field Guide to the Jewish People. Mansbach's debut screenplay, for the Netflix Original BARRY, was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and an NAACP Image Award, and he is a two-time recipient of the Reed Award and the American Association of Political Consultants' Gold Pollie Award, for his 2012 Obama/Biden campaign video "Wake The Fuck Up" and his 2020 Biden/Harris campaign ad "Same Old," both starring Samuel L. Jackson. Mansbach's work has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times Book Review, Esquire, The Believer, The Guardian, and on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, The Moth Storytelling Hour, and This American Life. His next novel, The Golem of Brooklyn, will be published by One World in September.

Reviews

[Kasa Cotugno · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't wait to see the reaction to this highly original work, since there are those who will see themselves portrayed none too gently, but then, they probably won't read it. As with any delicious satire, The Golem of Brooklyn is equal parts hilarious and disturbing, and should be required reading by those who, for instance, are saying that January 6 was not an attempted coup but a nice visit to our capitol. But then again, they won't read it. Even the chapters dealing with the history of the Jews, the persecution throughout the ages are wickedly funny. So we learn of the creation of a crime stopper in the form of a 9 foot 400 pound creature fashioned out of clay, traditionally by a rabbi, but here by a stoned art teacher in Brooklyn Heights. And off they go to a Charlottesville-like rally in Kentucky with a former member of the Williamsburg Hassidic community originally enlisted as a translator. What could possibly go wrong. I won't go further into the plot since it should unspool for each reader. All I'll say is, it will probably be banned in Florida.

[Vicki Herbert - Vacation until Jan 2 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why The Golem Here? And
Where's The Golem P*nis?...

THE GOLEM OF BROOKLYN
by Adam Mansbach

No spoilers. 3 1/2 stars. Len Bronstein was high on weed-laced cookies. He really didn't need a golem, but he had a large quantity of pilfered clay in his shed...

He was a high school art teacher, but he wasn't a sculptor, and so it was his drug addled brain that decided to fashion...

The Golem...

In Jewish folklore, the golem is a giant humanoid creature made of mud or clay by a learned holy Jewish man...

In times of crisis...

The Hebrew word for TRUTH is carved into its forehead. Prayers and rituals are invoked and...

The golem animates to do its creator's bidding...

After the golem's mission is accomplished (destroying Jewish enemies), TRUTH is erased from the forehead and replaced with...

DEATH...

... making the creature vacant and immobile like a toddler in front of a TV screen...

In some stories...

The golem is a hero. In others, he is an uncontrollable monster...

With the help of the internet...

Len finished his 9 foot, 400 lb. golem. He crafted it to be muscular up and down its enormous body, and...

... anointed it with his own blood mixed with cemetery dirt while saying clumsy incantations and prayers.Afterward, he waited 5 minutes...

Then, when nothing happened...

He went into the house to have a cold beer. That was when the golem ripped the door off its hinges and roared:

Why the golem here, and where the golem's p*nis?...

I only finished half of this novel. For me, it was a lost cause because there were too many Yiddish and Hebrew words to keep up with the story.

I rated the story 3 1/2 stars because if you are Jewish and know the phrases and words, I'm sure this was a very good and thought-provoking story. There's a lot of Jewish history here as well as an entertaining story.

Another story centering around this creature of Jewish legend is THE TRIBE by Bari Wood. It was published in 1981, so it dates itself somewhat in the storytelling but is still a fearsome story about this mindless killer.

[K.J. Charles]

By turns one of the funniest books I've read in ages, with laugh-out-loud lines and brilliant dry wit, and one of the most horrifying in its piling up of the history of atrocities against the Jews, and the resurgence of Nazism in the US. There's a lot to think about crammed in here (including the problems with assimilation, with separatism, with violent resistance, with not resisting), and a notable dearth of conclusions, which is fair because nobody seems to have answers. Pitch-dark comedy, immensely readable and haunting. Impressively sweary also, I was delighted to realise this is the author of Go the fuck to Sleep.

[ancientreader · Rating 5 out of 5]

Opening sentence: "Len Bronstein was not so much in need of a golem as he was in possession of a large quantity of clay, and very stoned." Two snorts of laughter: first for the sentence as a whole, second for the realization that "Len Bronstein" is one letter away from "Lev Bronstein," better known as Leon Trotsky, and that no way on this earth did Mansbach do that by accident, never mind by what series of preposterous accidents Len managed to create a golem.

Or rather, The Golem, which is his name. And now the ambiguities and questions start pouring in: Is The Golem alive? Is he a saving force or a destructive one? What makes a Jew? (Miri, the other central human character, is a lesbian ex-Hasid: her family doesn't consider her Jewish anymore. But The Golem converts a pork-eating 11-year-old to Judaism by having her stand on one leg, briefly, twice: once to approximate Hillel -- "What is hateful to you, don't do to your neighbor. That the Torah. The rest just commentary" -- and then to introduce the concept of tikkun olam.)

Also, as Len, Miri, and The Golem head for a planned white-supremacist demonstration in Kentucky: How should one respond to anti-Semitism (and to white supremacism in all its aspects)? The Golem thinks by extirpating anti-Semites, Len thinks by frightening them, and Miri ... well, you have to read the book to find out.

The Golem of Brooklyn starts and ends as one of the funniest books I've ever read; also, the further into it I got, the bleaker it became, until it hit what seemed to me a point of no return. Along the way it takes in the entire history of the Jewish people as well as the present threats to them and to all of us who overlap with or are properly allied with them -- queer people, Black people, Muslims ...

So I laughed all through, with breaks for grief and, as appropriate, fear, then finished stock-still in wonder and dismay. I can't recommend this book highly enough -- it's brilliant -- but brace yourself.

Many thanks to Random House and NetGalley for the ARC.

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of all the supernatural creatures in Jewish folklore, the golem is basically the only decent one: a giant humanoid built of mud or clay, always by a learned and holy man, and always in a time of crisis. The Hebrew word for “truth” is inscribed on its forehead, certain esoteric prayers and rituals are incanted and enacted, and the golem animates. Talmudic scholars, who agree on nothing, are unanimous in rejecting the notion that the golem is alive.

In an act of stoned whynotism, Williamsburg-based high school art teacher Len Bronstein decides to create a golem — the five-thousand-year-old “crisis monster” of Jewish mythology — and when he realises that he’s unable to communicate with the massive, Yiddish-speaking, rampage-machine he brought to life, Len runs to the local bodega to beg the clerk there for her help. Between Len (culturally Jewish but won’t say no to a BLT) and Miri (an ex-Hasid who loves her heritage but couldn’t live within the strict confines of her orthodox upbringing) and a night of binge-watching Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Golem is brought up to date on the current climate for Jewish people. And as the creature states that he can only be summoned in a time of great threat, and Len and Miri insist that their lives are not in any imminent danger, a news report about an upcoming White Pride rally in Virginia forces the trio to consider what use a crisis monster might be put to in our times. Adam Mansbach (probably best known for his Go the F**k to Sleep series of tongue-in-cheek “children’s” books) treats this examination of antisemitism with a light and humorous touch (Len is a goofball and extremists — whether Hasidic or Supremacist — are satisfyingly lampooned); but through the memories of The Golem (who is always the same creature with an intact consciousness over time) the history of Jewish persecution is outlined. Ultimately, the question asked by The Golem of Brooklyn is: If Jews are directed to both follow the Golden Rule (what is hateful to you, don’t do to your neighbour) and to engage in tikkun olam (to repair and improve the world), how does unleashing a killing machine against one’s enemies satisfy these directives? All delivered with dick and stoner jokes and a cameo by Larry David. It’s an odd balance, but thoughtful and entertaining. I’m glad I picked this up. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Why there has not been a greater profusion of golems, given the number of extremely shitty situations in which the Jewish people have found themselves over the last fifty-seven hundred and eighty-three years, remains a mystery. But clues might be found in the literature of golems, which you can read about on the internet. In some tellings, the golem is a heroic savior. In others, he is an uncontrollable monster, a doltish brute, even a tragic lover. But perhaps we have not yet scratched the surface of what the golem means.

If I had a slight complaint it would be that the main narrative unspools alongside a series of unrelated stories — the first page begins to outline the long plot of a novel Len never got around to writing (which in the acknowledgements at the end, Mansbach explains is a novel he has never gotten around to writing), a character asks The Golem for a story and he tells of being summoned during the Babylonian Exile in order to defend against the baby-killing spirit of Lilith, Len asks Miri for a story and she recalls trying to find her way in New York as a runaway eighteen-year-old “baby lesbian” — and while these stories do add colour, there’s something unsophisticated about the way they are inserted. On the other hand, it’s probably the only way to share The Golem’s entire history — from his first appearance (after God had moulded Adam out of clay, but before filling him with the breath of life) to his last (standing amongst the thirty-three thousand seven hundred and seventy-one Jews who were shot to death by German soldiers in Kyiv in September of 1941, “the last time he appears in the folklore of the Jewish people”) — and it is The Golem’s history, his purpose and destiny, that are the interesting crux of the narrative.

“So now we’re trying to invent a superhero?”

Miri laid her fork down. “If I’ve learned anything since I left the Sassovs and joined the real world, it’s that people love superheroes.”

“Yeah, in movies. Shit, Miri — people already believe that George Soros controls the world economy and Jews have secret space lasers. You really think —” Len broke off, snarled in his thoughts. He was down to his last bite of BLT, and he was severely tempted to order another one. “You really think that would be good for the Jews?” he finished weakly.

Over the course of the novel, we are shown that Len and Miri are both good people — people who live by the Golden Rule and tikkun olam — but Mansbach does such a good job of representing the White Pride rally as a credible threat to good people everywhere, that the question of what they should do with the power in their hands is an interesting one to explore. In its details, this is a really interesting and entertaining read; not really what you might call literary, and not exactly "light reading", but I'll round up to four stars.

[Sarah-Hope · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author of The Golem of Brooklyn, Adam Mansbach, is probably best known for writing Go the Fuck to Sleep [GTFTS]. The Golem of Brooklyn has the irreverence of GTFTS—only expanded, more detailed, crazier, and with a bit more room for probing the choices made by its characters.

The central character, Len Bronstein, is an art teacher who has been stealing clay a few kilos at a time from his high school classroom and has decided that now is the time to create a Golem. (For those who don't know, a Golem is a creature from Jewish folklore. Made out of mud or clay and brought to life through ritual involving the mystical name of g-d, the Golem will fight to defend Jews in times of great danger.) Len isn't really thinking about the great danger part of things. He just wants to see if he can get enough information online to actually bring this giant clay being to light. The answer is, "yes." Chalk up another win for the internet.

Of course, there are complications. First, the Golem speaks Yiddish, Lem doesn't. Second—and Lem discovers this only after he meets Miri Apfelbaum, who can speak Yiddish—the Golem is not at all pleased to have been created without a penis. Third, the Golem wants to know who he should be killing. That is, after all, his job, the reason he's been called into being in the past.

The novel unrolls as a sort of fever dream of a road trip, during which Lem and Miri track down the leader of the conservative Jewish community she left years ago when she came out as a lesbian, then make the mistake of showing the Golem video of a white nationalist protest, and find themselves driving south because the golem now knows who he wants to kill. Lem and Miri try to discourage the whole killing thing, but in the short term, it's easier to just do what the Golem wants while they try to figure out how you say "no" to a nine-foot tall being of superhuman strength.

It's the kind of plot that can only be dreamed up by someone possessing an unlikely combination of imagination, humor, and anarchism. It's funny. In fact, it's hilarious. It's also serious because Lem and Miri have moments when they're forced to question what they're doing as they allow themselves to be moved along the path of least resistance. Lem and Miri make an interesting, and surprisingly effective team. Miri not only knows Yiddish, she has deep knowledge of Judaism, but that knowledge is strangely unworldly because so much of her life has been spent at one remove from what we call the real world. Lem knows less than Miri does—he also worries less and thinks quickly on his feet when the choices he makes pull them into increasing layers of difficulty. And, because Miri is a lesbian, readers' time isn't wasted on the all-too-often-obligatory romance between characters who work just fine as friends. (Being, like Miri, a lesbian, I love a book where a man and woman can work together without becoming overwrought with carnal tension.)

Those who enjoy humor that combines the slapstick with the metaphysical (and shouldn't we all find that combination delightful?) will find The Golem of Brooklyn a rare treat, sparking both laughter and rumination.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are my own.

[Bam cooks the books · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hilarious! Len Bronstein, a Jewish high school art teacher, has systematically stolen 400 pounds of sculpting clay from the school's art supplies. With it, he creates a golem using instructions from the internet but is not prepared when the body he created becomes animated, starts smashing things and is yelling in Yiddish! Len plunks the golem in front of the TV set, tuned in to 'Curb Your Enthusiasm,' and takes off for the local bodega where he knows the clerk working there, Miri, speaks Yiddish, and convinces her to come help translate.

By the time they get back though, the golem is already pretty fluent in English and wants to know why he's been summoned. Usually a rabbi or prophet brings him forth in times of crisis and Len is neither one of those. And BTW, he's THE Golem, the one who has been called upon for over 5000 years. And now The Golem has decided his mission is to go to Kentucky to kill a bunch of Jew-hating white supremacists who are holding a rally there. Oy vey!

Really original and quite cleverly done with a very good moral message at the end. Mansbach fleshes out (pun intended) the story with some interesting bits of Jewish history and religion. I received an arc from the author and publisher via NetGalley. Many thanks! My review is voluntary and the opinions expressed are my own.

[Anne Wolfe · Rating 5 out of 5]

TRIGGER WARNING!!! If any of the following describes you, DO NOT READ THIS BOOK! IT IS NOT FOR YOU.
There is no question that the history revisionists, Trumpites, Holocaust deniers Proud Boys, Right Wing Republicans, and even Satmar sect Hasidic Jews will find themselves on these pages in a most unflattering light. (Hence the trigger warning - it's not too late NOT to start reading.)

Okay, now that that's out of the way, let me tell you how much I loved this book. I'll begin by saying that the first book I ever reviewed for Goodreads was titled The Golem and the Jini and it was a romance. So as soon as I saw that NetGalley had The Golem of Brooklyn available as an ARC, I downloaded it with great glee and anticipation and it did not disappoint.

Len is a high school Art teacher and over time, has brought home 400 pounds of art supply clay from his school. What to do with it? What else but build a Golem. For those of you who are not familiar with Golems, it is said that throughout Jewish history, renowned Rabbis have saved the Jews by creating a creature from clay, using other materials like blood and cemetery dirt mixed in to create it. Using the proper words, the Rabbi would animate the creature by writing EMET (meaning "truth") on its forehead. Once turned loose, the Golem would rampage and kill the offending oppressors of his people.

Len does all the proper things to accomplish this, but unfortunately the creature only speaks Yiddish, which Len does not understand. So he parks the enormous thing in front of the TV and goes off to bring Miri, a young woman who works in the nearby bodega, to translate. Miri is a Gay dropout from a strict Hasidic sect.

The early part of this novel is so hysterically funny that I was in pain by page 20 from laughing so hard. The fact that I speak Yiddish may have helped, although there are translations for non-speakers. But don't get too used to it. The laughter becomes mixed with discomfort and disbelief as the novel progresses. (My mother would have called it laughing with Yasherkes", which means with tears and pain.)

Mansbach's book even mentions Professor Lilly's dolphin experiments in the 1960s. (You should really read Dolphin House by AudreySchulman)

If you want to read a mind-blowingly funny book about a very serious subject, this is the one. My thanks to the author (You go Guy), to NetGalley and to One World publishers for a most unusual book. It's going to be a smash., I predict.

[Jessica Woodbury · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. There are not as many funny novels as there should be and lucky for us Mansbach really wants you to laugh while you read this book. He wants you to laugh every chapter and he succeeds. He embraces self-effacing Jewish humor in a story that is part farce, part religious allegory, part who the hell knows. It is a book that is stuffed to the gills with Jewish identity and culture, both ancient and modern, and so it's fitting that it is both darkly funny and just plain dark. It is finding the humor even while your very existence is under threat. It feels like a fitting book for our times.

Mansbach's biggest success is the Golem itself, it is not at all what you would expect it to be. It is a monster and a plot device and a symbol and a lot of other things but it is also a great character that keeps the whole story on its toes.

Even though sometimes Mansbach speeds through scenes too quickly (if you try to keep track of what is actually happening from physical descriptions, you will throw up your hands because often we just lose that piece entirely) the buddy comedy elements of how our two protagonists--Len the lazy stoner who is not at all in touch with his identity and Miri the lesbian former Hasid who still struggles after leaving her entire community behind--keep you invested and moving forward. Though Miri really pulls the bulk of the weight here, Len is more the empty everyman vessel serving as proxy for most readers.

Things bumped down to three stars for me at the ending. It's tricky to take this kind of dark comedy and throw in our current wave of white supremacists. They're not a hugely competent bunch and they already present as caricature that it can tip very easily into ridiculousness, it's a tightrope walk. Personally I have such a strong and vehement distaste for these villains that having some chapters from their point of view, while effectively raising the stakes, also pulled me out of the story. I don't want to understate these parts of the story as having this much attention (the entire third act is devoted to a far-right anti-semitic protest) may make it a difficult book for some readers.

[Zehava (Joyce) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you to Random House Publishing Group - One World and NetGalley for an arc in exchange for an honest review.

The Golem of Brooklyn tells the story of Brooklyn art teacher, Len Bronstein, who manages to create a Golem out of clay and then embarks on an ill advised road trip with Miri, a local ex-Chasid bodega employee and the Golem.

Parts of this story are extremely clever and hilarious (like the first third) and parts are just plain weird and underdeveloped. This book is very short and almost reads like an early draft of a novel. It has something to say but it truly doesn’t know what it is trying to say. The depiction of rabid anti-semitism was a buffoonish caricature and seems pretty naive to the real threat in 2023.

Overall this book is fascinating and such a great kernel of a story but the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

[Cait · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I said what I said,” miri told him. it was a phrase she’d picked up at the bodega. she liked it because it sounded like something god would say.

the kind of book that made me keep bugging my wife in a “listen to this” kind of way. follows len, a high school art teacher ('hebrew was not a language len knew; he had grown up observant only in the sense that he noticed things'), miri, a lesbian ex-hasid ('“I know what tikkun olam means,” miri said, and if len noticed that her pronunciation was a repudiation of his, he didn’t let on'), and the golem, [who is] the golem ('“guy in drerd un bak beygl,” he intoned, go bake bagels in hell').

this is a book that can move from incisive sociocultural commentary in one moment to a stoner joke in the next, and indeed is often doing both things at once. adam mansbach is a clever writer, and a hilarious one, and a beautiful one.

[...] long
before they learn to count,
[children] want things to be fair.
the need might surface as
a love of symmetry,
a parceling of objects, a
rigorous accounting of
to whom what belongs.

some choice anti-cop sentiment (in a book with countless laugh-out-loud moments, 'lmbo, enthused grimes' made an unexpected sneak up toward the top of my personal ranking!!), and mansbach the person outside of his writing seems like a pretty goddamn solid dude as well, on the whole.

“do you know about the twelve labors of heracles?” asked the witch[...]

the golem snorted. “that greek pretty boy idea of labor like, kill one lion, sit on asshole and drink wine for two years. capture one boar, sit on asshole and drink wine for two years.”

“you knew him?”

the golem shook his head. “not really move in same circles.”

if anyone can find and show me the “golem state warriors logo that we used on all the promo items” that mansbach references in the acknowledgments, I will be forever grateful.

world is world.

[Amy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had so been looking forward to this one and I was disappointed. I didn't find it funny. I found it crass. And bumbling.

And not for nothing, I am not reading this 2023 book out of nowhere. We are in the midst of a crisis, but not one for which a golem, or bumbling aggression would be remotely helpful. So what is our modern day response? It had to be one with intellect and compassion and thoughtfulness and extension to others and the world. Everything a golem is not. I have always loved the idea of the golem. But right now, I am looking for real life leaders and complex thoughtful characters who have a sense of what's called for. Thank God I read this in under an hour. It deserved less of my time and thought than that. Not even sure it deserves the time it takes to reflect on the book and try to write a cogent thoughtful review.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can't recommend this highly enough. Funny, clever, angry romp of a novel; I love anything that can make me laugh this much while also making me think.

[Jan Rice · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorite character is The Golem.
That's what he called himself so I'll follow suit.

The author is most famous, I think, for his parodies of kids' books, Adam Mansbach - Go the F**k to Sleep and You Have to F**king Eat 2-in-1 Collection, etc. Although he has written comedies with other famous comics, the parodies are how I learned of him. I liked them not in response to my own parenting experiences but because of how they send up certain current over-sanctimonious parenting attitudes. Liked the idea of them, rather. The Golem of Brooklyn is my first Adam Mansbach book.

And I'd heard him on some literary platforms, so was looking forward to the book.

It's much better than some recent books advertised as funny that were more like hit jobs.

Near the first and toward the middle of the book, the author engages in a few chapter-long digressions, as though, in doubt of his comedic reserves, he needed to fill some pages. If so, he needn't have worried. He is talented, and the flow's not likely to subside..

I also think he gets into stereotypical ideas about what certain characters are supposed to be like, and that constrains his comedy as well as his characterization.

Finally he espouses a certain political ideology such that real antisemitism comes from the right -- not such an unusual ideology as of September 26, 2023, when Golem was published. His ideology makes the bad guys of this book seem, in a way, almost endearingly quaint. Well, in a way....

Except that we shouldn't do to others what is hateful to ourselves, as The Golem would be the first to say, and that includes stereotyping cops. (All cops.) (Or, all Hasidim.) That turns the action into farce and subtracts from the possibility of genius-level humor.

...although it must be said that the penultimate scene is nevertheless a stirring adventure.

I do love his comedy when he gives it free rein.
I love his pithy characterizations of Jewish tradition that squarely hit home.
I even think that kind of laughter can be a potent way to neutralize antisemitism.

The book's not comedy and nothing but comedy. Mansbach also weaves in some beautiful midrashim.

This book is instructional.

As to the colorful language, which can be distasteful to some ladies of my age -- that is, of a certain age, as they say -- I've heard that Yiddish itself has the potential to be earthy.

You have to f**king laugh!

3 1/2 rounded up to 4 stars

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mansbach writes with irreverent and sometimes crude humor this entertaining story of a golem brought to life in current day Brooklyn for no good reason, but that ends at an alt-right/neo-Nazi rally on a note of agonized debate about how far one should go to protect one’s people from those who hate them when such hate has already murdered millions and promises to kill more.

It begins with an admirable opening line, getting across about exactly the sort of book this is: “Len Bronstein was not so much in need of a golem as he was in possession of a large quantity of clay, and very stoned.” Completely secular, Len joins forces with Miri, a young lesbian woman who has recently exited the Hasidic Sassov community, to try to figure out what to do with this astonishing creature.

The Talmud seems to indicate that golems cannot speak (Sanhedrin 65b:17 if you’d like to follow my research on the matter), but this one knows Yiddish and learns a pidgin English overnight by watching Curb Your Enthusiasm episodes, which you have to admit is a funny idea (and it leads later to a hilarious Zoom call with Larry David about strategy). Golems are usually not created by stoned doofuses either of course, so, we were already straying from orthodoxy. But Mansbach knows his golem history and gives a funny satirical account, tinged with black humor appropriate to the “why” of golems, such as the passage about the conflict between the Sadducees and Pharisees and stories that the latter had a golem:

The Pharisees were more interested in forging personal relationships to God than in setting goats on fire, and they encouraged Jews to worship and study Torah privately instead of investing all their time and money in the Temple and its priests… if the Pharisees had had a golem, they would not have gotten their asses kicked all up and down the fecund plains of Judea. But they did invent something nearly as useful: a decentralized model of worship and study that would help the Jews survive when everybody else began trying to kill them in the years to come.

The last iteration of the golem had been destroyed in the same Ukrainian pit into which the Nazis efficiently gunned down thirty thousand Jews in less than two days, but one child survivor lived to become the leader of the Sassovs. Reunited, the golem is tasked with enforcing some petty political corruption over a real estate deal, disgusting Len and Miri, who win back the golem’s loyalty by showing video of the infamous 2017 “unite the right” rally in Charlottesville, and of plans for a similar rally coming up in Kentucky under the slogan of “Save Our History’s Future”. The trip there, the debate over tactics, a rupture of the group, and the climax at the rally proceed amusingly apace.

There are some strange lengthy narrative asides though that don’t fit or really work. An outline of Len’s imagined sci-fi novel about epigenetics. An account of an Airbnb scam last year that led Len to fly to Sweden to confront an Iraqi engineer. These are other story ideas of Mansbach, I assume, that he couldn’t make work on their own so wedged them in here. Whatever their merits, they needlessly interrupt the narrative flow.

The ultimate rally introduces us to some characters that could have been taken right out of Percival Everett’s “The Trees” in their dumbass threatening racism. The Golem then does what golems do for a bit before the inevitable erasure, as the book ends with Len and Miri arguing the big question - how far to go to ensure the safety of the Jews, a people tasked with not just surviving but repairing the world.

The feeling that perhaps he had become irrelevant, which had nagged at The Golem ever since the machine gun bullets tore him apart at Babyn Yar, lifted slightly as he ran, to hover just above his shoulders. Was there still a place, in this changed world where his people could be slaughtered by the millions, for The Golem?

[avocet · Rating 3 out of 5]

Paper Towns meets Inglourious Basterds; a little heavy handed but an interesting read immediately on the heels of Frankenstein

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was absolutely hilarious. My in-laws are Jewish and I’m grateful to have learned so much about the culture that these jokes land HARD.

It was recommended as similar in tone to a Dave Barry novel (he and the author are frequent collaborators) so this recommendation was absolutely true. It’s serious when it needs to be and lighthearted when those serious moments are a little too serious.

The characters were authentic, real people reacting like real people do when something absolutely wild and horrifying happens in front of them. Only unrealistic thing in the whole book (include the titular Golem learning English by watching Curb Your Enthusiasm and also getting the blessing of Larry David himself to rough up some anti-Semites) is that the characters always have the perfect quip at the right time. That’s the real magic right there.

I enjoyed everything about this book: the tone, characters, worldbuilding, all of it.

Thank you to NetGalley, Random House, and Adam Mansbach for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

[Rana Bickel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the weirdest books I’ve ever read. It involves a secular Jewish art teacher and ex-orthodox lesbian who accidentally bring to life a golem (a mythical Jewish monster/protector). This book engages with serious questions about modern American Jewish identity, antisemitism and white supremacy, Jewish history, and a golem who learns English from Larry David. It’s offensively hilarious and deeply moving. It's truly remarkable and like nothing else.

[Lucía Almagro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Witty, chuckle-inducing, irreverent yet relevant. 10/10

[Kenya | Reviews May Vary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recent Read:
The Golem of Brooklyn by Adam Mansbach

Our main character, Len, is so high and bored that he decides to use 4000 pounds of stolen art-room clay to make a Golem. He’s “culturally Jewish,” though not practicing, and he certainly isn’t a priest or a prophet. When the golem wakes up, he only knows Yiddish, so Len recruits a woman from the local bodega to communicate. Miri has got no contact with her Hasid family. Both are a bit ambivalent about how best to use a crisis monster, especially one who gets broody about being made with no genitalia. The golem learns English by binge watching Curb Your Enthusiasm, and will only listen to Larry David when it’s time to decide if he should fulfill his duty to protect Jews by smooshing all threats.

The Golem has the memories of all golem called on before him. If you liked Thistlefoot by GennaRose Nethercott, you’ll probably like The Golem of Brooklyn. This one is as tender, but with more obvious humor.

The writing was a little dense for me at times, but I enjoyed it overall. Four wobbly stars.

[Dee Turner · Rating 4 out of 5]

IMAGE: THE GOLEM BEFORE SENTIENCE

Written by the author of a children's poem most famous for having been read by Samuel Jackson (Go The Fuck to Sleep), this is a modern day tale of The Golem, a singular creature allegedly brought to life by various rabbis during times of extreme trauma for the Jewish people. Our protagonist is Len Bronstein, who lives a charmed life as an overpaid art teacher at a froufrou private academy for the elite of NYC. He pays $1500/mo. rent on a flat that others are paying $4K on, mostly because he thinks his landlady is either demented or dead. But he's frustrated--his new novel isn't going well, with not a single word yet to land a page. So he does some research, steals $400 worth of gray clay from the school which would gladly give it to him, anyway, and builds a thing:

"The golem’s body was chunked with slabs of muscle up and down its four-hundred-pound, nine-and-a-half-foot length. Len was immensely proud of the golem’s shoulders, which were filigreed with remarkably realistic-looking striations along the deltoids. The hands were artless, and the feet looked like a pair of cinderblocks the golem had decided to wear as bedroom slippers. The face was brutal and amateurish, but expressive—the broad lips eager to peel back in a snarl or a laugh, the deep-set eyes oddly cagey and alert. The ears looked like actual clumps of sun-bleached dog shit that someone had decided to glue to a human head, but they were Len’s eighth attempt at ears and enough was enough."

Len ponders his lackluster participation in faith. "What was Judaism if not an exacting, totalized system of laws handed down by the divine, then kitted out with redundancies and fail-safes by the scholars to eliminate any chance of an infraction—building a wall around the Torah, it was called, the process by which don’t cook a goat in its mother’s milk ballooned into never mix dairy with meat, buy two sets of dishes, wash them in different dishwashers—and then, finally, poked full of loopholes so the devout might obediently circumvent those laws?"

He was even more critical of the "new" faith that had emerged from Judaism. "The surgent Christian faith was at great pains to distinguish itself to potential converts—to explain how a religion based on the worship of the Jewish son of the Jewish God was not merely some substrain of Judaism. The simplest and most elegant way to illustrate the differences, it turned out, was to kill as many Jews as possible for the next fifteen hundred years."

When he makes the aleph on The Golem's forehead and brings it to sentience, Len is immediately dismayed to learn the clay man speaks Yiddish only. Moreoever, he's quite angry about--something.
His drug-provider and bff Waleed provides tokes while they examine Len's creation. To calm it down. Waleed gives him about a thousand times a human dose of LSD. Len then enlists a Jewish girl named Miri from her job at a local ethnic grocery store (she sleeps upstairs) to help him understand his creation. Even super-high, The Golem is roaring, in translation, "Where's my DICK?" Which Len forgot to build. Miri is among non-Jewish people because she is a lesbian, which makes her anathema. (And her one shot at it ended dismally, so there's that, too.)

In an attempt to put The Golem at ease, Len tells a few pretty good Jewish jokes. He asks what the clay man thinks, who answers:

“'Couple thing,' The Golem said begrudgingly. 'Joke about Jew who become priest pretty good. The
Golem know actual Jew who become priest once.' 'Wow,' said Len. 'There’s gotta be a story there!' 'It
short story. They decide he still Jew and aroysgerisn di kishkes durkhn tokhes.' 'Ripped his guts out
through his ass,' Miri explained. 'Unpleasant,' said Len. 'That Spanish Inquisition in nutshell.'”

The Golem's gonna bail, so Miri and Len quickly show him a clip of the Charlottesville MAGA parade with the tiki torches and all those White guys shouting, "Jews will not replace us, Jews will not replace us!" Which gets The Golem on board to kill 'em all, right away. Now, having given him reason to "live," as it were, they have to spend much of the rest of the story tamping him down so he DOESN'T go on a murderous rampage.

I kinda fell in love with The Golem. And he's quick to remind everybody, it's not Golem, it's The Golem. He's always only ever been one, in all his iterations. At the end, Len and Miri disagree as to whether their religious mandate is to make the world better--or kill everybody that hates Jews. Miri thinks the latter serves the former--and then you get the feeling she may not be entirely gay, after all.

A primer for non-Jews, and a fun romp! Go for the jokes, stay for The Golem.

[Toni · Rating 1 out of 5]

With all of the great ratings on this book I deem to be, again, in the far opposite. I took 2 pages of notes on this book. I enjoyed the Jewish history and folklore but the format and story left me with my jaw on the floor. Mansbach's was ridiculous to me and he flitted all over the place. There had to be a better platform to go over history and the present day issues that we find the country with antisemitism today. The story was not one iota funny. I read the entire story hoping that I could see what I missed that evidently was not missed by the majority of readers.

[Feliciana · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this was more of a miss for me. I appreciated the Jewish history and folklore. The ridiculousness of the protagonists and introduction of random subplots outside of the historical narratives was……something…..

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

highest praise i can give: i listened to this audiobook on 1x speed

super funny

[Marjorie Ingall · Rating 3 out of 5]

Darkly hilarious, entertainingly discursive, quippy as fuck. (“The Crusades are usually thought of as Christian holy wars carried out to reclaim Palestine by killing or converting the Muslims who now controlled it. But most crusades kicked off with a festive, informal warm-up massacre of the local Jewish population. The fact that Jews were not allowed to own weapons made these pogroms perfect low-stakes team-building opportunities.”) But a novel isn’t a standup routine, and The Golem of Brooklyn is kind of a sprawling mess on a narrative and character level. But man oh manischewitz is it funny.

[Jordan Taffet · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book felt like the literary equivalent of someone making an incredibly hysterical and self-deprecating joke in a last-ditch effort to stifle a sob. In fact, it dives headfirst into the pitfall of a classically Jewish coping mechanism: laughing through the tears. Jewish people (like myself) will find the writing to be familiar, although others (ahem, goyim) will likely be a bit perplexed. The book makes heavy use of Yiddish and Hebrew words and covers a wide range of Jewish historical events and folklore. Perhaps most critically, the book maintains a paradoxically avoidant/non-avoidant attitude to cover its main themes, which is not altogether different from how many Jewish families choose to (not) talk about issues of particular import to the Jewish community today. This is to say that I smiled and chuckled to myself the whole way through this book, but I was disappointed to find that the ending was fairly abrupt and that it often shied away from the powerful ideas about the history of Judaism and Anti-Semitism that it touched upon in favor of (truly solid) punchlines.

If this book had been about 200-400 pages longer, set aside the Larry David-esque humor every once in a while, and approached the issues of modern-day Judaism with slightly more gravity (i.e. something like Michael Chabon's exploration of the Golem as a theme in "The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay") this could have been a truly stunning and timely book.

[Joe Human · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is a mess. Maybe I am just too unfamiliar with modern pop fiction, but the prose has this awful cheek to it - as if the author is nudging you with his elbow every time he makes a joke. However, I do appreciate the premise, the idea of a repository of Jewish memory housed inside a 10-foot golem is something I can get behind. Unfortunately, what the book does with its premise negated any interest that its description welled inside of me. I was able to finish this novel, but only because it was an astonishingly easy read. My gripes with this book culminated halfway through in a chapter entirely devoted to the main character recounting his adventure one summer ago, the events of which BORE NO RELATION TO THE PLOT WHATSOEVER. It seemed as if the author finished writing the book, realized none of the characters were likable, and decided he needed more character development. So he chose to go back to a random point in the novel to add an unrelated short story based on his main character. I'm sure I'd like Adam Mansbach as a person, but if I met him I'd have no choice but to tell him how much his book bore me.

[Derek Siegel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not even through the first chapter, I thought to myself, "this book has no business being this funny." I laughed all the way through "The Golem of Brooklyn," which was also a tour de force of Jewish history (hilariously composed), with great character beats (Len, Miri, and the Golem form a trio I didn't know I needed), and interesting social commentary. Often, books with such overt social justice themes feel a bit preachy, but "the Golem of Brooklyn" ends up raising more questions than it answers. It was a fun journey that I couldn't recommend more highly.

[Teresa · Rating 1 out of 5]

Can't wait for book club with this one

[Katy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I knew immediately after reading the synopsis that this was going to be an outstanding, deeply original work. I'm happy to have been proven right (and then some!) It moves so quickly that you don't have time to stop and ask yourself what the hell just happened. The Golem, Len, and Miri make the sweetest, funniest team I've encountered in a while - I laughed out loud at least twice every chapter. It's a no-brainer - The Golem of Brooklyn gets 5 stars and a permanent spot on my recommendation list. Excellent!