Adam Mansbach - The Golem of Brooklyn

Adam Mansbach will discuss The Golem of Brooklyn. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.

This event will be held in person at KAM Isaiah Israel.

About the Book: 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, making The Golem a repository of Jewish history and trauma. He demands to know what crisis has prompted his re-creation and whom must he 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.

About the Author: Adam Mansbach is a novelist, screenwriter, cultural critic and humorist. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Go the Fuck to Sleep, which has been translated into forty languages, named Time Magazine's 2011 "Thing of the Year," and sold over three million copies worldwide. The two sequels, You Have to Fucking Eat and Fuck, Now There Are Two of You are also New York Times bestsellers. The audiobooks, narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, Bryan Cranston, and Larry David, are pretty fucking good as well.

Mansbach's novels include Rage is Back, The End of the Jews (winner of the California Book Award), and Angry Black White Boy, which is taught at over a hundred schools and was adapted into a prize-winning stage play in 2008. His middle grades series, Jake the Fake Keeps it Real (co-written with Craig Robinson), was a Scholastic Book Club Main Selection and winner of the 2021 Grand Canyon Readers Award. With Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel, Mansbach wrote For This We Left Egypt, a finalist for the Thurber Award for American Humor, and the bestselling A Field Guide to the Jewish People.