Love and the Zionist Translation Project
A Frankely Judaic Podcast from the 2020-2021 Institute Theme Year “Translating Jewish Cultures”
Follow Jewish Studies at the University of Michigan and others on SoundCloud.
In this episode, with Maya Barzilai, author of Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monsters and associate Professor at the University of Michigan, we delve into the filmmaker himself, his experiences in World War I, and why his passion for The Golem led him to retell this story on film three times. This episode is scored by Marika Hughes, an acclaimed cellist and composer living in New York. She is accompanied by guitarist Shahzad Ismaily, who has performed with Yoko Ono, Laurie Anderson, Bonnie Prince Billy, and many others. Shahzad’s aural tapestries work perfectly with Hughes dark drones in this piece, a perfect soundtrack to the Golem. Watch here.
The Golem Rescored
Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monsters
A New Books Network Interview with Danielle Drori
This episode of New Books in Jewish Studies features Maya Barzilai, Assistant Professor of Hebrew Literature and Jewish Culture at the University of Michigan and the author of Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monsters (New York University Press, 2016). This timely book traces the evolution of the golem, a clay monster animated by a rabbi to serve and protect his community, from its presence in literature, drama, and cinema in the 1920s to its use as a reference in Israeli and American cultures during the second half of the 20th century. Barzilai has also published a short article in The Forward last November, in which she has shown how the golem was used as a metaphor in the recent US presidential elections to describe Donald Trump as well as the media that “created” him.
