No, not the character from “The Lord of the Rings.” Golem with a long “o.” Yes, I know there are golems in "Minecraft.” Not those, either.
The golem I’ve been trying to understand is a figure from Jewish folklore, a giant humanoid being created of mud or clay and animated through secret incantations to defend the Jewish people in times of crisis. Stories of the golem date to the 1500s, when the Jews of Europe were in more or less constant peril — not that the same couldn’t be said of the Jews for the bulk of our history.
The final step in animating a golem involves the Hebrew word for “truth”; it is inscribed on the creature’s forehead or written on a piece of paper and inserted into his mouth. When the golem’s work is done, the letter “aleph” is erased, turning “truth” to the word “death” and returning the golem to inchoate matter.
I started writing about golems in the spring of 2022 — before Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, and Kyrie Irving dominated the news cycle with antisemitic screeds and Holocaust denial — and finished my project the week former president Donald Trump had dinner with Ye and white supremacist Nick Fuentes. I’m writing this two months after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed the coronavirus had been engineered to exempt Ashkenazi Jews; a month after audio transcripts filed in a Manhattan court revealed Rudy Giuliani mocking Jews for celebrating Passover and Robert G. Bowers was sentenced for killing 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh; and the day Elon Musk threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League for costing X, formerly known as Twitter, ad revenue by calling attention to rising hate speech on the platform.
As public figures breathe new life into ancient stereotypes and hate metastasizes unchecked across social media, it seems clear that we live in a world in great need of a 10-foot-tall Jewish crisis monster — or, at the very least, a reckoning with what the golem can teach us.
The golem represents vigilance against the inevitable, cyclical return of injustice. His myth is born of an understanding that antisemitism is ineradicable — that as long as there are people who feel embittered about their lives, constrained by forces they cannot control, they will come to blame the Jews and then to enact violence upon us. This is both the small end of the funnel, where every conspiracy theory bottoms out, and the cornerstone atop which the broader ideology and praxis of hatred have been built.
The golem is necessary because no victory is permanent — and because when the reversal comes, it can be swift and deadly. History has seared this lesson into the Jewish people. But Americans cannot seem to remember it. Again and again, we search for the moderate streak in the extremist, tell ourselves we can find common ground with people who are explicit in their desire to do us harm. And so we get caught flat-footed when books are banned, when gay and trans people are brutalized, when antisemitism is mainstreamed, when abortion rights and voting rights are snatched away.
Perhaps this is why the word “truth” brings the golem to life. The golem is a vanquisher of lies — not just blood libels but also self-deception of the kind that leads some to shrug off as mere losers the white nationalists outside Disney World chanting “Jews will not replace us,” or to give a pass to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) for failing to respond.
Despite the power the golem holds, he is not meant to be a standing deterrent. He is always decommissioned as soon as safety, however tenuous, has been restored. This speaks to the necessity of working in good faith — of balancing knowledge of history with optimism about the future. Why not build an army of golems and keep it forever active? Because this solution would cost us too much of our humanity.
In my contemporary reimagining, the relationship between the golem and memory is inverted: There has only ever been one golem, and he remembers every previous iteration of himself. This ancestral memory makes him a walking repository of memory and trauma — not an empty vessel but an exceedingly full one. He is not created by a rabbi to save the Jews from danger but by a stoned art teacher who happens to be in possession of a large quantity of clay, and his first question is: Where’s the crisis?
This, it seems to me, is the essential question facing us. How do we identify a crisis when it’s everywhere and nowhere at once — when it isn’t a pogrom, but the creeping normalization of lies we thought we had overcome or the orderly erosion of the rights that safeguard our freedom?
In the absence of a giant clay superhero, our only choice is to become the golems we need. This doesn’t just mean physical confrontation, though there are times when that might be necessary. Nor does it consist simply of vigilance against Jew haters. Instead, it requires Jewish people to enlarge and modernize our watchfulness, to understand that every vehicle of hatred is built on a chassis of antisemitism, and that violence — in word or deed — against any marginalized group will always be a harbinger of tragedy for us.
This is how we balance golemhood and humanity: by remembering that a deep and courageous commitment to justice and truth knows no bounds. And that the opposite of truth is death.
