Blog
This miracle comes breaded
The story is told of a poor cobbler who attended the weekly lecture given by the village’s rabbi. He seldom grasped the complicated legal concepts, but still he attended. One day the rabbi spoke of the twelve “show bread” offerings made in the ancient Temple each week and how God loved the...
Sometimes you just gotta laugh
I had intended to write about what Jewish folklore has to say about the current moment. After all, when the plague of coronavirus is all the news all the time, it’s tough not to recall that the bible has 10 Big Ones, including, most on-the-nose, the plague of pestilence. There are also the...
About that other star of Jewish fantasy…
The golem is the creature par excellence of Jewish fantasy, the one that gets all the love. But living in its shadow is a shadowy creature with a pedigree at least as distinguished: the dybbuk. The spirit that takes possession of the living dates back to Hebrew Scripture and the Talmud,...
Japanese ghost stories are definitely NOT Jewish
Jews and Japanese are often noted for their similarities. They both put weight on tradition, family, education, and veneration of their elderly (all traits they share with other cultures, of course). But I’ve discovered a great distinction between them and I’m wondering what it means. I’m in...
A Christmas Carol is Jewish. Very Jewish.
Perhaps the most Jewish work of fantasy was written by Charles Dickens. And it’s called A Christmas Carol. It’s so Jewish it should be taught in yeshivas. I’ve been saying this to rabbis for years mostly, I confess, to get a rise out of them. But I also think it’s true, even though Dickens...
The Jewish Frankenstein?
It’s commonly suggested that Mary Shelley was inspired to write Frankenstein (1808), at least in part, by stories of Rabbi Judah Lowe’s creation of the Golem of Prague; both stories of course deal with the creation of an artificial man. It’s less-often suggested that if the borrowing did indeed...