The Golem of Brooklyn

A Novel

By: Adam Mansbach

Narrated by: Danny Hoch

The dazzlingly imaginative, ferociously funny story of an art teacher, a bodega clerk, and a five-thousand-year-old clay crisis monster, from the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Go the F**k to Sleep.

“A devastating romp through history, a bonkers road trip through America, this novel could not be any funnier—or any more important.”—W. Kamau Bell

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.

©2023 Adam Mansbach (P)2023 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“Jewish humor goes back a long way. And to a pantheon that includes Brooks, Bruce, Seinfeld, and David, add Mansbach at its virtual apex, with acerbic wit and an absurd premise: a supernatural avenger, a folklore savior of persecuted Jews, let loose in Trump’s America. Such satisfying calamity, this crisp book is easily the funniest novel I’ve ever read, and yet achieves an uncanny profundity. Mansbach’s voice is absolutely singular.” (Dan Charnas, New York Times bestselling author of Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, The Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm)

“Fast-paced and full of memorable characters, Adam Mansbach’s The Golem of Brooklyn is both a searing and hilarious tale of how far we're willing to go to protect ourselves and our community, and who we become when we do so. Mansbach’s ability to infuse wisdom, political insight, history and humor is commendable, and makes this book a page-turner.” (Fatimah Asghar, Carol Shields Prize-winning author of When We Were Sisters)

Stoner/Historical account of Judaism?

I really enjoyed 95% of this book, my only gripe is that it feels as if the ending was too abrupt. The book is funny, provocative, and thoughtful, but the ending just felt sudden and a bit of a copout.

Highly entertaining

My boyfriend and I both enjoyed this. The performance is maybe even better than the story.

book of the year

Brilliant, biting satire that covers the history of the Jews in hilarity and heartbreak. Danny Hoch reading is for real 🔥🔥🔥 a timeless novel, written via the aesthetics of hip-hop genius

amazing book

great story, truly inventive. excellent performance. so different than mosother books. one of a kind.

Historical information

Terry Pratchett uses mythological creatures from every culture; for some reason gollum caught my imagination, and I began researching their history. That’s how I found this book.
The ending was a bit abrupt though. I guess I pictured everyone returning to Brooklyn and living out their days with The Gollum.

Many cool ideas, but doesn’t quite come together

I love the idea of this book, love the historical details, the basis for all the characters, and the general pace of the story…but (perhaps in a delightful irony of my own perception) it felt like this book read kind of like the author’s description of Lev’s clay statue.

The storyline is fantastic and fantastical…but not quite cohesive enough to be fully satisfying. I really enjoyed all of the characters—their backstories are AWESOME, but as I listened, I kept feeling that they were not as fully developed as their foundations and in the story was brilliantly cool…and I feel like at times the story’s primary plot line was outweighed by delightful, but distracting tangents that at times felt more interesting than the lead-up to the rally. The end felt like it came too abruptly…which also seems to echo to the storyline of The Golem, now that I think of it.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. It was fun, inventive, full of enough delicious history and broken-belief-system-healing-power to keep my full attention, but light enough to pause my own personal experience of an existential crisis…

Ultimately, I do recommend, but I also I feel like it could benefit from a bit of minor polishing.

Intense and Funny at Times

This story carries a message against extremism on both sides. It ends rather abruptly. The Golem wasn’t quite as lovable as I had hoped. But the story held my interest and it was well performed.

Terrifically imaginative story. Terrific reader.

I loved the preposterous humor in many of the situations and the fact that along with humor some serious moral issues and some history are addressed. The dialog of the Golem is made even funnier when read aloud.

THE book for November, 2023!

I listened to this wonderful reading of this book as the IDF was and is in the midst of attempting to kill every Hamas member in Gaza as retribution for the Hamas assault on Jews on October 7, 2023, when they killed over 1000 Israeli and took more than 250 hostages back into Gaza. While the Golem, himself, is a comic portrayal which allows the reader to chuckle, the history he reiterates and the current reality he encounters are so tragic, so stupid, so complicated, and so hate-filled that the ambiguous resolution of the novel all-too-accurately reflects the impossibility of resolving the current situation in the Middle East while not predicting inevitable world wide destruction since the Golem can always be reconstructed (I hope). May there always be people of good will capable of empathy, being fair-minded, and not overwhelmed by hate and lies to stand up for a better world and human values.

An exploration of being Jewish in modern America

Delightful performance, and frequently very funny. However it’s more a sequence of interactions exploring what it is to be Jewish in current America than it is a tightly plotted novel.