Production and distribution of City Club forums and ideastream public media are made possible by PNC and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland, Inc.. Good afternoon and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Wednesday, November 15th.

And I'm Ken Schneck, editor of The Buckeye Flame, Ohio's only LGBTQ plus newsroom and moderator for today's conversation.

Joining me today is Adam Mansbach cultural critic, novelist, humorist and author.

His latest work is The Golem of Brooklyn, which is a story that intertwines Ashkenazi Jewish culture with the modern American present.

As he shares the story of a stoned art teacher, a clay figure called a golem, and the political scene of 2017.

I won't spoil the book any more than that.

Honestly, I'm not sure I could, even if I tried.

This newly published book has made waves in the literary community, especially with the wake of increasing waves of anti-Semitism over the last few years.

The book focuses on exploring the history of Jewish culture and how entire generation will intertwines.

All of us throughout the book Mansbach presents and ponders questions of faith, healing, humor and vengeance.

Adam Mansbach is also known as the author of the number one New York Times bestseller Go The Effort to Sleep, famously narrated by Samuel L. Jackson.

This book has been translated into 40 languages.

It was named Time magazine's 2011 Thing of the Year, and it sold over 3 million copies worldwide.

Not only an award winning novelist, Adam has also written an award winning screenplay for Netflix, and he has a feature film in the works called Super High.

If you have a question for our speaker, you can text it to 3305415794.

That's 3305415794.

And City Club staff will try to work it into the second half of the program.

Members and Friends of the City Club of Cleveland please join me in welcoming Adam Mansbach.

So the first question I heard, he got the answer in the green room.

So I know that you grew up in Boston when little Adam was running around Boston and was writing Always the dream.

Pretty much.

Stories in my family about me as a young kid often involve me at my grandparents cocktail parties with a pad and a pen tugging on people's pant legs, trying to get them to take dictation for me.

Which sounded cute to me until I started attending cocktail parties.

And now I realize how incredibly annoying that would be.

That's amazing.

You know, when I've interviewed other authors, there's often this narrative thread about it's almost a coming out story of that moment that you tell other people, This is how I'm going to make my living.

I'm going to be a writer.

Did you have one of those moments of telling your family, This is what I'm doing?

I'm very fortunate in that I come from a family of writers, so I never had to come out to them as a writer.

My grandmother, the one who threw those cocktail parties, was a poet and a playwright.

My father spent 40 years in the newsroom of the Boston Globe as an editor.

So in some ways, writing was kind of the closest we had to like a family business.

So I was not met with a lot of resistance.

It was sort of an accepted fact pretty quickly, pretty easily.

I was writing pretty seriously in high school.

I got to college.

I started a magazine as a 19 year old.

I started a hip hop journal.

So I was running around New York City going from newsstand to newsstand, selling three copies of a at a time of this magazine, running around, throwing parties to try to fund the printing of this magazine.

I managed to get my college to give me independent study credit for this.

So I graduated essentially with a degree in attempting to publish a hip hop magazine.

As a college professor, you are my nightmare for that.

Yeah.

I would be your nightmare for so many other reasons.

Also that I won't even get into here.

But yeah.

And then I. I wrote of draft of a novel.

My senior year of college went straight into an MFA program and was lucky enough to graduate at a time when the publishing industry was still fairly robust.

Sold to books as I graduated a novel and a book of poetry and have been lucky enough in one way or another to be able to continue working as a writer.

Ever since.

When I work with writers here in Cleveland and we try to carve out their elevator pitch, that sentence, number one, is about what is your genre you don't believe in being pigeonholed into one genre, it would seem, from your work?

No, I very much don't.

You know, as somebody who came up in hip hop, part of the esthetics of hip hop involve the obliteration of kind of distinctions between high and low culture.

It's all about a very democratic with a small d approach to sampling and the creation of the collage that becomes the foundation of your art.

And I think that principle extends into all the work I do.

So I feel no differently about writing a novel than I do a screenplay, than I do a profane children's book, than I do a PSA or a political ad.

I sort of try to bring the same rigor to all of them.

And for a long time I did just write novels.

But those novels would be optioned by a screenwriter or by directors.

And sometimes they did a bad job of the screenwriting.

So I would start stepping in and I started kind of delving into that genre, you know, also because like a of a movie that nobody sees is still seen by way more people than read a novel that everybody reads, you know what I mean?

So the attraction of an audience that big made the proposition of writing screenplays, which is a kind of if you get one of ten screenplays produced, you're batting an incredibly high average.

But also, as a novelist, those nine screenplays that don't get produced can become fodder for your next novel or your next nine novels.

So in a sense, by moving in different genres and doing different kinds of writing, I can do that without feeling like I'm wasting the work, without feeling like it's destined to just sit in a drawer.

If nobody spends millions of dollars to turn it into a movie, because I always have the option to work it into something else.

So yeah, I like to spread it around.

Is there any part of you that recognizes the ease at which you said I wrote a profane children's book is not something that the rest of us are quite familiar with.

Is there any part of you that says, Oh, yeah, that's right.

I wrote a profane children's book.

Yeah.

Every day.

Yeah.

I mean, that book was something I wrote in, like 38 minutes with no pants on.

I did not expect it to sell millions of copies or be narrated by Sam Jackson, probably his best work since Pulp Fiction.

Widely recognized?

Yes.

Widely recognized.

No.

But, you know, in a sense, it's very in keeping with my other work in that I'm always interested in kind of investigating and unpacking paradox and complexity.

And that could be, you know, the relationship between Jewishness and whiteness or the relationship between whiteness and hip hop or the complexity of masculinity in America.

Or it could be the simple paradox that you could be you could love your kid to death, but also be willing to do anything to get out of that bedroom after an hour and a half of trying to get that kid to go to sleep.

Like if Don Corleone walked in the room, it was like, I'll put the kid to bed, but you may have to do me a service one day.

And that day you're like, Whatever, Don Corleone like, we'll work out the details later.

Just take this baby.

So, you know, the use of humor to get people to the table, to get them willing to talk about things that might otherwise be too thorny, too complicated, too scary, or just forbidden by the culture as that kind of frustration and anger around parenting was when I wrote that book.

It very much fits in with everything else I do.

And did you say did you say earlier that one of your children, for whom you wrote that is now 15?

She is 15.

And does she go around saying, this is totally about me?

She plays it pretty low key.

There are a lot of things out in the world that are about her and she doesn't really like to talk about any of that very much.

Well, Cleveland, among many things, is is absolutely a city of writers.

And before we we jump into your latest work, everyone's always looking for some advice.

Do you have a writing spot?

Is there an actual place where you feel the most creative?

I do the bulk of my work in my home office, which is a converted garage, which is now a studio which is full of books and records.

I'm a deejay and a record collector, so that's where I tend to hold up and work.

But I've also learned to be versatile.

I work in cafes sometimes.

I like working around the buzz and home of activity.

I'm able to tune out a lot so I can work in the midst of chaos.

So that would be my advice to anybody.

Planning on writing is learn to work in the midst of chaos, not just the chaos of a crowded house or a crowded cafe, but the chaos of the world in which we live.

If you can't tune out some of that and focus, you'll perpetually be spinning your wheels.

And let's increase the sales of one artist.

Is there one particular record that has gotten you through quite a bit of writing?

I'll put it this way.

I've been in town for like 14 hours.

I've already bought like 12 records while I've been here.

So.

No.

Well, let's talk about your latest work.

I heard an interview online that this originally the Golem of Brooklyn, originally started out as a skit in your head.

In a sense.

What often happens with my work is that disparate ideas come together, and that's where the spark for writing something originates.

So in this case, there were two ideas.

One, you know, in Jewish folklore, a golem is traditionally made by a very learned, scholarly, religious man, a rabbi, a prophet, and always at a time of crisis.

And it involves a goal.

And by the way, do people know what a golem is?

Okay, maybe we back up a little bit, if you don't mind.

Let's do it.

A golem is a humanoid creature nine, ten feet tall, made out of mud or clay, animated through secret rituals, prayers, incantations that nobody can agree on, which is indicative of Judaism writ large, always by a rabbi or a learned man, always at a time of crisis, immediate crisis, not like the existential existence of anti-Semitism in the world.

But the villagers are marching toward the Jewish quarter with lit torches type crisis.

The last step in animating the golem.

And I try to use words like animate and society because strictly speaking, the Golem is not alive, nor is the Golem dead.

The Golem just is up and about or not.

The last step always involves the Hebrew word truth, which is either inscribed directly on the Golden's forehead or written on a piece of paper which is inserted into the golems mouth.

The golem comes alive.

He does the bidding of his creator or fails to.

Often he fails to Frankenstein's monster is very much kind of a descendant of the Golem in that sense.

Usually what he does is engage in the martial defense of the Jewish people as was the case with the Golem of Prague, largely considered the Michael Jordan of golems.

But it could also be something as simple as manual labor, which was the task of pointed to the Golem of Hell.

The Scottie Pippen of Golems.

When the golems work is done, one letter from the word truth.

The Aleph is a race turning the word truth to the word death and the Golden D animates.

My book is a little different in that the guy who makes the Golem is not a learned man or a rabbi or particularly observant.

He is an art teacher in Brooklyn who happens to have a lot of clay on hand and is extremely stoned.

And so he makes this golem for no real immediate reason.

What did you ask me again?

That it started as a sketch.

Oh, yeah, right, right, right, right.

So.

So, on one hand, I just was tickled by the comic potential of a totally unqualified person making a golem and the golem coming to life.

See?

There you go.

I said life by mistake and screaming at him in Yiddish, a language he does not understand and trashing his apartment.

All of which is how the book begins.

But that wasn't a novel.

That was a skit that was like the type of thing that would be funny on Saturday Night Live for 2 minutes and then for the next nine, you would be like, Where are they going with this?

Is there a musical guest coming?

You know, very much separate from that.

I was thinking about a novel that I wanted to write, a kind of sci fi, speculative future novel about epigenetics, which is the increasingly accepted scientific notion that trauma enters the DNA and kind of flips switches, and that that trauma can then be passed down from generation to generation.

I had an entire complex set of ideas about intergenerational trauma and epigenetics and how it could play out politically and legally.

But I couldn't really fully put together what the novel part was.

I had a very interesting premise, but I didn't have like a plot or characters and not to get overly technical, but you need those things for a novel.

And one day I woke up and I realized that if I made the Golem a creature with an ancestral memory, I could do everything I wanted to do in that epigenetics novel through the vehicle of the Golem.

So my golem then became this creature who is not made but remade.

There's only ever been one golem throughout all of history, and he remembers every previous iteration of himself.

So this makes him a walking repository of Jewish history and trauma.

Two words that unfortunately are fairly synonymous.

And in so doing, I kind of brought those two ideas together.

So I woke up, had this realization, sat down, wrote like a four page outline for this book, sent it to my agent who responded with a one line email.

He said, The Golem market is dead.

To be fair, he also said that he couldn't sell go the to sleep.

So the real question here is, why don't I fire Richard?

Yeah.

So what we're asking now, I don't think that I have ever had a book take off so quickly not to ruin it for folks.

The Golem is alive by page four or five right at the beginning.

And I just remember starting out the book and thinking, Oh, I don't have time to ease into this.

This is just jumping in.

Was that a goal of yours, too, to just pull people in immediately?

It was a ride from page one.

I was always clear that I wanted this to be a comic short novel that also went a lot of places.

The realization that the Golem was this creature with an ancestral memory unlocked for me, the fact that I could toggle back and forth between the past and the present to tell stories of the Golem in, you know, fifth century Babylon, 11th century Spain.

But yeah, I was always clear on wanting to get a real sense of momentum going, be riding downhill very early.

So yes, I wanted to Golem to be up and about active cursing at people pretty quickly.

This is a novel that I tried to balance a real sense of forward momentum with a real sense of digression and stories within stories.

There are a lot of places where we depart from that main narrative to go into the past to tell sad stories.

And my feeling was that the only way that I could make that work was if the main thrust of the story was very relentless and sort of pulsing forward at all times.

If you don't have momentum, you can't afford to put things on hold.

Was my feeling.

One of the other core concepts of the that you bring forward in the text is tikkun olam.

Tikkun olam.

This concept of healing the world, repairing the world.

It's tattooed on my arm, which we'll do a separate city club on Jews and tattoos.

That's a whole that's a whole different day.

Why was it important to you to weave tikkun olam really throughout the book?

Well, as I said, the golem is always for a time of crisis.

This golem, as soon as he begins to speak English, which he learns to do by binge watching Curb Your Enthusiasm, after accidentally ingesting a large amount of LSD.

What we realize very quickly is that what he's been asking, Len, his creator from his inception, is where is the crisis?

And eventually, after a number of adventures and misadventures, the other main character in the book, a woman named Miri who grew up Hasidic, speaks Yiddish, is recruited by Len to translate for the Golem, and left the Hasidic sect in which she grew up at 18 because she's gay, which is not really something that is permitted in that world.

Eventually, she shows the Golem footage on her phone of the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right Tiki Torch.

Jews will not replace US marchers.

And she's like, Here's the crisis.

Here's who wants to kill the Jews.

The Golem is like, Finally, we're getting somewhere.

Where are those guys?

And it turns out that there's a rally in a couple of days times scheduled in a town called Wagner, Kentucky, which I made up.

Kentucky is real, and it's going to attract a similar cross-section of the white nationalist movement and the Golem demands to be taken.

There.

And they embark on this road trip.

And halfway there, Len and Mary realize that they don't understand what the Golden's intentions really are.

So they get out of the car in West Virginia to inquire further about his plans.

When they get to this rally, which is called the Save Our History's Future rally, they're like, thank you.

Yes.

They're like, you're just going to scare them.

Right.

And the going is like, no, the golem are going to kill everybody.

And they're like, oh, no, that's that's a bad plan.

That's not good for the Jews.

You can't kill everybody.

You got to listen to us.

If you won't listen to us, you've got to listen to somebody.

Will you listen to the Grand Reb?

Will you listen to Uncle Josh?

Will you listen to Larry David?

The Golem is like my to listen to Larry David.

They managed to get Larry David's manager on the phone.

Mary is like, Listen, you don't know me, but I'm standing here in a parking lot in West Virginia with a nine and a half foot tall, £400 golem.

And he's about to kill hundreds of anti-Semites.

And the only person he'll listen to, the only person who can possibly stop him is Larry David.

Larry David's manager is like, I love it.

Pitch it just like that.

So they get Larry David on the phone.

And Larry David is like, you mean those Jews will not replace us guys?

He doesn't say guys.

He says words I can't say at the Cleveland City Club.

He's like, No, he should kill as many as possible.

Golem is like, told you.

So they make their way to this rally and ultimately Lenin, Mary, are sort of faced with this moral and ethical and spiritual conundrum, which they're on opposite sides of.

On one hand, you can let the Golem run amok and slaughter the enemies of the Jews, in which case you might be safe, but also in which case on some fundamental spiritual and moral level, you may no longer be Jewish.

The thing you were attempting to defend you may have moved so far from you may be engaging in actions so anathema to fundamental Jewish values that you're no longer Jewish.

And your other option is to erase the Aleph from the Golem forehead and turn him back into clay.

And the notion of tikkun olam, you thought I forgot what you had.

I knew you were going to land that plane.

Yeah, you were good.

The notion of repairing the world, fixing the world, this very central, important concept in Judaism is invoked throughout the book in different contexts, but comes into play at this critical moment at the end.

Len, who is not religious, who at some point in the book says he was raised observant only in the sense that he noticed things.

I'm trying that one out.

I underlined it.

I only underlined a couple sentences and that was one of them.

So and Mary, this woman who was raised deeply observant in this incredibly proscribed world that she has escaped from, neither of them is where they expected to be in terms of this crisis.

Len invokes this idea of tikkun olam in support of his desire to not allow the Golem to engage in violence.

He's like Mary, we are.

What about tikkun olam?

We're supposed to repair the world.

Mary is like my guy.

Has it ever occur to you that this is how we repair the world and that's sort of like where we leave them?

Yeah, I was one of my questions was, what is the Golem sound like in your head?

But I realize now it's it's Schwarzenegger.

So that's what just happened.

My impression leaves a lot to be desired.

He does speak in kind of a deep guttural, accented English.

He continues to speak a good amount of Yiddish, even after he learns English.

He is far better rendered on the audio book by my good friend Danny Hoch.

My golem is really just an impression of Danny's rendering of the Golan.

Got it.

Got it.

Tell us, when did you get the final proofs back?

So the date by which everything was finalized was, well.

Let's see.

I wrote the book in the summer of 2022.

I sold the book in November, and it was probably all locked up by the end of 2022.

Okay.

Yeah.

When you pictured yourself going on a book tour, this has become something very different.

The state of the world.

Not that there hasn't always been conflict, but the backdrop of talking about Judaism and tikkun olam and trauma has become something quite different in the past couple of weeks, I would imagine.

First of all, you're getting much different questions from folks as as you're touring around.

What has this experience been like for you?

Yeah, it's interesting.

You know, to a greater or lesser degree, the world in which you write a book is never the world in which you publish a book.

That's just the way the publishing industry works.

This book was actually, by publishing standards, rushed out because it was published about ten months after I delivered it rather than 20.

My publisher was clear on wanting to do that because they felt that the book was so timely.

And, you know, I didn't have the heart to tell them that like, anti-Semitism would still be around in the spring.

You know, their other big plan, I have to say, was they were like, we're going to publish the book in time for the Jewish High Holidays.

And I was like, That's not what you think it is.

Like, Yom Kippur is not like this big book buying day, you know what I mean?

Like, they didn't really understand.

It got me through my fast.

Yeah, well, that's good.

But, yes, the world is profoundly different and I am getting different questions and it does take on different meanings and different resonances and in some ways maybe is more relevant even than it was when I wrote it.

The thing that I've been thinking about more and more as I tour this book and discuss it with different folks is the fact that one of the consistencies throughout all of the folklore and mythology of the Golem across hundreds of years is the fact that the Golem is never allowed to remain active and emit any longer than is absolutely necessary.

As soon as any semblance of safety is restored, the Golem is taken off the board.

By the same token, no one ever builds an army of golems.

No one ever builds a thousand foot tall golem.

You might think that that level of protection, of vigilance, the safety that that implies would be attractive.

And you might think that that would be something that would make sense for the Jewish people to do.

But that also represents the Golem fundamentally represents a level of violence, of aggression, of brutality that is too much to control and every moment that he is active represents in some sense a compromising of our humanity.

So to have a standing army of golems would rob us of too much of who we are.

And the wisdom of that is consistent throughout the myth and the legend and the lore of the Golem.

So I've been thinking a lot about that lately.

Yeah.

I appreciated that you explained what a golem was.

Are you also finding the reverse?

There are Jews who are obsessed with the golems.

I faced time.

My sister last night told her I was doing this, and she.

She said, Oh, yeah.

Like my shelf of golems.

I didn't even know she had a shelf of golems.

I also went to Israel with my family five years ago, and when I got there I found out I was in a room with my parents, which I did not know, and there was a painting on the wall of a golem, and my dad was a loud snorer, and I remember praying to the Golem to stop his snoring.

And I'm happy that didn't work out.

After reading your book, it's a real niche community, too, of people who do believe that salvation can be found in this way, through mysticism, through some sort of solution.

Yeah, well, it's interesting.

Yes, I have found out a lot more about the Golem community.

And then I knew before I wrote the book and it is a robust one.

Yeah, Judaism has a fairly rich mythology that involves the supernatural, that involves stuff far weirder than what we typically talk about as Jews.

You know, there are supernatural monsters.

There are ghosts who possess bodies.

And yet we tend to focus on things like what grains we're allowed to have in our houses during Passover.

There's a winnowing down of the incredibly rich, weird, fascinating lore and text of Judaism.

The mysticism, the stories.

And, you know, those are deliberate choices made, I think, by Jewish educators and and organizations in this country and in the world.

And it's unfortunate to me, I think a lot is lost when we move away from this incredibly rich and ancient mythology that we have.

So I think the Golem resonates with people now and in recent times because he represents there's a reason that it's truth and death, right?

Like in some sense when the Golem is alive, is active, is animate, has been sus etated, you were confronting a fundamental truth that is otherwise obscured that you otherwise perhaps are allowed to put in your back pocket and ignore.

And that is the truth of constant danger and persecution.

And in some sense, as Myrie alludes to in the book, when you were race the word truth, you were returning to a state of self-deception.

And I think the starkness of antisemitism in the world in recent years, whether it's that Charlottesville March that I just mentioned or the things that were dominating the news cycle a year ago when I wrote the book, which were more along the lines of Donald Trump having dinner with Nick Fuentes or Kanye West, fulminating on various social media platforms, it's bubbled up in ways that are impossible to ignore and that, I think to many folks, suggests the need for a golem.

Before we get to people's questions, let's let's finish up by talking about humor.

First of all, I want a second printing to have a quote from Larry David on the cover.

Do we know if he has received the book yet?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Larry.

So Larry voiced the audio book for a sequel to Go to Sleep called F. Now there are two of you, which in my case is actually an understatement because I have three daughters, like a farmer and a joke.

So Larry and I have a bit of a relationship.

I feel like Larry Larry is the best friend of a frequent co-writer of mine named Alan Zweibel, which is how we got Larry to do the audio book.

And I could be wrong, but I feel like Larry has of respect for me based on the fact that when he went into the studio to record the audio book, the audio book company wanted to fly me out to like supervise the recording sessions, but it was August and I was on Martha's Vineyard and I was like, Yeah, nah, I feel like Larry David was like, respect, because that's what Larry David would have done.

So I did make an effort to try to get him the book, get him a blurb.

He was shooting the next season of Curb at the time, so he wasn't able to blurb it.

But really on a baseline level, what I wanted to establish was that Larry David was not inclined to sue me and I think so far so good.

That's a goal of most writers.

Yes.

Yeah.

That's that's how many of us start out.

That's right.

So talk to us about humor and the way that you employ humor in this book and across these pretty heady topics.

Yeah.

To me, humor is maybe the most important sort of color on my palate.

As a writer.

It tends to infuse all my work in one way or another, and the more serious the topic, the more inclined I am to rely on humor because it brings people to the table, it gets people's guards down, it makes people think and feel in ways that are different.

It deactivates the impulses in us to kind of run away or be scared.

These are thorny topics.

The fact is that a lot of people are afraid to say the wrong thing, afraid to embarrass themselves or say something impolitic or it's just a heady time to try to have any kind of serious, well-meaning discussion.

And humor is a way to diffuse a lot of that.

And Jewish humor in particular is incisive and insightful in ways that can cut right to the heart of matters.

You know, I wrote a book a few years ago with Alan Zweibel and Dave Barry called A Field Guide to the Jewish People.

And the first question people often asked us when we were discussing that book on stage is what is Jewish humor?

My first response was always, Have you ever heard the term Christian humor?

Probably not.

But, you know, Jewish humor, I think.

I mean, like there are jokes that to me are just do so much in so little time with so few.

Like my favorite Jewish joke is a joke that my mother has repeatedly asked me to never tell in public again.

Would like to hear it.

That's a.

Yes.

Yes.

So there's this Jewish guy and he moves in next door to Rockefeller, right?

He buys a mansion just as big.

He buys the same car.

He even hires the same gardener to trim the hedges.

And one day Rockefeller walks out of his house and he sees his neighbor and he says, Hey, you think you're as good as me, don't you?

Jewish guy looks over.

He's like, As good as you.

I think I'm better than you.

Rockefeller is furious.

Demands to know why.

The guy's like, Well, for one thing, I don't live next door to a Jew.

Thanks for coming to City Club, everybody.

The next forum will be.

Yeah, you got one applause.

I mean, I.

Love it or hate it.

It does a lot.

There's the redirection of anti-Semitism back toward the anti Semite balance with the kind of internalized self-hatred that this guy clearly feels.

It's got everything.

If I'd written that joke, I would just retire, live off the proceeds.

The first question is going to be from your mom.

Why are you still telling that joke?

She wrote in, Yes, we are about to begin the audience Q&A for our livestream audience.

Are those just joining?

I'm Ken Schneck, editor of the Buckeye Flame.

I'm here with Adam Mansbach, the author of The Golem of Brooklyn, among other work and culture critic and humorist in his spare time.

Do you have a lot of spare time?

I have three children, as I believe I mentioned.

Yes, not so much.

We welcome questions from everyone city club members, guests, students and those joining via our live stream at City Club dot org.

If you'd like to text a question for our speaker, please text it to 3305415794.

That's 330515794.

And City Club staff will try to work it into our Q&A.

May we have the first question, please?

Yes, my first question is, do you set aside a certain amount of time every day to write, regardless of whether you're feeling creative that day and how do you deal with writer's block?

And my second question since you talked about humor is, is Jewish humor kind of a way to just survive?

Is that why there's a Jewish humor when there is not a Christian humor?

I think the answer to your second question is yes.

In terms of writer's block and my own process, I'm fortunate in that this is what I do for a living.

So I'm not in the position that many, many writers are.

And I have so much respect for them who have to balance writing with real work like a real paying job.

I know folks who wake up at five to write before going to work at eight.

I'm able to devote the bulk of my time to writing projects.

That said, I was just having this conversation with my daughter, who is 15, and an aspiring writer who goes to a performing arts school.

And we were about writer's block.

And what I said to her and what I believe to be true is that writer's block is project specific.

So if you're feeling blocked, in my experience, it's usually in relation to a specific thing you're working on.

So my advice to her was to switch gears, to put down the thing you can't make progress on and do something else, maybe in a different genre.

If it's a poem, you can't make headway on, go to that essay that you put down a month ago.

If you can't make heads or tails of where you want to take this essay, go back to that novel or that outline of a novel you were writing.

I think that it very seldom is a generalized block.

It's got to do with a specific problem and a specific project.

That said, I never take my own advice.

I am the type to stare at that page sometimes for days until I figure out a way to get over that particular speedbump.

And humor as Jewish salvation, I think, was the that's how I encapsulated the second question.

I think.

Yes, I think that it's one of many survival tools that we've amassed.

It's hard to, you know, the story of Judaism in a sense, one of the stories of Judaism is about surviving and thriving in the narrow lanes that we've been permitted to occupy.

A lot of the history of Judaism is being forbidden, banned from different professions, different.

I mean, you know, you can't own land, you can't own weapons, you can't ride horses, you pay higher taxes.

So you react to all those things.

You move to the city.

You engage in a profession that does not involve land or horses.

And it's hard to ban anybody from being funny, you know, although I'm sure at some point in history it's been attempted.

Well, you know, I think Judaism is largely about work arounds and being middle men and liminal women and finding ways to make connections and carve out ways of not just surviving or thriving, but nurturing our creativity, nurturing our spirituality.

To me, one of the quintessentially Jewish stories I've ever heard is about the invention of the dreidel game, which is played at Hanukkah.

This is apocryphal, so I don't know how true it is, but the story is that the game was invented at a time when Jews had been banned from praying.

We were not allowed to study or pray these words again are largely synonymous.

So what we did was invent a pretend gambling game that we could play or pretend to play when we were actually studying the Talmud.

And if anybody came along, we'd quickly start spinning these tops.

To me, that's both hilarious and quintessentially Jewish, pretending to gamble so we could actually study.

That's like pretending to read a comic book in class.

But inside the comic book, you've got textbook, you know what I mean?

Like, I don't know.

I find that hilarious.

That's us.

That's us as a people.

Yes.

Hi, Adam.

Welcome to Cleveland.

I just want to let you know, you should feel very fortunate because this is a beautiful day and it's not typical.

So one thing, I just want to make a comment and ask a question.

One thing that I thought was really unique about this book is it's very didactic.

And you include a lot of history and I found that really informative.

So that was part of the pleasure of reading this book.

And then my question is pretty simple.

There's a lot of Yiddish in it, and I'm wondering if you had to do like a Google translator on that or do you you couldn't possibly know all that Yiddish?

I don't know.

Couldn't die, though.

I don't know a lot of Yiddish.

No, you're absolutely right.

I don't I would also never in a million years attempt to Google translate English into Yiddish.

That would be disastrous.

There is a lot of Yiddish in the book.

As I said, the Golem begins only speaking Yiddish and then continues to speak a lot of Yiddish.

He often can't remember the English word and instead speaks in Yiddish and Myriad.

Sometimes they have to translate.

A lot of the Yiddish in the book also exists in an untranslated state and is allowed to just wash over the reader.

And if you're a Yiddish speaker, great.

If you're not a Yiddish speaker and you're Jewish, maybe it'll make you call your grandmother.

Otherwise you just sort of let the words wash over you.

But I relied very heavily on a good friend of mine named Eddie Portnoy, who is a scholar of Yiddish.

He works in New York at Yivo Yiddish Institute, and he was kind enough to take on the task of translating for me whenever I needed it.

So I would call Eddie or text Eddie at all times of day or night with questions like Eddie, had you say rip his arms off in Yiddish?

And he would tell me the answer and even more so what?

Eddie was really valuable, as was an interlocutor who would make me drill down on the meanings of the words I needed.

So when I would be like, Eddie, how do you say abomination?

Eddie would be like, there are 27 possible words here.

You know, Yiddish is a fascinating language.

It's a combination of German and Flemish.

Not not Flemish, to be clear.

Yeah.

You know, and it's a language, it's like 80% insults.

So Eddie would be like, what kind of abomination are we talking about?

The Golem.

Are we talking about a person?

If so, what is their crime?

What did they do?

And he would sort of make me drill down on my own, meaning in ways that were very generative and helpful.

I wish, frankly, that I had someone to do that for me in English.

Yeah.

Okay.

We have a text question for young people who are interested in becoming writers and struggling whether or not to attend college to hone their craft.

Can you speak to some of the ancillary benefits and gains of the college experience that are oftentimes even more important and impactful than the academics themselves?

MFA Yay or nay?

MM Well, I feel like that question was about college, not graduate school.

I think that the benefits, the ancillary benefits, as you put it, of being in college are the same as being in any kind of community that is helpful, nurturing, supportive, intellectually rigorous, artistically fruitful.

If you can find that in college, that's an incredible benefit.

If you can find that outside of college, that's just as good and might leave you in less debt.

I did do an MFA.

It gave me time to write MFA have proliferated in this country.

It used to be that just having an MFA, putting that in a letter to an agent would peak their interest.

I don't think that's the case any longer because there are just so many of them.

I'm not a huge proponent, I'm not an evangelical supporter of MFA programs or even necessarily college, although don't tell my daughter that I said that because she will be attending a four year institution.

I think the education system needs a profound re hall in the sense that it is incredibly expensive, prohibitively so for many people, no matter what kinds of loans they take on.

But I think that that sense of community and that sense of being on a path together, being on a path of discovery together, of feeding each other as artists and as thinkers is incredibly powerful.

What I did before I came here was a gig at Oberlin College.

I published a book a couple of years ago that I never got to tour for because it was the middle of a pandemic.

It was what the book was one long poem.

It's very personal to me.

It's a memoir.

It's about my brother's suicide.

And two and a half years after publishing it, I just performed it for the first time with a jazz quartet made up of Oberlin students led by my nephew Max.

And it was an incredible experience not just to be on stage with those folks, but to be in that community of budding artists who are deeply engaged with each other, in support of each other, learning together, pushing each other, sharing inspiration and material with each other.

It reminded me of just how beautiful a college campus can be and a college experience can be.

My question is prompted by something you said in very much in passing at the beginning of the forum about the relationship between Jewishness and whiteness.

And it seems to me that, you know, for centuries Jews were not considered white people.

They were considered a different race, but particularly now when we examine anti-Semitism.

On the left, Jews are being referred to as oppressors, colonizers of people of color.

Have you thought much more about this whole relationship of Jews and whiteness and whether it's led to a different kind of anti-Semitism?

Thank you.

The relationship between Jews and whiteness is something I think a lot about and write about to some extent in the book.

And I agree.

I mean, first of all before even delving into that, let's talk about the norm, the normalization of Ashkenazi Jewishness in America and kind of in some sense throughout the world.

Eastern European Jews, Ashkenazi Jews are merely one part of the Jewish population in terms of color and race and creed.

Jews are a rainbow.

There are Ashkenazi Jews, Sephardic Jews, Mizrahi Jews, Black Jews, Asians, Jews, Jews do not look any particular way, but in America, as you say, Jews, including Eastern European, Ashkenazi Jews, were not considered white and the move toward whiteness for Jewish folks, in my mind, has been a real kind of uneasy bargain.

A devil's bargain what?

It's also worth saying that whiteness is by no means a static population.

Whiteness.

Recruit's whiteness opens its ranks and admits new members so that it has the numbers to continue to dominate and maintain hegemony and power.

So most of the people considered white in America were not always considered white in America, not just Ashkenazi Jews, but like Italian folks, Irish folks, Polish folks, Slavic folks.

Jews occupy a particularly uneasy and liminal space within whiteness because the praxis of anti-Semitism is so central to white nationalism that the people in America today who do not consider and will not consider Jews white fundamentally are white nationalists who believe that we are masquerading as white in order to undermine and bring down whiteness from within.

That is their position.

There's so much more I could say about the relationship between Jews and whiteness, but what I will say is that moving toward whiteness has required of us a changing of bedfellows, a walking away from the people who have long been and in my mind ought to be our allies, which is other oppressed and nonwhite people in this country.

So, you know, the civil rights alliance, which is so loud, it is celebrated, was undermined by the sudden possibility of Jews to become white, among many other factors.

You know, in my own lifetime, I remember certain critical moments, like when Jesse Jackson ran for president and was poised to win New York state and then the Democratic nomination in 1984, and then was caught on a hot mic, referring to New York City as Hymie town.

And it was this big scandal.

It was this big deal.

It tanked his campaign.

And he's never essentially been forgiven or welcomed back by segments of the Jewish community.

Groups like the ADL came down super hard on him and to me, what that was about was far more than this word, which is like a toothless word.

Did he just saying, Hymie, tell me that Jesse Jackson hates Jews means us harm?

No.

Was his entire history erased in the moment that he said that word, as if he'd never done anything else, as if he'd never stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in his life?

Yes.

Is that about semantically using the specter of black anti-Semitism as excuse for a Jewish withdrawal?

Pull back emotionally, practically financially from the Civil Rights Alliance?

Yes.

And to me, that's an incredibly sad moment.

And it's just one on a long continuum.

And, you know, the history of Jews and black folks in this country is an incredible, fascinating and long and beautiful and fraught one.

Probably no two groups have had so much ink spilled on their relationship, and it's more than we can hope to discuss right now.

But I mean, those are a few quick thoughts about it.

Thank you.

Part of conversations recently about how generational trauma impacts the Jewish community, but also the African-American community in this country.

I'm wondering if you can talk based on your previous comments regarding Jesse Jackson, how that concept can bring this.

To two communities back together.

Epigenetics, to me, is a it's a it's a it's a funny thing because it's one of these instances where same this confirms what we all already knew on some deep level.

Right?

It gives credence to the idea that trauma gets passed down, not just through stories, not just through interpersonal relationships, but in some deeper, invisible way that the children and grandchildren and descendants of people who experience middle Passage and slavery or pogroms and the Holocaust are altered by that on an actual genetic level.

I'm not a biologist, so I try not to get too deep into the weeds.

But the way it was recently explained to me when I missed explained it on stage, it's not so much that the DNA is altered as that switches are flipped.

Things that were dormant become activated.

Things that were active become dormant.

As this trauma sort of seeps into the genetic structures.

I think that that shared history of trauma among Jews and black folks, as you suggest among plenty of other groups, there are very few populations that have not experienced some level of trauma profound enough to probably enter and alter the DNA.

These can be points of connection.

They can be points of commiseration.

They can be the basis for beginning or restarting a dialog about the ways in which we can help each other to remember, to process.

And hopefully and ultimately heal.

Thank you.

Thank you.

To Adam Mannes back for joining us at the City Club today.

Forums like this one are made possible thanks to generous support from individuals like you.

You can learn more about how to become a guardian of free speech, which is a title that we all want at City Club dot org.

Today's forum is part of the Authors and Conversation series in partnership with the Cuyahoga Arts and Culture and the Cuyahoga County Library.

The City Club would also like to welcome and thank students joining us from M.C.

Squared STEM High School.

I love seeing you here every time you are here.

City Club will be off Friday, November 24th, but we will be back here on Friday, December 1st, with a conversation between the presidents of Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland State University and Tri-C. And I will be moderating that conversation.

Then on Friday, December 8th, we will hear from Eric Fingerhut, president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of North America.

You can learn about these forum and other acts and others at City Club, dawg.

Again.

Thank you so much to Adam Mam's back.

You must pick up this book, The Golem of Brooklyn, and thank you members and friends of the City Club.

I'm Ken Schneck, and this forum is now adjourned.

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