These two recent books both demonstrate a staggering breadth to their global and historical survey of a folkloric figure. Barzilai offers an update to our knowledge of the Jewish golem by looking to its twentieth-century reflection of warfare technology in film, literature, propaganda, and comics. Wagner plumbs the folktale that is perhaps most well-known to US audiences in its form as the story of Br’er Rabbit and the Tar Baby, but versions of which have been chronicled in places as diverse as South Africa, Corsica, the Bahamas, the Philippines, Nigeria, Oaxaca, and the Georgia Low Country. Yet, the books exhibit radically different structures.
Barzilai’s Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monsters details the appearances of the golem in diverse forms—from theater and film, to references in propaganda and media, as well as comic books and science fiction—and makes connections across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. This is a book...
