(soft music) (indistinct chattering) - [Angelique] Around us, you're seeing films, you're seeing artists that are painting images of this mythical creature.

- You know, Halloween, of course not a Jewish holiday, some of us have been calling it era of Halloween, you know, the, the night before Halloween, and kind of, you know, making it a little bit Jewish, right?

- You know, I've been touring this book for the last month and a half, and this is really the event I've been looking forward to the most.

- You can see around me that there's a vibrant community of people from different backgrounds, religions, and we're all here to focus on an incredible, provocative, work of fiction that helps us understand the current moment.

- So Reboot's mission is to foreground Jewish arts and culture.

And we do it by looking to the past, and inviting artists, and storytellers, and creators to wrestle with the past, to create new stories for the present and the future.

- One of the great things about Reboot is it says, "Here's a tradition, what are you gonna do with it?"

How do we reboot our traditions?

How do we keep our traditions alive?

And one of the great tasks that I get to have, in the conversation with Reboot is taking what is often very obscure, very esoteric ideas, and then making them accessible in a contemporary way.

And asking, this is also part of your tradition, magic mysticism, the occult.

What do you do with it, if anything?

- Yeah, I've been part of reboot since 2006, and it's been an incredibly important part of my life.

The people that I've met, the conversations I've had, the notion of re-envisioning in a broad and expansive way what Judaism is and can look like.

- Author Adam Mansbach conjured up a Golem for the 21st century to address 21st century issues, specifically issues around antisemitism, white nationalism.

- Adam's done a really ingenious job of reinvigorating this Golem tale, and I'm gonna be sort of the connective tissue, showing how Adam's drawing on really amazing mythology history, amazing stories from the Kabbalah mysticism in the occult and magic.

And showing that this very ancient, very medieval, very strange, very occult literature, can live on in really extraordinary ways, like this novel.

- It's a novel called "The Golem of Brooklyn."

In Jewish folklore, Golem is a humanoid creature, nine, 10 feet tall, made out of mud or clay, always by a very learned man, a rabbi, at a time of immediate crisis for the Jewish people.

My book is a little different.

The Golem my book is made by an art teacher, who is neither learned nor religious, and it is not a time of crisis.

He's merely in possession of a large amount of clay and extremely stoned.

So he makes this Golem, he manages to bring it to life.

The Golem immediately starts trashing his apartment, and screaming at him in Yiddish, which is a language he does not understand.

And we've learned that what he's been screaming at Len, his creator, is "Where is the crisis?"

Len can't really answer this question, but eventually someone shows the Golem, video of the 2017 Charlottesville tiki torch, Unite the Right, Jews will now replace as marchers.

And the Golem is like, "Okay, now we're getting somewhere.

Where are those guys?"

- So I think it speaks very beautifully to kind of perennial worries around not only the monsters that stalk us in the night, that are supernatural and beyond our making, but really the monsters that are the most dangerous, are us.

The monsters that we make, and the monsters that are in fact us.

The Golem is us.

And I think that's a powerful lesson.

- I hope that people will do some critical thinking about the means and the exercise of power.

To me, this speaks to the moral murkiness of creating a golden to begin with, and the necessity of stepping away from that fearsome power as soon as possible.

Nobody ever makes an army of Golems.

Nobody ever allows the Golem to remain active as a standing deterrent to future violence.

And that speaks to the necessity of a certain level of optimism, even in the face of horror, and speaks to how much of our own humanity we lose, if we were to allow the Golem to exist in perpetuity.

And I think that speaks to the current world in a fairly profound way.

- And his interpretation today really looks at the intersection of antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-black racism, LGBTQ oppression.

So it's really an interesting take at looking at all of these issues together.

- It's really important to be able to have a conversation right now that allows for the complexity, that doesn't live in the binary, and that is really about humanity at the center.

- And I think it's always with our artists where we can really see the true lines of humanity.

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