Clay Bodies and Human Hearts: The Golem as Zombie in Yiddish Folklore

The UJA Committee for Yiddish Invites You to a Virtual Lecture Spotlighting Innovative New Scholarship

Clay Bodies and Human Hearts: The Golem as Zombie in Yiddish Folklore

Marissa Herzig

Sunday, February 8, 2026, 2:00 pm ET

Live on Zoom

Please CLICK HERE to register for this program.

How does a golem come to be? Where do their bodies come from, and where do their bodies go when they are gone? The uncomfortable similarities between the golem (a creature of life) and the zombie (a creature of death) are far from a modern phenomenon, but one that can be seen in the folktale, “The Homunculus of Maimonides.” This lecture will compare and contrast the oral folktale “The Homunculus of Maimonides” with Reb Nachman’s “The Tale of a Prince” to discuss how anxieties about life, death, and Otherness have often coalesced into golem-zombie figures.

By tracing these concerns of nineteenth century folklore into contemporary Jewish literature, this lecture asks how the golem has evolved into a zombie-like figure and what this reveals about shifting discourses of embodiment, the soul, and sentience in the Jewish literary and cultural imagination.

Marissa Herzig (she/her) is a fourth-year English PhD candidate at the University of Toronto whose SSHRC-funded dissertation focuses on the female golem in contemporary retellings of Jewish folklore from the lens of disability studies. Marissa is currently a resident Junior Fellow at Massey College, part of the Jewish Studies collaborative program, and a consultant at the Writing Centre. In her spare time, Marissa enjoys listening to audiobooks and making three cups of tea a day.