There are plenty of paintings and installations, but this isn’t an art show. The main problem is that “Golem” can’t quite decide what it wants to be. There’s plenty about “Golem” to entertain and provoke, but the exhibit fails to coalescence or come into focus narratively or thematically. Kitaj (represented here with a 1980 “Golem” painting) and, more recently, Boris Lurie. In recent years, the Jewish Museum has stepped up its game for temporary exhibits, including bold retrospectives of R.B. Instead, we careen from Rabbi Judah Loew, the legendary creator of the golem in 16th-century Prague, to Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics” to learning about the “Golem Aleph,” an Israeli-built computer from 1965, which was named by Gershom Sholem, to the 2000 sequencing of the human genome. Sadly the notion of golem as avatar or projection of popular fears and desires isn’t taken up with any fervor in what follows. In the Golem’s case, it was a holy name in Trump’s, it’s a white baseball cap proclaiming ‘Make America Great Again.’” “And like the Golem, he now threatens to crush his creator if any attempt is made to remove the magic, animating letters from his forehead.
SOULLESS GOLEM TV
“Like the Golem of Chelm, the animated clay creature in Jewish folklore that grew uncontrollable and threatened the entire universe, Trump seems to gather power with every TV appearance and every crackpot speech,” the Canadian journalist Neil Macdonald wrote in September 2015, according to a quote featured in the display. Of political commentators, Spencer mused, “One wonders if these people are people at all, or instead soulless golem.” Meanwhile, so-called alt-right leader Richard Spencer has been quoted in The New York Times making reference to the mythical creature. The contemporary objects suggest two possible understandings of golem, with the best-selling smartphone standing in for the slew of digital avatars that threaten to substitute or subsume our identities and inner lives, while the emblazoned hat hints at president-elect Trump as a creature that has run amok of his creator(s). election, I was tickled to find one of Trump’s signature “Make America Great Again” baseball caps sharing a vitrine with an iPhone. Visiting the exhibit a week before the U.S.
Is Donald Trump the Golem of the current age? That tantalizing question is posed at the beginning of the Berlin Jewish Museum’s exhibit about Judaism’s folkloristic man of clay, starkly titled “Golem,” the name stripped of its article, as if to suggest that golem could be conceivably be adjective and verb as well. ‘It is said that the Golem lives everywhere and in all times,” wrote the Polish-Jewish writer David Frishman in 1922.
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