Episode 22: Jeremy Dauber
On Jewish Literature, Pop Culture, and What The Horror Genre Reveals About America
Jeremy Dauber’s Five Books:
A Treasury of Jewish Folklore by Nathan Ausubel
The Book of Esther
Three Books That Tell the Jewish American Story:
Bread Givers by Anzia Yesierska
Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin
MAUS by Art Spiegelman
11/22/63 by Stephen King
American Scary by Jeremy Dauber
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Hosted by Tali Rosenblatt Cohen
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“Show me what scares you, and I’ll show you your soul.”
In American Scary, noted cultural historian Jeremy Dauber draws a captivating through line that ties historical influences ranging from the Salem witch trials and enslaved-person narratives directly to the body of work we associate with horror today: from the taut, terrifying stories of Edgar Allan Poe to the grisly, lingering films of Jordan Peele.
Jeremy Dauber is a professor of Jewish literature and American Studies at Columbia University, where he has also served as director of its Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies. Jeremy grew up in a modern Orthodox Jewish community in New Jersey; went to Harvard and then Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, where he wrote about Hebrew and Yiddish literature – and while there, wrote the libretto for an opera that played in Boston and a movie that screened at the Cannes market (you can still find it bouncing around the lower cable channels late at night); came back to America and took a job at Columbia, where he now teaches about, among other things, Dostoevsky, Mel Brooks, graphic novels, and Sholem Aleichem.
To honor Jewish American Heritage Month, we tweaked our Book 3 section and asked Dauber to tell us about three books that shaped the Jewish American Story. In our conversation, we’ll also discuss how to get started reading Yiddish literature in translation, why American Jews may channel their fears more into comedy than horror, and how writing for mainstream American culture is also a Jewish act.
Other Books & Resources Mentioned:
Tevye the Dairyman by Sholem Aleichem
Diary of a Lonely Girl by Miriam Karpilove
The Cafeteria by Isaac Bashevis Singer
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Cultural Criticism:
Yiddish Literature:
Young Adult:
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Tali Rosenblatt Cohen:
Welcome to The Five Books, where each week we talk with a Jewish author about five books that are near and dear to them. My name is Tali Rosenblatt Cohen, and today I'll be talking with Jeremy Dauber about his new book, American Scary, a fascinating deep dive into the history of horror in the United States and what this genre reveals about the American psyche.Jeremy Dauber:
We have these very basic fears that sort of continue over and over and repeat. Fear of the other, fear of the person next door, and understanding that this is an iteration of something long past and seeing sort of the damage that it's done at different times might enable you to minimize it or shape it or channel it in a different direction.Dauber is also a professor of Jewish Literature and American Studies at Columbia University, and since it's Jewish American Heritage Month, we're also drawing on his expertise to explore the books that help us understand the Jewish American story.
One of the things I think that's great about American Jews and their contributions to mass popular culture, you're talking about things like horror and movies and comic books, right, is that as kind of insider outsiders, they really are, first of all, in love with America and they are trying to get in. And so they're looking with great affection and care, like on the outside window, kind of looking in at what it is that is making America work.
Some of Jeremy's previous books include The Worlds of Shalom Aleichem and Jewish Comedy: A Serious History, both of which were finalists for the National Jewish Book Award. As J.A. Dauber, he's also the author of the YA novel Mayhem and Madness: Chronicles of a Teenage Supervillain, which was a young adult's choice of the Children's Book Council, and a new middle grade novel titled Press One for Invasion, which will be published this September.
Dauber's perspective on Jewish identity and storytelling goes beyond just the American experience. He's also deeply committed to preserving and teaching the literature of the Jewish diaspora and making sure it's understood on its own terms.
It's very important for me to teach Yiddish literature not as a precursor to 1933 to 1945. You are doing an amazing disservice to all of these individuals by simply saying, well, you know, what a shame it was that they wrote this not knowing that in 15 years or 20 years they were going to be killed.
This episode is a crash course in Jewish literature, and I hope you enjoy. But before we get started, I wanted to share a quick, exciting update. Next week's episode would have been the last of the season, but over the course of this run of the show, we decided to move to an every-other-week publishing schedule. So now you won't have to wait between seasons to discover great Jewish authors and the books they love. More books, more authors, more recommendations.
And we have one more surprise for you. A few of our listeners wrote in asking for a newsletter that includes a list of each guest's five book picks. If you're one of those listeners, thank you for the feedback. We thought it was a great idea, so we're launching one. If you'd like to get reminders for when new episodes drop and a full list of the books discussed in your inbox, along with links and other goodies, subscribe to our newsletter by heading to our website, fivebookspod.org, or you can just head over to the show notes of this episode and you'll see a link there. And with those two announcements, let's get to today's episode of The Five Books.
Welcome to The Five Books, Jeremy. Thank you so much for being here.
It's great to be here. It's so much fun. I can't wait.
I'm really happy to have you here, particularly right now. I'm eager to talk to you about your book, American Scary, which is a history of horror in America. And it feels like a time when there is lots to be scared of. So happy to talk about that. And also, you are a professor of Jewish literature and American studies at Columbia University. And right now, we are in the midst of Jewish American Heritage Month. So I thought it would be great to talk to you a little bit more broadly about books and how they shape the Jewish American story.
I can't wait. We've known each other for a long time and it's so much fun to do this together. So I'm really excited about this.
Yes, fantastic. Okay, so American Scary, I know, is a class that you've taught at Columbia, and it's about how horror reveals what scares us. I think people might be surprised to know that you're also a scholar of Yiddish literature and teaching and writing about horror. So, would love to know just what drew you to horror and if there are any connections between those things that we might not expect.
Sure, well, you know, I think that I was always sort of drawn, I think a lot of people are, to kind of, you know, things that are scary, both in the way that there's this push-pull, you know, you don't want it, but you also want it at the same time, and also as maybe the budding scholar that I was, that I was trying to figure out why was I scared, why were other people scared of things, what made something scary, and it turns out that as a professor of literature and as a cultural historian, humor and horror are great ways of thinking about what makes a society tick, right? At the beginning of American Scary, I say something like, “show me what scares you and I'll show you your soul.” And I think that's right for countries and people as well. I was always interested in Jewish literature even as a kid. One of the things that I was the most interested in when I got to Yiddish literature were both the funny bits, of which there are quite a bit, and the scary bits, of which there are also quite a lot. And they came together when my first book was about sort of the beginnings of Jewish comedy in Hebrew and Yiddish literature. And my second book was about basically the supernatural in early modern Yiddish literature. So things that went bump in the night for early modern Jews.
Things that went bump in the night. You've written books about comedy, Jewish comedy. It's more common, I would, from my perspective, I think, that Jews tend to channel all of their fears into comedy instead of horror. Is there a reason for that, you think?
Well, it's a good question and it's funny because I was thinking about that a lot when I was writing this horror book because I'd written before this a history of comic books, American comic books, and Jews are all over that story. And before that I had written a history of Jewish comedy with a lot of focus on American Jewish humor and obviously American Jews are central to American comedy. But when you talk about horror in America, there's some very important figures, but it's really much less. And I think that when you're saying, we think about sort of Jews as channeling through comedy, you know, we're really thinking about American Jews because when we think about Yiddish literature, for example, everything's a horror story and really not always played for comedy. Sometimes it is, like in the work of Sholem Aleichem, whose biography I also wrote, but most of the time, you know, there's some flat out, scary, fearful stuff that's going on.
And I think that in America that, you know, in some ways this was the Goldene Medina. This was the golden land for many Jews, you know this was a place where things did not seem a scary for a very long time and that I think tamped down the horror element in sort of the American Jewish production or if it was there it was mixed in with this kind of, well, maybe we're joking, maybe you know this kind of comedic sort of aspect to it that was a little bit softening, a little bit domesticating. That's my working theory, I'm persuadable and I'm also persuadable that this may change, but that I think explains of the long American not as much Jewish horror in there and a lot of Jewish comedy
Book One: a Jewish book from childhood — A Treasury of Jewish Folklore by Nathan Ausubel.
I grew up in a modern Orthodox Jewish family. Our families knew each other. So it was a, and you know, as a result, there were these long Shabbat afternoons where you didn't play video games. You didn't, you know, have electronics. I mean, we didn't have the internet then anyway. And so what were you going to do other than read? And one of the things that I found on my parents’ bookshelf was this big, massive book, right? Perfect for a long Shabbat afternoon, but what was even more perfect about it was that it was full of stories and jokes. And this was this Nathan Ausubel’s Treasury of Jewish Folklore, which was a very, very popular book sort of in the middle of the 20th century for American Jews. And it contained just a tremendous number of folktales, of Jewish jokes that were kind of spread around. They were divided into different groups, different themes. There were different kinds of Hasidic tales and fables and all sorts of almost everything you could imagine between the covers of this multi-hundred page book and I went over and over again, and that in some sense became part of my DNA of, I guess what I found funny, but also what was for me kind of Jewish comedy.
And the thing that was wonderful about Ausubel was that it did not particularly have a solely American focus. It had a lot of American Jewish stuff, but it combined it with lots of stuff from Eastern Europe. And it also combined it over hundreds and hundreds of years of Jewish history. It was not only modern focused, but it really sort of went all the way from sort of the Talmud on. And when I wrote my history of Jewish comedy years later, and when I taught it at Columbia for these years before I even started writing it, those were two principles that I really tried to keep in mind. And when I talk to audiences, I say, you know, Jewish comedy is not something that sort of begins, you know, in the Vaudeville era and is sort of focused on the United States. It really is sort of a phenomenon that lasts as long as where Jews are. And really, I think it probably dates all back to Ausubel.
What were some of those early bits of comedy?
He has sort of different selections from the Talmud and from the Midrash. He has sort of fables from there or sort of riddles and things like that. Now, a lot of that in Ausubel’s writing gets turned into a kind of mid 20th century Americanese. But nonetheless, you can sort of feel the kind of different bones of the original material trying to make its way out. And it was fun to kind of discover some of that nifty variety as an adult.
And then, what did you study in college?
So in college, I did two things, one of which was that I studied, my major was in something that was interdisciplinary social sciences and theories, nothing to do with much of this, but it was very interesting in sort of trying to determine how culture and societies worked, which has been useful sort of in my later career. And then I took a lot of classes in Jewish and Yiddish literature, mostly with Ruth Weiss, who at that point had just recently arrived. She would later become sort of a much better known faculty member on the Harvard campus, but at that point she really wasn't. And so I was able to take a lot of classes with her and she really introduced me to many of the figures of Jewish literature and Jewish writing that I would then go on to study and write about and teach.
I wonder what it is that drew you to studying Yiddish literature. What made that something you wanted to pursue?
As everything in life, part of it was contingent in that, you know, it was for my first year in college and I was not thinking about doing anything related to Jewish literature, Jewish studies. And it turns out that my parents ran a clipping service. The internet was not there at the time. And so, you couldn't forward, you actually had to forward actual things in an actual mailbox. And I didn't have anything to do that summer. And they sent me a clipping about an internship at something that was then called the National Yiddish Book Center. And the way I often tell the story is that at that point in the day school upbringing that I had, the story was that the Jews were kicked out of Spain in 1492 and they kind of all met up in 1897 in Basel for the first Zionist conference. And there was basically not very much in between. And, you know, I was like, this is interesting. I kind of, I don't really know that much about this. and so I went and Aaron Lansky, he ran a little seminar for these interns where he taught us, in translation, Yiddish literature. And it was all about people from a traditional background coming to terms with modernity. And even though things were not exactly identical, I had similar kinds of thoughts and questions and experiences coming from this Modern Orthodox background to a very much more diverse, at least intellectually in terms of people, background in college.
So for people who are interested in some of that time period, obviously they should read your two earlier books. What pieces of Yiddish literature would you direct them to that you think are overlooked?
I think that many people who have thrilled to Fiddler on the Roof would be really interested in reading sort of the original material that the Tevye stories are based on, which are much, in my opinion, more complicated and nuanced and even emotionally powerful. They are available in a wonderful translation by a guy named Hillel Halkin, and I would certainly recommend those. If you want to hear more about him after you read those stories, I wrote a biography, I said, of Sholem Aleichem. You can pick that up. But the other couple of figures that I would mention, there is a trinity, if I can use this expression, of classic Yiddish writers. The third of them is a guy named Yod Lamed Peretz, I. L. Peretz. His material has been collected in an anthology that was edited by Ruth Weiss. Some people who are listening to this have probably heard the story of Bontshe the Silent, that name may be a little bit resonant. And then in a very different way, my student, Jessica Kurzane, has gone digging in the archives of the Yiddish press and found this wonderful writer that really had been, I think it's to say, really lost to obscurity, a woman named Miriam Karpilov, who wrote a series of novels, but one of them called Diary of a Lonely Woman, I believe this is the translation, is sort of like a Sex in the City written in New York in like 1911. And it's wonderful and Jessica does a phenomenal job sort of bringing it to life. And I would highly recommend that also to show the kind of diversity of what Yiddish literature was. We tend to think of it as Tevye or as Bontshe, but it really is also really cosmopolitan. It's men, it's women, it's big cities, it's little shtetls, it's all of these things. So juxtaposing those would be fun for your first steps out, so to speak.
Amazing. I'm excited to add those to my to-be-read pile. And I'm just curious, what you're teaching right now, what are your classes that are in the realm of Yiddish and Jewish literature?
So this spring, we're just finishing the end of term and I decided to start a project, we'll see how far it goes to really kind of do an ongoing series of seminars on the history of Jewish literature. So I decided to go right back to the beginning and teach a class on the book of Genesis, which was a lot of fun. And I did it using sefaria, which I'm sure many people who are listening to the podcast know is a wonderful sort of tool, incredible tool. And so we did a really intense look at Genesis and a number of the Jewish commentaries that were, you know, 2000 years of commenting on it. That was in the afternoons. And in the mornings, I taught a class on cultural history of the 1980s in America.
So we can see the full breadth of your interests on display right there.
That's right. You know, Nachmanides in the afternoon and Taylor Dane, you know, in the morning.
Book Two: A Jewish Book from Adulthood — the Book of Esther.
To me, the Book of Esther is just an endlessly fascinating and interesting book for sort of quite a number of reasons. And if anyone here looks at the history of Jewish comedy I wrote, you'll see that I make the argument that really what we think of as Jewish comedy really sort of all starts with the Book of Esther. And it's a book that is a diasporic book that's in the Bible. It's written about the experience of the Jews diaspora. And it's a book that tells a story of Jewish comedy that is actually quite unsettling, right? I mean, it presents the Jews as this minority who are hated, who are possibly sort of at the risk of genocidal disappearance, right? And the way that most of us who grew up in traditional households read the book is through the scrim of rabbinic interpretation, which says that, you know, the Jews were, maybe they were kind of in danger, but thanks to God's providence, it all is going to work out fine. Or as the old saying goes, they tried to kill us, we survived, let's eat.
But the book itself, very famously, doesn't have God's name in it. And if you read it with the tools and the eyes of an adult and sort of a literary critic, what you see is the possibility of Jewish survival being contingent on a series of circumstances, which are so haphazard as to be almost random. And of course, the central metaphor of the book, which is the lottery, really talks about that kind of uncertainty. And that is the kind of black comedy, the kind of dark comedy at the heart of the diasporic Jewish condition, which is to say, we think of ourselves as special, we think of ourselves as this chosen people, but is this a story that we're telling ourselves? Is this some kind of joke? And that kind of knife edge that we walk on in some sense is the heart of being an adult in the modern Jewish existence, sort of taking one's faith if one is a believer, or taking one's existence if one is not, you know, seriously with all of the possibilities, the conceptual possibilities that are open. So to me, the book of Esther has become more powerful and more meaningful with every year. My favorite joke, of course, in the book, I always ask people this tricky question. What is the last thing that happens in the book of Esther? And basically no one, most people don't remember. But it is of course that there's a tax that is raised. So basically everything goes back to the way it was before, except the taxes are a little higher, which seems like a perfect kind of metaphor for something.
And the message there really is, you know, everything could be upside down in a moment.
I think that's part of it. And part of the message is that heroism is standing up and saying that you're Jewish. The book doesn't have a name in its first appearance, right? But we've called it, we've all agreed to call it, I think quite rightly, to call it the book of Esther. And Esther's heroism is not that she is particularly ritually observant, right? That's not obvious at least from a plain reading of the book. It's certainly not that she is ensconced in the hearth of her Jewish community. She spends all the time not with all these other Jews. And it's not that she is a great rabbinic scholar, right? But her heroism comes from the part when it matters, she comes and risks it all, personally speaking, certainly, for saying, I'm Jewish, and this is my people. That's enormous. That's what it's about, right? We could say it was Providence, or we could say it wasn't. But what matters is the decision that Esther makes to act on that.
Book Three: three books that have shaped the Jewish American story — Breadgivers by Anzia Yezierska, Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin, and Maus by Art Spiegelman.
Okay, so usually we talk about book three as being a book that changed your worldview, and I'm sorry that I'm taking that away from you. You know, given that you are a professor of Jewish literature and American studies, I really wanted to hear from you what books you think have shaped the Jewish American story. So you gave us three books, and I would just love to hear why you chose those three books.
Okay, it is no fun if you just sort of simply accept the premise of any question that's given to you. So I was mean to Tali and gave her three and they’re three kind of unusual ones. But I think that they in some sense tell a kind of American Jewish story. And part of what we do as academics is we always reject the premise to say, is there something that's central to the American Jewish experience? What does that even mean? I don't even know. Right. But here are three that speak in different ways to an American Jewish experience. So the first one is a wonderful and fascinating novel by a writer named Anzia Yezierska, who really flourished in the early part of the 20th century. She wrote in English and the novel that I'm talking about is called Breadgivers, which is kind of an anglicism of this Yiddish bread giver, of like the person who puts the bread on the table. The subtitle is something like “the struggle between a father of the old world and a daughter of the new”. And it's told really from the perspective of a young woman with this tyrannical father who's really trying to establish a kind of patriarchy over the daughter, really takes all of the family earnings, really is sort of parasitical in these kind of terrible ways, and her struggle to kind of liberate herself from under his suffocating shadow. And in some ways, that is part of the story that we often tell kind of about America and American Jewry is saying, well, this is a land of freedom, and that freedom is about sort of separating oneself from sort of things that we're behind, that America is this land where all sorts of things are possible. And in some ways, Yezierska’s biography is complicated and doesn't end quite as well as one would have hoped, but she herself was sometimes called the Cinderella of the Tenements because her books were sort of becoming huge successes, some of them became movies, and she would end up being a quite well-known name.
Her books were known beyond just the Jewish population.
Some of them were. Yes, for sure. For sure. This was a kind of real success story, but it was a success story that really was predicated on telling the story of the Jewish community kind of broadly, right. And so that leads a nice segue into our second choice, which is Ira Levin's novel Rosemary's Baby, which probably everyone here on the podcast has heard of at least in its movie version, right. Because it was a novel first. And what's interesting to me is, right, if Yezierska is a story about sort of telling the Jewish story, but using it to kind of liberate yourself, Levin's novel is so good at sort of a Jewish effort at sussing out what the majority culture kind of wants that it's almost hard to imagine that a Jew wrote it at all.
So Ira Levin writes this novel, Rosemary's Baby, about a young Catholic woman named Rosemary who gives birth to the antichrist, right? These are, it's fair to say, not particularly Jewish preoccupations. They are Christian, particularly Catholic preoccupations, but Levin kind of understands, boy, this makes a great story. Now you can say that the act of a Jew writing the archetypal Christian horror novel in America is a very Jewish story itself, right? That's certainly possible in the same way that, as everyone knows, White Christmas was written by Jews and Superman, know, the big, you know, Gentile heroes are written by Jews, right? And so that is a very Jewish activity. So in that sense, not being a Jewish story, you could say, is also part of the American Jewish story. One of the things I think that's great about American Jews and their contributions to mass popular culture here, I'm talking about things like horror and movies and comic books, right, is that as kind of insider outsiders, but at the beginning more outsider than in, they really are, first of all, in love with America, like we were saying. They really see America as a tremendously wonderful place, by and large. And they are trying to get in, right? They want to be. And so they're looking with great affection and care, like on the outside window, kind of looking in at what it is that is making America work. Right.
I mean, I wrote this biography of Mel Brooks as well. And Mel Brooks is a master at this because as a parodist, you really have, let's say the Western, right? You really have to love Westerns and you have to watch them over and over again and know what makes them work, right? In order to sort of, you know, deconstruct them or subvert them or what have you. And, you know, you can do that for parodic purposes, like Mel Brooks does for comedy, or you can do it just to do it, right? Because once you know how these things work, you can craft a work of art that really hits all of these sort of American culture points. And, you know, some of the great American Jewish creators are interested simply in doing that and not sort of putting in a kind of Jewish element to that.
I mean, I think a classic example of this for a lot of his career, although by no means all, is someone like Steven Spielberg, who is one of our great horror directors and one of our great drama directors and one of our great action directors. And you can make arguments, for example, that something like Raiders of the Lost Ark really is all Jewish underneath, because it's about hitting Nazis and about finding sort of the Lost Ark of the Covenant, and that's fine. But you can also say that lots of Americans in 1980 wanted to see somebody, a hero like Harrison Ford, punch Nazis. And there were a lot of Christians also who think that the Holy Ark of the Covenant is kind of an interesting thing too. So, you know, what we sometimes, you know, do, maybe less cleverly than Spielberg does, is read kind of a narrow Judaism into some of this, where I think people were looking out in the same way that people, and sometimes I'm, get an unpopular pushback on this, but people are like, “is Superman Jewish? Oh, of course, Superman's really Jewish.” And my feeling is Siegel and Schuster didn't want to make Superman Jewish. They wanted to make him as un-Jewish as possible because they wanted to create a story that is much more applicable to sort of everybody in America because that's how you, you know, solve comic books in the middle of the Depression.
And you get into some of this in American Scary, but what is it that you think Ira Levin sussed out in Rosemary's Baby?
I think that, you know, one of the things that at that period, sort of late 1960s, early 1970s, is that there's this increasing kind of feeling or maybe discomfort is even a good word, anxiety about all of this wave of secularism that's coming out, particularly from a younger generation, of saying, you know, God is dead, right? That's in fact in the movie version, right? There's a magazine cover that they say that Rosemary sees in the waiting room, a famous magazine cover that says “is God dead?” Right? And, you know, the message of Rosemary's baby is no, there is no way God is dead. Right? That's one, that's one aspect. Most of the movie, and again, this becomes very interesting to watch this as an adult. When you watch this as a teenager, you're like, Oh, it's all about the Antichrist. When you watch it as an adult, especially an adult in the 2020s, you're saying, you know, what this really is about is a woman who's being gaslit by everybody around her and that that's the real terror, right? Is this, you know, and so there are also these concerns that Levin channels both in this and in a novel of his, The Stepford Wives that comes out that really basically any of these movements of feminism, any of these kinds of things really are going to be shut down by a kind of patriarchy. And that's another thing that Levin is sort of putting his finger on as well.
And then the third book that I chose was Art Spiegelman's Maus. And I chose that one to say that for good or for ill, and I think in many ways both, the Holocaust has become central to the American Jewish experience and writing about the Holocaust and thinking about the Holocaust has become an extremely important part of this. Now, as you saw from my previous choice of the book of Esther, I'm very alert and alive to the questions of antisemitism, the questions of genocidal intent and the importance of historical memory in that way. What Spiegelman's biography and autobiography, it's a biography of his father and an autobiography of himself, shows is the way in which that preoccupation can be both creatively fruitful and also deeply troubling and even traumatizing. And that is an interesting part of the story. Again, I make no moral judgments on that. And I think having taught Maus dozens of times over the course of my career, it's a phenomenal and hugely important piece of art and an important part of the Jewish, American Jewish story. But one of the reasons that it's so great is that it is also troubling as all the best works of literature are.
Could you say a little bit more about what's troubling?
Well, I think, you know, it's certainly the case that Spiegelman, and I'll call him Art because his father is also a Spiegelman, you know, is very much put in a particular place because of his father's experiences and because of the way in which those experiences impact him and his inability to liberate himself from those experiences or certainly his perceived inability to do so. And, you know, that creates a kind of narrative in which he is captive to this trauma, right? And a way in which one could argue that one of the essential stories of this generation is to be traumatized in these particular ways. And Spiegelman, I'm talking about Art Spiegelman here, to his credit, is very aware of this. He's very aware that his story and his relationship to his father is not the only story that someone could have with a survivor parent. But it becomes a kind of way of thinking about what does it mean to have the Holocaust in American life.
Interestingly, and obviously, that one is really the one of the three that probably most American Jews would have agreed on your pick of saying like, oh that makes sense to me that that's, you know, part of the Jewish American story.
Yeah, there are many ways in which having that kind of historical memory is hugely important. And there are kind of ways in which we want to make sure that it is in its proper place, but also in its place balanced with all these other kinds of elements. One of the things when I came to Columbia many years ago was to say, it's very important for me to teach Yiddish literature, which is the literature of Eastern European Jewry mostly for many hundreds of years, not as a precursor to 1933 to 1945.
You were doing an amazing disservice to all of these individuals by simply saying, well, you know, what a shame it was that they wrote this not knowing that in 15 years or 20 years they were going to be killed. Right. That seems like a travesty in many ways. And I don't think anyone thinks of it explicitly that way, but that's something that we really want to make sure that we put in a perspective surrounded by all sorts of other aspects of Jewish literature, Jewish history, Jewish culture that we're also reading and teaching and thinking about.
Well, I think taking those three books together, I wasn't sure how we were going to put them all together. But I really do see how they can shape for us the Jewish American story. So thank you for doing that for us.
Book Four: the book you're reading now — 11/22/63 by Stephen King.
I was in the middle of rereading really basically everything that Stephen King wrote. It was a little treat for myself after having finished the American Scary book and just for fun. And I had gotten up to this massive book of his, which I think is one of his best books, which is called 11/22/63, which is of course the date of John F. Kennedy's assassination. It is kind of a horror novel, right? But it's not only a horror novel. And it's really about, this doesn't spoil anything, a person who is able to take advantage of a wormhole in time to go kind of back in time to right before the Kennedy assassination and thinks about whether or not he is going to prevent that assassination because now he has the power presumably to alter history. That's all I'm going to say, not to spoil because I'm not going to spoil for you out there if you, in case you haven't read it, but I do think one of the things that it does so well and that King does so well is talk about the past and saying what is the weight that that past has on you? How does it affect the person that you are now? How do you look at it differently now that you're sort of a little further down the timeline, so to speak? And I think that King's novel does all of those things as well as give a very sort of thickly wonderfully described sense of that kind of moment, which King identifies as kind of a hinge point in American history where things started to change and not for the better. Now that is both, Tali and I are a generation later than King, so we may have a different point, but it's a very sort of interesting, I think powerful sort of temporal point for a lot of people, and it's interesting to see that perspective as well.
Yeah. Is this your favorite Stephen King book or do you have one that's your favorite?
That's a good question. I don't think it's my favorite. No, I think it's one of the ones that I think is one of his best, but I think for all sorts of sentimental and natural, you know, it's probably It, which is not a very creative answer, but I think it happens to be the right one or the right one for me. It's worth all the 1100 pages.
Book Five: the author's latest book— American Scary: a History of Horror from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond by Jeremy Dauber.
You noted earlier that you open the book with, “show me what scares you and I'll show you your soul,” which is amazing and such an incredible framing for the whole book. What do you think we gain when we know what scares us?
Self-knowledge is always kind of useful. Even self-knowledge that you're powerless to change. I think there's a lot that you can change about yourself when you know more about yourself, but there's some that you can't. And even understanding that is very useful. From the perspective of nations, or cultures or peoples, and if you look at these souls, so to speak, over a long period of history, you can see things that are dismayingly regular and that may enable you to understand when something is coming around again. And that is both worrying at times and, I don't want to say comforting because it's not usually, but at least may enable you to think about how to try and face it and confront those fears in ways that are the most productive and maybe the most useful.
There's that old saying, is that old cliched chestnut that history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. And I think that that's true with fears. We have these very basic fears that sort of continue over and over and repeat and cycle over and over again. Fear of the other, fear of the thing above, fear of the person next door, and understanding that this is an iteration of something long past and seeing sort of the damage that it's done at different times, might enable you to minimize it or shape it or channel it sort of in a different direction that may be more useful.
You do a brilliant job of linking fiction, movies, et cetera, to the underlying fears at the time. And you talk about how Americans use horror as a catharsis for real life fears and anxieties. Can you tell us maybe a few examples of those links and maybe even some of the ones that most surprised you?
Yeah, I'll start with the one that was sort of unsurprising and I'll start with something that I found very surprising. It was not surprising to me that when, for example, the atomic bomb, you know, when Hiroshima starts, right, that everyone says, this is terrifying, you know, we now have the power to basically destroy the entire planet and it can happen immediately. And so that wasn't surprising that was a fear. It was also not that surprising that fear in the 1950s because it was such a scientific and technological fear took the form most prominently of science fiction horror, and particularly kind of alien invasion so that instead of, you you didn't really want to focus on the fact, usually, that it was the Russians that were going to do this. So you displaced that fear onto aliens from outer space with that death rays, you know, and then also you knew, at least you thought in the 1950s, you weren't going to be able to beat the Russians like that, you know, but that you could somehow find the secret key to drive away the aliens and destroy them and, you know, save the planet or something like that. And that was the catharsis that could happen. So that was an example of how you really see it fits very neatly. It's not very hidden in a lot of ways. It's not so surprising.
The thing that really surprised me, I will say, is that I started thinking about this book at the tail end of the active part of the COVID pandemic, let's say. I had been saying to a number of people over the course of the pandemic that when we write histories of the early part of the 20th century, we will be rewriting them, like all of us who grew up reading these histories of the 1920s and whatever, we didn't hear that much about the flu pandemic of 1918 to 1920. We heard a lot about World War I and we heard a lot about the trenches and all that. And I said, you know, nobody's going to write those histories that way anymore. Everyone's going to write about both World War I, but also this pandemic. But I said, I'm sure there are going to be horror stories about this pandemic that killed tons and tons of people. It was crazy. And you know, you don't find it. You know, there are exceptions. There are always exceptions that prove the rule. But you would have thought it would be everywhere. And it's not. And then, you know, someone pointed out to me quite correctly, they were like, look at television now. It's like you watch TV now. And with very few exceptions, it's like the pandemic never took place in the sitcoms that are going on and in the dramas. People aren't wearing masks all the time, aren’t social distancing. People really just did not want to talk about it. I think you can see it a little bit in, as I say, sort of very deep allegorical traces. I make the argument in the book that I think Dracula, which is about a kind of wasting disease that kind of takes place and that spread from one person to another is actually a lot more about virality than we would think that it was. But there's really not that much of it. And that was genuinely surprising.
And I mean, you also talk about the fear of the other and heightened periods of times when they're marginalized groups undergoing changes. So can you give us some examples of that?
What Tali is talking about, which I think is a very important part of the American story and all sorts of horror stories, is being afraid of the person who's right next door to you. Now, in Jewish history, we are the other in so many of these stories. We're the ones who, as rumors, and as libel, this is not true, of course, I'm saying this on the podcast, we're the ones who they say poison the wells, the ones who say kidnap the children. We are the boogeymen of this and it's because we live right there. We live right next door, right? In America, for all sorts of reasons, the Jews, and maybe until recently one has to say, but the Jews have not become as much the others as all sorts of other others. In part, that's because Americans, as Americans, we have a much larger crime than antisemitism historically as woven into our American DNA, which is slavery. So that becomes one of the most important others. Women have always all through history become, been an other. And so, you know, those two others really are intertwined.
The subtitle of the book is “from Salem to Stephen King and beyond.” We've talked a lot about Stephen King. We haven't talked that much about Salem, but in Salem, you know, there is no question that sort of this fear of witchcraft that comes up is a combined fear of women as others, particularly women who have their own kind of power, right? And also people of color. The first person who is accused is an enslaved person, is an enslaved woman named Tituba. And they're right there, they're in our households, and they're in league with the devil. That's what witchcraft means in the 17th century, right? That you have made a pact with the devil himself. So, you know, you think this person is a nice church-going person, but you don't really know them at all. And that's very terrifying.
Yeah, I'm not someone who is drawn to horror, but after reading your book, you know, and being able to see it in a totally different perspective it made me want to go back to some of these stories and reread. You know, you talked a little bit about Jews being the other and you do touch on some Jewish stories in there, particularly Jewish American fears, post Holocaust, and I.B. Singer's story, “The Cafeteria”. So I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about the Jewish angle on some of these scarier horror stories.
Well, I think, you know, one of the interesting things about even the way that you said it, and I quite rightly, is that the main exponent of American Jewish literature and Jewish fear in the second half of the 20th century that was sort of explicitly coded as Jewish was someone who wrote in Yiddish and was perceived, and in part because of his own presentation, to be a kind of ghostly figure himself, right? Isaac Bashevis Singer presents himself as a kind of walking remnant of a murdered people. And some of his most effective stories really lean in to that kind of ghostliness. One of my favorite stories, one of the ones I talk really about in the book, this story, “The Cafeteria”, is a story about a woman who tells this sort of narrator, who's kind of a Singer stand-in, that she has seen Adolf Hitler kind of alive and well in a cafeteria in New York City, in one of these sort classic New York City cafeterias that were like Yiddish emigre hangouts. And, you know, it's this idea of saying, first about trauma, right, that time and space are collapsed, that you are all of a sudden back where you were, right? But also it's about, you know, it can happen here. One of the books that we talked about doing on this podcast is Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. And, you know, one of the things that's interesting about Roth in 2004, at least, is that for Roth America is kind of like a rubber band basically. Like you can stretch it all out of proportion but will eventually snap back to good old America where it's supposed to be then you know all's well because it will end well. That is not necessarily the case with Singer. So it'll be interesting to see whether or not Roth's vision or Singer's vision, as we're defining them in this particular moment, kind of win out, you know, in our contemporary moment. But certainly that is a kind of fear of saying, you know, can it happen here that, you know, what would be foolish to say is not resonating in the minds of a lot of Jews thinking about now.
Yeah, absolutely. I also know that you've written middle grade fiction and you have a new one coming out in September. Does any of your horror expertise figure into how you approach writing these middle grade stories?
So, know, thank you for asking about it. I mean, I'm very excited about this book that's coming out. You know, it's called Press One for Invasion. So I talked about some of these alien things. The premise is basically that this kid really wants a phone. He finds one on the street and he looks through the camera mode on the phone. And like everybody looks normal except for his crossing guard, who looks like a goggle-eyed alien monster, but only when he looks through the phone, right? And it turns out that his crossing guard is like a beachhead in an alien invasion to basically like factory farm humans and turn them into food. But the lunch lady, who's also an alien, has turned vegetarian and they, teams up with the kids, she's the one who dropped the phone and teams up with the kid to like stop it. So it's a lot of fun. Both my children who are not diplomatic at all, they both read it and they, both my boys read it. They both like it. So I think your kids will like it as well. I think that, you can even see from this that there's a lot of sort of classic horror bones in this. It's not scary in the way that a horror story really is. It's sort of more fun, but it's got the kind of science fiction, alien invasion thing. It's got a Hansel and Gretel vibe to it, right? It's like, you know, you want to eat up the kids, you know, so there's that fairy tale version of it. All of these things kind of come together in a melange. And I will say that, you know, writing these stories is very interesting also to make you think as a critic about sort of reading these stories, about saying we as critics tend to be very interested in kind of categorization and taxonomy and things like that. And as a writer, kind of like, you know, if it works, if it works well together, let's just put it together. And, you know, it doesn't really matter.
So is it a commentary on how we should be terrified of giving children phones?
Well, I think for sure. I think that's, it's one of the questions that I was asking myself, and I know you had this conversation, we had this conversation, but is, what's the right age to give kids a phone, right? Because they really want it. And that was part of this, saying, okay, well, this kid wants the phone so badly that he finds one in the street. He knows he should kind of turn it in, but he's like, maybe I can play with it a little first. But it turns out, I guess if you give a kid a phone at the right time, they might save the world. So, there you go.
We won't tell the wait until eighth crowd.
All the fourth graders are going to say, see, I got to buy this book.
Exactly. Okay, so this has been fantastic. My last question for you is really just, what do you think the horror of today tells us about what Americans are most afraid of?
I think really what people are afraid of now are both the real kind of fragmentation of American society, the fear of the other really has sort of hypercharged and whatever commonalities Americans have are fraying. And so a movie that came out like Civil War, you know, or really things like that, movies like the Purge franchise, which has been right. These really are having a kind of moment. The other, I think, is the way in which the, you know, apocalyptic fiction has been very big for quite some time now, again, but as opposed to apocalyptic fiction being just, there's a zombie outbreak or something from above in some ways. It's really more of that things are falling apart from kind of within. There's always been an aspect of that, even like, you know, in a movie about nuclear war, like Dr. Strangelove, there's some aspect of, you know, it's the people, it's not sort of the nukes, you know, but I think more and more, you know, the fears are more idiocracy than they are one of the alien invasion movies. You know, it's just going to all fall apart from within and it's just not going to be that great anymore. So that's, those are the two main kind of years.
So the last thing I will say, I think is that we're also afraid of something that is working both very well and very badly, which is sort of this artificial intelligence and virtual life sort of sense. It's working badly in the sense that it tends to hallucinate, but it works very well in the sense that increasingly we're not going to be able to know what is right or what isn't right anymore. What is real? What isn't real? There's always a moment this happens in Stephen King's novel, It, all the time, but it happens in a lot of novels, horror novels and horror movies, including this Press One for Invasion, this book of mine, right? Where you have to take this jump and you have to say this thing that can't possibly be the case actually is the case. There are...I can't believe that this is an alien, right? But it actually is an alien and they're actually are going to, right? What's scary about virtual reality and sort of artificial intelligence is that the answer is not a binary anymore. It's not yes or no. It's like, well, we may never really be a hundred percent sure anymore. And that kind of corrosive effect I think is genuinely terrifying. And it's something that we really are only beginning now and probably will forever to really try and get our hands around in an analogous way that in 1945, humanity had to come to terms with the fact that they could destroy the planet through their own actions, which was not something that humanity ever really thought about before. So that’s cheery.
Yeah, I was going to say. It's so interesting the way that they all kind of overlap in the Venn diagrams of things deteriorating and also just not knowing right from wrong or truth from untruth. But even if it's not the most optimistic, I think we will all sort of read pop culture and read horror a little bit differently having spoken to you. This was fantastic. I wish I could sit in on all of your classes.
That’s kind of you to say, thank you. This was so much fun.
Thank you so much for joining us today for the five books. Our guest today was Jeremy Dauber talking about his book, American Scary. You can find a link to the book and all the many others Jeremy discussed in our show notes. A reminder that we're launching our newsletter to keep you up to date with new episodes and links to all the books directly into your inbox. You can sign up in the show notes or on our website, fivebookspod.org.
If you enjoyed the show, please be sure to subscribe and share with friends and family and rate and review in Apple podcasts or wherever you listen. Rating and reviewing really does help new listeners find our show. You can email us feedback or author recommendations at team at five books pod. You can find us on Instagram @fivebookspod or on Facebook, the five books podcast. I'm Tali Rosenblatt Cohen. Our producer is Odelia Rubin. Editorial and website support from Sarah Waring. Music by Dov Rosenblatt and Blue Dot Sessions, art by Dina Friedman. Thanks especially to the Jewish Book Council and a special shout out to Bait Raban's Aleem Klaas.
