“Werewolves are kind of like good Jewish boys, only more so,” says a character in Wen Spencer’s young adult novel, The Black Wolves of Boston. And it’s true. When 30 Rock debuted the novelty song “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah” (think “Monster Mash,” but with a nice cut of brisket), the joke seemed random, even unsustainable. But you might be surprised to learn that the idea of Jewish werewolves is a long-winded mesorah. They may not all have bar mitzvahs, but if you count off the usual tenets of a werewolf story—following a lunar calendar, dashing off when the sun goes down, making excuses for weird disappearances, accusations, hunts, being driven off by suspicious townspeople—it’s easy to guess why Jewish creators throughout the years have chosen the werewolf as a central horror figure. After all, who could know better how it feels to be both a part of a nation and a nation apart?

The wolfish-Jewish association goes as far back as the Biblical Benjamin, who a Medieval commentator, Rabbi Efraim ben Shimshon, described as not just like a “ravenous wolf,” but capable of turning into a wolf itself. Notably, the rabbi’s fear was not that Benjamin would kill others, but that he would change among strangers and be killed by them.

This theme follows through most Yiddish lore. Germany fairy tales warned children not to go into the woods, lest they be snatched; Yiddish folk tales warned readers not to go into the wood lest they be accused of snatching children and baking them into matzo.

H. Leivick, a Yiddish folklorist of the last century, picks up this thread. Leivick, fugitive from Mother Russia, was no stranger to tackling creature features; his play, The Golem, turns a scary story about a clay man into a Miltonian epic with messianic ruminations and introspective soliloquies where every man, even the clay one, verges on tragedy.

Leivick’s poem “The Wolf,” from around 1920, stalks in the same vein, when a rabbi, last survivor of anti-Semitic violence, finds himself transformed into the titular beast. Taken to the woods, the rabbi-wolf haunts a new generation of Jews who have moved in to rebuild the town and eventually attacks them in the synagogue on Yom Kippur, where he is beaten to death by the congregation. It is interesting to gauge Leivick’s reaction to the pogroms of his homeland; the wolf, rather than turning his rage upon those who wronged him, instead terrorizes his kin. Leivick, it seems, is using the wolf to warn that blood for blood is pointless, for it makes the Jewish victim no different from his non-Jewish oppressors. It is not a revenge fantasy, but rather a revenge nightmare.

The Jewish werewolf once more emerges from the shadows in The Wolfman (1941) and An American Werewolf in London (1981), two films in conversation about the possibility of Jewish existence in Europe during and after the dehumanizing effect of the Holocaust. If Leivick’s desire was to remain the Other, these films express the terror of becoming the Other in a hostile world. You fit in, until you can’t. You’re one of us, until you’re not.

Consider screenwriter Curt Siodmak, who like many of his generation and, like the subject of his trend-setting The Wolfman, was forced to flee from home across the wastes of Europe, marked for pursuit, marked for Otherness, by a star.

“Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night may become a wolf,” the poem in the film goes—it can happen anywhere, through no fault of your own. Kafka saw himself as a cockroach; Siodmak saw himself as a wolf.

Along lurks An American Werewolf in London, intent on flipping The Wolfman on its head but, in the end, only fulfilling the pre-war prophecy, as two spry American Jews (implied but never explicitly outed) return to Europe and swiftly find themselves attacked and facing certain doom. The Holocaust clings like a sickly pall, polluting pop culture, because the Holocaust was the monster under the bed, and if you hid enough, you might silence it forever.

Movies like An American Werewolf in London invented a way around the societal gag order, and they did it by embracing the truth of the Holocaust as a horror show without a happy ending. When pig-faced Nazis storm werewolf-bitten David Kessler’s house in the film, it’s post-Holocaust shlock as shock therapy. When David is goaded by his old friend into suicide, it’s a punchline of Jewish guilt. When wolf-David is gunned down on a busy street in London, it’s a reversion to the open dehumanization of The Wolfman, inescapably Othered.

Flashforward and suddenly you have Jewish werewolves overrunning genre television—between Oz on Buffy (they may never have said it, but he’s played by Seth Green, okay?) and George of Being Human UK and Josh of its North American remake, werewolves are young and cool and holding down nine-to-five jobs, assimilated into the greater world. Or are they?

One of the biggest sources of unease in a werewolf story is the inability to pick one out of a crowd. They look like you, they sound like you, they could be any of you. Josh and George are nice Jewish boys growing up to be nice Jewish doctors and upstanding members of society before they are cursed, cast out of society and forced to live mouth-to-mouth, way station to way station, unable to settle down or find peace. Though they look just as normal as the next person, the vampires are able to sniff them out. An existence that had seemed integrated is once more Othered, and these characters are forced to wrestle with their identity as wolf or human.

“This is me, all the time,” Josh eventually confesses—not one or the other, but both: a werewolf. This is ironically confirmed by the show’s extension of vampire mythology to include Stars of David as religious symbols that harm the undead. Only his foes react to Josh’s necklace with fear; it is harmless to those he counts as friend.

From Bible verses to novelty songs, Jewish werewolves have always been lurking on the fringes, waiting to be brought into the light. Like the moon itself, I expect there will always be more to see.

Esther Saks thinks Bob Dylan deserved the Nobel Prize. Her writing is featured in Heroes: A Raconteur House Anthology.

Image via Wikimedia

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This was the first Rosh Hashanah I didn’t go to shul. I still saw friends, went to meals, dipped the apple in honey more than once, yet I never entered any one of the several minyanim I’ve frequented in the past. I never opened the machzor I’ve been using for years, the one I received free in the mail for a hoped-for donation that I didn’t send. And I never heard the shofar blasts calling me to repentance.

Does this mean I was blameless all year, that I had nothing to repent for? Hardly. It’s just that despite the myriad of rituals, the primary way the Jews I know mark Rosh Hashanah is with an extra-long synagogue service. And I don’t enjoy prayer.

This is not merely a sign of how degenerate I’ve become since leaving Orthodoxy. Prayer, even when I was a full-on believer, was always the most difficult part of Judaism for me. I’ve never been able to sit or stand still and even the most vigorous shokeling, the ritualistic swaying that the religious set do while davening, was never enough to keep boredom at bay. As a child, I was able to leave services without glares of disapproval and would spend hours in the ladies’ room with a friend, swinging from stalls (though I never did giant swings like John Cage did on Ally McBeal) and giving bubbies the scare of their lives when I popped out.

As I got older, I was expected to stay in the women’s section for even longer periods of time as though age had miraculously reformed my twitchy nature. It did no such thing. Throughout the practically daylong Rosh Hashanah services, I’d alternate my foot tapping from one leg to the other and then back again. I would leave my seat as often as possible to get sips of water from the fountain or to visit the restroom. I no longer attempted acrobatics in the stalls. Rather, I engaged in the more teenage-appropriate behavior of checking my hair in the mirror. But after five old ladies entered the bathroom and then left, I felt obligated to return the sanctuary.

Despite these stratagems, there was still left ample time to stew in my seat. Or stand and pray. The worst was mussaf, which translates to “additional service.” The first part is recited to oneself and I did my best to complete it as quickly as possible in order to get a chance at sitting before the even longer repetition portion began. (Woe unto me when I learned at school that I wasn’t supposed to sit down in front of a person still engaged in prayer. I’d stare angrily at the woman behind me who seemed to be taking her sweet time communing with God and seeking blessings for her family. I hated her so much.)

I also engaged in “machzor math” by flipping to the end of the mussaf service to figure out how many pages were left until the final shofar blasts of the day. (As a math-phobic person, this remains the only type of arithmetic I’ve ever been any good at.)

At times, however, I took a grim satisfaction in surviving the service as though I had run some sort of liturgical marathon. Back at school after the holidays, we’d boast to one another about how long our davening lasted. The winners (and losers) were the ones who didn’t get to eat lunch until it was practically time for seniors in Florida to get their early bird specials. (This same sort of competition was applied to Passover seders. Eating dinner before midnight was a sign of impiety.) In Orthodox Judaism, as in my beloved sport of gymnastics, your grit is measured by how much suffering you can endure.

As an adult, I stopped attending Orthodox services. I found congregations that shared my values, from egalitarianism to social justice. There is just one problem—these guys use a liturgy very similar in content and length to the service of my youth. And they really like to sing it out.

Again, I found myself resorting to the same time-killing strategies I used as a kid. I showed up late, got up often to go to the bathroom and get sips of water. I found people to speak to. I rose and sat with the congregation. And I counted how many pages we had to go until we would be free for the day.

When I woke up on Monday morning, I was ready to go through all of it again. I’d show up late and then distract others with mindless chatter. And then I’d distract myself when they’d finally shush me. I’d rise and sit in accordance with the script. Once again I’d hope that instead of ten or twenty minutes of connectedness with the material and the songs, maybe I’d get half an hour this year.

Then I decided to go back to sleep. Perhaps it was pure laziness that kept me in bed for hours with a book and a cup of coffee until it was time to meet my friends for lunch. And it was that, at least in part. But it was also me finally recognizing that prayer wasn’t meant to be my form of spiritual expression and engagement.

On some level, this is surprising. I’m a writer and rabbinic Judaism (as one good rabbi friend once pointed out to me) is a verbal culture. I enjoy text study and can argue for hours. You’d think that prayer, being comprised of a lot words written into books, would also thrill me. But when confronted with the liturgical text, I rarely feel anything in the recitation of it, even amongst a group of friends I love and respect. It mostly leaves me cold.

So what’s the difference between the intellectual discussion that excites me and the prayers that bore me to distraction? It is, in part, the demand for stillness. I’m not a meditative sort and I feel most connected when I’m moving and dancing. But it’s also the rote nature of these lengthy services. What I cherish about literary analysis and debate is that though we are working from a static text, we’re improvising as we argue. For me, spirituality is achieved, however briefly, from constant shifting and changing. I can’t work from a script. (Or remember a beam routine much to my former coach’s chagrin.)

This reminds me, like virtually everything else in life, of a moment from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When Werewolf Oz is asked about Sunnydale High School’s marching jazz band, he explains, “Since the best jazz is improvisational, we’d be going off in all directions, banging into floats…scary.”

Similarly, a standardized davening keeps the congregation together. The unity and cohesion of many voices joining together, saying the same words, is for some an incredibly spiritual experience. I have friends who find great fulfillment and connectedness in the traditional service.

Thankfully, these folks mostly indulge me and my inability to daven. After two years of living in Los Angeles, my friends hosted a Shabbat lunch to bid me farewell. When it came time to bench after the meal, one announced, “I think that because it’s Dvora’s last Shabbat here, we should bench quietly and to ourselves, the way she likes it.” It was one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me.

Though undoubtedly these friends also find Rosh Hashanah davening overly long—I’ve spied others doing machzor math—they enjoy a good sing-along and get into it. I wouldn’t want anyone to cut it short on my behalf.

Besides, the longer they spend in shul, the more time I get to spend in bed or dancing around my apartment before I meet them for the most Jewish act of all—eating.

(image via Shutterstock)

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