"In his #novel #AFoolsKabbalah, #SteveStern #writes in a manic whirl of disturbing and hilarious images as he follows the great historian of #Jewish #mysticism #GershomScholem on his journey to gather up the remains of a vanished civilization."

"Steve #Stern’s new novel, A Fool’s #Kabbalah, is a #comedy about #tragedy and a tragedy about comedy. It is a #mystical #fable of real events and a realistic account of mysticism. There are Jewish #jokes and Jewish jokesters and #Nazis who torture and kill the jokesters. #Kafka, Kabbalah, #Zionism, and the #shtetl of #Zyldzce (pronounced, perhaps, as “zilch”); #WalterBenjamin, #HannahArendt, love for a #rabbi’s beautiful daughter, and an #occult midnight marriage to an unearthly albino girl in a white gauze dress; shit jokes, fart jokes, raw misery, deep #philosophy, brutal #history and brutal #fantasy, broken hearts and heartfelt joy—these exuberantly disparate topics are somehow, improbably, made to cohere."

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/04/09/the-possibility-of-humor-fools-kabbalah-steve-stern/