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“Magical Meet Cute” – new novel imbues age-old “golem” theme with romance…and mystery
Review by BERNIE BELLAN I’d never read what would be considered a romance novel before, so when I received an email from a publicist for Harper Collins inviting me to read what was described as a new “rom-com,” I admit I was somewhat hesitant to accept the offer.
But – the premise of the novel, as described in that email was somewhat enticing. Here’s what it said:
“Ettel Resnick is a proud Jewitch woman. After being dumped by her fiancé of seven years, she recreated herself, selling her successful legal practice in Manhattan to open Magic Mud Pottery in Woodstock, New York. But everything changes on the fateful night Ettel returns from yet another singles event at the synagogue—and finds her town papered with antisemitic flyers.
“Desperate for comfort, she turns to the only thing guaranteed to soothe her Jewitch soul. Pottery. Heading to her studio, she gets super drunk, and crafts a golem. Ettel pours her heart into that little clay creature. She gives it everything she’s ever wanted in a partner, etching words onto his body—some sensible, some esoteric—before getting totally naked and burying that golem doll in her backyard.
“But when her ideal man turns up the very next day—and checks every detail inscribed on her clay man’s belly, including loving to play Scrabble and reading her books—she’s left wondering if she’s falling in love with the real deal, or if she’s truly summoned a golem.
“This laugh out loud romantic comedy explores witchcraft from a Jewish angle, fighting back against the anti-Semitic way Jewish witches have been portrayed throughout history. It also features a woman dealing with anti-semitism in her town and turning to the ancient Jewish protector—the golem.”
There are several things wrong with what that publicist wrote, however: First, the main character’s name was not Ettel Resnick, it’s Faye Kaplan. (That mistake alone made me wonder where the publicist got her information. Obviously, she hadn’t read the book.)
But second – and perhaps this is more important, to describe “Magical Meet Cute” as a rom-com is a disservice to a book that is far more than a rom-com.
Yes, it contains some of the elements of a romance novel and it does have some good laughs, but as the book develops it takes on a far more serious tone – and turns into a rollicking good mystery.
After reading something about the author, Jean Meltzer, I discovered that she had just about completed writing the book, but then October 7 happened and it cast a giant shadow over what she had mostly written. As a result, she now says that there is a much more serious overtone to her book than what she had anticipated in writing it.
A good part of “Magical Meet Cute” has to do with antisemitism and how completely shocked so many Jews are when it comes to having to deal with overt displays of antisemitism. In the book, Faye fights back, but others in the Jewish community are less willing to confront the threat posed by a group known as “the Paperboys.”
As the press release noted, the action in the book takes place in the very real town of Woodstock, New York (although I have no idea whether the Woodstock described here bears much resemblance to the real town.)
As for the reference to “witchcraft,” I admit that threw me off somewhat. I have encountered the notion of Jewish witches previously, especially in Alice Hoffman’s brilliant “The Dovekeepers,” but as I read “Magical Meet Cute,” I became much more aware of the notion of “Jewitches” which, in this book, is treated in a positive manner.
But, add to that the introduction of the theme of the “golem” in this novel, and you get something quite a bit more complex than what many readers might expect to find in a typical “rom-com.”
Yes, Faye Kaplan does drunkenly fashion a golem out of clay early on in the novel – and then the very next day a character appears who certainly does seem to tick off all the right boxes as a real golem. But, that’s where this book takes a very interesting turn, as the author explores the notion of the golem in Jewish history.
The theme of antisemitism and how ordinary Jews – just leading their everyday lives, are taken so completely by surprise when they encounter direct – and often vicious antisemitism, is especially hard hitting in “Magical Meet Cute.” And, because the notion of the golem as a magical defender of Jews has been around for centuries (as the author explains), it serves as a very convenient – and enticing device around which to develop a modern-day novel, especially in a time of rampant antisemitism.
That’s also where the book veers from romance to thriller – and Jean Meltzer does a fabulous job of injecting tremendous suspense – and trepidation, into the latter part of what is actually quite a long novel (over 480 pages).
In fact, I could have done with less of the romance and more of the thriller. When Faye Kaplan does meet – and fall in love with the character, who we come to know as “Greg” – who may or not be a real golem, I suppose it would have ruined the story for the two of them to go to bed right off the hop. But Meltzer describes Faye as quite beautiful, while Greg is what I would think would be almost any woman’s fantasy of a perfect male.
Not only is he gorgeous, he’s absolutely devoted to Faye. I won’t let you know whether they consummate their relationship, but there is an entire subplot revolving around Faye’s abandonment issues which prevents her from trusting Greg that is really quite sad, although totally credible.
As I made my way through “Magical Meet Cute,” I kept asking myself: Would someone who isn’t Jewish enjoy this book quite as much as someone who is? After all, there are so many references that, if you weren’t Jewish, you’d be wondering just what the heck they mean?
One that comes to mind off the top though – and it’s one I’ve never encountered previously, is Faye’s repeated use of the expression “Haman’s hat,” which she says whenever she’s quite surprised by something. I did a bit of reading on the subject but I simply couldn’t find an explanation why someone would say “Haman’s hat” as say, a substitute for something like “holy s_it.” (Maybe someone will enlighten me.)
Something else that intrigued me was Faye’s predilection for “hard kosher salami.” I realized early on it was her go-to comfort food, but aside from how unhealthy it is to eat, I couldn’t help but think of its phallic overtones. (By the way, Meltzer does enjoy using the term “shvantz” as a term of endearment in describing a certain part of Greg’s anatomy. I would have thought she might have resorted to the more commonly used “schmeckle.”)
When Meltzer introduces the group terrifying the Jews of Woodstock as “the Paperboys,” it’s obviously a not-too-thinly veiled reference to one of Donald Trump’s favourite white supremacist groups, “the Proudboys.” (I apologize if I’ve offended any Trump lovers. After all, there were “many good people on both sides,” as Trump suggested, during the white supremacist march through Charlottesville in 2017, weren’t there?)
“Magical Meet Cute” does have so much more to offer than simply a romance, but if I do have one qualm about the book it is that it so very long. It could have been cut down to no more than 300 pages but, having said that, I applaud the author for combining two quite different genres into quite the good read.
By the way, the book is slated for release August 27, but it’s available online right now from Amazon.
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Remains of final hostage Ran Gvili on way back to Israel after being located in Gaza
(JTA) — The remains of the final Israeli hostage in Gaza, Ran Gvili, have been retrieved and are on their way back to Israel for burial.
The announcement by the Israeli military marks a significant milestone for the Israeli public, which transformed into a communal vigil for the hostages taken when Hamas attacked on Oct. 7, 2023. It also removes an obstacle to the second phase of the U.S.-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
Gvili, a 24-year-old police officer, was killed defending Kibbutz Alumim on Oct. 7. His remains were recovered from a cemetery in Gaza City during a major military operation, the IDF said. Hundreds of bodies were reportedly exhumed during the search and are being reburied.
“The return of Ran z”l for burial is a painful moment of closing the circle—with the return of the last hostage from the Gaza Strip territory to the soil of Israel,” said Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz in a post on X. “This is a moment that underscores the State of Israel’s commitment to its fighters and citizens: to bring every single one home—as we promised the families and the public in Israel. This is mutual responsibility.”
Four of the hostages released under the ceasefire deal had been held since before Oct. 7, meaning that Gvili’s return marks the first time since 2014 that there will be no Israeli hostages in Gaza.
Earlier this month, the Trump administration announced that the second phase of the Gaza ceasefire had commenced despite opposition from Gvili’s family who said his body should be returned first.
Since then, the Trump administration has announced the formation of an international “Board of Peace” to oversee the ceasefire and presented plans for the reconstruction of Gaza. On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office announced that it would reopen the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt after the search for Gvili’s remains was completed.
Gvili’s mother, Talik, said the news of his return is “a relief, after these two and a half years, even though we hoped for a different ending,” according to the Times of Israel.
The discovery of Gvili’s remains was also celebrated by Israeli soldiers at the cemetery where he was found. Video of the soldiers posted on X showed many embracing and singing “Ani Ma’amin,” a Hebrew song meaning “I Believe.”
Some Jews and Jewish institutions removed their hostage necklaces and dismantled their displays in support of the hostages after all of the remaining living hostages were released in October. Others posted social media videos of themselves doing so on Monday following the news of Gvili’s return.
Speaking to the media in the Knesset on Monday, Netanyahu said, “We promised, and I promised, to bring everyone back, and we brought everyone back,” adding, “Rani is a hero of Israel. He went in first, he came out last. He came back.”
The post Remains of final hostage Ran Gvili on way back to Israel after being located in Gaza appeared first on The Forward.
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Columbia selects Jennifer Mnookin, Jewish U of Wisconsin chancellor, as its next leader
(JTA) — Three different women have taken turns as Columbia University’s president amid ongoing turmoil surrounding the handling of pro-Palestinian protests on the New York City campus. Now, Columbia has invited a fourth — and the first to be Jewish — to try her hand at running the Ivy League school.
Jennifer Mnookin, the chancellor of University of Wisconsin, has been chosen as Columbia’s next president, the co-chairs of the school’s board of trustees announced on Sunday. She will be the school’s first Jewish leader since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, triggering a war in Gaza and a student protest movement in the United States of which Columbia was an epicenter.
Mnookin, a legal scholar, served as dean of the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law before moving to Wisconsin in 2022. At least two other candidates reportedly declined the Columbia position prior to her selection.
She takes the helm at a delicate time for Columbia as it continues to reel from the fallout of the student protests, which has included included penalties from the Trump administration, rapid leadership changes and ongoing fear and anxiety among many Jewish students.
“I am honored and thrilled to join Columbia University at this important moment,” Mnookin said in a statement released by the university. “Columbia is defined by rigorous scholarship, a deep commitment to open inquiry, world-class patient care, and an inseparable and enduring connection to New York City, the greatest city in the world.”
She follows three other women who struggled amid the turmoil. The president in charge on Oct. 7, Nemat Minouche Shafik, cited the “period of turmoil” that followed when she resigned in 2024; she had faced criticism from members of Congress as well as the Columbia community over her handling of the student encampment that formed this year.
Her temporary replacement, Katrina Armstrong, stepped down in March 2025 as the school faced pressure from the Trump administration over antisemitism allegations. Armstong’s successor, the current interim president, Claire Shipman, struck a $221 million deal with Trump to settle the claims; she also apologized soon after taking office for having suggested the removal of a Jewish member of the school’s board of trustees.
Now, Mnookin will be responsible for managing Columbia’s relationship with federal authorities, weighing and implementing the recommendations of its antisemitism task force and healing a divided campus, which has been closed to outsiders now for years.
“The last few years have been undeniably difficult for the Jewish and Israeli communities on campus. While challenges remain, there is a vibrant, joyful, proud Jewish community at Columbia,” Brian Cohen, executive director of Columbia/Barnard Hillel, said in a statement. “I am hopeful that President-elect Mnookin will bring the reputation, experience, and understanding that we need to build on that strong foundation.”
It will be Mnookin’s first time working at a private university. At Wisconsin, first sent law enforcement to shut down a student encampment, then negotiated with protesters after they established a second one. The deal required Students for Justice in Palestine to comply with university rules related to protest in exchange for the right to present their divestment demands to “decision makers,” who did not accede to them.
She also denounced neo-Nazi protesters who marched on the Wisconsin campus in November 2023, calling them “utterly repugnant.” Through it all, she gained a reputation for promoting open inquiry and academic freedom — even as Wisconsin, like dozens of other universities, faced a federal investigation over antisemitism allegations.
“I think universities should be spaces where ideas, and different ideas, embodied by people from different backgrounds, come together, and where it won’t always be comfortable, but where we will learn and do better from that engagement,” she said in a roundtable of college presidents published in The New York Times in November. (The other presidents were also Jewish: Sian Bellock of Dartmouth College and Michael Roth of Wesleyan University, who has emerged as a rare leader in higher education who is willing to spar with the Trump administration.)
Mnookin was raised in a Reform Jewish family in the Bay Area that escalated its Jewish engagement when she asked to celebrate her bat mitzvah, according to her father Robert. A scholar of conflict negotiation, he described the evolution in his 2015 book “The Jewish American Paradox: Embracing Choice in a Changing World,” which he said he wrote in part to explore his own late-onset attachment to Judaism.
The post Columbia selects Jennifer Mnookin, Jewish U of Wisconsin chancellor, as its next leader appeared first on The Forward.
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Tim Walz invokes Anne Frank in pressing Trump to end ICE operations in Minnesota
(JTA) — Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, invoked Anne Frank in exhorting President Donald Trump to call off the ICE operations in the Twin Cities in which a second protester was killed over the weekend.
Speaking at a press conference on Sunday, Walz — whose master’s degree focused on Holocaust education — suggested that the conditions facing children in his state during the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement raids were of a kind with those facing Frank during the Holocaust.
“We have got children in Minnesota hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside. Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank,” he said. “Somebody is going to write that children’s story about Minnesota.”
The prominent mention of Frank, who died of disease in a Nazi concentration camp after her family’s hiding place was betrayed, adds to a growing discourse about whether ICE’s operations targeting immigrants in Minnesota can be compared to the Nazis’ tactics in rooting out Jews during the Holocaust. Figures such as Stephen King and Bruce Springsteen have likened ICE to the Gestapo.
Until recently, Nazi comparisons were long considered inappropriate by many in the Jewish world who argued that such analogies cheapen the memory of the particular genocide against the Jews. In the last decade, that norm has to some degree fallen away, with voices on both the right and left likening their opponents to Nazis.
On Sunday, some of Walz’s critics denounced his comments and said an immigration crackdown cannot be compared to the deliberate murder of Jews. Retweeting an account called Stop Wokeness, the activist Shabbos Kestenbaum tweeted, “One million Jewish children were killed during the Holocaust. Illegal immigrants are offered thousands of dollars to take a free flight home. Tim Walz is an evil retard.”
In a post on X responding to Walz’s analogy, Stephen Miller, a top aide to Trump, wrote, “The purpose of the rhetoric is to incite attacks on ICE.”
But others said the comparison was apt, with a quotation from Frank’s diary circulating widely online as it did in 2019 in response to ICE raids then. The quotation, those sharing it suggested, offered a close parallel to what has been playing out in Minnesota.
“Terrible things are happening outside,” the passage says. “Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared. … Everyone is scared.”
Jewish voices, too, have invoked the Holocaust in arguing for intervention in Minnesota, where federal agents on Saturday shot and killed a man, Alex Pretti, who had been protesting their presence.
“What did we learn from the Holocaust? We have to act and we have to resist,” one rabbi who flew into Minnesota to protest told the Religion News Service last week.
Walz, a Democrat who was the vice presidential candidate in 2024, wrote a master’s thesis on Holocaust education, arguing that the Holocaust should be taught “in the greater context of human rights abuses,” rather than as a unique historical anomaly or as part of a larger unit on World War II.
“Schools are teaching about the Jewish Holocaust, but the way it is traditionally being taught is not leading to increased knowledge of the causes of genocide in all parts of the world,” he wrote in his 2001 thesis, completed while he was a high school teacher.
The post Tim Walz invokes Anne Frank in pressing Trump to end ICE operations in Minnesota appeared first on The Forward.