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Modern Jewish culture is full of monsters, ghosts, golems, dybbuks, and other occult creatures. We will study the rich religious and folkloric traditions that these works draw on in order to better understand why Yiddish, German, Hebrew, and English literature from the 19th century to the present and why film from its beginnings are so full of the occult and the supernatural. We will pay special attention to the ways that monsters, spirits, and the like were deployed in modernist literature and film, in order to ask and answer major questions about modernity: what are the social and aesthetic consequences of technology and automation? what aspects of human nature are revealed by new insights into the psyche? All readings in English.