• The U.S. State Department chastised Israel over its announcement of new building in the settlement of Ariel. [Reuters/Haaretz]

• Twilight actress Kristen Stewart, apparently not a Jew, nonetheless got her start singing “a more serious dreidel song” (which is to say, presumably not the “I made it out of clay” one). [W]

• Splitsville for the Madoffs. [JTA]

• The U.S. military has learned several counterinsurgency tactics from the Israelis. [Abu Muqawama]

• Camp Be’chol Lashon, in Marin County, California, is specifically for Jews of color. [NYT]

Amy Winehouse made out of pills? Amy Winehouse made out of pills.

But even amid this bacchanal of otherworldly hotties, one breed of monsters fades into air: Forgive us, zombies, for we know not what we do.

To be sure, the undead aren’t altogether invisible in popular culture. AMC’s Walking Dead is a fine and thrilling depiction of the days following the zombie apocalypse, and a few recent movies, from Zombieland to Shaun of the Dead, have had clever fun with brain-eating ghouls. But while American girls have neatly lined up in Team Edward and Team Jacob and spent many slumber parties arguing the respective merits of the pale bat versus the big dog, none, I assume, has pined to find herself in the slightly decomposing arms of a lovelorn zombie.

The reason for that is simple: Zombies are on the wrong side of the deathly divide. Unlike vampires, who, if TV and movies are to be believed, have a penchant for attending proms and making out with women in bars well into their 11th decade, zombies die first and then live on. And no matter how hard they try to impress, they can never, it seems, shake the grave’s dirt off their pants: We look at them and see nothing but reanimated corpses. Zombies can’t get no respect.

This should not come as a surprise. After all, in a society as fearful of death as ours, any intimate acquaintance with the afterlife is enough to doom one to the undesirable status of shotgun fodder.

Georges Bataille understood this instinctively. Writing about slaughterhouses, the French philosopher observed that having once been closely connected with religious, ritualistic sacrifice, and therefore placed prominently in the centers of towns, abattoirs have become, in modern times, cursed destinations to be avoided at all costs. “In our time,” he wrote, “the slaughterhouse is cursed and quarantined like a plague-ridden ship. Now, the victims of this curse are neither butchers nor beasts, but those same good folk who countenance, by now, only their own unseemliness, an unseemliness commensurate with an unhealthy need of cleanliness, with irascible meanness, and boredom. The curse (terrifying only to those who utter it) leads them to vegetate as far as possible from the slaughterhouse, to exile themselves, out of propriety, to a flabby world in which nothing fearful remains.”

It would not, perhaps, be too much of a stretch to suggest that one of modernity’s key quests has been the eradication, by whatever means necessary, of death in both its physical and metaphysical forms. Science, law, literature: all bound together to diminish death’s terrible force, to rob it of the power to terrify and afflict. We spend a lifetime fighting death, and when it finally occurs in our vicinity, we rely on a handful of institutions—from hospitals to Hallmark cards—dedicated to helping us sublimate the jarring experience. Bataille was right: We’ll go out of our way to avoid death, even if rationally we know that it is merely life’s logical and inevitable conclusion.

The ancient Israelites, apparently, were no different. In this week’s parasha, we are presented with the strange law of the red heifer. This animal—“a perfectly red unblemished cow, upon which no yoke was laid”—is, God tells Moses, to be slaughtered and burned and its ashes used to purify those who have come into contact with the dead. And while the existence of such a process of purification may be comforting, Jewish thinkers parsing the parasha quickly stumbled on a small problem: Nature, alas, produces very few unblemished red cows. To many commentators, then, this particular law is an example of the Lord’s mysterious ways. Why propose a ritual that could, in all likelihood, never be fulfilled here on earth by us mere mortals? God only knows.

But zombie fans, a group with which I feel a semi-religious affinity, know better. We know that the fear of death, then as now, is a strong and savage force; nothing can spook the living more than coming into contact with the deceased. But what might we do, given that death is all around us? Find a red heifer. And if those are extremely rare? Keep looking.

This is God’s coup de grace. In commanding a ritual involving a species of animal of which he had created so precious few, the Almighty both comforts us by suggesting a magical process by which we might cleanse ourselves of death and forces us to confront our fears once we realize that said magical process is, like all bits of magic, little more than an illusion. This one-two existential punch is the only way to get us to stop worrying and learn to love the great beyond.

Even now, more than 3,000 years after Moses, it’s a lesson we’ve yet to fully learn. We flock to vampire fiction en masse, infatuated with the fanged bloodsuckers and their alabaster skin and eternal youth, or fawn over werewolves and their virility. But we never live forever, and we’ve no red cows to redeem us; much like zombies, all we’ve left to do is slowly become accustomed to the inherently frightening notion of life after death.

Join us, then, at this new educational feature on The Scroll, a recurring lesson we’re calling—in a pun on the Yiddish term meaning “a Jewish brain”—“A Yidisher Pop.” Each Friday for the next eight weeks, “A Yidisher Pop” will caption gossipy photos of politicians, athletes, and celebrities, giving readers a vibrant taste of Yiddish.

Though the lessons embedded in these captions are progressive in the way of any beginner course, this feature is intended, of course, as an introduction, not a comprehensive class. The Yivo Institue, Tel Aviv University’s Goldreich Family Institute, and the Vilnius Yiddish Institute all provide more resources.

And, in the meantime, if you need to brush up on your Yiddish alphabet, Yivo can help you with that, too.

יונגע… שיינע… און אַזאַ אוּמגעלוּמפּערטן פֿילם!

Transliteration:Yunge… Sheyne… un aza umgelumpertn film!

Meaning: Young… Beautiful… and such a clumsy film!

אוי וויי! זייַן טאָג איז געוואָרן נאַכט. קען עס זייַן אַז טאָם קרוּזעס לעצטער פֿילם איז טאַקע זייַן לעצטער?

Transliteration: Oy vey! Zayn tog iz gevorn nakht. Ken es zayn az Tom Cruise’s letster film iz take zayn letster?

Meaning: His day has turned into night. Could it be that Tom Cruise’s last film is really his last?

קלערן, קלערט זי… רעדן, רעדט זי… און וואָס וועגן אַרויסרעדַן וואָס זי קלערט?

Transliteration: Klern… klert zi… Redn, redt zi… un vos vegn aroysredn vos zi klert?

Meaning: She thinks. She speaks. But what about saying what she thinks?

אַ נייַע שטעלע… מאַק-קריסטאַלס עצה פאַר פּאַטרעוּס: רעדן איז זילבער… און שטילקייַט איז גאָלד.

Transliteration: A naye shtele… McChrystal’s eytse far Petraeus: redn iz zilber… un shtilkayt iz gold.

Meaning: A new position… McChrystal’s advice for Petraeus: Speech is silver… and silence is gold.

זיי שטערן אין פֿוּס-באָל שפּילן! אָבער … וווּנדערבאַר ווען מען לייענט די מגילה. המן, וועסט אוּנדז הערן!

Transliteration: Zey shtern in fusbol shpiln; ober kenen zayn vunderbar ven men leyent di megileh. Homon, vest undz hern!

Meaning: They annoy during football games! But perfect for megile-reading. Haman, you will hear us!

The Sounds of Yiddish יידישער קלאַנג

The letter aleph א signals two sounds in Yiddish: the komets aleph אָ sounds like o as in gold and the aleph with a pasakh אַ sounds like a. The name “Obama,” for instance, is spelled with both alephs: אָבאַמאַ. The tsvey (two) yudn with a pasakh ײַ makes the sound AY like zayn זײַן (meaning his) or nay נײַ (new), and without the pasakh makes the sound EY like sheyn שײן (beautiful) or like leyenen לײענען (to read). In Yiddish, the only sound the letter ayin ע makes is E as in עלעמענט (element) or as in klern קלערן (to think) or redn רעדן (to speak). The V sounds is represented by tsvey vovn װ, as in vey iz mir װײ איז מיר (woe is me) or vos װאָס (what). Finally, there is Yiddish’s OY as in froy פֿרוי (woman).

Among them is Sarah Jane Stratford’s debut novel, The Midnight Guardian, published this month. Set from 1938 to 1940, it follows a group of English millennials—vampires who have been undead for more than a thousand years—as they try to sabotage Hitler’s plans for world domination. Stratford’s elegant plot device establishes that war, by killing too many humans, leads to vampire famine. “This was defense of what both humans and vampires held dear,” Stratford writes of the millennials’ quest, “although the humans did not count among their own delights their status as delicious, and necessary, food.”

But as Hitler’s intent to cleanse Europe of vampires—as well as certain other undesirables, particularly the Jews—becomes apparent, the mission’s urgency grows. Yes, that’s right: Stratford has given this latest vampire revival its first Holocaust novel.

This, of course, is not without its problems. Vampires—a secret cult with an ancient tradition, bent on world domination and feeding on human blood—fit a bit too snugly with the demented stereotypes that more imaginative anti-Semites have cultivated for centuries. Emory University professor Erik Butler traces this connection in his forthcoming book, Metamorphoses of the Vampire. Originating in 12th-century England, the blood libel—the idea that Jews ritualistically slaughter gentiles and feast on their blood—was so common by the late 19th century that Blutsauger, or “bloodsucker,” the German word for vampires, was a common derogation for Jews. Karl Lueger, the notoriously anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna, amplified the charge, in turn inspiring his admirer, Hitler, to call Jews parasites in Mein Kampf.

Though Stratford’s vampires are targeted for genocide by the Nazis, they are not allegorical substitutes for the doomed Jews of Europe. In The Midnight Guardian, there are vampires, and there are Jews. (There is even one vampire who used to be a Jew, though he no longer considers himself so: after all, blood is not kosher.) Instead, Stratford uses vampires as a double for Jews: real and stark examples of things the Jews were falsely accused of being. Lining them up together, she cleverly articulates the pseudo-biological basis of Nazi anti-Semitism and attempts to communicate what it means to wish to wipe away an entire people because of perceived biological differences.

Of course, such points about history and ideology, and the use of such literary devices to make them, are not the book’s prime focus. In the Twilight tradition, the book’s obsession is heart-rending, ecstatic, all-consuming, impossible, way too graphic, and, in one scene, pretty raunchy vampire love. Unlike Meyer’s goyishe Edward Cullen, Stratford’s protagonist is Eamon, the ex-Jew; his soulmate, Brigit, is the vampire who “made” him by biting his neck. To complicate this interfaith vampire love even further, one of the book’s subplots has to do with Leon Arunfeld, a legendary Jewish vampire-hunter, who, rather than kill Brigit, has asked her to save his children by smuggling them to safety in England. Thus, the destinies of the vampires and the Jews, those similarly persecuted, traditional, and benevolent creatures (in Stratford’s world, vampires are good, even if they literally live off murder), are sensitively intertwined.

Unfortunately, Stratford’s vampire-Jew connection is too crudely done. Because her book is only a semi-fantasy—a recognizable, historically true world that also happens to have vampires—one can never quite know where other, “different” humans stand. The line between her imagination and reality is smudged. She should have made her book either more realistic or more fantastical.

Art Spiegelman’s graphic-novel masterpiece Maus, which also uses non-human creatures to depict the Holocaust, represents the realistic route. After all, for all the artistic liberty Spiegelman takes, Maus is entirely faithful to what happened. The Jews are not anthropomorphic mice, as is frequently said; rather, they are Jewish men and women, who are merely drawn as mice. (They have tails, but they do not have a yen for cheese.) Thus, there is never confusion over what Spiegelman is trying to say about Nazism and the Holocaust, as there is in The Midnight Guardian.

As for Stratford, she ought to have taken the fantastical route. A more committed allegory—a World War II novel in which the vampires of Europe, and the vampires of Europe alone, were targeted for extermination—might have worked better. It certainly would have been more horrifying; and a good vampire yarn should always be a horror story.