people love dead jews reports from a haunted present

“An Anne Frank who lived might have told us what she saw at Westerbork, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen, and people might not have liked what she had to say…. With brutal honesty, she bursts treasured myths like the changing of Jewish names at Ellis Island and tackles international icons like Anne Frank, whose appeal, she posits, lies in her lack of a future. In People Love Dead Jews, Horn continues her exploration of “the strange and sickening ways in which the world’s affection for dead Jews shapes the present moment, leaning into the “distorted” public interest in past Jewish suffering, which she writes she had previously mistaken as a sign of respect for living Jews. Appropriately timed to confront the worrying rise in antisemitism, its unnerving title reflects Horn’s thesis that individuals both Jewish and non-Jewish are obsessed with selective memories of the past that focus on a “dejewing” process in many parts of the world without paying much attention to the Jewish present-which she calls a “profound affront to human dignity.”Ī Hebrew and Yiddish scholar and the author of five novels, Horn got an early start as a published writer: The essay she alludes to in her introduction about visiting concentration camps was originally printed in Hadassah Magazine when she was a teenager.

In her latest collection of essays People Love Dead Jews, Horn draws on her own family’s life - trying to explain Shakespeare’s Shylock to a curious 10-year-old, her anger when swastikas are drawn on desks at her children’s school in New Jersey, the profound and essential perspective offered by traditional religious practice, prayer, and study - to assert the vitality, complexity, and depth of this life against an anti-Semitism that, far from being disarmed by the mantra of “Never forget,” is on the rise.People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Presentĭara Horn’s new book is not for the faint-hearted.

Reflecting on subjects as far-flung as the international veneration of Anne Frank, the blockbuster traveling exhibition called “Auschwitz,” the Jewish history of the Chinese city of Harbin, and the little known “righteous Gentile” Varian Fry, Dara Horn challenges us to confront the reasons why there might be so much fascination with Jewish deaths, as emblematic of the worst of evils the world has to offer, and so little respect for Jewish lives, as they continue to unfold in the present.

People love dead jews reports from a haunted present