People Love Dead Jews
Reports from a Haunted Present
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4.3 • 59 Ratings
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice
Finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Wall Street Journal, Chicago Public Library, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year
A startling and profound exploration of how Jewish history is exploited to comfort the living.
Renowned and beloved as a prizewinning novelist, Dara Horn has also been publishing penetrating essays since she was a teenager. Often asked by major publications to write on subjects related to Jewish culture—and increasingly in response to a recent wave of deadly antisemitic attacks—Horn was troubled to realize what all of these assignments had in common: she was being asked to write about dead Jews, never about living ones. In these essays, Horn reflects on subjects as far-flung as the international veneration of Anne Frank, the mythology that Jewish family names were changed at Ellis Island, the blockbuster traveling exhibition Auschwitz, the marketing of the Jewish history of Harbin, China, and the little-known life of the "righteous Gentile" Varian Fry. Throughout, she challenges us to confront the reasons why there might be so much fascination with Jewish deaths, and so little respect for Jewish lives unfolding in the present.
Horn draws upon her travels, her research, and also her own family life—trying to explain Shakespeare’s Shylock to a curious ten-year-old, her anger when swastikas are drawn on desks in her children’s school, the profound perspective offered by traditional religious practice and study—to assert the vitality, complexity, and depth of Jewish life against an antisemitism that, far from being disarmed by the mantra of "Never forget," is on the rise. As Horn explores the (not so) shocking attacks on the American Jewish community in recent years, she reveals the subtler dehumanization built into the public piety that surrounds the Jewish past—making the radical argument that the benign reverence we give to past horrors is itself a profound affront to human dignity.
Now including a reading group guide.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this searing essay collection, novelist Horn (Eternal Life) delves into the "many strange and sickening ways in which the world's affection for dead Jews shapes the present moment." Analyzing The Merchant of Venice, Holocaust memorials, and press coverage of a mass shooting at a Jersey City, N.J., kosher grocery store in 2019, among other topics, Horn comes to the conclusion that "the enormous public interest in past Jewish suffering" does not signify respect for living Jews. She notes that it took months for leaders of the Anne Frank House to reverse their policy preventing an employee from wearing his yarmulke. ("Seems like a rather long time for the Anne Frank House to ponder whether it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding," Horn quips.) Documenting her visit to the Chinese city of Harbin, Horn recounts how Russian Jews built the town in the early 20th century, only to have their community decimated by Japanese occupiers in the 1930s. Recent efforts to refurbish Harbin's Jewish heritage sites ignore that tragic history, however, in favor of fake artifacts and stereotypes about "rich and smart" Jews. Enlivened by Horn's sharp sense of humor and fluid prose, this penetrating account will provoke soul-searching by Jews and non-Jews alike.
