People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

by Dara Horn Narrated by Xe Sands

Overview

A startling and profound exploration of how Jewish history is exploited to appease 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.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

★ 06/28/2021

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. (Sept.)

Commentary - Elliot Abrams

"How can a book filled with anger, a book about anti-Semitism and entitled People Love Dead Jews, be delectable at the same time? The novelist Dara Horn has done it, combining previously published pieces in a work that is far greater than the sum of its parts."

Booklist - Ilene Cooper

"Horn herself [is] sometimes a witness, at others providing insightful commentary full of anguish and rage. This is not an easy book to read. But wrestling with Horn’s ideas makes for a rich experience. In all, a profound lament."

Mark Oppenheimer

"To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle, George Orwell told us. Dara Horn has engaged that struggle, and in People Love Dead Jews she explains why so many prefer the mythologized, dead Jewish victim to the living Jew next door. It’s gripping, and stimulating, and it’s the best collection of essays I have read in a long, long time."

James Carroll

"Dara Horn proposes a disturbingly fresh reckoning with an ancient hatred, refusing all categories of victimhood and sentimentality. She offers a passionate display of the self-renewing vitality of Jewish belief and practice. Because antisemitism is a Christian problem more than a Jewish one, Christian readers need this book. It is urgently important."

Alma - Emily Burack

"Horn is clearly exhausted about thinking about dead Jews, and about antisemitism, and you can feel her emotion through the page. But she channels the emotion to weave together a large amount of stories — from Russian Jews living in China to Daf Yomi — and what results is a compelling series of essays."

Jeffrey Salkin

"Extremely engaging... Horn will make you think."

The Jewish Chronicle - David Herman

"This is one of the best books of essays about Jewish history and culture that I have read in years."

Yaniv Iczkovits

"“So necessary and so disquieting…People Love Dead Jews is an outstanding book with a bold mission. It criticizes people, artworks, and public institutions that few others dare to challenge.”"

Wall Street Journal - Martin Peretz

"This is a beautiful book, and in its particular genre—nonfiction meditations on the murder of Jews, particularly in the Holocaust, and the place of the dead in the American imagination—it can have few rivals. In fact, I can’t think of any."

The Jewish Chronicle - Keren David

"The questions and ideas raised by Horn in People Love Dead Jews are — like the Yiddish stories she writes about — endless and defiant of neat solutions. But there is comfort to be found, in the most Jewish ways, in her humour and clear-eyed critical thinking."

Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs - Juliana Geran Pilon

"Barely concealed behind the breezy-sounding words ‘People Love,’ cannily reminiscent of a soap ad, is the implicit understanding that ‘people don’t love live Jews’ and even its complement, ‘people love Jews dead.’ In her latest masterpiece, Horn means them all, and more. The best-selling novelist, professor of Jewish literature, and devoted mother of four does not hesitate to confront this hypocrisy head-on... Horn diagnoses with astonishing accuracy the origins, symptoms, and intransigence of the spiritual cancer at the heart of modern culture."

Tablet - David Mikics

"People Love Dead Jews is, of all things, a deeply entertaining book, from its whopper of a title on. Horn’s sarcasm is bracing, reminding us that the politics of Jewish memory often becomes an outrageous marketing of half-truths and outright lies... People Love Dead Jews reminds us that Jewishness is not a museum, a graveyard, or a heritage site but a lively ongoing conversation at a long table that stretches before and behind us. Come out of hiding, Horn urges us, it’s time to take part in Jewish life."

Jewish Book Council - Jonathan Fass

"Weaving together his­tory, social sci­ence, and per­sonal story, she asks readers to think criti­cal­ly about why we vener­ate sto­ries and spaces that make the destruction of world Jewry a compelling narrative while also mini­mizing the cur­rent cri­sis of antisemitism... Peo­ple Love Dead Jews offers no definitive solution to the para­dox it unfolds. Horn leaves the reader with several inter­wo­ven expla­nations, each of which lead us to con­front the dark reality that Jewish deaths make for a compelling edu­cational narrative, while facing the antisemitism of the present demands a com­mit­ment to equality that the world remains unable to embrace."

Ruth Franklin

"Dara Horn’s thoughtful, incisive essays constitute a searing investigation of modern-day antisemitism, in all its disguises and complications. No matter where Horn casts her acute critical eye—from the ruins of the Jewish community in Harbin, China, to the tragedy at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue—the reports she brings back are at once surprising and enlightening and necessary."

Tom Reiss

"Dara Horn has an uncommon mastery of the literary essay, and she applies it here with a relentless, even furious purpose. Horn makes well-worn debates—on Anne Frank and Hannah Arendt, for instance—newly provocative and urgent. Her best essays are by turns tragic and comic, and her magnificent mini biography of Varian Fry alone justifies paying the full hardcover price."

Library Journal

09/01/2021

Horn, a scholar of comparative literature and a novelist in her own right (Eternal Life), has collected and revised her previously published articles and essays about ways in which Jews have been portrayed, perceived, and mythologized throughout world history. Topics range from the international embrace of Anne Frank, in "Everyone's (Second) Favorite Dead Jew," to the portrayal of Jews in Western literature ("Fictional Dead Jews," "Commuting with Shylock"); for these subjects, Horn draws on her expertise in Jewish literature. Horn will engage readers as she uncovers the nearly forgotten story of American journalist Varian Fry, who ran a Holocaust rescue network in France during World War II ("On Rescuing Jews and Others"), and unpacks common public responses to "Dead American Jews" in an essay that reflects on the 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. The whole of Horn's book is much more than the sum of its parts, amounting to an interdisciplinary study of the pervasiveness of antisemitism in the United States and around the world. VERDICT A moving, meditative, well-written book that will be of profound interest to anyone concerned with Jewry and Jewish literature. Horn's writing is personable and engaging from start to finish.—Joel Neuberg, Santa Rosa Junior Coll. Lib., CA

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2021-06-29
A guided tour of the hypocrisy that serves as the mechanism by which antisemitism rages on unchecked.

The cold fury and in-your-face phrasing of the title of acclaimed novelist Horn's essay collection sets the tone for this brilliantly readable yet purposefully disturbing book. In the first chapter, "Everyone's (Second) Favorite Dead Jew"—presumably Jesus Christ is No. 1—Horn looks at Anne Frank, who the author believes would never have been so beloved had she survived. At the heart of Frank's myth is a passage from her diary that reads, "I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart." As Horn points out, Frank was less than a month from meeting people who surely convinced her that she was wrong. The author ranges widely: the mythology of Ellis Island; the marketing of the Jewish history of Harbin, China (why call it "Property Seized from Dead or Expelled Jews" when you can call it a "Jewish Heritage Site”?); and the problematic elements of Holocaust museums and exhibits. Since these museums have not stopped people hating or killing Jews, wonders the author, what is the point of recalling the operation of the genocide at a “granular” level? Readers will be enthralled throughout by the fierce logic of Horn's arguments, novelty of research, black humor, and sharp phrasing. Particularly affecting is "Commuting With Shylock," in which Horn describes how she listened to an audio version of The Merchant of Venice with her precocious 10-year-old son, stopping frequently to explain key points. His clarity about the meaning of the "prick us, do we not bleed" speech is a revelation. Though Horn briefly mentions Zionism as a key aspect of Jewish heritage, one subject not discussed here is how the complex situation in the Middle East—characterized by dead Jews and dead Palestinians—fits into her analysis.

A riveting, radical, essential revision of the stories we all know—and some we don't.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940175985093
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	09/07/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	1,255,015

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