It’s also heartbreaking-painfully sad, anger-triggering-and at times a little numbing-ĭara Horn challenges thoughts about people who say legends don’t matter- doesn’t matter who your parents were or where they came from-“what matters is what you do now with the opportunities this country presents to you, and this is what we call the American dream”…. This book is amazing - brilliant - unbelievably THOUGHT-TRANSFORMATIVE- AWAKENING - *NEW* THOUGHT ….(almost hard to discover any ‘new’ thought in 2021)…but Dara Horn delivered them! ….Is THE MOST MEMORABLE (unfortunately)….but POWERFULLY THOUGHT-PROVOKING….sentence of the YEAR!!!! “People Love Dead Jews”….is a fricken BOLD title!!! 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. Renowned and beloved as a prizewinning novelist, Dara Horn has also been publishing penetrating essays since she was a teenager.

Dara horn people love dead jews