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People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present
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.
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.
237 pages, Hardcover
First published September 7, 2021
About the author
Dara Horn
22 books731 followersDara Horn, the author of the novels All Other Nights, The World to Come, and In the Image, is one of Granta’s "Best Young American Novelists" and the winner of two National Jewish Book Awards. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and four children.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,461 reviews
January 5, 2023
Sorry to edit this one again. I must stop re-reading this.
I'm just now finishing Horn's other book "The Rescuer" which is only 36 pages.
"People Love Dead Jews ..." Horn's latest book is written with a different perspective that I perhaps would not have recognized. It also happened to be a finalist for the "Kirkus Reviews Prize" 2021 in nonfiction which I wasn't aware of when downloading it.
Both books speak about about Varian Fry, a man on a selfless mission to rescue jews from Nazi hands; many of them becoming famous journalists, celebs, artists, etc. One such person was Hannah Arendt, who as a journalist became a controversial name when covering the Eichmann trial, writing that jews were also to blame as well for basically being too passive in their resistance.
Really? She got out before the war; but this is for a different discussion.
Whoa...Horn really chose an eye-stopping title for this book. She does an outstanding job of research "to legitimize" the purpose and drives her message home in such a manner that "only Horn could pull off." The climate is extremely ripe for her book.
I used a quote from "Tablet Magazine" in lieu of spoilers that hints at Horns book ....
"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."
////
To the authors point; as jews- if we don't play even a small role in any aspect of jewish life, anti semitism receives no pushback, chancing a permanent opinion
I'm just now finishing Horn's other book "The Rescuer" which is only 36 pages.
"People Love Dead Jews ..." Horn's latest book is written with a different perspective that I perhaps would not have recognized. It also happened to be a finalist for the "Kirkus Reviews Prize" 2021 in nonfiction which I wasn't aware of when downloading it.
Both books speak about about Varian Fry, a man on a selfless mission to rescue jews from Nazi hands; many of them becoming famous journalists, celebs, artists, etc. One such person was Hannah Arendt, who as a journalist became a controversial name when covering the Eichmann trial, writing that jews were also to blame as well for basically being too passive in their resistance.
Really? She got out before the war; but this is for a different discussion.
Whoa...Horn really chose an eye-stopping title for this book. She does an outstanding job of research "to legitimize" the purpose and drives her message home in such a manner that "only Horn could pull off." The climate is extremely ripe for her book.
I used a quote from "Tablet Magazine" in lieu of spoilers that hints at Horns book ....
"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."
////
To the authors point; as jews- if we don't play even a small role in any aspect of jewish life, anti semitism receives no pushback, chancing a permanent opinion
September 11, 2021
“People Love Dead Jews”…..is a fricken BOLD title!!!
“People love dead Jews. Living Jews not so much”. …..Is THE MOST MEMORABLE (unfortunately)….but POWERFULLY THOUGHT-PROVOKING….sentence of the YEAR!!!!
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!
It’s also heartbreaking-painfully sad, anger-triggering-and at times a little numbing—
Dara 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”….
“The fact that this legend is untrue does not detract from its power; legends are not reports on reality but expressions are they cultures values and aspirations”.
I absolutely love this book… I learned a lot. It changed and opened my thinking about Jews….(how Jews see Jews - how non Jews see Jews)….and TONS of important messages, insights, and education taught about BEING JEWISH - “we are not just - not Christian - or - Muslim - or whatever else other people are — we are also just not dead people”.
Horn suggests:
“Jewish communities, figures and abstract symbols of ‘the Jews’ have come to serve a moral role in the Western imagination, that when one takes a step back, it is bizarre and grotesque”.
“It’s easy to acknowledge the darkness of the Holocaust and to marvel at the optimism of Anne Frank, but Dara Horn detects in that
acknowledgment something insidious that hasn’t yet been fully revealed or explained”.
I love this book so much - hard to keep to my under 5 minute review rule for myself—
It was eye opening, fascinating, interesting, heartbreaking, maddening, tearful, moving, powerful, educational, transformative, entertaining, adventurous, and even funny.
…… “As King Lear’s Fool put it, “They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying, and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace”.
“People love dead Jews. Living Jews not so much”. …..Is THE MOST MEMORABLE (unfortunately)….but POWERFULLY THOUGHT-PROVOKING….sentence of the YEAR!!!!
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!
It’s also heartbreaking-painfully sad, anger-triggering-and at times a little numbing—
Dara 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”….
“The fact that this legend is untrue does not detract from its power; legends are not reports on reality but expressions are they cultures values and aspirations”.
I absolutely love this book… I learned a lot. It changed and opened my thinking about Jews….(how Jews see Jews - how non Jews see Jews)….and TONS of important messages, insights, and education taught about BEING JEWISH - “we are not just - not Christian - or - Muslim - or whatever else other people are — we are also just not dead people”.
Horn suggests:
“Jewish communities, figures and abstract symbols of ‘the Jews’ have come to serve a moral role in the Western imagination, that when one takes a step back, it is bizarre and grotesque”.
“It’s easy to acknowledge the darkness of the Holocaust and to marvel at the optimism of Anne Frank, but Dara Horn detects in that
acknowledgment something insidious that hasn’t yet been fully revealed or explained”.
I love this book so much - hard to keep to my under 5 minute review rule for myself—
It was eye opening, fascinating, interesting, heartbreaking, maddening, tearful, moving, powerful, educational, transformative, entertaining, adventurous, and even funny.
…… “As King Lear’s Fool put it, “They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying, and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace”.
July 5, 2023
I listened to the audio version so I can share no excerpts. This book is absolutely scalding in its approach to how dead Jews are memorialized, how the media reports and describes antisemitic acts, how scholars have successfully whitewashed the vicious antisemitism of "The Merchant of Venice" (Horn has a PhD in English so she is definitely qualified to speak), myths about name-changing on Ellis Island, and a good deal more. Stated in the simplest terms, she argues that people love Jews who are dead -- killed by pogroms, in the camps, in attacks on American streets -- but live Jews not so much.
There's no way I can summarize the book without making it sound dry or polemical. It's not. Horn's voice is engaging and welcoming (so too is the astonishingly good job of reader Xe Sands -- wow!), and reading the book is like spending several evenings -- spread out over time, of course -- with a smart friend who knows a lot about a lot of things, is gifted in her ability to (warmly) share what she knows, has a good sense of humor, is brutally honest, and who is really angry.
Among her topics: China spending millions of dollars to recreate the Chinese city, Harbin, that once was home to a large and prosperous Jewish community. They don't mention that Jews left the city under duress, and the reconstructed synagogue is merely a prop -- empty save for equipment used by municipal workers. Chinese officials do, however, acknowledge that the city was rebuilt with the express purpose of attracting Jewish travelers who might add Harbin to their itinerary and spend money.
How a Jewish employee at the Anne Frank house was prohibited from wearing a yarmulke unless it was covered by a baseball cap because the idea was to keep the secret attic "neutral." They obviously didn't see the awful irony of forcing a person to hide his Jewish identity in a place whose purpose was to memorialize Jews who had to hide. And who died because they were Jewish. Horn uses this discussion to take apart how the world's portrayal Frank's experience has been molded into something different than what it really was. How her famous lines about people being "truly good at heart," quoted everywhere to convey a message of love, was tragically naive and wrong, as Anne herself learned, shortly after writing those very words when she was taken by people who were decidedly not good. Horn comments too on the bizarre phenomenon of bestselling novels set the camps or during the Holocaust years. Searing stuff, and convincing.
Also: How the news media treats antisemitic attacks differently than it does other hate-motivated attacks.
I don't agree with everything she says but that doesn't make her wrong or me right. (I have to acknowledge that as holder of a PhD in English myself I was resistant to her remarks about "Merchant of Venice" but came away believing her right.) She is, moreover, a far more observant and knowledgeable Jew than I am... by many, many leagues. But I didn't find that a barrier at all.
A remarkable book. And again, I can't say enough to praise how good Xe Sands is in her narration. Listening to the book might have prevented me from taking notes and underlining passages, but her reading more than compensates.
There's no way I can summarize the book without making it sound dry or polemical. It's not. Horn's voice is engaging and welcoming (so too is the astonishingly good job of reader Xe Sands -- wow!), and reading the book is like spending several evenings -- spread out over time, of course -- with a smart friend who knows a lot about a lot of things, is gifted in her ability to (warmly) share what she knows, has a good sense of humor, is brutally honest, and who is really angry.
Among her topics: China spending millions of dollars to recreate the Chinese city, Harbin, that once was home to a large and prosperous Jewish community. They don't mention that Jews left the city under duress, and the reconstructed synagogue is merely a prop -- empty save for equipment used by municipal workers. Chinese officials do, however, acknowledge that the city was rebuilt with the express purpose of attracting Jewish travelers who might add Harbin to their itinerary and spend money.
How a Jewish employee at the Anne Frank house was prohibited from wearing a yarmulke unless it was covered by a baseball cap because the idea was to keep the secret attic "neutral." They obviously didn't see the awful irony of forcing a person to hide his Jewish identity in a place whose purpose was to memorialize Jews who had to hide. And who died because they were Jewish. Horn uses this discussion to take apart how the world's portrayal Frank's experience has been molded into something different than what it really was. How her famous lines about people being "truly good at heart," quoted everywhere to convey a message of love, was tragically naive and wrong, as Anne herself learned, shortly after writing those very words when she was taken by people who were decidedly not good. Horn comments too on the bizarre phenomenon of bestselling novels set the camps or during the Holocaust years. Searing stuff, and convincing.
Also: How the news media treats antisemitic attacks differently than it does other hate-motivated attacks.
I don't agree with everything she says but that doesn't make her wrong or me right. (I have to acknowledge that as holder of a PhD in English myself I was resistant to her remarks about "Merchant of Venice" but came away believing her right.) She is, moreover, a far more observant and knowledgeable Jew than I am... by many, many leagues. But I didn't find that a barrier at all.
A remarkable book. And again, I can't say enough to praise how good Xe Sands is in her narration. Listening to the book might have prevented me from taking notes and underlining passages, but her reading more than compensates.
January 14, 2022
This book was very hard for me to read and that surprised me. In any case, before I say anything else: this book is very much recommended.
Dara Horn has articulated thoughts and ideas in a way I had never considered before. This is one of the best descriptions of Judaism in modern times I’ve ever read. So so sharp, this book grasps so much that I see in daily life. Horn writes savagely, fiercely. Her writing is comedic and it's intelligent and it's well researched. It’s inspiring, it’s empowering. I wish I could read the equivalent book for other groups in society.
In each chapter, Horn delves into a different topic relating to Jews. She weaves in history and her own personal life to really tell these stories in a way that is personal and just plain fascinating. From the Jewish community of Harbin, China to the website Diarna that chronicles Jewish life in MENA with 3D photos, each tale is just intriguing and eye-opening.
And it's also just very very sad. I don't want to victimize myself and other Jews. I don't want to believe that antisemitism is so prevalent and has such long history. I don't want these stories to shape me. Reading this book made me relate so deeply to those early Zionists who looked at all of this trauma and basically said, "that's not mine, this weakness isn't me, that’s the old Jews, we’re something else".
And I wonder if the reason I find this so appealing is because dealing with Jewish history is overwhelming. It's scary to consider that Jewish graveyards are scattered all over the world, that our communities have a past tense, it's always that one Jewish family left, that one old rabbi remembering what a great community it was until the pogrom, until the expulsion, until the massacre.
I want to say that this isn't my Judaism but can I? This is the legacy and this is the present. And simultaneously, I’m very well-aware of the tendency of Jews to see our trauma in the center. Sometimes, it feels like Judaism is so focused on tragedy that we cannot help but see ourselves as the victims forever. Judaism as a religion is very good at balancing victimhood with joy but Jews as a people are not.
The opening chapter is the one that gives this book its name and aside from the last chapter, I think it’s my favorite. Horn points out that the Jews that get attention are always dead and often forgiving. As the classic Christian lore, we ask of Jews to be the ones to show us redemption, to absolve of us our sins. If Anne Frank says we are all good people, she must know what she's talking about. We don't want to see living Jews describe modern day antisemitism, we don't want to see Jews who are vengeful and angry, who are not forgiving.
In another fantastic chapter, Horn points out that the Holocaust has also created a societal limit. Many things are bad but they are not the Holocaust. And if they’re not the Holocaust, they’re not that bad. The Holocaust symbolizes all that is wrong but also makes us feel better because no matter what we’re doing, we’re not committing or experiencing another Holocaust. So if Jews suffer through a hate crime, it’s fine because it’s not the Holocaust. The expulsion of Mizrahi Jews is fine because it’s not the Holocaust. None of this is the Holocaust.
Horn also describes the difference between “Purim antisemitism” and “Hannukah antisemitism”. Purim anitsemitism is the classic villain who wants to murder all Jews. Hannukah antisemitism, however, is more insidious. It is the pressure to assimilate, being told that Jews are okay, so long as they . We like Jews as long as they’re not religious, don’t speak Hebrew or Yiddish, served in the German army, look European enough. As long as they’re not Zionists, as long as they hate Israel. The idea that if only Jews lose enough of their culture, they will be accepted. This, too, is antisemitism.
The part about Varian Fry was also a highlight. Horn points out that the people who saved Jews make up a tiny tiny percent of Europeans, despite the great attention to them. I had goosebumps when she points out that Varian Fry saved the "culture of Europe" but did not save Hasidic Jews. Their culture was apparently not worth saving- no one saved them. I gained so much respect for the Ultra-Orthodox once I realized that their existence is a form of resistance, it is an insistence to remain, even when their entire communities were massacred in the Holocaust and despite cultural pressure to assimilate into Israeli society. It takes courage to look at the world around you and insist that you’re staying true to your own culture.
I do have two points of criticism.
First, the comment on the boycotts of Israel.
Horn makes a brief comparison of German boycotts of Jewish goods to BDS now. I get it- such boycotts harm Diaspora Jews significantly more than they harm Israelis. I’m sure it does feel like you’re a Jew and everything Jews do will be eventually boycotted for reasons that sound socially acceptable. And yet, I don't want special treatment. BDS people are dumb but I do not believe the majority are intentionally employing techniques used for antisemitism.
I heard Ireland's foreign minister the other day say that Israel should be flattered that it is being held to a Western standard. And at first, I was mildly annoyed. The assumption that the Western standard during wars is inherently better is somewhat hilarious. But thinking about it also made me agree in some ways- it is flattering. We are expected to act as any European country would act when around us, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon and Sudan get their own standards.
And that’s okay. Sure, we can complain but I do not want Israel to get a free pass because the world feels bad for Jews or thinks badly of the Middle East. I’d like these people to question why they’re so obsessed with Jews but when they raise solid points (and they do), using our historical trauma as a shield is cowardly. If we're in the wrong, we must fix it. Yes, even if Assad is up there doing what Assad does, even if Yemen's civil war is a horrible horrible man-made tragedy. Even if 99% of the people speaking against Israel come from countries that treated their Jewish community terribly.
Israel’s geo-political troubles certainly correlate with antisemitism but they cannot be summed up with it. When the Hamas or Hezbollah or Palestinian Islamic Jihad threaten Israel, they use antisemitic imagery but I struggle to compare it to other forms of antisemitism because the entire framework is different- I do not blame any Palestinian who hates Jews, just as I don’t blame any Israeli who hates Arabs. We’ve been through a lot.
So no- a boycott of Israel isn't like a boycott of Jews in the thirties, even if it feels the same.
My second point is that despite all attempts, I still felt like this was a little bit too Ashkenazi oriented. It still felt like Horn is very very much an American Jew, with everything that entails. The 13 pages of Mizrahi history compared to the hundreds of pages about Ashkenazi's (and whatever USSR Jews are in the mood to call themselves this time, USSR Jews have got to collectively decide if they're Ashkenazi or Mizrahi or neither). There is always more to do to emphasize other Jewish stories and while this book is a great start, I wasn’t sure that it was exactly enough.
As an Israeli, I worry about the war with Hezbollah. I worry about the rising number of Haredim and their ability to contribute to the workforce, I worry about the failing Palestinian leadership, I worry about the mess that is the West Bank and the never-ending suffering of Palestinians by our hand, I worry about the militarization of Israeli society, I worry about Israeli society being unable to stay united. I don't worry about colleges banning kosher food.
In this sense, there’s room to question what are Jewish concerns nowadays, when the Jewish society is essentially split in two geographically. We are united by our Judaism, sure, but I'm not sure how much we're able to truly understand each other or really stand up for mutual struggles.
However, all in all, this is a fantastic book. I really really recommend it.
what i’m taking with me
- I've got to start reading Daf Yomi, I hope to start after I finish reading the Quran.
- I’m pretty sure the only direct antisemitism I’ve ever experienced personally irl was when I went to a doctor in London. When I explained the way my travel insurance works, the doctor’s response was to go, "wow, Jews are always so clever". At the time, being basically on my deathbed, my response was to mumble "I know plenty of stupid Jews," and he simply doubled down, talking about how we’re so smart, so clever, so good with money. I thought it was a weird interaction but I was mostly relieved the insurance worked (cause I have way less trust in Jews). And I wonder what legitimization do any of us have to connect this particular experience to a millennium of persecution.
- I also don't want Israel to be seen merely as a refuge, as that place where all the "last Jews of...." went to but that ship might have sailed.
- I do not want to spend my life talking about antisemitism. I want to talk about policy. I want to submerge myself in conversations on how to create negotiations that work, on how to create environment policies that allow Israelis and Palestinians to thrive but also defend our earth, on how to improve education cause God knows we are all ignorant on this conflict’s century long history, on how to build institutions that speak for and to everyone, on how to build bridges and break walls. I am scared that I’ll never be able to do that with this conflict because of all the loud politization and radicalism.
-----------------------------------
The fact that Poland just had a march where they shouted "death to Jews" is literally unbelievable when 90% of Poland's Jewish community was killed in the Holocaust. I'm just staring at this like, Poland's Jewish population is now less than 0.05%, what more do you want?
Anyways, this book gave me a lot to think about, review to come!
Dara Horn has articulated thoughts and ideas in a way I had never considered before. This is one of the best descriptions of Judaism in modern times I’ve ever read. So so sharp, this book grasps so much that I see in daily life. Horn writes savagely, fiercely. Her writing is comedic and it's intelligent and it's well researched. It’s inspiring, it’s empowering. I wish I could read the equivalent book for other groups in society.
In each chapter, Horn delves into a different topic relating to Jews. She weaves in history and her own personal life to really tell these stories in a way that is personal and just plain fascinating. From the Jewish community of Harbin, China to the website Diarna that chronicles Jewish life in MENA with 3D photos, each tale is just intriguing and eye-opening.
And it's also just very very sad. I don't want to victimize myself and other Jews. I don't want to believe that antisemitism is so prevalent and has such long history. I don't want these stories to shape me. Reading this book made me relate so deeply to those early Zionists who looked at all of this trauma and basically said, "that's not mine, this weakness isn't me, that’s the old Jews, we’re something else".
And I wonder if the reason I find this so appealing is because dealing with Jewish history is overwhelming. It's scary to consider that Jewish graveyards are scattered all over the world, that our communities have a past tense, it's always that one Jewish family left, that one old rabbi remembering what a great community it was until the pogrom, until the expulsion, until the massacre.
I want to say that this isn't my Judaism but can I? This is the legacy and this is the present. And simultaneously, I’m very well-aware of the tendency of Jews to see our trauma in the center. Sometimes, it feels like Judaism is so focused on tragedy that we cannot help but see ourselves as the victims forever. Judaism as a religion is very good at balancing victimhood with joy but Jews as a people are not.
The opening chapter is the one that gives this book its name and aside from the last chapter, I think it’s my favorite. Horn points out that the Jews that get attention are always dead and often forgiving. As the classic Christian lore, we ask of Jews to be the ones to show us redemption, to absolve of us our sins. If Anne Frank says we are all good people, she must know what she's talking about. We don't want to see living Jews describe modern day antisemitism, we don't want to see Jews who are vengeful and angry, who are not forgiving.
In another fantastic chapter, Horn points out that the Holocaust has also created a societal limit. Many things are bad but they are not the Holocaust. And if they’re not the Holocaust, they’re not that bad. The Holocaust symbolizes all that is wrong but also makes us feel better because no matter what we’re doing, we’re not committing or experiencing another Holocaust. So if Jews suffer through a hate crime, it’s fine because it’s not the Holocaust. The expulsion of Mizrahi Jews is fine because it’s not the Holocaust. None of this is the Holocaust.
Horn also describes the difference between “Purim antisemitism” and “Hannukah antisemitism”. Purim anitsemitism is the classic villain who wants to murder all Jews. Hannukah antisemitism, however, is more insidious. It is the pressure to assimilate, being told that Jews are okay, so long as they . We like Jews as long as they’re not religious, don’t speak Hebrew or Yiddish, served in the German army, look European enough. As long as they’re not Zionists, as long as they hate Israel. The idea that if only Jews lose enough of their culture, they will be accepted. This, too, is antisemitism.
The part about Varian Fry was also a highlight. Horn points out that the people who saved Jews make up a tiny tiny percent of Europeans, despite the great attention to them. I had goosebumps when she points out that Varian Fry saved the "culture of Europe" but did not save Hasidic Jews. Their culture was apparently not worth saving- no one saved them. I gained so much respect for the Ultra-Orthodox once I realized that their existence is a form of resistance, it is an insistence to remain, even when their entire communities were massacred in the Holocaust and despite cultural pressure to assimilate into Israeli society. It takes courage to look at the world around you and insist that you’re staying true to your own culture.
I do have two points of criticism.
First, the comment on the boycotts of Israel.
Horn makes a brief comparison of German boycotts of Jewish goods to BDS now. I get it- such boycotts harm Diaspora Jews significantly more than they harm Israelis. I’m sure it does feel like you’re a Jew and everything Jews do will be eventually boycotted for reasons that sound socially acceptable. And yet, I don't want special treatment. BDS people are dumb but I do not believe the majority are intentionally employing techniques used for antisemitism.
I heard Ireland's foreign minister the other day say that Israel should be flattered that it is being held to a Western standard. And at first, I was mildly annoyed. The assumption that the Western standard during wars is inherently better is somewhat hilarious. But thinking about it also made me agree in some ways- it is flattering. We are expected to act as any European country would act when around us, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon and Sudan get their own standards.
And that’s okay. Sure, we can complain but I do not want Israel to get a free pass because the world feels bad for Jews or thinks badly of the Middle East. I’d like these people to question why they’re so obsessed with Jews but when they raise solid points (and they do), using our historical trauma as a shield is cowardly. If we're in the wrong, we must fix it. Yes, even if Assad is up there doing what Assad does, even if Yemen's civil war is a horrible horrible man-made tragedy. Even if 99% of the people speaking against Israel come from countries that treated their Jewish community terribly.
Israel’s geo-political troubles certainly correlate with antisemitism but they cannot be summed up with it. When the Hamas or Hezbollah or Palestinian Islamic Jihad threaten Israel, they use antisemitic imagery but I struggle to compare it to other forms of antisemitism because the entire framework is different- I do not blame any Palestinian who hates Jews, just as I don’t blame any Israeli who hates Arabs. We’ve been through a lot.
So no- a boycott of Israel isn't like a boycott of Jews in the thirties, even if it feels the same.
My second point is that despite all attempts, I still felt like this was a little bit too Ashkenazi oriented. It still felt like Horn is very very much an American Jew, with everything that entails. The 13 pages of Mizrahi history compared to the hundreds of pages about Ashkenazi's (and whatever USSR Jews are in the mood to call themselves this time, USSR Jews have got to collectively decide if they're Ashkenazi or Mizrahi or neither). There is always more to do to emphasize other Jewish stories and while this book is a great start, I wasn’t sure that it was exactly enough.
As an Israeli, I worry about the war with Hezbollah. I worry about the rising number of Haredim and their ability to contribute to the workforce, I worry about the failing Palestinian leadership, I worry about the mess that is the West Bank and the never-ending suffering of Palestinians by our hand, I worry about the militarization of Israeli society, I worry about Israeli society being unable to stay united. I don't worry about colleges banning kosher food.
In this sense, there’s room to question what are Jewish concerns nowadays, when the Jewish society is essentially split in two geographically. We are united by our Judaism, sure, but I'm not sure how much we're able to truly understand each other or really stand up for mutual struggles.
However, all in all, this is a fantastic book. I really really recommend it.
what i’m taking with me
- I've got to start reading Daf Yomi, I hope to start after I finish reading the Quran.
- I’m pretty sure the only direct antisemitism I’ve ever experienced personally irl was when I went to a doctor in London. When I explained the way my travel insurance works, the doctor’s response was to go, "wow, Jews are always so clever". At the time, being basically on my deathbed, my response was to mumble "I know plenty of stupid Jews," and he simply doubled down, talking about how we’re so smart, so clever, so good with money. I thought it was a weird interaction but I was mostly relieved the insurance worked (cause I have way less trust in Jews). And I wonder what legitimization do any of us have to connect this particular experience to a millennium of persecution.
- I also don't want Israel to be seen merely as a refuge, as that place where all the "last Jews of...." went to but that ship might have sailed.
- I do not want to spend my life talking about antisemitism. I want to talk about policy. I want to submerge myself in conversations on how to create negotiations that work, on how to create environment policies that allow Israelis and Palestinians to thrive but also defend our earth, on how to improve education cause God knows we are all ignorant on this conflict’s century long history, on how to build institutions that speak for and to everyone, on how to build bridges and break walls. I am scared that I’ll never be able to do that with this conflict because of all the loud politization and radicalism.
-----------------------------------
The fact that Poland just had a march where they shouted "death to Jews" is literally unbelievable when 90% of Poland's Jewish community was killed in the Holocaust. I'm just staring at this like, Poland's Jewish population is now less than 0.05%, what more do you want?
Anyways, this book gave me a lot to think about, review to come!
January 26, 2022
I have complicated feelings about this one. On the one hand, informative, emotional, beautifully communicates the pain felt by the Jewish community in the centuries old, ongoing perpetuation of antisemitism.
But I felt this unspoken undercurrent that is never addressed, how the oppressed can also oppress; i.e., regarding Israel and Palestine.
Is that fair, though? It feels like "whataboutism" to expect that Horn must acknowledge that tension. She's discussing antisemitism, acts of hatred committed against the Jewish people; but I think because she tells the story globally, and knowing how many of these historical diasporas led to the creation of the state of Israel, it's hard not to be aware of how we're not talking about Israel. At one point she describes a "Boycott Israel" alongside other microaggressions against the Jewish people, which - to me - one of these things is not like the other ones.
So, yeah. I keep struggling with this sense of, it isn't Horn's responsibility to talk about Israel in a book about antisemitism. But it's hard not to compare the work with Cathy Park Hong's Minor Feelings, in which she so adeptly handles the complex relationship around Asian American and Black communities, while still broadly writing about anti-Asian racism.
But I felt this unspoken undercurrent that is never addressed, how the oppressed can also oppress; i.e., regarding Israel and Palestine.
Is that fair, though? It feels like "whataboutism" to expect that Horn must acknowledge that tension. She's discussing antisemitism, acts of hatred committed against the Jewish people; but I think because she tells the story globally, and knowing how many of these historical diasporas led to the creation of the state of Israel, it's hard not to be aware of how we're not talking about Israel. At one point she describes a "Boycott Israel" alongside other microaggressions against the Jewish people, which - to me - one of these things is not like the other ones.
So, yeah. I keep struggling with this sense of, it isn't Horn's responsibility to talk about Israel in a book about antisemitism. But it's hard not to compare the work with Cathy Park Hong's Minor Feelings, in which she so adeptly handles the complex relationship around Asian American and Black communities, while still broadly writing about anti-Asian racism.
November 8, 2022
I looked at this books from two angles.
To explain the first angle, I'm going to describe a story I heard on NPR. It's by Samuel James, and it was recorded back on Oct. 12, 2019, even though I just heard it last Sunday. Mr. James tells at length about how his white grandmother instilled a love in him for the TV show "The Dukes of Hazard" when he was just a small boy, and how only many years later as an adult did he become aware of the dynamics between her and his father, who had married a New England sheriff's daughter. As he approaches the end of his tale (called "The Little Pink General Lee"), he says to the radio audience that what people expect out of his story is redemption for the grandmother. But that's not what the story is about. It's about those dynamics, which existed at the same time as his grandmother's love for him. Both existed.
Same with what Dara Horn is saying: from dead Jews, people expect a word of redemption and a moment of grace. They are looking for a sense of having been forgiven. That's what they embrace. That's what gets remembered.
The second angle is Jews often are complicit in that attitude.
Back ten or more years ago, you would often hear a conservative white Republican accuse an African American who had any sort of complaint of "playing the race card." What you would not hear was another Black person make such an accusation. However, it's not unusual to hear a Jew more or less accuse another Jew of playing the "antisemitism card." Well, not in those same words but in similar ones. The first Jew might accuse the second of seeing antisemitism where there is none, even though the second Jew had never so much as mentioned the term "antisemitism." She has merely noticed something and articulated what she noticed. Or, when the second expresses concern about antisemitism, the first Jew might pipe up and criticize the concern, saying the fears are exaggerated or the worries unfounded.
What Dara Horn says is going on in such cases is that the one who has moved to suppress the other guy's observation or complaint is strongly desirous of wanting to belong, to be accepted. And that that is a community-wide approach, based on the longing of the community as a whole to believe -- sometimes to the point of self-delusion -- that this is their home and that they're safe. Stories to make seeing what's in front of our noses disappear become de rigueur.
That's it in a nutshell. I want to return with a few more notes and comments on the various tales.
Let me say here that Dara Horn is brave.
Now for those comments on the book's sections, so as to expand on what reading it meant to me, not to mention helping me remember after I return the book to the library. The book is nonfiction so no spoilers plot-wise, but if you'd rather encounter it on your own, stop here.
I will say the book goes well beyond what I'd gotten from reviews and book discussions (including from the author!).
The preface has to do with the different perspective on Jews from inside and outside (although Jews are going to get both perspectives to some degree, depending on the particular Jew's degree of involvement and knowledge, since Jews are colored by the larger culture). It's not so easy to disabuse people of their views, since Jews play a part in the imaginations of others. That's the way Dara Horn puts it, an alternative to talking about "narratives" frequently, as I do. Also, the Jews that others learn about are mostly Jews who are dead.
The section on Anne Frank best reflects the desire for the gift of grace and absolution from a murdered Jew....
The section on a one-generation "golden age" for Jews in Manchuria foreshortens the usual generations-long rise and fall. In 1896, Jews were promised escape from pogroms and antisemitic laws, if only they would move to northeast China and develop an administrative center that Soviet Russia required -- Russia at that time having a commission to build the Trans-Siberian Railroad for China. Jews succeeded in building a city and lifting themselves up, until pogroms and the like followed them in the persons of "White" Russians fleeing the Communist revolution. Next came the Japanese occupation. The Jewish sojourn in the city of Harbin did not end well.
If Jews play an outsize role in the imaginations of Westerners, the Harbin Ice Festival, reflecting the events of a century ago, teaches us something about the role of Jews in the non-Western imagination.
The USSR again needed Jews as the World War II era got underway. They didn't let Jews practice their religion or support Zionism, but they figured they had a way to attract Jewish financial backing for their war effort: support Yiddish culture, or pretend to. So the state threw its support behind Jewish theater and art, that is, until the war was won. Then they accused the involved Jews of treason and moved to liquidate them as "enemies of the state."
It is in this section that Dara Horn also describes the phenomenon of being a "cool" Jew, i.e., kissing up to the larger society; becoming a "good" Jew in their eyes. She defines that as stripping yourself of your identity and culture, as opposed to being in physical danger, but that's at the beginning: in the end, it comes down to the same thing.
In the chapter on "Fictional Dead Jews," Horn describes demands to write stories that are enjoyable and uplifting, that serve mankind and give us an ending that makes sense -- in essence, to enable us to make sense of the world -- which Dara Horn says matches neither Judaism the religion nor the Jewish historical experience. As with attitudes to more candid witnesses than Anne Frank, the author seems to be saying people can't (or don't want to) handle the truth.
In "Legends of Dead Jews," the example the author uses is the legend that Jewish names were accidentally changed at Ellis Island. No. People -- whole families -- changed their names -- because they couldn't get jobs or gain access to education or certain professions. That's like my earlier reference to wanting in, wanting acceptance. People couldn't stand to admit the truth. And they blamed themselves: something was wrong with them and with their names, etc. instead of with the prejudiced people and society.
I have read two books by authors whose forebears went through that experience, Paul Cowan's An Orphan in History: Retrieving a Jewish Legacy (original surname: Cohen), and Stephen B. Shepard, Founding Dean Emeritus of the Graduate School of Judaism at the City University of New York and former editor-in-chief of Business Week. He wrote in his book A Literary Journey to Jewish Identity: Re-Reading Bellow, Roth, Malamud, Ozick, and Other Great Jewish Writers that his father had changed the family name from Shapiro.
The "legend" may also relate to the prior "cool Jews" discussion.
A particularly moving chapter is the one on Varian Fry, and how, except for his Academy Award performance in rescuing Jewish authors, artists, and other geniuses from Hitler, he was a misfit. Struck me that he was a misfit the way the hero of A Prayer for Owen Meany is a misfit: cut out for one particular precise job. That chapter reminds me of those discussions of whether mental illness means something is wrong with the person, or, maybe it's the society that's sick and that's why the allegedly mentally ill person is troubled and unable to fit in.
There is a chapter on the laborious reconstruction of the history and lives of former Jewish populations of Middle Eastern countries (large populations that sometimes predated the seventh century Muslim conquest).
There is a chapter on blockbuster Holocaust museums and the like. They, too, tend to celebrate the deaths, not the lives. She raises the question of whether they inadvertently teach that anything short of the Holocaust is not "really" antisemitic.
Another especially moving chapter for me is "Commuting with Shylock," in which she listens to The Merchant of Venice with her sharp ten-year-old son. Does all the stuff about how Shakespeare humanizes Shylock amount to gaslighting? Sounds that way. I especially loved the part where her son recognizes the so-called humanizing soliloquy ("... If you prick us, do we not bleed? ...) as "the supervillain monologue" and asks his mom, "You seriously fell for that?" Philip Roth would agree! (Operation Shylock: A Confession)
Finally, let me not omit "Dead American Jews, Part One," "...Part Two," and "...Part Three." After Pittsburgh and after Poway, she was invited -- and was able -- to write guest editorials for the New York Times.
She asserts that the presence of Jews in a society represent freedom -- that you don't have to believe the same as everybody else, that you can survive and flourish anyway, as long as you take responsibility for yourself. That's why they are a threat to those who want ideological conformity, who don't want anybody marching to the beat of a different drummer.
"Dead American Jews, Part Three" was different, though. She's talking here about the Jersey City attack, the machete attack on a Hanukkah party in Monsey, New York (not far from where she lives), and a series of stabbings and beatings. She's talking about the "contextualizing" that went on in the media, basically a form of explanation that those attacks were understandable and deserved, explanations that she promptly skewers.
Seemingly, though, many people feel Hasidic Jews are getting what can be expected.
She says that of all the attempted explanations for the return of antisemitic violence, the real reason is time and distance since the Holocaust.
Not all of us, but many, have been led to believe that antisemitism was over -- at least officially and publicly condoned antisemitism, that the decades of our lives have represented a new antisemitism-free era. But no. There was chagrin and repentance over antisemitism and antisemitic teachings after the war, but that's now being forgotten, or, rather, not known by those who were born later.
What she doesn't mention is that from the top there was an effort to stop antisemitism: it was like the enemy (the Nazis) and was not the American way. The uniformity of that message and that external enemy to hone our solidarity -- all that is missing now.
Now, this may all sound pretty grim -- not uplifting -- not a pleasant message. But in another sense it's invigorating. The constant avoidance of the truth, the shuck and jive, the groveling, the desire to be pleasant and fit in, to be what society considers a good Jew: to make others comfortable, to keep one's head down -- all that is a drain, too. Don't practice your religion; hate Israel. So, I applaud Dara Horn. She says she too struggles with bravery, with what she can and can't say.
This book is not without some inconsistencies. She sometimes gets sarcastic. It's not as though she knows just what to tell us to do, either. Sometimes this book is about Dara Horn not knowing what to do.
I am glad she has spoken out. Thank you, Dara Horn.
Thanks to the public library for providing this book.
Thanks to those who are queuing up to read it, meaning I had to wait a while and have to return it tomorrow for the next person in the line.
Update: Good interview from last July (2022) with Dara Horn and Eric Cohen of Tikvah
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4bFw...
To explain the first angle, I'm going to describe a story I heard on NPR. It's by Samuel James, and it was recorded back on Oct. 12, 2019, even though I just heard it last Sunday. Mr. James tells at length about how his white grandmother instilled a love in him for the TV show "The Dukes of Hazard" when he was just a small boy, and how only many years later as an adult did he become aware of the dynamics between her and his father, who had married a New England sheriff's daughter. As he approaches the end of his tale (called "The Little Pink General Lee"), he says to the radio audience that what people expect out of his story is redemption for the grandmother. But that's not what the story is about. It's about those dynamics, which existed at the same time as his grandmother's love for him. Both existed.
Same with what Dara Horn is saying: from dead Jews, people expect a word of redemption and a moment of grace. They are looking for a sense of having been forgiven. That's what they embrace. That's what gets remembered.
The second angle is Jews often are complicit in that attitude.
Back ten or more years ago, you would often hear a conservative white Republican accuse an African American who had any sort of complaint of "playing the race card." What you would not hear was another Black person make such an accusation. However, it's not unusual to hear a Jew more or less accuse another Jew of playing the "antisemitism card." Well, not in those same words but in similar ones. The first Jew might accuse the second of seeing antisemitism where there is none, even though the second Jew had never so much as mentioned the term "antisemitism." She has merely noticed something and articulated what she noticed. Or, when the second expresses concern about antisemitism, the first Jew might pipe up and criticize the concern, saying the fears are exaggerated or the worries unfounded.
What Dara Horn says is going on in such cases is that the one who has moved to suppress the other guy's observation or complaint is strongly desirous of wanting to belong, to be accepted. And that that is a community-wide approach, based on the longing of the community as a whole to believe -- sometimes to the point of self-delusion -- that this is their home and that they're safe. Stories to make seeing what's in front of our noses disappear become de rigueur.
That's it in a nutshell. I want to return with a few more notes and comments on the various tales.
Let me say here that Dara Horn is brave.
Now for those comments on the book's sections, so as to expand on what reading it meant to me, not to mention helping me remember after I return the book to the library. The book is nonfiction so no spoilers plot-wise, but if you'd rather encounter it on your own, stop here.
I will say the book goes well beyond what I'd gotten from reviews and book discussions (including from the author!).
The preface has to do with the different perspective on Jews from inside and outside (although Jews are going to get both perspectives to some degree, depending on the particular Jew's degree of involvement and knowledge, since Jews are colored by the larger culture). It's not so easy to disabuse people of their views, since Jews play a part in the imaginations of others. That's the way Dara Horn puts it, an alternative to talking about "narratives" frequently, as I do. Also, the Jews that others learn about are mostly Jews who are dead.
The section on Anne Frank best reflects the desire for the gift of grace and absolution from a murdered Jew....
The section on a one-generation "golden age" for Jews in Manchuria foreshortens the usual generations-long rise and fall. In 1896, Jews were promised escape from pogroms and antisemitic laws, if only they would move to northeast China and develop an administrative center that Soviet Russia required -- Russia at that time having a commission to build the Trans-Siberian Railroad for China. Jews succeeded in building a city and lifting themselves up, until pogroms and the like followed them in the persons of "White" Russians fleeing the Communist revolution. Next came the Japanese occupation. The Jewish sojourn in the city of Harbin did not end well.
If Jews play an outsize role in the imaginations of Westerners, the Harbin Ice Festival, reflecting the events of a century ago, teaches us something about the role of Jews in the non-Western imagination.
The USSR again needed Jews as the World War II era got underway. They didn't let Jews practice their religion or support Zionism, but they figured they had a way to attract Jewish financial backing for their war effort: support Yiddish culture, or pretend to. So the state threw its support behind Jewish theater and art, that is, until the war was won. Then they accused the involved Jews of treason and moved to liquidate them as "enemies of the state."
It is in this section that Dara Horn also describes the phenomenon of being a "cool" Jew, i.e., kissing up to the larger society; becoming a "good" Jew in their eyes. She defines that as stripping yourself of your identity and culture, as opposed to being in physical danger, but that's at the beginning: in the end, it comes down to the same thing.
In the chapter on "Fictional Dead Jews," Horn describes demands to write stories that are enjoyable and uplifting, that serve mankind and give us an ending that makes sense -- in essence, to enable us to make sense of the world -- which Dara Horn says matches neither Judaism the religion nor the Jewish historical experience. As with attitudes to more candid witnesses than Anne Frank, the author seems to be saying people can't (or don't want to) handle the truth.
In "Legends of Dead Jews," the example the author uses is the legend that Jewish names were accidentally changed at Ellis Island. No. People -- whole families -- changed their names -- because they couldn't get jobs or gain access to education or certain professions. That's like my earlier reference to wanting in, wanting acceptance. People couldn't stand to admit the truth. And they blamed themselves: something was wrong with them and with their names, etc. instead of with the prejudiced people and society.
I have read two books by authors whose forebears went through that experience, Paul Cowan's An Orphan in History: Retrieving a Jewish Legacy (original surname: Cohen), and Stephen B. Shepard, Founding Dean Emeritus of the Graduate School of Judaism at the City University of New York and former editor-in-chief of Business Week. He wrote in his book A Literary Journey to Jewish Identity: Re-Reading Bellow, Roth, Malamud, Ozick, and Other Great Jewish Writers that his father had changed the family name from Shapiro.
The "legend" may also relate to the prior "cool Jews" discussion.
A particularly moving chapter is the one on Varian Fry, and how, except for his Academy Award performance in rescuing Jewish authors, artists, and other geniuses from Hitler, he was a misfit. Struck me that he was a misfit the way the hero of A Prayer for Owen Meany is a misfit: cut out for one particular precise job. That chapter reminds me of those discussions of whether mental illness means something is wrong with the person, or, maybe it's the society that's sick and that's why the allegedly mentally ill person is troubled and unable to fit in.
There is a chapter on the laborious reconstruction of the history and lives of former Jewish populations of Middle Eastern countries (large populations that sometimes predated the seventh century Muslim conquest).
There is a chapter on blockbuster Holocaust museums and the like. They, too, tend to celebrate the deaths, not the lives. She raises the question of whether they inadvertently teach that anything short of the Holocaust is not "really" antisemitic.
Another especially moving chapter for me is "Commuting with Shylock," in which she listens to The Merchant of Venice with her sharp ten-year-old son. Does all the stuff about how Shakespeare humanizes Shylock amount to gaslighting? Sounds that way. I especially loved the part where her son recognizes the so-called humanizing soliloquy ("... If you prick us, do we not bleed? ...) as "the supervillain monologue" and asks his mom, "You seriously fell for that?" Philip Roth would agree! (Operation Shylock: A Confession)
Finally, let me not omit "Dead American Jews, Part One," "...Part Two," and "...Part Three." After Pittsburgh and after Poway, she was invited -- and was able -- to write guest editorials for the New York Times.
She asserts that the presence of Jews in a society represent freedom -- that you don't have to believe the same as everybody else, that you can survive and flourish anyway, as long as you take responsibility for yourself. That's why they are a threat to those who want ideological conformity, who don't want anybody marching to the beat of a different drummer.
"Dead American Jews, Part Three" was different, though. She's talking here about the Jersey City attack, the machete attack on a Hanukkah party in Monsey, New York (not far from where she lives), and a series of stabbings and beatings. She's talking about the "contextualizing" that went on in the media, basically a form of explanation that those attacks were understandable and deserved, explanations that she promptly skewers.
Seemingly, though, many people feel Hasidic Jews are getting what can be expected.
She says that of all the attempted explanations for the return of antisemitic violence, the real reason is time and distance since the Holocaust.
Not all of us, but many, have been led to believe that antisemitism was over -- at least officially and publicly condoned antisemitism, that the decades of our lives have represented a new antisemitism-free era. But no. There was chagrin and repentance over antisemitism and antisemitic teachings after the war, but that's now being forgotten, or, rather, not known by those who were born later.
What she doesn't mention is that from the top there was an effort to stop antisemitism: it was like the enemy (the Nazis) and was not the American way. The uniformity of that message and that external enemy to hone our solidarity -- all that is missing now.
Now, this may all sound pretty grim -- not uplifting -- not a pleasant message. But in another sense it's invigorating. The constant avoidance of the truth, the shuck and jive, the groveling, the desire to be pleasant and fit in, to be what society considers a good Jew: to make others comfortable, to keep one's head down -- all that is a drain, too. Don't practice your religion; hate Israel. So, I applaud Dara Horn. She says she too struggles with bravery, with what she can and can't say.
This book is not without some inconsistencies. She sometimes gets sarcastic. It's not as though she knows just what to tell us to do, either. Sometimes this book is about Dara Horn not knowing what to do.
I am glad she has spoken out. Thank you, Dara Horn.
Thanks to the public library for providing this book.
Thanks to those who are queuing up to read it, meaning I had to wait a while and have to return it tomorrow for the next person in the line.
Update: Good interview from last July (2022) with Dara Horn and Eric Cohen of Tikvah
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4bFw...
March 28, 2023
It’s extraordinarily rare when almost immediately I know when I’m reading a 5 star worthy book. This is one of those very few books. I knew right away with this book. I wish I could give this book 6 stars. It’s one of the best books that I’ve ever read.
Excellent! Well written, great storyteller, engaging, Thought provoking. Horrifying. Humorous at times. A wonderful variety of topics about the same basic subject.
I’d like to read more books by this author so I’ll look at her novels and if their stories appeal to me I’ll definitely add them and hopefully get to them and read them.
There is a list of works consulted included at the end of the book.
I thought that she might lose me in the last 10 pages but nothing could diminish the impact of the thoughts the author puts into these essays and I enjoyed even these last pages.
In spoilers because this is NOTHING to do with this book and I hate to take attention away from its contents but
Brilliant book and I’d like to recommend it to all readers or at least all non-fiction readers or at least all who have Jewish heritage or know anyone who’s Jewish, but really almost all readers.
The author is a LibraryThing author. I would like it if she also became a Goodreads author member.
ETA: This is the text of the first chapter and maybe my favorite chapter. I think that it's brilliant and thought provoking:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/histor...
Excellent! Well written, great storyteller, engaging, Thought provoking. Horrifying. Humorous at times. A wonderful variety of topics about the same basic subject.
I’d like to read more books by this author so I’ll look at her novels and if their stories appeal to me I’ll definitely add them and hopefully get to them and read them.
There is a list of works consulted included at the end of the book.
I thought that she might lose me in the last 10 pages but nothing could diminish the impact of the thoughts the author puts into these essays and I enjoyed even these last pages.
In spoilers because this is NOTHING to do with this book and I hate to take attention away from its contents but
Brilliant book and I’d like to recommend it to all readers or at least all non-fiction readers or at least all who have Jewish heritage or know anyone who’s Jewish, but really almost all readers.
The author is a LibraryThing author. I would like it if she also became a Goodreads author member.
ETA: This is the text of the first chapter and maybe my favorite chapter. I think that it's brilliant and thought provoking:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/histor...
November 17, 2023
Dara Horn is an excellent writer with self-evident research chops, and I'd like to check out the fiction work for which she is better known. I'm pretty loosey-goosey with stars, and I'd give this a 3.5 if I could. While sections of it were intriguing, surprising, and moving, I found the book's (unarticulated) ideological framework impossible to ignore, and a huge impediment to its ostensible goal. tl;dr: a liberal reading of antisemitism which fails to take an intersectional approach, which ignores the near-universal commitments of contemporary Western Jewry to Whiteness and Zionism, will be doomed from the start in any attempt at a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon.
As someone often in the business of reading, thinking, writing, & talking about Jews, dead or alive (lol), I felt compelled to give "People Love Dead Jews" a read. There are some very good essays here — as I said, Horn's skill as a writer is not in question — in particular the chapters on Varian Fry & the Jews of Hadrin were fascinating. I must admit however I found the book most interesting when Horn strayed furthest from her central theme. It is in the basic assumptions at the book's core that she loses me.
Horn's definition of antisemitism, her explications of its manifestations, functions, and consequences, and her contextualization of it within modern socio-political ecosystems are at best insufficient and at worst myopic. In its attempt to present a diverse survey of Jew-hate past and present, "People Love Dead Jews" is blinkered by two forces, neither of which are discussed at length, both of which define so much of Horn's approach: Zionism and Whiteness. Failing to recognize, let alone grapple with, the inextricable role these two ideological commitments play in shaping our perspectives on Jews and antisemitism leaves us with conclusions too imprecise and sentimental to really get *at* anything, regardless of the quality of the prose or thoroughness of research.
These prejudices allow Horn to make generalizations too facile for a writer of her obvious intelligence and sensitivity. In one uniquely offensive example, the author writes an entire essay on the internal contradictions of Holocaust memorialization — then turns around and genuinely compares college campus BDS proponents to 1933's "Kauft nicht bei Juden!" Nazi boycotts. This is simply unserious!
The book's copy cites the oft-mentioned designation of antisemitism as "the oldest hatred," and Horn does nothing to disabuse the reader of this interpretation. This ahistorical framework does the book and its subject matter a great disservice. We desperately need more writing that digs deep on antisemitism, that considers the unique role it plays in connecting disparate far-right movements and actors, that unpacks the meaningful and instructive ways that it functions differently from other forms of ethnic, racial, or religious oppression. I don't feel this book ever gets there.
"People Love Dead Jews" locates antisemitism throughout history while somehow managing not to engage with the social, political and material realities that shape its varying manifestations. It draws no distinctions between pre-modern theocide accusations, medieval blood libel, and modern puppet-master conspiracy narratives. Despite a lengthy (and excellent!) essay on the history of Jewish name-changing and other considerations of assimilation, the book refuses to engage with the changes in ethnic imagination that allowed European Jews to become White — nor with what Jews both gained and sacrificed in order to do so.
A telling moment occurs in the final essay, in which Horn recalls a year marked both by a notable uptick in antisemitic violence in the US as well as her first participation in Daf Yomi, the global tradition of studying a page of Talmud a day for 7 years. In recounting her disgust at the media's equivocation in reporting on the anti-Jewish attacks, Horn falls into the same rhetorical pitfall we hear so often from Jews regarding antisemitism: "they would never say [dismissive, minimizing comment] if it were [different minority group] being attacked!" This is offensively false. There is no degree or variety of justification or blame experienced by victims of antisemitism that is not also (and, frequently, more severely) experienced by BIPOC, trans people, queer people, disabled people, etc etc etc. Here the Whiteness which undergirds many of the books weaknesses takes centerstage.
The books greatest failings surround a pervasive myopia, by no means unique to Horn, that we might call "Jews Love Dead Jews." You see the same ideas on those hideous pink JewBelong billboards, or aish.com's delightfully insane "If you're Jewish, somebody hates you" campaign. The moment we suggest that antisemitism is eternal, unchangeable, devoid of context or explanation, is the moment we cut off any possibility of genuinely understanding it, let alone ending it.
In the same essay mentioned above, Horn also rejects the idea that one might see antisemitism through a broader lens of oppressive forces — she responds to the idea that antisemitism is about more than Jews with the dismissal that such an attitude simply treats Jews like a canary in the coal mine, no better. But in our failure to understand antisemitism not as its own special hate, but rather coexisting and interrelating with other socio-political forces, we don't just blind ourselves to the realities of how antisemitism works — we deny ourselves a fuller understanding of oppression writ large.
The author obviously knows her stuff. She has a deep & admirable expertise on many aspects of Jewish culture and history, and I look forward to reading her novels. There are moments in "People Love Dead Jews" which feel like welcome, striking correctives to many of the failures & fallacies of public antisemitism discourse. But there are two huge silent shadows, that of race and that of Israel, which run across these essays, and, for me, even the very best work in this book gets lost beneath them.
As someone often in the business of reading, thinking, writing, & talking about Jews, dead or alive (lol), I felt compelled to give "People Love Dead Jews" a read. There are some very good essays here — as I said, Horn's skill as a writer is not in question — in particular the chapters on Varian Fry & the Jews of Hadrin were fascinating. I must admit however I found the book most interesting when Horn strayed furthest from her central theme. It is in the basic assumptions at the book's core that she loses me.
Horn's definition of antisemitism, her explications of its manifestations, functions, and consequences, and her contextualization of it within modern socio-political ecosystems are at best insufficient and at worst myopic. In its attempt to present a diverse survey of Jew-hate past and present, "People Love Dead Jews" is blinkered by two forces, neither of which are discussed at length, both of which define so much of Horn's approach: Zionism and Whiteness. Failing to recognize, let alone grapple with, the inextricable role these two ideological commitments play in shaping our perspectives on Jews and antisemitism leaves us with conclusions too imprecise and sentimental to really get *at* anything, regardless of the quality of the prose or thoroughness of research.
These prejudices allow Horn to make generalizations too facile for a writer of her obvious intelligence and sensitivity. In one uniquely offensive example, the author writes an entire essay on the internal contradictions of Holocaust memorialization — then turns around and genuinely compares college campus BDS proponents to 1933's "Kauft nicht bei Juden!" Nazi boycotts. This is simply unserious!
The book's copy cites the oft-mentioned designation of antisemitism as "the oldest hatred," and Horn does nothing to disabuse the reader of this interpretation. This ahistorical framework does the book and its subject matter a great disservice. We desperately need more writing that digs deep on antisemitism, that considers the unique role it plays in connecting disparate far-right movements and actors, that unpacks the meaningful and instructive ways that it functions differently from other forms of ethnic, racial, or religious oppression. I don't feel this book ever gets there.
"People Love Dead Jews" locates antisemitism throughout history while somehow managing not to engage with the social, political and material realities that shape its varying manifestations. It draws no distinctions between pre-modern theocide accusations, medieval blood libel, and modern puppet-master conspiracy narratives. Despite a lengthy (and excellent!) essay on the history of Jewish name-changing and other considerations of assimilation, the book refuses to engage with the changes in ethnic imagination that allowed European Jews to become White — nor with what Jews both gained and sacrificed in order to do so.
A telling moment occurs in the final essay, in which Horn recalls a year marked both by a notable uptick in antisemitic violence in the US as well as her first participation in Daf Yomi, the global tradition of studying a page of Talmud a day for 7 years. In recounting her disgust at the media's equivocation in reporting on the anti-Jewish attacks, Horn falls into the same rhetorical pitfall we hear so often from Jews regarding antisemitism: "they would never say [dismissive, minimizing comment] if it were [different minority group] being attacked!" This is offensively false. There is no degree or variety of justification or blame experienced by victims of antisemitism that is not also (and, frequently, more severely) experienced by BIPOC, trans people, queer people, disabled people, etc etc etc. Here the Whiteness which undergirds many of the books weaknesses takes centerstage.
The books greatest failings surround a pervasive myopia, by no means unique to Horn, that we might call "Jews Love Dead Jews." You see the same ideas on those hideous pink JewBelong billboards, or aish.com's delightfully insane "If you're Jewish, somebody hates you" campaign. The moment we suggest that antisemitism is eternal, unchangeable, devoid of context or explanation, is the moment we cut off any possibility of genuinely understanding it, let alone ending it.
In the same essay mentioned above, Horn also rejects the idea that one might see antisemitism through a broader lens of oppressive forces — she responds to the idea that antisemitism is about more than Jews with the dismissal that such an attitude simply treats Jews like a canary in the coal mine, no better. But in our failure to understand antisemitism not as its own special hate, but rather coexisting and interrelating with other socio-political forces, we don't just blind ourselves to the realities of how antisemitism works — we deny ourselves a fuller understanding of oppression writ large.
The author obviously knows her stuff. She has a deep & admirable expertise on many aspects of Jewish culture and history, and I look forward to reading her novels. There are moments in "People Love Dead Jews" which feel like welcome, striking correctives to many of the failures & fallacies of public antisemitism discourse. But there are two huge silent shadows, that of race and that of Israel, which run across these essays, and, for me, even the very best work in this book gets lost beneath them.
December 6, 2021
I love truth-telling and we live in an era when it seems exceedingly hard to do that—a time when people are convinced of their “alternative facts;” when telling factual history has become a threat; when people feel entitled to claim past-life real experience of another race or ethnicity and therefore say they don’t need to learn because they already know everything about being Black/Brown/Jewish/Arab/etc. and they sincerely cannot understand why this might be insulting to people walking around in Black/Brown/ethnic skin, facing the reality of their reception daily; or when a white Protestant editor of a nondenominational spiritual magazine feels that it’s respectful to suggest an article about the special knowledge Jews possess about making money and he cannot understand why this makes both a practicing and a completely assimilated nonreligious Jew (me) gag—this really happened!—Oh, I could go on and on—this is where we are, friends.
I’m sure that this blindness, oblivion, willful ignorance (pick your term) is an age-old problem; nuance has never been popular because seeing it demands going through the crucible of learning you’re wrong.
Welcome to Dara Horn’s mind and anthology of essays.
If you have had the experience of walking into a place that has airbrushed out nuance, a place filled with sirens blaring off-key reverential music and you cannot understand why everybody else isn’t cringing in pain—why on earth are they acting like this is reverence at all?—you may appreciate this book. If you are interested in history told in an engaging voice with something riveting and original to say, read it. If you are member of any group whose culture, language, and traditions were willfully destroyed (i.e., Native American whose kids were taken away to boarding schools in order to “destroy the Indian and leave the man” and Black people) and now see that parts of your culture have become popular to revere, making those who do so feel better about themselves, you may be interested in the commonality of the Jewish experience. If, like me, you were not brought up with any Jewish or other religion or culture, yet somewhere in your bone marrow, you have a truth detector, you may love this book.
Dara Horn is a Jewish literature scholar with a virtual toilet paper roll of credits and degrees. I am not a scholar, and as I mentioned, I was not brought up Jewish. Generally I get bored by commentaries on literature, but I was on the edge of my intellect inhaling everything Horn had to say in this compelling book of essays. Despite my vacuum of a background in anything religious, I realized so many things, one of which is that the bone marrow truth detector inside me that I so value is a Jew!
There is so much to think about in this book that I could not begin to enumerate the ideas and quests, but the one that evoked my bone marrow epiphany is that Jewish literature does not favor neat, happy endings; instead it leaves things open-ended, accepting not knowing or ambiguity. And following in that tradition, not all of Horn’s ideas are crisp—and I particularly like her choice to favor the search rather than the conclusion about what makes a person (Varian Fry) leap into action to rescue people he doesn’t know (Jews in Nazi-occupied France). I’ve always deeply felt not knowing is more honest than its opposite (what that is I’ll leave for others to fill in). So for me, this is a book of deep truth.
With that, I’ll refer you to Elyse Walters’s ecstatic response which is what propelled me to read this indescribably powerful and intellectually exciting book.
I’m sure that this blindness, oblivion, willful ignorance (pick your term) is an age-old problem; nuance has never been popular because seeing it demands going through the crucible of learning you’re wrong.
Welcome to Dara Horn’s mind and anthology of essays.
If you have had the experience of walking into a place that has airbrushed out nuance, a place filled with sirens blaring off-key reverential music and you cannot understand why everybody else isn’t cringing in pain—why on earth are they acting like this is reverence at all?—you may appreciate this book. If you are interested in history told in an engaging voice with something riveting and original to say, read it. If you are member of any group whose culture, language, and traditions were willfully destroyed (i.e., Native American whose kids were taken away to boarding schools in order to “destroy the Indian and leave the man” and Black people) and now see that parts of your culture have become popular to revere, making those who do so feel better about themselves, you may be interested in the commonality of the Jewish experience. If, like me, you were not brought up with any Jewish or other religion or culture, yet somewhere in your bone marrow, you have a truth detector, you may love this book.
Dara Horn is a Jewish literature scholar with a virtual toilet paper roll of credits and degrees. I am not a scholar, and as I mentioned, I was not brought up Jewish. Generally I get bored by commentaries on literature, but I was on the edge of my intellect inhaling everything Horn had to say in this compelling book of essays. Despite my vacuum of a background in anything religious, I realized so many things, one of which is that the bone marrow truth detector inside me that I so value is a Jew!
There is so much to think about in this book that I could not begin to enumerate the ideas and quests, but the one that evoked my bone marrow epiphany is that Jewish literature does not favor neat, happy endings; instead it leaves things open-ended, accepting not knowing or ambiguity. And following in that tradition, not all of Horn’s ideas are crisp—and I particularly like her choice to favor the search rather than the conclusion about what makes a person (Varian Fry) leap into action to rescue people he doesn’t know (Jews in Nazi-occupied France). I’ve always deeply felt not knowing is more honest than its opposite (what that is I’ll leave for others to fill in). So for me, this is a book of deep truth.
With that, I’ll refer you to Elyse Walters’s ecstatic response which is what propelled me to read this indescribably powerful and intellectually exciting book.
June 25, 2021
People Love Dead Jews is a collection of essays on the disturbing and occasionally surreal ways the world gives attention to dead Jews and how this attention shapes the treatment of living Jews today. Author Dara Horn shares how individuals and institutions represent Jewish suffering and how this suffering is repurposed for the benefit of others. These nuanced accounts cover a number of time periods and places, with a few key themes running through the chapters.
The first is trying to preserve the past through writing, record keeping and cultural preservation. This seems natural when discussing a people which has faced cultural destruction, banishment and genocide for generations upon generations. The second is that many are more familiar with and prefer their Jewish stories to be about ‘dead Jews’ rather than to learn about or help preserve living Jewish culture. I knew I would enjoy this book in the opening story of how the author took part in an academic competition in Tennessee as a teenager. Her Jewishness was questioned because of her blond hair and blue eyes when one of the other girls said I “thought Hitler said you all were dark.” The author recognizes decades later that those girls were not stupid and probably not bigoted, but rather that their total knowledge of the Jewish people and their history was rooted in school lessons based on what Hitler said about them.
People Love Dead Jews focuses heavily on the arts, including the restoration of Jewish historical sites, the development of Holocaust museum exhibits and portrayals of Jews in film and literature. Having lived in China and toured the reconstructed and redeveloping Jewish areas of Shanghai, I could relate well to the chapter on the reconstruction of Jewish sites in Harbin. The author takes a sad, cynical look at the lack of true historic preservation (frankly not uncommon across all types of sites in China) and how this area was developed in hopes of boosting tourism and potential Israeli investment. What good does it do if it doesn’t explain why there aren’t any Jews there now? Or why they were there in the first place? Or how they were fleeced and murdered? Or when the exhibits display fake objects?
Renovated Jewish heritage sites are springing up everywhere, but avoid “all those pesky moral concerns – about, say, why these “sites” exist to begin with evaporate in a mist of goodwill.” In many parts of the world, you can no longer travel to meet Jewish people, you can only visit their graves. Many Americans are completely unaware that Jewish families have lived in areas such as North Africa, the Middle East or Asia. Another blood pressure raising example is when the famous Anne Frank House dragged their feet on allowing a Jewish employee to wear his yarmulke to work. As Horn says, “I had mistaken the enormous public interest in past Jewish suffering for a sign of respect for living Jews. I was very wrong.” I found her brief comments on what she considered to be the sources of modern anti-Semitism to be very interesting and wish she had written more on this subject. For example, when I was young, the 1997 film Life is Beautiful was quite popular, but it wasn’t at all uncommon to hear derogatory comments about someone being, looking or acting Jewish (even if they weren’t Jewish) from what seemed like the most unlikely sources. Would they be ‘called out’ nowadays or is making comments about groups such as Jews or Roma somehow acceptable even amongst progressive groups because one can slip these comments through by saying they’re a culture, rather than a race?
There were two things that took me by surprise in this book.
The first was the collective memory myth American Jews have created about changing their surnames when pursuing education or employment. Evidently many families didn’t even want to admit to themselves discrimination was an issue in the new world, and so created stories that their names were changed quickly by some silly bureaucrat at Ellis Island. Bravely contradicting this popular narrative, the author shows thousands of court cases where Jewish people were legally changing their names to avoid discrimination. Of course, they didn’t want to tell their children and grandchildren they had changed it out of necessity rather than accident.
In a world where “Anti-Semitism” has a high bar of being the Holocaust, lower levels of persecution or intolerance slide by, and especially when that bigotry is quietly visible where “Jews themselves are choosing to reject their own traditions. It is a form of weaponized shame.” There’s genocide and there’s also the slow dismantling of Jewish civilisation. Jews hiding their identity and changing their names is a story that goes all the way back to Esther and Purim. In these name changes, we “witness ordinary American Jews in the debasing act of succumbing to discrimination instead of fighting it.” Of course, Horn recognises that sometimes you have to prioritise feeding your family over fighting discrimination.
This section keenly observes how American Jews might have completely different experiences and struggles based on their personal history, place of residence or their class. Similarly, in another section, the violence against American Jews is justified by the local community and media because they were ‘gentrifying’ the area, even when the victims were living in poverty and had moved to that area to avoid the soaring prices of where they had come from. It seems only recently that mainstream English language books and online articles are catching up to the fact that Americans of Jewish background are a diverse group and aren’t necessarily Ashkenazi, well off and living in certain zip codes.
The second surprise was how Yiddish and Hebrew literature differs from English literature in how they portray Jewish suffering. The Hollywood films and “uplifting” books which use concentration camps as a back-story have reduced victims to mere metaphors. Many English language books want a Holocaust story to have a redemptive ending where a protagonist learns something. Better yet, non-Jewish rescuers should be involved to save some “hapless Jews.” The Jews who should be saved should be very relatable, not terribly religious and certainly not speak Yiddish. The Jewish suffering must serve some larger purpose and provide closure for the reader. This demand requires real dead Jews to “teach us about the beauty of the world and the wonders of redemption- otherwise, what was the point of killing them in the first place?” Of course, we know that the vast majority of real victims had their possessions seized and their families and love turned to ash. For those who survived, there was little welcome or support for them in their home countries after the war. In Yiddish literature, “the language of the culture that was successfully destroyed, one doesn’t find many musings on the kindness of strangers.” In this essay and others, the author helpfully shares her recommended Jewish literature, often available in translation, so your ‘to-read’ list will certainly grow after reading this book.
The profile of American journalist Varian Fry, who rescued hundreds of artists, musicians, scientists and other intellectuals was a real page turner. Again, this book challenges our assumptions about what sort of person can be a brave rescuer and how victims to should act and respond. Here the author uses her incisive talent for puncturing the ‘feel good’ nature of these stories. Yes, it was wonderful that Fry did all he could despite his lack of resources, crumbling marriage and his own troubled mental health. He complained, “No, we should be able to save them all. Why just the world’s greatest painter?” Fry painfully understood that the U.S. government was only willing to save certain useful Jews, and that they determined what culture was worth preservation. Certain sub-cultures of Jewish arts and learning were wiped out forever, because they were determined by outsiders to be not worth the effort of saving. This cultural loss is again reflected in the chapter on Diarna, which uses new technologies such as 3-D modelling, satellite images, photography, and other methods to allow users to virtually visit disappearing or recently destroyed Jewish heritage sites.
Another heartbreaking theme of this book is the recent deadly attacks on Jewish places of education and worship within the United States. When it comes to mass shootings at Jewish spaces, the author carefully reviews how the media coverage excuses these attacks, which contradicts the common belief that ‘Jews control the media.’ If Jews controlled all the media, attacks on Jewish children in the United States would not be excused by poorly researched articles providing “context” about why the victims deserved it. In one powerful paragraph, she describes how incredibly detailed holocaust museum exhibits mask lower level attacks on Jews that might not be “systemic” enough for the American public. Arson, assaults, shootings? Not the holocaust. “Doxxing Jewish journalists is definitely not the Holocaust. Harassing Jewish college students is also not the Holocaust…It is quite amazing how many things are not the Holocaust.” Are we educating people about bigotry or are we giving them ideas?
People Love Dead Jews covers a number of heavy topics which will shatter preconceived notions and have you rethink the media you consume. Despite the themes outlined above, this book is often darkly funny and relatable. Well, relatable if you’ve experienced any sort of anti-Semitism or read a best selling concentration camp romance novel. The author’s voice comes through as if this was a close friend relating how these representations affect her and her loved ones. You feel the frustration over the hypocrisy, the fake concern and the commodification of Jewish suffering.
The first is trying to preserve the past through writing, record keeping and cultural preservation. This seems natural when discussing a people which has faced cultural destruction, banishment and genocide for generations upon generations. The second is that many are more familiar with and prefer their Jewish stories to be about ‘dead Jews’ rather than to learn about or help preserve living Jewish culture. I knew I would enjoy this book in the opening story of how the author took part in an academic competition in Tennessee as a teenager. Her Jewishness was questioned because of her blond hair and blue eyes when one of the other girls said I “thought Hitler said you all were dark.” The author recognizes decades later that those girls were not stupid and probably not bigoted, but rather that their total knowledge of the Jewish people and their history was rooted in school lessons based on what Hitler said about them.
People Love Dead Jews focuses heavily on the arts, including the restoration of Jewish historical sites, the development of Holocaust museum exhibits and portrayals of Jews in film and literature. Having lived in China and toured the reconstructed and redeveloping Jewish areas of Shanghai, I could relate well to the chapter on the reconstruction of Jewish sites in Harbin. The author takes a sad, cynical look at the lack of true historic preservation (frankly not uncommon across all types of sites in China) and how this area was developed in hopes of boosting tourism and potential Israeli investment. What good does it do if it doesn’t explain why there aren’t any Jews there now? Or why they were there in the first place? Or how they were fleeced and murdered? Or when the exhibits display fake objects?
Renovated Jewish heritage sites are springing up everywhere, but avoid “all those pesky moral concerns – about, say, why these “sites” exist to begin with evaporate in a mist of goodwill.” In many parts of the world, you can no longer travel to meet Jewish people, you can only visit their graves. Many Americans are completely unaware that Jewish families have lived in areas such as North Africa, the Middle East or Asia. Another blood pressure raising example is when the famous Anne Frank House dragged their feet on allowing a Jewish employee to wear his yarmulke to work. As Horn says, “I had mistaken the enormous public interest in past Jewish suffering for a sign of respect for living Jews. I was very wrong.” I found her brief comments on what she considered to be the sources of modern anti-Semitism to be very interesting and wish she had written more on this subject. For example, when I was young, the 1997 film Life is Beautiful was quite popular, but it wasn’t at all uncommon to hear derogatory comments about someone being, looking or acting Jewish (even if they weren’t Jewish) from what seemed like the most unlikely sources. Would they be ‘called out’ nowadays or is making comments about groups such as Jews or Roma somehow acceptable even amongst progressive groups because one can slip these comments through by saying they’re a culture, rather than a race?
There were two things that took me by surprise in this book.
The first was the collective memory myth American Jews have created about changing their surnames when pursuing education or employment. Evidently many families didn’t even want to admit to themselves discrimination was an issue in the new world, and so created stories that their names were changed quickly by some silly bureaucrat at Ellis Island. Bravely contradicting this popular narrative, the author shows thousands of court cases where Jewish people were legally changing their names to avoid discrimination. Of course, they didn’t want to tell their children and grandchildren they had changed it out of necessity rather than accident.
In a world where “Anti-Semitism” has a high bar of being the Holocaust, lower levels of persecution or intolerance slide by, and especially when that bigotry is quietly visible where “Jews themselves are choosing to reject their own traditions. It is a form of weaponized shame.” There’s genocide and there’s also the slow dismantling of Jewish civilisation. Jews hiding their identity and changing their names is a story that goes all the way back to Esther and Purim. In these name changes, we “witness ordinary American Jews in the debasing act of succumbing to discrimination instead of fighting it.” Of course, Horn recognises that sometimes you have to prioritise feeding your family over fighting discrimination.
This section keenly observes how American Jews might have completely different experiences and struggles based on their personal history, place of residence or their class. Similarly, in another section, the violence against American Jews is justified by the local community and media because they were ‘gentrifying’ the area, even when the victims were living in poverty and had moved to that area to avoid the soaring prices of where they had come from. It seems only recently that mainstream English language books and online articles are catching up to the fact that Americans of Jewish background are a diverse group and aren’t necessarily Ashkenazi, well off and living in certain zip codes.
The second surprise was how Yiddish and Hebrew literature differs from English literature in how they portray Jewish suffering. The Hollywood films and “uplifting” books which use concentration camps as a back-story have reduced victims to mere metaphors. Many English language books want a Holocaust story to have a redemptive ending where a protagonist learns something. Better yet, non-Jewish rescuers should be involved to save some “hapless Jews.” The Jews who should be saved should be very relatable, not terribly religious and certainly not speak Yiddish. The Jewish suffering must serve some larger purpose and provide closure for the reader. This demand requires real dead Jews to “teach us about the beauty of the world and the wonders of redemption- otherwise, what was the point of killing them in the first place?” Of course, we know that the vast majority of real victims had their possessions seized and their families and love turned to ash. For those who survived, there was little welcome or support for them in their home countries after the war. In Yiddish literature, “the language of the culture that was successfully destroyed, one doesn’t find many musings on the kindness of strangers.” In this essay and others, the author helpfully shares her recommended Jewish literature, often available in translation, so your ‘to-read’ list will certainly grow after reading this book.
The profile of American journalist Varian Fry, who rescued hundreds of artists, musicians, scientists and other intellectuals was a real page turner. Again, this book challenges our assumptions about what sort of person can be a brave rescuer and how victims to should act and respond. Here the author uses her incisive talent for puncturing the ‘feel good’ nature of these stories. Yes, it was wonderful that Fry did all he could despite his lack of resources, crumbling marriage and his own troubled mental health. He complained, “No, we should be able to save them all. Why just the world’s greatest painter?” Fry painfully understood that the U.S. government was only willing to save certain useful Jews, and that they determined what culture was worth preservation. Certain sub-cultures of Jewish arts and learning were wiped out forever, because they were determined by outsiders to be not worth the effort of saving. This cultural loss is again reflected in the chapter on Diarna, which uses new technologies such as 3-D modelling, satellite images, photography, and other methods to allow users to virtually visit disappearing or recently destroyed Jewish heritage sites.
Another heartbreaking theme of this book is the recent deadly attacks on Jewish places of education and worship within the United States. When it comes to mass shootings at Jewish spaces, the author carefully reviews how the media coverage excuses these attacks, which contradicts the common belief that ‘Jews control the media.’ If Jews controlled all the media, attacks on Jewish children in the United States would not be excused by poorly researched articles providing “context” about why the victims deserved it. In one powerful paragraph, she describes how incredibly detailed holocaust museum exhibits mask lower level attacks on Jews that might not be “systemic” enough for the American public. Arson, assaults, shootings? Not the holocaust. “Doxxing Jewish journalists is definitely not the Holocaust. Harassing Jewish college students is also not the Holocaust…It is quite amazing how many things are not the Holocaust.” Are we educating people about bigotry or are we giving them ideas?
People Love Dead Jews covers a number of heavy topics which will shatter preconceived notions and have you rethink the media you consume. Despite the themes outlined above, this book is often darkly funny and relatable. Well, relatable if you’ve experienced any sort of anti-Semitism or read a best selling concentration camp romance novel. The author’s voice comes through as if this was a close friend relating how these representations affect her and her loved ones. You feel the frustration over the hypocrisy, the fake concern and the commodification of Jewish suffering.
July 18, 2023
This is an important work, and while I read it quickly, I think its an important work.
I first want to say that I met Dara Horn, when she came to CJP in Boston for a book club, and I just loved her. I felt like we could be best friends, soul-sisters. I loved everything about her and I related to her. I thought Eternal Life was great, but also felt the conversation that was held that night, toally deepened and enriched the conversation. I actually really liked the Rabbi who was the discussant, and I believe they knew one another from the past. It felt like what I describe, when I say I want to be at one of these lunches with Alice Hoffman and Jodi Picoult. Like some people feel like your tribe. Dara is in my tribe both ways. The larger Jewish tribe, but also the spiritual connection thing. She has vibrancy, depth, perception and insight. She is deeply intelligent, warm, funny, dynamic. Is it wrong of me to elevate myself such? Maybe I just haven't written my book yet. I do write essays. I like to think some of these authors would recognize me.
I thought many things about the book were interesting. But I really latched onto the story of Ellis Island changing the names. Which Dara says was a myth. That never happened. It's a part of the dynamic of other and self hatred. They at Ellis were meticulous and well trained. She outlines a whole host of other reasons this happened eventually, which had to do with legal changes chosen by the families and immigrants themselves. But mythology is interesting, because this is a quite embedded story. We are told that it was antisemitism that made the Ellis Island and other officials choose our names, which is how we got to Gold, Silver, and Green. All colors associated with money. I think Stein is supposed to be connected to money as well. What is fascinating to me about this, is that even if it never happened, the story of antisemitism is still woven in.
Speaking of, I also appreciated the part of the book, where she is talking to her son and letting him see under-themes, and letting him know more truly about the world - at his insistence. I thought she was hard on herself around this. We are all negotiating this with our children. I have three sons, and its important for them to understand and come to their own experiences of being Jewish in the world. But oh did I relate to this.
I thought the book was tough but powerful and important. I'm glad I finally read it.
I first want to say that I met Dara Horn, when she came to CJP in Boston for a book club, and I just loved her. I felt like we could be best friends, soul-sisters. I loved everything about her and I related to her. I thought Eternal Life was great, but also felt the conversation that was held that night, toally deepened and enriched the conversation. I actually really liked the Rabbi who was the discussant, and I believe they knew one another from the past. It felt like what I describe, when I say I want to be at one of these lunches with Alice Hoffman and Jodi Picoult. Like some people feel like your tribe. Dara is in my tribe both ways. The larger Jewish tribe, but also the spiritual connection thing. She has vibrancy, depth, perception and insight. She is deeply intelligent, warm, funny, dynamic. Is it wrong of me to elevate myself such? Maybe I just haven't written my book yet. I do write essays. I like to think some of these authors would recognize me.
I thought many things about the book were interesting. But I really latched onto the story of Ellis Island changing the names. Which Dara says was a myth. That never happened. It's a part of the dynamic of other and self hatred. They at Ellis were meticulous and well trained. She outlines a whole host of other reasons this happened eventually, which had to do with legal changes chosen by the families and immigrants themselves. But mythology is interesting, because this is a quite embedded story. We are told that it was antisemitism that made the Ellis Island and other officials choose our names, which is how we got to Gold, Silver, and Green. All colors associated with money. I think Stein is supposed to be connected to money as well. What is fascinating to me about this, is that even if it never happened, the story of antisemitism is still woven in.
Speaking of, I also appreciated the part of the book, where she is talking to her son and letting him see under-themes, and letting him know more truly about the world - at his insistence. I thought she was hard on herself around this. We are all negotiating this with our children. I have three sons, and its important for them to understand and come to their own experiences of being Jewish in the world. But oh did I relate to this.
I thought the book was tough but powerful and important. I'm glad I finally read it.
January 15, 2024
I can't write as detailed a review of this as I would like, because it was a library book, my loan expired just as I was finishing it, and consequently my notes and highlights are gone. Unfairly, because Horn has plenty of breathtaking insights (her thinking on the subject of how people turn the memory of the dead to their own purposes connects up, in my mind, with what Timothy Snyder has to say in the afterword to Bloodlands), I mostly remember the two points on which I would argue with her:
1. She appears to identify Jews with Israel, or Israel with all Jews; I'm not the only person to think that this effectively treats Jews as a monolith and so can in itself be anti-Semitic. (Masha Gessen might have something to say on this point.)
2. Unlike Horn, I think there are reasons to be wary of ultra-Orthodox Judaism that aren't necessarily anti-Semitic. To the significant extent to which hostility toward ultra-Orthodox Jews is greater than the hostility directed toward other religious cultists, I do agree with her. (Of course.) One doesn't see news reports of murderous attacks on evangelical Christians qua Christians -- the mass murder at Emmanuel AME Church was directed at the people as African Americans, not as Christians, whereas the 2019 shooting at a kosher grocery store in Jersey City, NJ, was obviously directed at the victims as Jews.
That having been said, in NYC, where I live, the Hasidim vote as a bloc, and they voted for Trump. Trump voters are not people with whom I, as among other things a queer person, can feel easy. But -- to return to the matter of how much hostility toward ultra-Orthodox Jews is directed toward them as specifically Jewish religious cultists -- on the national scale in the US, evangelical Christians are far more dangerous than the Hasidim could ever be. So I suppose I'm quibbling with Horn here, rather than fully disputing her.
Not incidentally, Horn's takedown of defenses of The Merchant of Venice on the ground that it's somehow not anti-Semitic is brilliant. As her young son points out, the "Do we not bleed?" speech is more villain origin story than anything else.
People Love Dead Jews makes uncomfortable reading for a progressive person who's not Jewish, though I have a feeling it would make uncomfortable reading for a lot of Jewish people as well. I also have a feeling that it's my very discomfort leading me focus on my disagreements with Horn rather than on the many points where she made me squirm.
1. She appears to identify Jews with Israel, or Israel with all Jews; I'm not the only person to think that this effectively treats Jews as a monolith and so can in itself be anti-Semitic. (Masha Gessen might have something to say on this point.)
2. Unlike Horn, I think there are reasons to be wary of ultra-Orthodox Judaism that aren't necessarily anti-Semitic. To the significant extent to which hostility toward ultra-Orthodox Jews is greater than the hostility directed toward other religious cultists, I do agree with her. (Of course.) One doesn't see news reports of murderous attacks on evangelical Christians qua Christians -- the mass murder at Emmanuel AME Church was directed at the people as African Americans, not as Christians, whereas the 2019 shooting at a kosher grocery store in Jersey City, NJ, was obviously directed at the victims as Jews.
That having been said, in NYC, where I live, the Hasidim vote as a bloc, and they voted for Trump. Trump voters are not people with whom I, as among other things a queer person, can feel easy. But -- to return to the matter of how much hostility toward ultra-Orthodox Jews is directed toward them as specifically Jewish religious cultists -- on the national scale in the US, evangelical Christians are far more dangerous than the Hasidim could ever be. So I suppose I'm quibbling with Horn here, rather than fully disputing her.
Not incidentally, Horn's takedown of defenses of The Merchant of Venice on the ground that it's somehow not anti-Semitic is brilliant. As her young son points out, the "Do we not bleed?" speech is more villain origin story than anything else.
People Love Dead Jews makes uncomfortable reading for a progressive person who's not Jewish, though I have a feeling it would make uncomfortable reading for a lot of Jewish people as well. I also have a feeling that it's my very discomfort leading me focus on my disagreements with Horn rather than on the many points where she made me squirm.
July 22, 2022
this book is deeply, irredeemably offputting and i will not be convinced otherwise. horn plays fast and loose not only with histories and historical actors, but with what seem to be her own convictions, chapter to chapter. it's unclear who these essays are meant for, but i can only imagine that it's not meant for secular, antizionist jews — said groups are treated with far too much condescension and vitriol to find anything to latch onto here. even if considering that horn is writing for a generalist — and largely non-jewish audience — these essays are filled with embarrassing generalizations, vaguely masked stereotypes of self-loathing jews, genuine historical inaccuracies, and personal preferences upsettingly presented as the only right/righteous way to approach these topics. there are a few glimmers of interesting points, but none of these topics are new; there are other writers whose texts handle power relations, memory, violence, and culture with nuance that horn simply doesn't have the range for. genuinely hated this lol! should not have finished it but i'm a masochist!
January 24, 2022
The title of Dara Horn's collection of essays matches the tone of its contents: attention-grabbing, sarcastic, brimming with anger. Horn explores the phenomenon of many (non-Jewish) people being more comfortable with reading stories about the Holocaust that have uplifting messages about a homogenised humanity than they are with learning anything about living, breathing Jewish people, let alone trying to protect those lives. The twelve essays range widely—from the past and present of anti-Jewish bigotry in the US, to the now-vanished Jewish community of Harbin in China, to talking about The Merchant of Venice with her ten-year-old son. Horn provides the reader with much to think about, and I know that I will mull over what she has to say about the hegemony of Christian frameworks in subconsciously shaping the rhythms of narrative arcs.
However, there were parts of the book that I found less successful. There is a bit of a tendency to conflate Judaism as a whole with Ashkenazi Jews, and to frame secular/atheist Jews as assimilated/self-loathing—both of these aspects seemed reductive to me. There is much that is sad and regrettable about heritage language loss, but a Jewish person who doesn't speak or read Yiddish or Hebrew is no less Jewish because of it than I'm less Irish because my Gaeilge is only líofa liofa. Horn also skirts much engagement with modern Israeli politics and practices (which is fine, she is American), but some of what she did say had me jotting question marks in the margins. Horn's understanding of Jewish history seems to align very much with the so-called "lachrymose" school (the first part of David Nirenberg's Communities of Violence provides a good introductory overview of the historiography of Judaism), and this produces a tension with her implicit Zionist sympathies. Had Horn I think dug into that more, this would have been a stronger work.
However, there were parts of the book that I found less successful. There is a bit of a tendency to conflate Judaism as a whole with Ashkenazi Jews, and to frame secular/atheist Jews as assimilated/self-loathing—both of these aspects seemed reductive to me. There is much that is sad and regrettable about heritage language loss, but a Jewish person who doesn't speak or read Yiddish or Hebrew is no less Jewish because of it than I'm less Irish because my Gaeilge is only líofa liofa. Horn also skirts much engagement with modern Israeli politics and practices (which is fine, she is American), but some of what she did say had me jotting question marks in the margins. Horn's understanding of Jewish history seems to align very much with the so-called "lachrymose" school (the first part of David Nirenberg's Communities of Violence provides a good introductory overview of the historiography of Judaism), and this produces a tension with her implicit Zionist sympathies. Had Horn I think dug into that more, this would have been a stronger work.
July 27, 2021
A deeply troubling, moving, painful, and inspiring examination into the eons of dead Jews that create the Jewish history the world knows. Anne Frank and her diary are only known because we know the tragic end to her story. But it’s hard to imagine her diary ever being published, let alone translated and distributed across the world, if she would have lived to have seen age 15 or any year after. Many can recall the names of Nazi deathcamps where the Yiddish language was nearly wiped out, but few can name even a couple Yiddish poets or authors. The world hears of tragedies befalling Jews, their communities, and their places of worship but pays little attention to their vibrant culture or their valuable accomplishments. This is the basis of Horn’s compilation of essays—Jews are others, they aren’t Christian, they aren’t Muslim, they aren’t white but they aren’t brown, and the world only knows their story from the eons of tragic events that has befallen a global diaspora.
September 12, 2021
This book was a deep hug and a cold slap in the face. Everyone I know should read this book, ESPECIALLY* if they are not Jewish.
It is an increasingly terrifying time to be Jewish where I live. I am isolated and don’t know another Jewish person in this city/neighborhood where I live. But I do have neighbors who fly nazi flags. I live close to a literal neo-nazi militia training organization with a worldwide following of dangerous hatemongers. My synagogue’s cemetery, like so many other Jewish cemeteries, was violently desecrated in 2019, just after the anniversary of the Tree of Life massacre. My congressman actively spreads the same conspiracy theory that lead to that massacre.
I don’t know if I can find the words to explain how deeply my soul needed this book RIGHT NOW and how much it felt like a heart to heart with a longtime friend (who is way more smart and insightful and helps you make connections in your heart and soul and mind that we’re never there before). I feel validated in my fear and horrified by the reality of what the author explains and helps me to understand for myself.
I read this book so fast and was so enthralled that I never removed the lining around the hardcover. That has never happened before.
* I definitely recommend this book to Jewish readers as well! Lol. But as a relatively isolated Midwestern Jew, most of my IRL friends aren’t Jewish and almost NONE of them have spoken out against the rampant antisemitism, here or otherwise. In fact, a lot of them have perpetuated antisemitic tropes and consPiracy theories. They don’t even realize it. It’s either because of their own deeply ingrained and unexamined antisemitism and/or because they’re not seeing the terrifying uptick in violence and aren’t affected by it and don’t bother to care. Or, as the author writes me in the last chapter of the book, maybe once something happens three times, it isn’t news anymore. It’s just normal.
It is an increasingly terrifying time to be Jewish where I live. I am isolated and don’t know another Jewish person in this city/neighborhood where I live. But I do have neighbors who fly nazi flags. I live close to a literal neo-nazi militia training organization with a worldwide following of dangerous hatemongers. My synagogue’s cemetery, like so many other Jewish cemeteries, was violently desecrated in 2019, just after the anniversary of the Tree of Life massacre. My congressman actively spreads the same conspiracy theory that lead to that massacre.
I don’t know if I can find the words to explain how deeply my soul needed this book RIGHT NOW and how much it felt like a heart to heart with a longtime friend (who is way more smart and insightful and helps you make connections in your heart and soul and mind that we’re never there before). I feel validated in my fear and horrified by the reality of what the author explains and helps me to understand for myself.
I read this book so fast and was so enthralled that I never removed the lining around the hardcover. That has never happened before.
* I definitely recommend this book to Jewish readers as well! Lol. But as a relatively isolated Midwestern Jew, most of my IRL friends aren’t Jewish and almost NONE of them have spoken out against the rampant antisemitism, here or otherwise. In fact, a lot of them have perpetuated antisemitic tropes and consPiracy theories. They don’t even realize it. It’s either because of their own deeply ingrained and unexamined antisemitism and/or because they’re not seeing the terrifying uptick in violence and aren’t affected by it and don’t bother to care. Or, as the author writes me in the last chapter of the book, maybe once something happens three times, it isn’t news anymore. It’s just normal.
February 13, 2024
An honest and powerful report of antisemitism through the ages and one that is more relevant today than ever before. Required reading, especially for those who aren’t Jewish!!
March 27, 2023
This is an engrossing read. Horn and I have a differnt lens, but her arguments really got me thinking about things that I did not before. All of this is well written and reasoned. That said, though well-reasoned I don't think all of her positions hold up. I would point particularly to her reading of The Merchant of Venice where she substitutes a critical lens with the reasoning of her 10-year old. He is clearly a very smart kid, and his observations are interesting, but he is 10 and his analysis of a 500 year old play centered on the position that the play's subtext is clear from looking at the tropes of 21st century superhero movies is charming, and says a lot about how Shakespeare is still the foundation on which Western storytelling is built, but that does not make it make sense. Other positions also fall down, like her view of the impact of Holocaust memorials. A few things read to me as her describing me as something of a self-loathing Jew, which is far from true. Still, she got me thinking about a lot of things that I don't often think about, and she framed the analysis well so that I saw things more clearly, even if that is because her analysis rankled.
I read a lot about institutionalized racism, but not a lot about American society's willful ignorance regarding antisemitism. It is pervasive and it is deadly. A couple months back I read Hell of a Book and there are some words in there about living knowing that people want you dead, and the impact on the person you become when that is the case. I worked for a Jewish non-profit in a major metropolitan area for less than two years and in that time the agency and individual employees received bomb threats, general death threats, and had a car try to drive into the building (he failed because someone had done the same thing before and so we had security reinforcement to prevent that.) My point is I know what it is like to be aware that people want me dead, and I understand how that changes a person. My other point is that we ignore it when spin-doctors use anti-semitic tropes to attack George Soros in popular media and just yesterday I looked on Goodreads at a review of a bio of the Rothschild family and the most popular review was someone talking about how the book was not good because it did not discuss how the Rothschilds had created the new world order (a reference to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an ur-text of 20th century antisemitism.) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5.... I am pleased to see someone writing about how people love the dead Jews, the Anne Frank's, and hate live Jews. (I will say it was great to have one other person say how appalling the film version of Schindler's List is (despite being a well crafted movie.) To take the annihilation of a people and make it about one Christian guy's redemption is shameful. That is some white savior shit. See also, Life is Beautiful and most Holocaust set historical fiction and film.)
All-in-all an intellectually simulating and instructive collection of essays I hope sees wide readership.
I read a lot about institutionalized racism, but not a lot about American society's willful ignorance regarding antisemitism. It is pervasive and it is deadly. A couple months back I read Hell of a Book and there are some words in there about living knowing that people want you dead, and the impact on the person you become when that is the case. I worked for a Jewish non-profit in a major metropolitan area for less than two years and in that time the agency and individual employees received bomb threats, general death threats, and had a car try to drive into the building (he failed because someone had done the same thing before and so we had security reinforcement to prevent that.) My point is I know what it is like to be aware that people want me dead, and I understand how that changes a person. My other point is that we ignore it when spin-doctors use anti-semitic tropes to attack George Soros in popular media and just yesterday I looked on Goodreads at a review of a bio of the Rothschild family and the most popular review was someone talking about how the book was not good because it did not discuss how the Rothschilds had created the new world order (a reference to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an ur-text of 20th century antisemitism.) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5.... I am pleased to see someone writing about how people love the dead Jews, the Anne Frank's, and hate live Jews. (I will say it was great to have one other person say how appalling the film version of Schindler's List is (despite being a well crafted movie.) To take the annihilation of a people and make it about one Christian guy's redemption is shameful. That is some white savior shit. See also, Life is Beautiful and most Holocaust set historical fiction and film.)
All-in-all an intellectually simulating and instructive collection of essays I hope sees wide readership.
September 5, 2022
2.5 rounded up. Strong provocative title that I’m not sure the book lives up to. It’s very clear through this book that Horn is a novelist and not a journalist, historian, or social scientist. The book is a collection of essays vaguely connected by themes of antisemitism only few of which manage to connect back to her thesis.
There were Interesting forays in this book—e.g. the Varian Fry story was interesting— but her over generalizations and personal opinions stuck into more factual sections were frustrating. For example her claim that Christian story structures have happy/redemptive endings in comparison to Jewish stories is just …Not true? You’d think someone with a phd in literature would know that plenty of non-Christian traditional narratives have hopeful moral themes and also that Jewish lit doesn’t exclusively have open or sad endings. I mean, I’m Sephardi so maybe I’m just frustrated seeing Ashkenazi/Yiddish lit being considered the only Jewish lit.
I’m not sure who this book’s intended audience is…gentiles who are pro-Israel maybe? I wanted to like this book more but I think Horn’s inability to methodically organize a non-fiction book and clearly differentiate between fact and her own opinion holds me back from being able to recommend this to people who don’t already know a lot about the history of antisemitism and those who are knowledgeable enough to parse through Horn’s thoughts.
Her point on the rejection of rescuers by survivors is interesting. I’ve only ever seen grateful testimony from Jewish survivors towards their rescuers? Though they were mostly rescued as children so maybe that avoids the humiliation that Horn theorizes?
Also she misuses the term “gaslight” in her opening chapters and that’s a pet peeve lol
There were Interesting forays in this book—e.g. the Varian Fry story was interesting— but her over generalizations and personal opinions stuck into more factual sections were frustrating. For example her claim that Christian story structures have happy/redemptive endings in comparison to Jewish stories is just …Not true? You’d think someone with a phd in literature would know that plenty of non-Christian traditional narratives have hopeful moral themes and also that Jewish lit doesn’t exclusively have open or sad endings. I mean, I’m Sephardi so maybe I’m just frustrated seeing Ashkenazi/Yiddish lit being considered the only Jewish lit.
I’m not sure who this book’s intended audience is…gentiles who are pro-Israel maybe? I wanted to like this book more but I think Horn’s inability to methodically organize a non-fiction book and clearly differentiate between fact and her own opinion holds me back from being able to recommend this to people who don’t already know a lot about the history of antisemitism and those who are knowledgeable enough to parse through Horn’s thoughts.
Her point on the rejection of rescuers by survivors is interesting. I’ve only ever seen grateful testimony from Jewish survivors towards their rescuers? Though they were mostly rescued as children so maybe that avoids the humiliation that Horn theorizes?
Also she misuses the term “gaslight” in her opening chapters and that’s a pet peeve lol
May 21, 2022
IF YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH DO NOT READ THIS BOOK!
The title is provocative as it should be because the content is provocative.
It is raw.
It is harrowing.
It is horrifying.
It is impossible to ignore.
It is unpleasant.
It is shocking.
It is obscene.
It is horrendous.
It is NOT pleasant reading.
It is definitely a Must Read.
If nothing else it is thought provoking – if you have a brain.
As much as I have read about Jewish history there is so much more that I didn’t know…look up The Jews of Harbin, China.
An entire chapter devoted to my personal hero VARIAN FRY. A hero I have been trying, in my small and ineffectual way, to inform people about for many, many years.
“The existence of Jews in any society is a reminder that freedom is possible, but only with responsibility – and that freedom without responsibility is no freedom at all. People who hate Jews know this” (Pg.107)
This is deserving of no less than 10-stars.
The title is provocative as it should be because the content is provocative.
It is raw.
It is harrowing.
It is horrifying.
It is impossible to ignore.
It is unpleasant.
It is shocking.
It is obscene.
It is horrendous.
It is NOT pleasant reading.
It is definitely a Must Read.
If nothing else it is thought provoking – if you have a brain.
As much as I have read about Jewish history there is so much more that I didn’t know…look up The Jews of Harbin, China.
An entire chapter devoted to my personal hero VARIAN FRY. A hero I have been trying, in my small and ineffectual way, to inform people about for many, many years.
“The existence of Jews in any society is a reminder that freedom is possible, but only with responsibility – and that freedom without responsibility is no freedom at all. People who hate Jews know this” (Pg.107)
This is deserving of no less than 10-stars.
June 13, 2022
I think this might be the best book I've read this year. First the writing. Dara Horn, I love that name,has that gift of writing as if she were having a conversation with the reader. One example is the description of Jews in Harbin China, to quote: "You already know that this story has to end badly". There was a scene in the movie Casablanca where Louis Renault the Captain of police is about to drink from a bottle of Vichy water. He looks at the label which says Vichy and throws the bottle away in disgust. Having read Dara's description of the role of the puppet government in Vichy I now know Louie's motivation. There are some fabulous characters in the book. There is an entire essay describing Varian Fry, who according to the author "went to France with a far more secular goal; to save Western civilization." Alma Schindler who I believe was unrelated to Oskar Schindler of the book and movie Schindler's List was very interesting. She was involved romantically with: the artist Gustav Kimt and dumped him, Alexander Zemliasky, who she dumped, Gustav Mahler, who she dumped, Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius, who she dumped, and artist Oskar Kokoschka who she dumped! He did get a form of revenge.(read the book to find out how). Horn offers some reading suggestions, with my favourite quote from the book "For English-language readers drowning in uplifting Holocaust fiction, here is one novel among many that demonstrates a more honest way to write fiction about atrocity." Speaking of atrocity, one of the songs that people sang in the gas chambers was Hatikvah or The Hope which is now the national anthem of Israel. Dara Horn does write with some humour. Her description of dressing for the frigid weather in Harbin is very funny. I am now going to read all her novels.
July 16, 2021
If I said this book was disconcerting, I would not be wrong.
If I said this book was hopeful and inspiring, I would not be wrong.
So well written and so interesting. I will be sending unsolicited copies to friends and relatives.
If I said this book was hopeful and inspiring, I would not be wrong.
So well written and so interesting. I will be sending unsolicited copies to friends and relatives.
August 8, 2021
I have been a fan of Dara Horn's since I read her debut novel In the Image in 2002. All Other Nights is one of my favorite books of all time. I heard her speak in person several years ago and she is brilliant. So, it's no surprise that the essays in this collection are excellent. Very thought provoking, interesting, and unique. I received an advanced review copy through Edelweiss but I can't wait to get my hands on the hard cover so I can re-read all of them. I'm sure the book will be getting lots of buzz when it is released on September 7.
October 16, 2021
I don’t think I’ve ever felt so deeply understood or connected to an author. Dara’s writing is phenomenal and this book is no exception. She covers every major point about the American Jewish experience. I need you to read every last detail. This book is urgent. A must read. Now please excuse me while I go cry in the bathtub over how finally someone just *gets it*
December 12, 2022
This book is super interesting. Some essays are just brilliant. Some not so much. The thinking generally is smart and searing. Some writing feels a bit clunky. Overall very good.
December 8, 2021
Really liked the forward where the author makes the provocative statement that the world uses the history of anti-semitism to minimize its own anti-semitism. First chapter was quite interesting, and I learned details about Anne Frank’s diary and other Holocaust memoirs that I hadn’t heard before. However, I found the arguments repetitive and grating, and disagreed with the conclusions she drew from the examples she provided.
The author complains that Holocaust fiction is bad because it shows too many good actors, when the number of people who actually helped Jews was “a rounding error.” She goes further and says that they usually show redemption, which she attributes to Christianity. This is a terrible point — fiction always tells about extraordinary people and events. Showing some goodness and hope amidst evil and pain doesn’t negate the evil — it highlights it, and makes the story more conducive for mass consumption.
She describes a Auschwitz exhibit, which she says “does everything right.” First she complains that the items displayed in the Holocaust exhibition are divorced from the people who owned them. Then, she complains that these anonymous people are somehow being exploited. She says the exhibit “does everything right but fixes nothing.” She may be asking too much from a museum exhibit.
The author complains that Holocaust fiction is bad because it shows too many good actors, when the number of people who actually helped Jews was “a rounding error.” She goes further and says that they usually show redemption, which she attributes to Christianity. This is a terrible point — fiction always tells about extraordinary people and events. Showing some goodness and hope amidst evil and pain doesn’t negate the evil — it highlights it, and makes the story more conducive for mass consumption.
She describes a Auschwitz exhibit, which she says “does everything right.” First she complains that the items displayed in the Holocaust exhibition are divorced from the people who owned them. Then, she complains that these anonymous people are somehow being exploited. She says the exhibit “does everything right but fixes nothing.” She may be asking too much from a museum exhibit.
January 25, 2023
An incredibly thoughtful, impassioned exploration of the history of Jewish culture which focuses particularly on the consistently troubling ways that other cultures interact with Jewish culture. Horn explores this complex topic from a range of angles, across a broad stroke of different time periods and places around the world. I consider myself a fairly well-read Social Scientist, yet there was much to learn for me here; insightful, at times confronting analysis. Highly recommended.
March 9, 2023
Rarely, do I give a book such a low review. I had high hopes but was disappointed. My interest peaked regarding her idea that the past is the present. I identified with the child who could not sleep, bothered by existential fears.
Dara Horn began with Anne Frank. I do not disagree that the diary and the writer are unfinished. But, it is certainly not true that "we don't want to hear of her devastating end."
I read the book eons ago, and at the end of the diary, I read the devastating truth of her death. The book was written by a talented teenager who tragically died. I do not understand how a phrase of grace towards others means that readers like dead Jews? If people limit their reading about the Holocaust to The Diary of Anne Frank, yes they will have limited knowledge of the evil that was perpetrated.
The author continued--selecting small details, expanding and expounding, and then coming to a generalized conclusion. On to Harbin. Now, this was absurd. Yes, the Jews are gone. The Communists took over China in 1949. She failed to recognize the Jews who were saved by relocating to Harbin and then moving on to the Shanghai ghetto. And why does she riducule an enormous ice structure in present day Harbin? I would leave the Asians out of the mix, since thousands of Jews were saved in Japan and China during World War II.
Heritage sites become the next concept to criticize. True, the Chinese can create some odd memorials as I have seen in other non-Western countries. Morocco is an example of what she bemoans--the Jews are gone. The cemeteries and old synagogues are decrepit, watched over by non-Jews. But, in my mind still worth seeing.
Ms. Horn interspersed wise comments about the past being the present throughout the book, which to me was a wise observation and truth. She explored the devastating long term effects of state sanctioned antisemitism spanning the Roman Empire to the former Soviet Union. This chapter rang true especially her comment--"the Soviet regime forced Jews to participate in and internalize their own humiliation."
Any serious reader in the early 21st century could not avoid books with unredeeming endings. I agree with Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, we live in a broken, unredeemed world. I do not know readers who only want uplifting endings. However, is it not better for people to read mass produced Holocaust stories than nothing at all? Readers often evolve from naive to sophisticated. As a mature reader, I no longer expect to receive a resolution to a story about attrocity.
I do not doubt Ms. Horn's research on name changing. She judged the new Americans from shetls and cities of eastern Europe harshly. They were scared and ashamed. Is that not the same as being victims of antisemitism? The term was fairly new in the early 20th century and may not have been known by the eastern European Jews from small enclaves. And who would go up to a government clerk and say, "I'm changing my name because of antisemitism"? One might say, " I am submitting a name change request. My current last name is too hard to pronounce and spell." In the early to mid 20th century, people generally were reluctant to speak up about sensitive subjects in general--i.e. cancer, homosexuality, etc.
Eventhough I am the daughter of refugees, I could not possibly know what it feels like to run from one's country of birth, land in a foreign nation, and then begin over again. I believe in the virtue of telling our children stories based on truth yet turning the resultant fear into hope. I did that with my children, adopted as babies. Freedom assumes responsibility; I agree with Dara Horn. Without responsibility, freedom is meaningless.
I cannot comprehend Dara Horn's obsession with Varian Fry--one Harvard graduate's disdain for another alumnus? I continuously asked "why does it matter" that Mr. Fry was an elitist, self-centered, narcissistic, possibly bi-polar if he helped in the rescue of Jews? The righteous rescuers were motivated by a variety of reasons. I agree with Mr. Sauvage--a collector of Varian Fry's papers-- who said, "You judge a mission by what it accomplished, not by what it didn't accomplish."
I enjoyed the chapter about Diarna, a project which creates virtual archives of ancient Jewish sites in countries situated in the Middle East and North Africa where Jews are no longer welcomed. I see nothing bad about a traveling exhibit about Auschwitz, for those who cannot travel to Poland. I would not go, since I have experienced the "real thing;" but, I certainly would not disdain an opportunity for others to learn.
Yes, Shakespeare was antisemitic--that's old news. Whether, "The Merchant of Venice" is appropriate for ten year olds is not relevant.
Writing this review exhausted me just as the book did.
Dara Horn began with Anne Frank. I do not disagree that the diary and the writer are unfinished. But, it is certainly not true that "we don't want to hear of her devastating end."
I read the book eons ago, and at the end of the diary, I read the devastating truth of her death. The book was written by a talented teenager who tragically died. I do not understand how a phrase of grace towards others means that readers like dead Jews? If people limit their reading about the Holocaust to The Diary of Anne Frank, yes they will have limited knowledge of the evil that was perpetrated.
The author continued--selecting small details, expanding and expounding, and then coming to a generalized conclusion. On to Harbin. Now, this was absurd. Yes, the Jews are gone. The Communists took over China in 1949. She failed to recognize the Jews who were saved by relocating to Harbin and then moving on to the Shanghai ghetto. And why does she riducule an enormous ice structure in present day Harbin? I would leave the Asians out of the mix, since thousands of Jews were saved in Japan and China during World War II.
Heritage sites become the next concept to criticize. True, the Chinese can create some odd memorials as I have seen in other non-Western countries. Morocco is an example of what she bemoans--the Jews are gone. The cemeteries and old synagogues are decrepit, watched over by non-Jews. But, in my mind still worth seeing.
Ms. Horn interspersed wise comments about the past being the present throughout the book, which to me was a wise observation and truth. She explored the devastating long term effects of state sanctioned antisemitism spanning the Roman Empire to the former Soviet Union. This chapter rang true especially her comment--"the Soviet regime forced Jews to participate in and internalize their own humiliation."
Any serious reader in the early 21st century could not avoid books with unredeeming endings. I agree with Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, we live in a broken, unredeemed world. I do not know readers who only want uplifting endings. However, is it not better for people to read mass produced Holocaust stories than nothing at all? Readers often evolve from naive to sophisticated. As a mature reader, I no longer expect to receive a resolution to a story about attrocity.
I do not doubt Ms. Horn's research on name changing. She judged the new Americans from shetls and cities of eastern Europe harshly. They were scared and ashamed. Is that not the same as being victims of antisemitism? The term was fairly new in the early 20th century and may not have been known by the eastern European Jews from small enclaves. And who would go up to a government clerk and say, "I'm changing my name because of antisemitism"? One might say, " I am submitting a name change request. My current last name is too hard to pronounce and spell." In the early to mid 20th century, people generally were reluctant to speak up about sensitive subjects in general--i.e. cancer, homosexuality, etc.
Eventhough I am the daughter of refugees, I could not possibly know what it feels like to run from one's country of birth, land in a foreign nation, and then begin over again. I believe in the virtue of telling our children stories based on truth yet turning the resultant fear into hope. I did that with my children, adopted as babies. Freedom assumes responsibility; I agree with Dara Horn. Without responsibility, freedom is meaningless.
I cannot comprehend Dara Horn's obsession with Varian Fry--one Harvard graduate's disdain for another alumnus? I continuously asked "why does it matter" that Mr. Fry was an elitist, self-centered, narcissistic, possibly bi-polar if he helped in the rescue of Jews? The righteous rescuers were motivated by a variety of reasons. I agree with Mr. Sauvage--a collector of Varian Fry's papers-- who said, "You judge a mission by what it accomplished, not by what it didn't accomplish."
I enjoyed the chapter about Diarna, a project which creates virtual archives of ancient Jewish sites in countries situated in the Middle East and North Africa where Jews are no longer welcomed. I see nothing bad about a traveling exhibit about Auschwitz, for those who cannot travel to Poland. I would not go, since I have experienced the "real thing;" but, I certainly would not disdain an opportunity for others to learn.
Yes, Shakespeare was antisemitic--that's old news. Whether, "The Merchant of Venice" is appropriate for ten year olds is not relevant.
Writing this review exhausted me just as the book did.
October 30, 2021
The author made some great points. She also made some ridiculous, unsupported and unsupportable claims about anti-Zionism, comparing supporters of BDS to Nazis and attempting to use the tragic history of Jews in the Soviet Union to show that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. The tone of much of the book also betrayed a deep anger and disdain for people the author considers unintelligent, whether they're anti-Semitic or not, which makes for an unpleasant reading experience. For example, she includes a letter a reader sent her and then calls it "stupid." I agree that the letter is stupid, but what do I gain as a reader of this book from seeing the author say that? Nothing. Books are for intellectually engaging readers, not for settling scores with random, uneducated civilians.
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