Steve Haft's Reviews > People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

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.