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People Love Dead Jews
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People Love Dead Jews
People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present is a 2021 non-fiction book by author and academic Dara Horn exploring the exploitation of Jewish history, particularly focusing on the fascination with Jewish deaths rather than respecting the lives and culture of the living Jewish community. The book, a collection of essays, covers various topics including the global veneration and universalization of Anne Frank, the commercialization of Jewish history in places like Harbin, China, and indifference to rising antisemitism. Horn critically analyzes the subtle dehumanization embedded in the public reverence given to past atrocities, arguing that this benign reverence is a significant affront to human dignity.
People Love Dead Jews won a 2021 National Jewish Book Award and was on several year-end best books of 2021 lists.
Author Dara Horn recounts an inspiring event for the book was at a Nashville quiz bowl tournament in the 1990s. Horn shared a room with two Mississippians, who discussed watching Mister Rogers. The Southerners were utterly convinced that (as children) Rogers was speaking directly to them through their TV screens — just like they absolutely knew that Jesus loved them. They waited for Horn to concur. When she instead mumbled something about synagogue, they looked, stunned: "I thought Hitler said you all were dark [complexion]." Reflecting on that experience, Horn would realize that what people knew about Jews is that people killed them.
Horn explained that her mission with the book was to "unravel, document, describe, and articulate the endless unspoken ways in which the popular obsession with dead Jews, even in its most apparently benign and civic-minded forms, is a profound affront to human dignity."
In an interview with The Atlantic, Horn argues, that Western society prefers to tell stories about how Jews died, rather than how they lived, because "it's much easier to mold dead Jews into martyrs and morality tales than it is to coexist with living ones." Horn mentions that the book attempts to confront common excuses for not caring about antisemitism, such as that antisemitism is not systemic and antisemitic incidents are all "lone wolf" events or committed by deranged individuals. She also mentions that the "Jews are rich" stereotype, which is regularly used to justify antisemitism, is not used as an excuse for prejudice against Hindus, who are one of the wealthiest minority religious groups in the United States and United Kingdom.
People Love Dead Jews consists of 12 essays exploring how Jewish tragedy is commemorated, how the Holocaust is written about, how the media presents antisemitic events, how museums honor Jewish heritage, how society reads literature with Jewish protagonists are all distractions from the main issue, which is the specific deaths of Jews. According to Horn, much of how Jewish history is remembered and narrated is at best, self-deception, and at worst, rubbish. Society is fascinated with the death of Jews, but cares little for living Jews. To Horn, the destruction of world Jewry is a compelling historic narrative, but the current crisis of antisemitism is minimized.
Writing about the Shakespeare play The Merchant of Venice, Horn argues that taking the play in through Jewish eyes reveals "just how deep the gaslighting went," as critics ignore phrases such as, "Certainly the Jew is the very devil incarnate" to insist that Shakespeare portrayed Jewish character Shylock's humanity. As Horn relistens to an audio version of the play, she realized she had been conditioned to accept Shylock's famous soliloquy "Hath not a Jew eyes" as Shakespeare's attempt at humanization, rather than justification that he is treated poorly because there is something repulsive about him, such as his Jewishness.
Horn demonstrates that Jewish literature often invokes the horrors of Jewish past, ignoring the uplifting messages of grace more common in Western Christian literary traditions. In a discussion about the enormous success of The Diary of a Young Girl, the diary of Anne Frank, Horn examines the diary's most famous sentence, "I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart". In Horn's view, Frank's words are inspirational as people look for universal lessons rather than attending to the actual persecution of Jews. The first published editions of the diary were carefully edited to strip away too much Jewish specificity about Frank, who Horn calls "Everyone's (Second) Favorite Dead Jew" after Jesus.
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People Love Dead Jews
People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present is a 2021 non-fiction book by author and academic Dara Horn exploring the exploitation of Jewish history, particularly focusing on the fascination with Jewish deaths rather than respecting the lives and culture of the living Jewish community. The book, a collection of essays, covers various topics including the global veneration and universalization of Anne Frank, the commercialization of Jewish history in places like Harbin, China, and indifference to rising antisemitism. Horn critically analyzes the subtle dehumanization embedded in the public reverence given to past atrocities, arguing that this benign reverence is a significant affront to human dignity.
People Love Dead Jews won a 2021 National Jewish Book Award and was on several year-end best books of 2021 lists.
Author Dara Horn recounts an inspiring event for the book was at a Nashville quiz bowl tournament in the 1990s. Horn shared a room with two Mississippians, who discussed watching Mister Rogers. The Southerners were utterly convinced that (as children) Rogers was speaking directly to them through their TV screens — just like they absolutely knew that Jesus loved them. They waited for Horn to concur. When she instead mumbled something about synagogue, they looked, stunned: "I thought Hitler said you all were dark [complexion]." Reflecting on that experience, Horn would realize that what people knew about Jews is that people killed them.
Horn explained that her mission with the book was to "unravel, document, describe, and articulate the endless unspoken ways in which the popular obsession with dead Jews, even in its most apparently benign and civic-minded forms, is a profound affront to human dignity."
In an interview with The Atlantic, Horn argues, that Western society prefers to tell stories about how Jews died, rather than how they lived, because "it's much easier to mold dead Jews into martyrs and morality tales than it is to coexist with living ones." Horn mentions that the book attempts to confront common excuses for not caring about antisemitism, such as that antisemitism is not systemic and antisemitic incidents are all "lone wolf" events or committed by deranged individuals. She also mentions that the "Jews are rich" stereotype, which is regularly used to justify antisemitism, is not used as an excuse for prejudice against Hindus, who are one of the wealthiest minority religious groups in the United States and United Kingdom.
People Love Dead Jews consists of 12 essays exploring how Jewish tragedy is commemorated, how the Holocaust is written about, how the media presents antisemitic events, how museums honor Jewish heritage, how society reads literature with Jewish protagonists are all distractions from the main issue, which is the specific deaths of Jews. According to Horn, much of how Jewish history is remembered and narrated is at best, self-deception, and at worst, rubbish. Society is fascinated with the death of Jews, but cares little for living Jews. To Horn, the destruction of world Jewry is a compelling historic narrative, but the current crisis of antisemitism is minimized.
Writing about the Shakespeare play The Merchant of Venice, Horn argues that taking the play in through Jewish eyes reveals "just how deep the gaslighting went," as critics ignore phrases such as, "Certainly the Jew is the very devil incarnate" to insist that Shakespeare portrayed Jewish character Shylock's humanity. As Horn relistens to an audio version of the play, she realized she had been conditioned to accept Shylock's famous soliloquy "Hath not a Jew eyes" as Shakespeare's attempt at humanization, rather than justification that he is treated poorly because there is something repulsive about him, such as his Jewishness.
Horn demonstrates that Jewish literature often invokes the horrors of Jewish past, ignoring the uplifting messages of grace more common in Western Christian literary traditions. In a discussion about the enormous success of The Diary of a Young Girl, the diary of Anne Frank, Horn examines the diary's most famous sentence, "I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart". In Horn's view, Frank's words are inspirational as people look for universal lessons rather than attending to the actual persecution of Jews. The first published editions of the diary were carefully edited to strip away too much Jewish specificity about Frank, who Horn calls "Everyone's (Second) Favorite Dead Jew" after Jesus.