People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

by Dara Horn
People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

by Dara Horn

Hardcover

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Overview

Winner of the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Con­tem­porary Jewish Life and Prac­tice
Finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Wall Street Journal, Chicago Public Library, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year

A startling and profound exploration of how Jewish history is exploited to comfort the living.

Renowned and beloved as a prizewinning novelist, Dara Horn has also been publishing penetrating essays since she was a teenager. Often asked by major publications to write on subjects related to Jewish culture—and increasingly in response to a recent wave of deadly antisemitic attacks—Horn was troubled to realize what all of these assignments had in common: she was being asked to write about dead Jews, never about living ones. In these essays, Horn reflects on subjects as far-flung as the international veneration of Anne Frank, the mythology that Jewish family names were changed at Ellis Island, the blockbuster traveling exhibition Auschwitz, the marketing of the Jewish history of Harbin, China, and the little-known life of the "righteous Gentile" Varian Fry. Throughout, she challenges us to confront the reasons why there might be so much fascination with Jewish deaths, and so little respect for Jewish lives unfolding in the present.

Horn draws upon her travels, her research, and also her own family life—trying to explain Shakespeare’s Shylock to a curious ten-year-old, her anger when swastikas are drawn on desks in her children’s school, the profound perspective offered by traditional religious practice and study—to assert the vitality, complexity, and depth of Jewish life against an antisemitism that, far from being disarmed by the mantra of "Never forget," is on the rise. As Horn explores the (not so) shocking attacks on the American Jewish community in recent years, she reveals the subtler dehumanization built into the public piety that surrounds the Jewish past—making the radical argument that the benign reverence we give to past horrors is itself a profound affront to human dignity.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780393531565
Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date: 09/07/2021
Pages: 272
Product dimensions: 5.70(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

About The Author
Dara Horn is the author of five novels and was one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. She has taught Jewish literature at Harvard, Sarah Lawrence College, and Yeshiva University. She lives in New Jersey with her family.

Table of Contents

Introduction In the Haunted Present xiii

Chapter 1 Everyone's (Second) Favorite Dead Jew 1

Chapter 2 Frozen Jews 15

Chapter 3 Dead American Jews, Part One 48

Chapter 4 Executed Jews 53

Chapter 5 Fictional Dead Jews 72

Chapter 6 Legends of Dead Jews 88

Chapter 7 Dead American Jews, Part Two 104

Chapter 8 On Rescuing Jews and Others 108

Chapter 9 Dead Jews of the Desert 167

Chapter 10 Blockbuster Dead Jews 182

Chapter 11 Commuting with Shjlock 193

Chapter 12 Dead American Jews, Part Three: Turning the Page 209

Acknowledgments 231

Works Consulted 233

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