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, cover 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.

Background and context

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 stayed up late watching Mister Rogers. The Southerners were utterly convinced that 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.” Reflecting on that experience, Horn would realize that what people knew about Jews is that people killed them.

Horn describe 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 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 antisemitic 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.

Synopsis

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.

Horn then turns to Harbin, China, a city that sought to attract Jewish entrepreneurs at the end of the 20th century to construct its buildings and run its hotels. The local government promised Jews that if they came, antisemitic laws and pogroms would not follow, and at its peak, there were 20,000 Jews in the city. By 2021, there was just one Jew remaining. Today, Harbin advertises its "Jewish Heritage", which Horn quips should be renamed "Property Seized from Dead or Expelled Jews."

Over three chapter called "Dead American Jews", Horn discusses the growth of antisemitism in the United States. To Horn, by setting the bar of antisemitism as the Holocaust, "anything short of the Holocaust is, well, not the Holocaust." Therefore, antisemitic events such as the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, the Poway synagogue shooting, and the 2019 Jersey City shooting have a short shelf life. Horn writes that the "public shame associated with expressing antisemitism was dying too. In other words, hating Jews was normal."

Horn discusses the attacks on Hasidic Jews before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, writing that she was shocked that almost every article about the attacks didn't also say something derogatory about the community in the process. To Horn, this is signaling to the public that these people had it coming to them.

Horn then turns inward to the Jewish community. She asks why Jews cling to the apocryphal legend that immigration agents changed the names of Jews at Ellis Island, which was disproven by historian Kirsten Fermaglich. According to Horn, if Jews told the truth about American antisemitism, they would look like fools, coming to a land they thought promised the American Dream, but where they couldn't get hired with a last name like Rosenberg. Therefore, it would prove that America was not different in the prejudice, discrimination and violence that Jews faced.

Reception

People Love Dead Jews won a 2021 National Jewish Book Award in the "Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice" category. and was on Publishers Weekly's and Mosaic Magazine's lists of best books of 2021.

Writing in the New York Times, Yaniv Iczkovits called People Love Dead Jews a "brilliant" and "outstanding book with a bold mission" that "criticizes people, artworks and public institutions that few others dare to challenge."

Historian Pamela Nadell in the Washington Post called People Love Dead Jews a "riveting, gorgeously written book". She compared Horn's argument to Nadell's academic work arguing that the focus on the Holocaust in American education has "let Americans off the hook" in realizing that antisemitism is not just an Old World phenomenon.

Yair Rosenberg writes in The Atlantic that book is "compulsively readable, pugnaciously provocative, yet profoundly humanizing." He described Horn's argument is "stark". In an interview with Rosenberg, Horn argues that she does not think that Jews can solve the problem of antisemitism. However, there is an educational problem in the way that Judaism or Jewish culture is taught in broader society. For example, if instead of being taught only about the slaughters of the Israelites and the Holocaust and told "that's bad", students were taught about Judaism as a "civilization that developed as a counterpart to these other civilizations, and that often exposes their flaws," it would change the way that Jews are thought of in a non-Jewish society.

See also

• Antisemitism in Europe
• Antisemitism in the United States