“This term is a brilliant marketing ploy because it sounds so much better than property seized from murdered or expelled Jews,” Horn said. Horn pointed out that a museum about former Jewish residents in Harbin is one of many examples of a tourist-industry concept called “Jewish heritage sites”. The book also reveals how the northeastern Chinese city of Harbin brazenly markets its Jewish history-long after the Jews were displaced-in pursuit of tourist dollars while offering little insights into their lives building the community. People Love Dead Jews delves into a wide variety of topics, including why the world is so devoted to Anne Frank but not nearly so much to Jews who wrote about their experiences in concentration camps. “I think I didn’t appreciate this vast role that Jews-and especially dead Jews-play in the wider not-Jewish world of imagination.” “I now look back and think I was a little naive,” she said. She bluntly stated that people often tell stories about dead Jews to make them feel better about themselves.
“As I put it in the book, I became the go-to person for the emerging literary genre of synagogue shooting op-eds-not a job I applied for,” Horn said wryly.Ī scholar of Hebrew and Yiddish literature, Horn had already written five novels on themes of Jewish culture, history, and tradition before embarking on People Love Dead Jews. That prompted a New York Times editor to ask if she would “like to write about dead Jews”. Shortly after the essay was published, a hate-fuelled gunman attacked the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 and wounding six. The title is derived from the opening lines of her 2018 essay on Anne Frank in the Smithsonian Magazine: “People love dead Jews. Horn addresses these issues her provocative 2021 book of essays, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present. Such as, why do people care so much about how many people died if they really don’t care how people in this famously literary culture actually lived? And why is Jewish identity so often defined by what the outside world did to the Jews rather than what Jews have stood for and accomplished through the millennia?
That raises troubling follow-up questions.
“My point, of course, is 80 percent of the people who were murdered in the Holocaust were Yiddish speakers,” she said. That’s a far tougher question for most in the room. “I would then ask those same readers: how many people here can name three Yiddish writers?” “That’s often something that many readers can do-or just three concentration camps,” Horn told the Straight by phone. author and essayist Dara Horn has a simple exercise to demonstrate how little most people know about Jewish culture.Īt public events, she asks how many of her readers in the audience can name four Nazi concentration camps.
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