People Love Dead Jews

Dara Horn, a novelist and scholar of Hebrew and Yiddish literature, opens this collection of essays with a formative memory. At 17, she shares a hotel room at a quiz-bowl tournament with two girls from Mississippi who, upon learning she is Jewish, stammer in disbelief at her blonde hair and blue eyes. One tells her, "I thought Hitler said you all were dark." Horn reflects that these girls were not stupid or bigoted; they had simply learned about Jews primarily because people had killed Jews. In their education, Jews were people who existed for the purpose of being dead. Horn contrasts this perception with her own deeply engaged Jewish life: weekly synagogue attendance, chanting from the Torah (Judaism's central scripture), intensive Hebrew and Yiddish study, and reading Jewish philosophy. She describes a childhood obsession with the disappearance of time that Judaism answered through its spiral relationship with the past, where ancient events are experienced as present realities through ritual and communal reading. After years of writing novels about living Jewish culture, Horn found herself, following the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, drafted as a commentator on dead Jews. She decided to confront this reality directly, documenting what she calls a perverse and widespread obsession with Jewish death.

The opening essay examines the global fame of Anne Frank's diary and the concealment of Jewish identity at its core. Horn notes that the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam once told a Jewish employee to hide his yarmulke, a Jewish skullcap, under a baseball cap to maintain the museum's "neutrality," and that Hebrew was the only language on the audio guide not represented by a national flag. She argues that Frank's appeal lies precisely in her lack of a future: A surviving Frank might have been angry at her Dutch betrayers or described the horrors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen in ways audiences would not want to hear. Horn dissects Frank's most famous line about people being "truly good at heart," arguing it flatters readers and offers absolution, noting Frank wrote those words before encountering people who were not. She contrasts Frank's fame with the near-total obscurity of Zalmen Gradowski, a young man in Auschwitz's Sonderkommando (prisoners forced to escort arrivals into gas chambers and burn their bodies), whose buried Yiddish chronicle describes the murder of 5,000 Czech Jews in searing prophetic detail. Gradowski's testimony remains unknown, Horn argues, because it does not offer the grace audiences demand from dead Jews.

Horn travels to Harbin, China, a city built largely by Jewish entrepreneurs who arrived beginning in 1898 after Russia offered them freedom from antisemitic laws if they developed the Trans-Siberian Railroad junction in Manchuria. The community thrived for a generation before being systematically destroyed by successive occupying regimes. By the early 1960s, the last Jews had left. Horn visits the city's lavishly restored "Jewish Heritage Sites," a $30 million government project aimed at attracting Jewish tourism and investment. She finds a Jewish museum with life-size white plaster sculptures of Jews frozen at pianos and desks, and narratives focused exclusively on wealthy industrialists that reinforce the stereotype that Jews are rich. Nothing explains why the community no longer exists. Horn connects Harbin to a global phenomenon in which "Jewish Heritage Sites" function as property seized from dead or expelled Jews, repackaged as goodwill.

Three shorter essays respond to antisemitic attacks in the United States. After the October 2018 Pittsburgh massacre, in which 11 people were killed at the Tree of Life synagogue, Horn situates the violence within the ancient prayers the victims were reading at the hour of their deaths, tracing how Jewish liturgy has addressed the murder of Jews for millennia. After an April 2019 shooting at a synagogue near San Diego, she argues that Jews have always represented the frightening prospect of freedom, and that antisemitism is a conspiracy theory that absolves its believers of the responsibility freedom demands. After a December 2019 attack on a Jersey City kosher market, she documents how media coverage framed the murders with "context" about Hasidic Jews, a visibly traditional Orthodox community, supposedly gentrifying a minority neighborhood. Horn identifies this as victim-blaming absent from coverage of comparable hate-crime massacres targeting Black, LGBTQ, and Latino communities.

A longer essay explores the Soviet Union's destruction of Jewish culture through what Horn calls "Hanukkah antisemitism": a form that eliminates Jewish civilization while leaving de-Jewed bodies intact and enlisting Jews as agents of their own cultural erasure. She meets Ala Zuskin Perelman, daughter of the executed Soviet Yiddish actor Benjamin Zuskin, who describes her father's career in the Moscow State Yiddish Theater, where performers could only stage plays that denounced traditional Judaism as backward or dead. The regime offered unprecedented material support to Yiddish culture while surgically removing religious practice, Hebrew, Zionism, and any content it deemed unacceptable. Joseph Stalin created the Jewish Antifascist Committee in 1942 to raise wartime funds from overseas Jews, then charged its members with treason and had them executed. Ala tells Horn that this was in some ways worse than Nazi Germany's persecution, because the Soviets "forced Jews to participate in and internalize their own humiliation," and because "they never had a Nuremberg."

Horn turns to literary criticism, arguing that Western storytelling conventions of salvation, epiphany, and grace are fundamentally Christian in origin. She surveys canonical Yiddish and Hebrew works and identifies a pattern of stories without conclusions, full of endurance rather than redemption. She presents Chava Rosenfarb's The Tree of Life, a Yiddish-language trilogy about the Łódź Ghetto, as honest fiction about atrocity that refuses inspirational comfort, and argues that the popular demand for "uplifting" Holocaust fiction insists Jewish suffering is worth examining only if it provides a service to others.

An essay on the American Jewish myth that family surnames were changed at Ellis Island traces the story as a founding legend. Horn cites historian Kirsten Fermaglich's research documenting thousands of court petitions in which Jews voluntarily changed their names because antisemitism blocked their professional advancement, and connects the myth to similar origin stories from medieval Spain and Poland, all designed to transform the fear of rejection into a fantasy of acceptance.

Horn investigates Varian Fry, a young American journalist who rescued roughly 2,000 artists and intellectuals from Nazi-occupied France in 1940-41, operating from Marseille with a small team of improvised operatives. She traces his escort of refugees over the Pyrenees and his arrest and expulsion, arranged by the Vichy police (the forces of France's collaborationist wartime government) at the U.S. government's request. Horn documents the ingratitude of those Fry saved, including the philosopher Hannah Arendt, whom Fry's committee helped rescue but who never publicly acknowledged the fact. Horn connects this ingratitude to the inherent shame built into rescue relationships. Fry's post-war life was devastated by serial firings, failed relationships, and an inability to reintegrate into American society; he died of a heart attack at 59, found in bed covered with pages from his unfinished autobiography. Horn challenges the idea that Fry's mission to "save the culture of Europe" was sufficient, noting that no rescue committee was convened for Hasidism (a traditional Jewish religious movement) or the Musar (ethics) Movement, entire academies devoted to the study of righteousness that were destroyed without anyone attempting to save them.

Other essays profile Diarna, a virtual museum project documenting endangered Jewish sites across the Middle East and North Africa; critique a blockbuster Auschwitz exhibition that does "absolutely everything right, and fixes nothing"; and recount listening to The Merchant of Venice with Horn's 10-year-old son, who sees through the famous "Hath not a Jew eyes?" speech by Shylock, the Jewish moneylender in the play, identifying it as a standard supervillain monologue.

In the final essay, amid a wave of antisemitic violence, Horn joins the global Daf Yomi cycle, a program in which hundreds of thousands of people study one page of the Talmud each day over seven and a half years. She recognizes in the ancient sages' obsessive discussions the expressions of survivors of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem's Temple, who reinvented Judaism as a system of communal memory to preserve what had been lost. Their memory overlaps with her own: The prayers and blessings they debate are the same ones she learned as a child. The book ends with Horn turning from the news toward the ancient, carried by fellow readers living and dead, all turning the pages together.