People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

I think after reading her fiction and her nonfiction, some people are clearly Dara Horn people and I am not those people. Not that anything she wrote was wrong. And she was very clear that her opinion is that Jewish writing doesn't need to have a moral or a narrative thread. But there was no there there. It was just a discussion of the antisemitism in the world and a conclusion that the only choice we have is to keep being Jewish. Most Jews in the world already knew both of those pieces before we even knew the ABC's and most non-Jews, unfortunately, won't read it. The essays didn't necessarily fit. Some of them were, in my opinion, uncharitably picky about just how a Holocaust museum exhibit did or didn't hit Horn's specific personal criteria for what made a thoughtful exhibit, or whether a virtuous gentile was unselfish enough while saving hundreds of Jews and at one point Jewish Shakespeare critics who didn't agree with her ten-year-old son's interpretation of Shylock's monologue. It's too bad it didn't live up to its excellent title.

This book opened my mind to and challenged “old saws” that I hadn't even realized were myths—the Ellis Island renaming was foremost here. Another deep dive and retake was Horn's treatment of the place Anne Frank's Diary holds in literature, and of more recent books about the Holocaust in general—there's a coyness to the way some of these books treat the issue, almost a romanticized view that turns away from the blood and guts and real human tragedy of it. This is extended into her analysis of various shooting incidents, and the difference in how they are treated by the media when they affect Jewish communities versus non-Jewish ones—as if the media is “mansplaining” the horror of the violence and smearing the victims with justifications that are irrelevant and worse.

I happened to read Dara Horn's book just after finishing a fictionalized account that based on Varian Fry's efforts to smuggle artists out of Nazi-occupied and Vichy France: The Postmistress of Paris, by Meg Waite Clayton. That book led me to a blog about Varian Fry, and to Ms. Clayton's credit, she hewed closely to the historical facts. What Dara Horn opened my eyes to, in addition to adding more detail about specific artists rescued by Fry and his group, was frankly deeply embarrassing and nearly incomprehensible: when Fry, after returning home, reached out to some of his famous “rescuees” to ask for their support in the form of their voices and to a lesser extent their financial help for continuing the effort to help refugees, he was ignored. How inexcusable!

Unlike Ms. Horn, I am 100% Jewish by birth, tradition, and culture, but not by religion. I was raised atheist in Romania, by atheist parents who believed (at the time) that atheism and the socialist dream would save their Jewish community. They were wrong, but I haven't seen any reason since then to revoke my atheism. I still hold religion as more of a problem than a solution, though fully support, in all wa, everyone's right to their own religious beliefs. However, although I don't resonate with Dara Horn's religious echoes, I feel pulled in by the threads she makes to Judaic culture and traditions, and feel less disconnected from them than she might think (or I suspect, give me credit for). I feel indebted to her and this book, and appreciate so many lessons in it. We are still not part of the greater community around us, and we forget or ignore that at our own peril.