People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

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.