People Love Dead Jews

A startling exploration of how Jewish history is exploited to comfort the living.

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Reflecting on subjects as far-flung as the international veneration of Anne Frank, the blockbuster travelling exhibition called “Auschwitz”, the Jewish history of the Chinese city of Harbin and the little known “righteous-gentile” Varian Fry, Dara Horn challenges us to confront the reasons why there might be so much fascination with Jewish deaths, as emblematic of the worst of evils the world has to offer, and so little respect for Jewish lives, as they continue to unfold in the present.

Horn draws on her own family life—trying to explain Shakespeare’s Shylock to a curious ten-year-old, her anger when swastikas are drawn on desks in her children’s school in New Jersey, the profound and essential perspective offered by traditional religious practice, prayer and study—to assert the vitality, complexity and depth of this life against an anti-Semitism that, far from being disarmed by the mantra of “Never Forget”, is on the rise.