‘People Love Dead Jews’ author to discuss antisemitism
Dara Horn spent more than 20 years ignoring an uncomfortable feeling about her religion — that living Jews are often ignored by larger society as people tell stories about dead ones — until she couldn’t set it aside any longer.
Then she decided others shouldn’t be able to disregard it either and wrote her first nonfiction book about the topic, “People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present.”
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Horn, the author of several novels, started writing the book after events made her realize that people tell stories about dead Jews but don’t talk about what happened to them while they were living or why Jews don’t live in those places anymore.
Horn will discuss her book, history, antisemitism and what it’s like to be a Jewish writer with the Columbus community on Friday and Saturday as part of a scholar-in-residence program at Congregation Tifereth Israel.
The program was originally scheduled to take place in January but was delayed due to COVID-19.
Before the New Jersey resident set out to write the book, which took her on travels around the world, Horn said she was naïve.
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“I didn’t realize the role dead Jews play in the larger world’s imagination,” she said in a January interview. “Why do we care about how these people died if we don’t care that they lived?”
Included in the book are stories of towns around the world that were either built by Jewish people or hosted large populations of them and which now have few, if any.
Horn points to a city in China called Harbin that was built by Russian Jews at the beginning of the 20th century. Now, one Jew lives there — out of 16 million people, she said. Over the years, the community’s Jews were driven from the city — sometimes violently — by non-Jewish Russian refugees, Japanese occupiers, Soviets and other groups.
The city has spent millions restoring “Jewish heritage sites,” without naming why there are no more Jews, Horn said. There are many countries in the world that do the same, she said.
“Once you see this problem you can’t unsee it, and you just realize how pervasive it is.” Horn said.
Tifereth Israel, a synagogue on the Near East Side, uses its annual scholar-in-residence program as a way to highlight relevant and pressing issues in the Jewish community each year, according to Associate Rabbi Alex Braver.
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In the past, scholars have talked about Judaism and the environment, feminism, art and more.
Antisemitism remains a huge conversation happening in the Jewish world, Braver said in an interview earlier this year. He said he hopes people come away from the weekend being able to see Jewish life and antisemitism in a way they hadn’t been able to before.
“I’m hoping that in our conversation with her we’ll be able to sort of uncover ‘OK, now what do we do as American Jews in 2022 — and as non-Jews who are just interested in this topic? What do we do to confront this and do to confront more subtle forms of antisemitism?'” he said.
The book puts words to a feeling many Jews have experienced but haven’t been able to articulate, Braver said.
Senior Rabbi Hillel Skolnik said it’s remarkable to read Horn’s words and be inspired by them. She’s “someone who we have so much to learn from,” he said.
Horn said she first started asking questions about dead Jews in 2018, when a magazine asked her to write an essay about Anne Frank, a Jewish girl who hid from the Nazis during the Holocaust and whose diary, published after her death in a concentration camp, is famous.
Horn said she felt an “overwhelming sense of dread” about writing the essay and started to examine why she didn’t want to write the piece. During that time, she noticed a news article about how the Anne Frank House museum in Amsterdam, in the building where Frank hid from the Nazis, had not allowed a young Jewish employee to wear a yarmulke to work.
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The man appealed the decision, and the museum’s board deliberated for four months before allowing him to wear the religious skullcap.
“I thought, ‘Four months is a very long time for the Anne Frank Museum to ponder whether they should force a Jew into hiding,'” Horn said. “This realization launched me onto this book.”
Horn wants to contribute to a larger conversation in the nation about diversity and whether society will be open and accept differences of opinion or not.
“I want people to be uncomfortable. … When you’re uncomfortable, that forces you to question your assumptions that you didn’t even know were assumptions,” she said. “I’m really, in this book, challenging readers.”
It’s hard to talk about the negative, Braver said, but Horn makes the case that it isn’t possible to avoid conversations about antisemitism in 2022.
“America is one of most welcoming places Jews have lived,” Braver said. “To shed a light on the problem, the dark underbelly, … is really uncomfortable.”
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Horn wants to draw attention to the problem, but she said she’s not sure she’s going to solve it. That said, she has some ideas.
One is changing the way students study Judaism in non-Jewish culture, such as in K-12 history books and social studies texts. Most have chapters about the Holocaust, but Horn said that’s not enough.
“From that we learn that Jews are people who were killed, and dead Jews are here to teach you some nice lesson,” she said. “But there’s nothing in between. … What would it mean if there was something in between?”
Horn said she’s not interested in convincing people of her point of view; instead, she’s welcoming them to take a journey with her as she tells stories about Jews in each chapter.
“I’m encouraging people to reconsider their assumptions about what living Jewish culture is, and I’m encouraging people to reconsider assumptions about what it means to fight antisemitism,” Horn said.
For more information on events featuring Dara Horn at Congregation Tifereth Israel, visit tiferethisrael.org.
@DanaeKing
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