Overview

A startling and profound exploration of how Jewish history is exploited to appease the living Renowned and beloved as a prizewinning novelist, Dara Horn has also been publishing penetrating essays since she was a teenager. Often asked by major publications to write on subjects related to Jewish culture--and increasingly in response to a recent wave of deadly antisemitic attacks--Horn was troubled to realize what all of these assignments had in common: she was being asked to write about dead Jews, never about living ones. In these essays, Horn reflects on subjects as far-flung as the international veneration of Anne Frank, the mythology that Jewish family names were changed at Ellis Island, the blockbuster traveling exhibition Auschwitz, the marketing of the Jewish history of Harbin, China, and the little-known life of the ""righteous Gentile"" Varian Fry. Throughout, she challenges us to confront the reasons why there might be so much fascination with Jewish deaths and so little respect for Jewish lives unfolding in the present. Horn draws upon her travels, her research, and also her own family life--as in 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, the profound perspective offered by traditional religious practice and study. In this way she asserts the vitality, complexity, and depth of Jewish life against an antisemitism that, far from being disarmed by the mantra of ""Never forget,"" is on the rise. As Horn explores the shocking attacks on the American Jewish community in recent years, she reveals the subtler dehumanization built into the public piety that surrounds the Jewish past--making the radical argument that the benign reverence we give to past horrors is itself a profound affront to human dignity.

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9798200799923

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Reviews

""A riveting, radical, essential revision of the stories we all know--and some we don't."" -- ""Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"" ""Asks read-ers to think crit-i-cal-ly about why we ven-er-ate sto-ries and spaces that make the destruc-tion of world Jew-ry a com-pelling nar-ra-tive while also min-i-miz-ing the cur-rent cri-sis of anti-semitism."" -- ""Jewish Book Council"" ""There is comfort to be found, in the most Jewish ways, in her humor and clear-eyed critical thinking."" -- ""Jewish Chronicle"" ""This is a beautiful book, and in its particular genre―nonfiction meditations on the murder of Jews, particularly in the Holocaust, and the place of the dead in the American imagination―it can have few rivals."" -- ""Wall Street Journal""

Author Information

Dara Horn is the author of five novels and one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. She has taught Jewish literature at Harvard, Sarah Lawrence College, and Yeshiva University. Xe Sands is an Earphones award-winning narrator known for her authentic characterizations and intimate delivery. She has more than a decade of experience bringing stories to life through narration, performance, and visual art and has recorded more than two hundred titles. She has also been recognized for her engaging romance narrations.

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