People Love Dead Jews

Reports from a Haunted Present

By: Dara Horn

Narrated by: Xe Sands

Length: 6 hrs and 23 mins

Publisher's summary

A startling and profound exploration of how Jewish history is exploited to comfort 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 anti-Semitic 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 - trying to explain Shakespeare’s Shylock to a curious 10-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 - to assert the vitality, complexity, and depth of Jewish life against an anti-Semitism that, far from being disarmed by the mantra of "Never forget", is on the rise. As Horn explores the (not so) 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.

©2021 Dara Horn (P)2021 Recorded Books

Good book- good/bad title

There are so many good things about this book, the title is not one of them.
First the performance by the narrator is top notch. The inflections and pace are great. She does a wonderful job.
The title. Let's talk about that. The title is the point, but it is so raw when I want to recommend it to a co-worker, I need to buffer the title with a long disclaimer. The point is that the general public of well meaning gentiles love Jews when something horrid has happened. Live Jews (now I'm remembering 2 Live Jews- hip hop) yeah, people are a little less interested. Fair. And that's the theme of the book.
What did I love about the book? So much, I will try to tackle most of them.
I'm a practicing Catholic and I felt a connection to the author when she talked about visiting China and visiting a synagogue that was no longer an operating one, because most of the Jews of the town were forced to flee or were killed. She was illustrating how well preserved/ reconstructed it was because the space invoked familiar feelings of asking how late she was for the service and the physical ritual muscle memory that kicks in when in such a space.
Another topic was on antisemetism... okay not another topic, it is the main topic, but in one essay, she pairs it to Purim and Hanukkah. One, Purim represented pure let's kill the Jews. The other Hanukkah represented we like Jews as long as they are not Jewish.
Something that will require more thought is all the Holocaust memorials that were all the rage in the 1990s. I worked at one of those places. Do they help make it so this will never happen again? Well it keeps happening, to Jews and others. Jews keep getting attacked and killed. Which takes us back to the title.
Lastly, she tackles the Merchant of Venice. She makes a great argument and I am willing to concede that it is an antisemitic piece. But it doesn't make me think of Shakespeare any less. He was who he was and Elizabethan England was not a Jew friendly place and never will be. It is what it is.

The last 10 minutes

The book provided an interesting perspective. In a post October 7th world the last 10 minutes offered

phenomenal overview of Judaism continuity

This book provides deep insights into antisemitism, beautifully written, with historical anecdotes and personal views. Real food for thought. Thank you!

Required reading

This should be required reading in every high school across America. The research done for this is impeccable. The story is extraordinarily relatable whether you are Jewish or not. The relevance of this is unmatched. In addition to the seriousness of the text, the story is also humorous, heartwarming, and terrifying. Dr. Horn has written a remarkable and significant historical piece of literature.

Awesome!

This is a wonderful book read by a good narrator. Only one nit: the name chava is pronounced with a gutteral ch

Excellent and Disturbing

Loved this book. Horn cogently challenges the popular thinking on anti-semitism. The book was powerful, informative, and eye-opening.

Powerful and smart

Absolutely scalding. Stated in the simplest terms, Horn argues that people love Jews who are dead -- killed by pogroms, in the camps, in attacks on American streets -- but live Jews not so much. She demonstrates her point by looking critically at how dead Jews are memorialized, how the media covers antisemitic acts in ways different from other hate crimes, how scholars have successfully whitewashed the vicious antisemitism of "The Merchant of Venice" (Horn has a PhD in English so she is definitely qualified to speak), myths about name-changing on Ellis Island, and a good deal more. Her travels in laying all this out take us from New Jersey to Amsterdam, Syria to China, and numerous places in between.

There's no way I can summarize the book without making it sound dry or polemical. It's not. Horn's voice is engaging and welcoming (so too is the astonishingly good job of reader Xe Sands -- wow!), and reading the book is like spending several evenings -- spread out over time, of course -- with a smart friend who knows a lot about a lot of things, is gifted in her ability to (warmly) share what she knows, has a good sense of humor, is brutally honest, and who is really angry.

A remarkable book. And again, I can't say enough to praise how good Xe Sands is in her narration. Listening to the book might have prevented me from taking notes and underlining passages, but her reading more than compensates.

Wonderful-Thoughtful

Really make you think and rethink the conventional interpretation of Jewish history and how the world still views Jews in many ways the same as it has throughout time.

Extremely powerful book!

This book will change your perspective on antisemitism and what it is to live as Jew.

Interesting personal essays

The anecdotes were interesting and worth knowing. I don't agree with all of the author's conclusions, and I don't find one strong opinion running throughout that she seems to be advocating, but rather it is a collection of her musings that awaken thoughts on the topic of anti-Semitism and Jewish life in America.