Review: “People Love Dead Jews” by Dara Horn

“All of this is captured in twelve essays in novelist Dara Horn’s powerful and coruscating book on why people still love dead Jews over living Jews. It is a book that shreds modern piety and sophistry in equal measure.”

Throughout history, people have found it easier to deal with Jews when they are dead rather than alive. In ancient times, Greece and Rome suppressed Jewish life and lives for the monotheism that repudiated their polytheist worldview. In medieval Europe, most Christians preferred the “rejectors of Christ” to be killed in pogroms, blood-libel mobs, and crusades than to live alongside them. Those in the supposedly more tolerant age of modernity managed sometimes to see Jews as human but still denied their religious and civilizational particularity, as in Revolutionary France. Then, of course, the cultural, social, and scientific Darwinism of 19th century Progress reprised the old hatreds for the modern world, and we made our way on the tracks of Progress into the execution trenches of the Eastern Front and the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz. Then, the memorialization of the Shoah, noble on its face, allowed non-Jews to ignore inconveniently living Jews as survivors in Europe or pioneers in Israel. Now, we see rising rates of anti-Semitic attacks and the spreading of anti-Semitic beliefs in Europe and the United States. All of this is captured in twelve essays in novelist Dara Horn’s powerful and coruscating book on why people still love dead Jews over living Jews. It is a book that shreds modern piety and sophistry in equal measure.

Given that Jewish people are such a small minority in the United States (2.2% at most), it is not surprising that most Americans do not know any living Jews in person. Horn illustrates this point with a personal anecdote about the reactions of two fellow teenagers, incredulous that she was a real, living Jewish girl, because a) she was blond, and Hitler had said Jews were brown haired and brown eyed (yes, really) and b) because “Like most people in the world, they had only encountered dead Jews: people whose sole attribute was that they had been murdered, and whose murders served a clear purpose, which was to teach us something. Jews were people who, for moral and educational purposes, were supposed to be dead.”

And Jews, supposed to be dead in most peoples’ eyes, were subject to “a certain gaslighting about the Jewish past and present that I had never seen before, even when it was right in front of me. I had mistaken the enormous public interest in past Jewish suffering for a sign of respect for living Jews,” an interest in dead Jews instead of living, especially observant ones, which revealed “something deeply perverse, and all the more so when it wore its goodwill on its sleeve.” They say dead men tell no tales, in which case how much easier is it to tell the tales of dead Jews so that we can make them conform to our own ideas of what they should represent? As a result, for Horn, “the popular obsession with dead Jews, even in its most apparently benign and civic-minded forms, is a profound affront to human dignity.”