“Living Jews? Not so much,” says Horn, because they do “icky things like practice Judaism.” The book is less about overt or implicit antisemitism and more about the conflicted relationship Gentiles have to Jews in their history.
The argument of the book is simple: people love dead Jews. What they all have in common is that they are not about Jews, not really, but instead about the empty spaces where Jews once were. But she was also turned to for what were erstwhile thought of a Jewish subjects: Anne Frank, a new museum exhibit about the Holocaust, global Jewish heritage sites.
She came to the subject kicking and screaming: she was anointed the op-ed writer of choice for the genre of “responding to Jewish murder.” Anytime there was an antisemitic hate crime, she became the go-to. The recent book by Jewish novelist Dara Horn, known for reviving the characters and history of Hebrew and Yiddish literature, is a work of non-fiction on the phenomenon of loving now-deceased Jews. It says something about our perceptions of antisemitism that People Love Dead Jews has been flocked to as a defining tract on the subject.
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