People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

Throughout the book, Dara gives heartbreaking examples of Jews being avoided, demeaned, persecuted, tortured, and killed for being Jews. She shows that the oft-repeated stories of Jewish names being changed at Ellis Island are false. No, rather, Jewish families petitioned the court to change their names when they couldn’t get jobs. 

But the U.S. is safer than other places, right? There isn’t real antisemitism in the U.S. These assumptions were tested by a series of three attacks on Jews since 2018: 

•    Murder of 11 Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue in October 2018.
•    Murder of 1 Jew in a San Diego-area synagogue during the Passover holiday in 2019.
•    Murder of 4 at a kosher grocery in New Jersey in December 2019.
 

These three deadly attacks prompted Dara Horn to write this book. Before these three attacks, Horn had been writing novels about Jewish life. 

"I fought hard to keep everything as autonomous as possible, making sure to tell the stories of how Jews had lived and what they had lived for, rather than how they had died. … By the end of 2018, after a massacre of Jews in our more perfect union that hardly came from nowhere, the only thing my readers, students, colleagues, and editors wanted me to talk about was dead Jews. I became the go-to person for the emerging literary genre of synagogue-shooting op-eds — a job I did not apply for, but one that I accepted out of fear of what someone less aware of history might write instead." (xix)

By the third attack, she was done commenting on Jewish deaths for American non-Jews. 

"After the first attack in Pittsburgh, I was devastated. After the second attack in San Diego, I was angry. But after the third attack near my home and the season of horror that followed, I simply gave up." (216)

Dara is an award-winning novelist, and it shows in this non-fiction book. Her narrative style is easy to read or listen to. Her angry, sarcastic tone at first pulled me in, like when you have that friend who complains about the hardships of life in a witty but cutting way. You laugh at the turns of phases even as you wince at the brutal truth. 

I got a bit bogged down in two of the latter chapters which comment on a project documenting abandoned Jewish spaces in majority Muslim countries and the problems with for-profit Holocaust education exhibits. I like hearing stories about people, and while her commentary on these projects is important, it wasn’t as compelling as when she was sketching out the lives of real people. Horn finishes strong, with two very personal stories.