From the beginning, the regime eliminated anything that celebrated Jewish 'nationality' that didn't suit its needs. “.Soviet support for Jewish culture was part of a larger plan to brainwash and coerce national minorities into submitting to the Soviet regime-and for Jews, it came at a very specific price. People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present (Of course, they already are.) My husband’s grandfather once owned a bus company in Poland. I do not want my children to be someone else’s metaphor. And I find myself furious, being lectured by this exhibition about love-as if the murder of millions of people was actually a morality play, a bumper sticker, a metaphor. In the years since I walked through Auschwitz at fifteen, I have become a nagging mother.

Then as now, Jews were cast in the role of civilization’s nagging mothers, loathed in life, and loved only once they are safely dead. It happened because entire societies abdicated responsibility for their own problems, and instead blamed them on the people who represented-have always represented, since they first introduced the idea of commandedness to the world-the thing they were most afraid of: responsibility. The Holocaust didn’t happen because of a lack of love. That the Holocaust drives home the importance of love is an idea, like the idea that Holocaust education prevents antisemitism, that seems entirely unobjectionable. Here it is the ultimate message, the final solution. (Sept.“Love rarely comes up why would it? But it comes up here, in this for-profit exhibition. Enlivened by Horn’s sharp sense of humor and fluid prose, this penetrating account will provoke soul-searching by Jews and non-Jews alike. Recent efforts to refurbish Harbin’s Jewish heritage sites ignore that tragic history, however, in favor of fake artifacts and stereotypes about “rich and smart” Jews. (“Seems like a rather long time for the Anne Frank House to ponder whether it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding,” Horn quips.) Documenting her visit to the Chinese city of Harbin, Horn recounts how Russian Jews built the town in the early 20th century, only to have their community decimated by Japanese occupiers in the 1930s. She notes that it took months for leaders of the Anne Frank House to reverse their policy preventing an employee from wearing his yarmulke.

In this searing essay collection, novelist Horn ( Eternal Life) delves into the “many strange and sickening ways in which the world’s affection for dead Jews shapes the present moment.” Analyzing The Merchant of Venice, Holocaust memorials, and press coverage of a mass shooting at a Jersey City, N.J., kosher grocery store in 2019, among other topics, Horn comes to the conclusion that “the enormous public interest in past Jewish suffering” does not signify respect for living Jews.

Dara horn dead jews