#people love dead jews: reports from a haunted present
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The line most often quoted from Frank's diary are her famous words, “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” These words are “inspiring,” by which we mean that they flatter us. They make us feel forgiven for those lapses of our civilization that allow for piles of murdered girls – and if those words came from a murdered girl, well, then, we must be absolved, because they must be true. The gift of grace and absolution from a murdered Jew (exactly the gift that lies at the heart of Christianity) is what millions of people are so eager to find in Frank's hiding place, in her writings, in her “legacy.” It is far more gratifying to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognize the obvious: Frank wrote about people being “truly good at heart” before meeting people who weren't. Three weeks after writing those words, she met people who weren't.
— People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present (Dara Horn)
#book quotes#dara horn#people love dead jews: reports from a haunted present#history#antisemitism#holocaust#anne frank#concentration camps
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"Holocaust novels that have sold millions of copies both in the United States and overseas in recent years are all "uplifting," even when they include the odd dead kid. The Tattooist of Auschwitz, a recent international mega-bestseller touted for its true story," manages to present an Auschwitz that involved a heartwarming romance. Sarah's Key, The Book Thief, The Boy in Striped Pajamas, and many other bestsellers, some of which have even become required reading in schools, all involve non-Jewish rescuers who risk or sacrifice their own lives to save hapless Jews, thus inspiring us all. (For the record, the number of actual "righteous Gentiles" officially recognized by Yad Vashem, Israel's national Holocaust museum and research center, for their efforts in rescuing Jews from the Holocaust is under 30,000 people, out of a European population of at the time of nearly 300 million - or .001 percent. Even if we were to assume that the official recognition is an undercount by a factor of ten thousand, such people remain essentially a rounding error." In addition to their wonderful non-Jewish characters, these books are almost invariably populated by the sort of relatable dead Jews whom readers can really get behind: the mostly non-religious, mostly non-Yiddish-speaking ones whom noble people tried to save, and whose deaths therefore teach us something beautiful about our shared and universal humanity, replete with epiphanies and moments of grace. Statistically speaking, this was not the experience of almost any Jews who endured the Holocaust. But for literature in non-Jewish languages, that grim reality is both inconvenient and irrelevant."
- Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present
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In school growing up I sang fake English Hanukkah songs created by American music education companies at school Christmas concerts, with lyrics describing Hanukkah as being about "joy and peace and love." Joy and peace and love describe Hanukkah, a commemoration of an underdog military victory over a powerful empire, about as well as they describe the Fourth of July. I remember challenging a chorus teacher about one such song, and being told that I was a poor sport for disliking joy and peace and love. (Imagine a "Christmas song" with lyrics celebrating Christmas, the holiday of freedom. Doesn't everyone like freedom? What pedant would reject such a song?)
Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present
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Sometimes your body is someone else's haunted house. Other people look at you and can only see the dead.
from People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present by Dara Horn
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Weekly Recap (8th – 14th May 2023)
Study
Read Among the Mongols (ch6-9)
Read 4 MGL articles
Read 5 MGL photo essays
Read 60 articles
Reread 4 articles
Reading (non-fiction)
Read The English Medieval Minstrel (ch1)
Read People Love Dead Jews: Reports From a Haunted Present (intro, ch1-5)
Read Bedlam: London and Its Mad (intro, ch1)
Read The Austerity Olympics: When the Games Came to London in 1948 (intro)
Read A History of God (intro)
Reading (fiction)
Reread 3 Shirley Jackson short stories
Read Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
Read House on Endless Waters by Emuna Elon (ch 1-28)
Read The Wasps by Aristophanes
Read The Frogs by Aristophanes
Writing
Wrote Iris (Step 0) – 2117 words
Music
Played flute for L. (Thursday)
Listened to Yishan Mountain Fantasy || Gada Meilin symphonic poem || Fantasia of the Red Guards on the Hong Lake || Hong Nianzi symphonic poem || Yellow Crane Mansion symphonic poem || Butterfly Lovers Violin Concerto (performed by Tang Baodi)
Exercise
Tuesday 1.4km exercycle
Saturday 1.4km exercycle
Other
Knitted 3 scarf rows
3 shorter readings
Read 30 photo essays/collections/etc
Watched 4 videos
Watched geography drone footage (18min)
Puzzles
Special Daily Hashi (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday)
Special Weekly Hashi
11 25x25 Hashi (hard)
32 Suguru
2 Killer Sudoku
1 Sudoku
1 Wordhunt
1 Mini Sudoku
6 Mental Sums
2 Number Fit
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Posted @withregram • @streickercenter In 2021, Dr. Dara Horn published “People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present.” Two years later, people have felt like they were seeing the title of her book, unfortunately, coming to life before their eyes.
When the award-winning author stopped by the #StreickerCenter to speak on our “Jewish Challenges, Jewish Solutions in the Wake of the Unthinkable” panel, we asked her what she would like to say to people who didn’t fully believe her warnings before October 7th. Here’s what she had to say about the impact of her book in today’s world.
#darahorn #peoplelovedeadjews #jewishpriorities #antisemitism #antisemitismus #stopantisemitism #stophhate #noplaceforhate #standuptojewishhate #fightinghateforgood #jew #jewish #jewsofinstagram #jewishlife #jewishculture #jewishjoy #jewishpride #jewishnyc #jewishevents #jewishbooks #jewishauthors #jewishcelebrities #americanjews #proudjew
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Prize-winning author Dara Horn to discuss her book People Love Dead Jews Oct. 12 at Lafayette College
Prize-winning author Dara Horn to discuss her book People Love Dead Jews Oct. 12 at Lafayette College
Award-winning novelist Dara Horn will discuss her latest critically acclaimed book, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present, 7:30-9 p.m. Oct. 12 in Lafayette College’s Colton Chapel. The event is free and open to the public.
Moderator Monika Rice, assistant professor of Jewish studies and Russian and East European studies at Lafayette, will discuss with Horn why she wrote the…
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I was finally able to use my barnes and noble giftcard I got for christmas!!!
Not all of these were my first choice, as a ton of books that I was looking for weren't in stock, I am happy with what I got!
#I'll look at the used book store in town and the library first before hitting up amazon for the rest#but I really want to read; The Sympathizer;#How We Survived Communism & Even Laughed;#Last Days at Hot Slit;#Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism;#and#People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present#so I'll have to go hunting around
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Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present
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I had mistaken the enormous public interest in past Jewish suffering for a sign of respect for living Jews. I was very wrong.
— People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present (Dara Horn)
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"Jews have lived throughout the Middle East and North Africa for thousands of years, of ten in communities that long pre-dated the Islamic conquest. But during the mid-twentieth century's tumultuous power shifts in the region between colonial and post colonial control, political instability, and antisemitic violence intensified to create a vast exodus, driving nearly a million Jews to emigrate to Israel and elsewhere, leaving entire countries all but dead of Jews - and leaving behind synagogues, schools, and cemeteries that served these communities for generations. The circumstances of this mas migration varied. In some places, like Morocco, the Jewish community's flight was largely voluntary, driven partly by sporadic antisemitic violence but mostly by poverty and fear of regime change. At the other extreme are countries like Iraq, where Jews were stripped of their citizenship and had their assets seized, and where, in the capital city of Baghdad, a 1941 pogrom left nearly two hundred Jews murdered and hundreds of Jewish-owned homes and businesses looted or destroyed."
- Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present
#dara horn#people love dead jews#antisemitism#history#jewish history#arab history#arab communities#baghdad#morocco#pogrom
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Two distinct patterns of antisemitism can be identified by the Jewish holidays that celebrate triumphs over them: Purim and Hanukkah. In the Purim version of antisemitism, exemplified by the Persian genocidal decrees in the Book of Esther, the goal is openly stated and unambiguous: kill all the Jews. In the Hanukkah version of antisemitism, whose appearances range from the Spanish Inquisition to the Soviet regime, the goal is still to eliminate Jewish civilization. But in the Hanukkah version, this goal could theoretically be accomplished simply by destroying Jewish civilization, while leaving the warm, de-Jewed bodies of its former practitioners intact.
For this reason, the Hanukkah version of antisemitism often employs Jews as its agents. It requires not dead Jews but cool Jews: those willing to give up whatever specific aspect of Jewish civilization is currently uncool. Of course, Judaism has always been uncool, going back to its origins as the planet's only monotheism, featuring a bossy and unsexy invisible God. Uncoolness is pretty much Judaism's brand, which is why cool people find it so threatening- and why Jews who are willing to become cool are absolutely necessary to Hanukkah antisemitism's success. These "converted" Jews are used to demonstrate the good intentions of the regime- which of course isn't antisemitic but merely requires that its Jews publicly flush thousands of years of Jewish civilization down the toilet in exchange for the worthy prize of not being treated like dirt, or not being murdered. For a few years. Maybe.
Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present
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People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present by Dara Horn https://amzn.to/3yYKGIw
https://bookshop.org/a/17891/9780393531565
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This new normal culminated in a particularly horrifying attack, when a man entered a crowded Hanukkah party at a Hasidic rabbi’s house in Monsey, New York, wielding a four-foot machete, and stabbed or slashed five people, all of whom were hospitalized; one victim, who fell into a coma, died several months later from his wounds. Stabbing Jews was apparently in vogue in Monsey, as this was actually the second antisemitic knifing in town in just over a month. The previous attack’s victim was beaten and stabbed while walking to morning prayers, winding up in critical condition with head injuries. Media coverage of these attacks also sometimes featured “context” (read: gaslighting), mentioning heated school-board or zoning battles between Hasidic and non-Hasidic residents—even after the perpetrator was identified as a resident of a town forty minutes away. One widely syndicated Associated Press article situated the previous week’s bloodbath by informing millions of readers that “The expansion of Hasidic communities in New York’s Hudson Valley, the Catskills and northern New Jersey has led to predictable sparring over new housing development and local political control. It has also led to flare-ups of rhetoric seen by some as antisemitic.” In other words, the cause of bloodthirsty antisemitic violence is . . . Jews, living in a place! Sometimes, Jews who live in places even buy land on which to live. To be fair, there were many countries and centuries in which this Jews-owning-land monkey business was illegal, though twenty-first-century Hudson Valley, the Catskills, and northern New Jersey are sadly not among those enlightened locales. Predictably, this leads to sparring, and flare-ups. Who wouldn’t express frustration with municipal politics by hacking people with a machete?
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.
There was no way I could write about any of this for the New York Times, or any other mainstream news outlet. I could not stomach all the “to be sures” and other verbal garbage I would have to shovel in order to express something acceptable to a non-Jewish audience in a thousand words or less. I could no longer handle the degrading exercise of calmly explaining to the public why it was not OK to partially amputate someone’s arm with a four-foot-long blade at a holiday party, even if one had legitimate grievances with that person’s town council votes. Nor could I announce, as every non-Jewish media outlet would expect, that these people whose hairstyles one dislikes are “canaries in the coal mine,” people whose fractured skulls we all ought to care about because they serve as a warning—because when Jews get murdered or maimed, it might be an ominous sign that actual people, people who wear athleisure, might later get attacked! I was done with this sort of thing, which amounted to politely persuading people of one’s right to exist.
— Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports From a Haunted Present
#sorry for how graphic this is#but it really hit for me#dara horn#what I’m reading#antisemitism#quote#books#people love dead jews#mine#moth.txt
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Weekly Recap (15th – 21st May 2023)
Study
Read Among the Mongols (ch6-7)
Read 39 articles
Reading (non-fiction)
Finished reading People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present (ch6-12)
Read Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (further reading)
Read The Victorians (intro & ch1)
Read Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: and other lessons from the crematory (intro & ch1-2)
Read Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania are Ruining Kids' Sports (intro)
Reading (fiction)
Read Les Misérables (part 1)
Read Much Ado About Nothing (intro)
Read Our Missing Hearts (some more)
Read House on Endless Waters (ch29)
Read The Poet and the Women by Aristophanes (Scene 1)
Read The Miseducation of Cameron Post (ch1)
Read Incidents in the Rue Langier (ch1)
Read Exodus by Leon Uris (ch1-8)
Writing
Wrote Iris (Step 0) – 323 words
Music
Listened to Vienna Boys' Choir “Edelweiss” – 15 songs
Listened to Cambridge Singers “Flora Gave Me Fairest Flowers” – 25 songs
Found new cleaning rag for flute
Exercise
Monday 3.1km exercycle
Other
Watched 3 videos
Read 19 photo essays/collections/etc
Cleaned & tidied desk with Mum (Monday)
Sorted out new keyboard with Mum (Monday)
Argentina food place with Sue (Wednesday)
Garden Centre with Sue (Wednesday)
VCed James
Sorted out 4K 360°E videos
Rescheduled flu vaccine
Puzzles
Special Daily Hashi (Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday)
Special Weekly Hashi
Special Monthly Hashi
Special Daily Loop (Sunday)
7 25x25 Hashi (hard)
38 Suguru
2 Killer Sudoku
#studyblr#weekly recaps#personal#this week sucked obviously#that was almost no study and almost no exercise#GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER
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Two distinct patterns of antisemitism can be identified by the Jewish holidays that celebrate triumphs over them: Purim and Hanukkah. In the Purim version of antisemitism, exemplified by the Persian genocidal decrees in the biblical Book of Esther, the goal is openly stated and unambiguous: Kill all the Jews. In the Hanukkah version of antisemitism, whose appearances range from the Spanish Inquisition to the Soviet regime, the goal is still to eliminate Jewish civilization. But in the Hanukkah version, this goal could theoretically be accomplished simply by destroying Jewish civilization, while leaving the warm, de-Jewed bodies of its former practitioners intact.
For this reason, the Hanukkah version of antisemitism often employs Jews as its agents. It requires not dead Jews but cool Jews: those willing to give up whatever specific aspect of Jewish civilization is currently uncool. Of course, Judaism has always been uncool, going back to its origins as the planet's only monotheism, featuring a bossy and unsexy invisible God.
Uncoolness is pretty much Judaism's brand, which is why cool people find it so threatening - and why Jews who are willing to become cool are absolutely necessary to Hanukkah antisemitism's success. These "converted" Jews are used to demonstrate the good intentions of the regime - which of course isn't antisemitic but merely requires that its Jews publicly flush thousands of years of Jewish civilization down the toilet in exchange for the worthy prize of not being treated like dirt, or not being murdered. For a few years. Maybe.
From Chapter 4, “Executed Jews”, in People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present by Dara Horn
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