That is, how Jews seem to love to read about how people love dead Jews. What is perhaps most striking about Horn’s book isn’t the book itself (more on that below) but how badly Jews want to read it. Why would an upwardly-mobile talented writer of fiction from the belly of American suburbia with a PhD in Yiddish literature from Harvard write a book about how everyone, everywhere, sooner or later hates Jews, banishes or kills them, and then memorializes them? And how is it that such a book becomes an instant bestseller? Of course, this book is written by a person with the best education in the world, in a free country where her Jewishness is not only protected, but where the president just appointed a special envoy to fight antisemitism (and, it’s worth noting, where there’s no special envoy to fight racism or Islamophobia). That seems to be for Horn the common denominator of human civilization. Dead Jews is the subject of the book not, mind you, antisemitism, but literally: dead Jews. In fact, in reading Horn’s book one might think the only thing that all peoples share, from Russia to America, from Manchuria to Jersey City, is that they love dead Jews. The premise is that people - not everyone of course - but all kinds of people in all kinds of places, throughout all periods of history, sometimes embraced Jews, until they didn’t. Not circumstantial victimhood, not situational victimhood, but systemic victimhood. People Love Dead Jews is a book about collective victimhood and the inability to disentangle from it. Many locales where Jews once lived, and sometimes still live, but were also banished from or murdered. Non-Jews of all sorts and from many places China, America, the Soviet Union, Syria etc.

The “people” in the title are not Jews, but non-Jews. But I’m not the “people” Dara Horn is referring to in her new book People Love Dead Jews. As a scholar of Judaism I spend my days reading, writing, thinking about, and teaching about dead Jews.

Book people love dead jews