The problem with inspirational dead Jews - The Jewish Chronicle

Jews don’t count, as David Baddiel so eloquently reminded us this year, pointing out the invisibility of Jews and our concerns from so many aspects of the progressive left in his short, polemical book. Now the American writer Dara Horn has taken the argument quite a few steps further in her new collection of essays, published recently along with the launch of a new podcast. Not only do Jews not count, Horn argues, but the world actively prefers dead Jews to the living.

People Love Dead Jews is its wince-inducing title, and its targets go well beyond the world of woke. From American to China, via Amsterdam and Syria, Horn examines ways in which all kinds of cultures and narratives laud and celebrate the fantasy of Jews of the past, while erasing and misrepresenting living Jews. It’s a fascinating read, although more than a little depressing, I tell her when we speak on Zoom.

Focusing on the negative goes against the grain, she insists, pointing out that one of her award-winning novels was about a Jewish woman who lives for 2,000 years — “the Jew who can’t die!”. She has been a writer since she was a teenager, starting with journalism and proceeding to novels, while bringing up her four children (and her efforts to work alongside bringing up a family may explain why she appears to be speaking to me from a clothes cupboard).

Examining the ways that Jews are talked about came naturally for someone who has studied Hebrew, Yiddish and English literature. And as a prominent Jewish writer, when there was a spate of attacks on Jews in synagogues in the US, “I became the go-to person to write op-eds. People expected me to write something sad and beautiful and ultimately hopeful.” She felt an increasing discomfort at the disconnect between the expectations of others and what she wanted to write.

And then came the attack on Jews that no one asked her to write about, on a kosher grocery store in Jersey City, in her native New Jersey by assailants who, police concluded were armed for an attack on a Jewish school. In the book she rails against the “context” supplied by news outlets, calling it “breathtaking in its cruelty.” She’s referring to the supposed “racial tension” and “pushback” against Chasidic families moving to the area, reported in a way that almost seemed to excuse the murderers. “There was no way I could write about any of this for the New York Times,” writes Horn. “…Nor could I announce, as every non-Jewish media outlet would expect, that these people whose hairstyles one dislikes are “canaries in the coalmine”, people whose fractured skulls we 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.”

The first essay in the book, the one which gives it its title, starts with the line “People love dead Jews. Living Jews, not so much,” inspired by an incident in 2018 at the Anne Frank Huis in Amsterdam, the blockbuster museum on the site where the teenage diarist hid from the Nazis. There an employee was asked to remove his yarmulke, or hide it under a baseball cap, in the interests, he was told, of “neutrality”.

“The museum finally relented after deliberating for four months, which 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,” writes Horn in an essay which goes on to ponder why Frank’s diary became a best seller, because, she concludes, Anne’s experiences at Westerbork, Auschwitz and Belsen where she died, were not part of it, because her words of hope — her belief that “people are truly good at heart” —are considered inspirational, and offer absolution. “That 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 recognise the obvious: Frank wrote about people being ‘truly good at heart’ before meeting people who weren’t.”

This Christian framework is so often imposed on Jewish stories, says Horn, the ‘sense of an ending’ identified by the literary critic Frank Kermode as reflecting religion’s way of giving meaning to life. By religion, of course he meant Christianity, the framework to so many of our expectations. This, says Horn, is not how Yiddish literature works. Often the power of a book lies in the lack of change and redemption, “the hero doesn’t learn anything, there is no moment of grace.”

The same, she says, is true of modern Hebrew literature where often the narrator “goes nowhere and then hits a wall. There is no need of a resolution.”

Listen to Horn’s podcast, Adventures with Dead Jews, and you understand the tone of her book — a very Jewish, very American, eyebrows raised “Can you believe this” kind of anger, as she deftly unpacks the attitudes of the international heritage industry, the media, and a publishing industry which churns out Holocaust novels designed to inspire the non-Jewish reader with their statistically unlikely tales of heroic rescuers and “the sort of relatable dead Jews that readers can 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.”

In contrast, she tells me about her favourite Israeli novel, Mr Mani written by A B Yehoshua, about five generations of a family with a suicide gene, a story which goes back in time to untie the origins of the self-destructive urge. “It’s a fantastic book,” she says, “which ends with a question.”

The questions and ideas raised by Horn in People Love Dead Jews are — like the Yiddish stories she writes about — endless and defiant of neat solutions. But there is comfort to be found, in the most Jewish ways, in her humour and clear-eyed critical thinking. And there’s her description of talmudic study. The endless, timeless spiral of questions and responses, gave her a way to turn away from the shocking news of attacks on Jews “toward the old, the ancient.” She is “forever haunted, as living people always are, our minds the dwelling places for the fears and hopes of those who came before us.” But she carries on turning the pages “carried by fellow readers, living and dead.”

People Love Dead Jews is published by WW Norton & Company