In Dara Horn's introduction to People Love Dead Jews (2021), the opening personal anecdote is from one of her own early interactions. Two non-Jewish girls asked her how she could possibly be blonde-haired and blue-eyed if she were truly Jewish. Didn't being Jewish entail that she was "from the Middle East"? Didn't Hitler report that "you all were dark"? Horn reports that, in the moment, she had the presence of mind to give "the correct answer: 'Hitler was full of shit.'" Today, her follow-up insight is that these girls "had learned about Jews mainly because people had killed Jews. Like most people in the world, they had only encountered dead Jews: people whose sole attribute was that they had been murdered, and whose murders served a clear purpose, which was to teach us something. Jews were people who, for moral and educational purposes, were supposed to be dead."
Non-Jews perceive Jewish identity “as simply a state of non-being: not being Christian or Muslim or whatever else other people apparently were,” and, when they considered Jews, to them “dead Jews were the most popular of all.” Disproportionately to Jews' percentage of the overall population, they have "played a behemoth role in other people’s imaginations." Horn decided that "the enormous public interest in past Jewish suffering" is not "a sign of respect for living Jews" but is instead "deeply perverse" and, "even in its most apparently benign and civic-minded forms, [it] is a profound affront to human dignity."
The book has a chapter on The Diary of Anne Frank. Anne Frank was a Jewish girl who hid in her closet in Amsterdam for two years before the Nazis finally found her and sent her to Auschwitz, then Bergen-Belsen, where she died at age 15. Her diary (published posthumously) is enormously popular precisely because this young teenager didn't write "a work about genocide. If it were [about genocide], it is unlikely that it would have been anywhere near as universally embraced." Analyzing Frank's work more precisely, we can see that she "wrote about people being 'truly good at heart' before meeting people who weren’t." She was still a child, and the Nazis hadn't captured her yet. The fact of the genocide, the context for which she was being hidden in a closet, "does not come up at all in Anne Frank’s writings" [emphasis mine].Aphorisms like "people are truly good at heart" help us to "feel forgiven," Horn says. They seem to offer "grace and absolution from a murdered Jew (exactly the gift that lies at the heart of Christianity)." But what does Frank get out of this? She never saw adulthood. She wrote in her diary: “I want to go on living even after my death!" If we think we are restoring her to life simply by reading her words, we are thinking too metaphorically. She was someone who wanted to live, and she wasn't allowed to. Disturbingly, it is her very "lack of a future" that generates "the entire appeal of Anne Frank to the wider world." In Horn's analysis, Anne Frank is one of those famously dead Jews who non-Jews seem to like more because they are dead. Their deadness is supposed to teach something and simultaneously absolve people for having required or allowed someone to die given that the living have learned something from it.
The Amsterdam house where Anne Frank famously hid is now a museum. One Jewish employee was not permitted to wear his yarmulke to work because, the employer argued, having visibly Jewish employees might (somehow?) make the organization seem biased (toward acknowledging the existence of Jews?), and four months passed before the museum agreed to let the employee wear the yarmulke. As Horn points out, just as Anne Frank was forced to hide her Jewishness, the directors of the museum tried to force their employee to hide his Jewishness. They had not learned from Anne Frank's plight; they replicated it. People want Jews to be invisible. People especially love dead Jews, as the title of Horn's book has it.
A related example of the same cultural preference: Elie Wiesel's first version of his Holocaust memoir, And the World Was Silent, was in Yiddish and it was angry. He toned it down "with the help of the French Catholic Nobel laureate François Mauriac", and it became La Nuit [Night] in French, "a work that repositioned the young survivor's rage into theological angst," after which he won the Nobel Peace Prize and was featured by Oprah’s Book Club.
Regarding museums that center on dead Jews — that is, on "anonymous dead people pressed into service to teach us something" a bit in the same way that corpses are used in medical exhibits — Horn discusses a couple approaches that these museums commonly take. One is to focus on the Jews' lives and culture while entirely avoiding the topic of why and how they died. This is done in Harbin, China, regarding the Russian Jewish community that was once there but is now extinct. These Jews are imagined to represent something desirable, like success in business, but there is just not a lot of explicit reflection on the fact and circumstances of their extinction. Another approach, taken elsewhere, is to focus only on the topic of why and how Jews died. This is a typical approach of Holocaust exhibits: making a general exhortation to empathy, asking the visitor to imagine what if this had been your fate? rather than to learn about the individual and cultural specificity of the people whose fate it actually was. One way or the other, there is a disproportionate focus on Jews' life or death; the commonality of these museums is that the Jews who are the museums' subjects are now dead; and to fully understand, care, and honor them, we ought to bring both their lives and deaths into view simultaneously, but this is not done because of the roles that non-Jews want dead Jews to play. Either the institutional narratives indulge in stereotypes of Jewish life (positive or negative) that those Jewish individuals and communities cannot rebut because they are already dead, or they invoke Jewish death as a metaphor for something about human dignity, suffering, and forgiveness that non-Jews can apply to themselves without seeing the specificity of Jewish life. But the Holocaust is not "a fancy metaphor for the limits of Western civilization" and, "for us [living Jews], dead Jews aren’t a metaphor, but rather actual people that we do not want our children to become." The Holocaust was a genocide, not "a morality play, a bumper sticker, a metaphor."
Horn points out a side-effect of delving into factual detail about how the Nazis murdered their victims. "Yes," she says, "everyone must learn about the Holocaust so as not to repeat it. But this has come to mean that anything short of the Holocaust is, well, not the Holocaust. The bar is rather high." We have come to hear a particular kind of excuse for doxxing, harassment, trolling: "Doxxing Jewish journalists is definitely not the Holocaust. Harassing Jewish college students is also not the Holocaust. Trolling Jews on social media is not the Holocaust either, even when it involves photoshopping them into gas chambers." Drily, she notes: "It is quite amazing how many things are not the Holocaust." In other words, closely examining the specifics of the Nazis' awfulness is an indirect way of licensing ourselves to feel we are forgiven for not being as bad as the Nazis.
Of the rescue of Jewish artists and intellectuals by the non-Jewish American Varian Fry, Horn raises at least two questions. First, which artists and intellectuals were judged worthy to be saved? Did their work need to appear minimally Jewish or otherwise appeal to non-Jews? For example: "That [Marc] Chagall’s art did not rely on a Jewish language — that it had, to use that insidious phrase, 'universal appeal' — allowed him a chance to succeed as an artist in the West." This is an important question. There is a caveat: In the context of asking who survives genocide (whether in terms of their bare life or their culture), it can tend to be victim-blaming, as it may imply that certain individuals were too Jewish or not Jewish enough and that they should have known the more pragmatic or more ethical thing to do, as those choices may seem clear to us from our very far-off 21st-century armchairs. Secondly, the praise of a single rescuer may fail to point out all the people in the dominant culture who weren't rescuers, and reflection upon the broader problem could lead us to a refusal to take the genocidal situation as a given and rather to object to there having been a need for "rescuers" in the first place. The discussion of how Jews (artists/intellectuals or not) chose, or were forced, to moderate their identities, and whether they ought to have made different choices, can evade the question of why they were not simply allowed to exist however they liked. The Holocaust was not a "natural disaster." It was not "a shipwreck or an epidemic." If we are going to make philosophical thought-experiments of it, we should ask whether, "if someone was in a position to choose whether to save person A or person B, shouldn't whole societies have been in the position to reject the notion of genocide altogether?"
Horn doesn't find "rescuer stories" inspirational since, when she looks at the statistics, they demonstrate that "the most righteous people available could do no more than provide, for a tiny number of people, the possibility of remaining alive." Also, while the rescuing may have provided a high point in the lives of the rescuers (at least when they too had reached safety and could ethically judge themselves in retrospect or wax nostalgic), it was a low point in the lives of communities that needed rescuing. Even those who survived may have felt ashamed (consciously or not) to have needed rescuing.
Fry, the rescuer, noted the philosophical problem in a New Republic article: How could it have been that the “heirs of the humanist tradition” committed genocide? But they did — so what then, Horn asks, was Fry trying to save when he targeted artists and intellectuals for rescue? He viewed them as part of the same European culture — or didn't he? They, too, belonged to the same humanist tradition — or didn't they?
Why did Fry — a good person — want to save people who fit artistic and intellectual criteria rather than, say, ethical criteria? Why did he not rescue people who were more likely to want to be rescuers themselves? Why does a certain discourse of ethics-and-culture value the preservation of culture but not primarily the preservation of its own ethics?
In this collection, Horn has an essay in which she acknowledges that American Jews who changed their last names generally did so voluntarily to avoid antisemitism; it was not done to them at Ellis Island. They often told their families it happened at Ellis Island, but this lie was told out of kindness, since they did not want to "implicate America" and thereby spoil their children's impression of their new home. "If you tell that story to your children," Horn says — that is, if you tell the truth that you chose to change your name to assimilate — "you’d be confirming two enormous fears: first, that this country doesn’t really accept you, and second, that the best way to survive and thrive is to dump any outward sign of your Jewish identity." If you instead lie about what happened, "you’ve made America into a place so welcoming that happy non-Jews greet you at the door, and then make innocent mistakes that coincidentally help you to fit right in, at no cost to you or to the three-thousand-year-old tradition you want to maintain." The name changes weren't happy, coincidental, "innocent mistakes" — they were choices by immigrants about their own names. Horn expresses compassion for people who chose to change their names. American Jews have long told themselves that the United States "has never been a place where antisemitism affected anyone’s life. We don’t simply prefer this founding legend. We need it." Psychologically, anyway, it has served a purpose. Here, I note that Horn is forgiving of myths that Jews tell to promote their own survival and wellbeing, and less forgiving of myths that non-Jews invent for their own consumption of stories about Jewish death.
If we cannot immediately think of different ways to talk about living Jews and dead Jews, we should try harder. Horn asks us to think about "the books the murdered people were reading at the hour of their deaths" and the books that Anne Frank did not live to write.
People Love Dead Jews can be ordered in print through Bookshop. I wrote a different essay about it for Medium. Readers with a paid membership on Medium don't have to worry about the paywall.
If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books.
