That prompted a New York Times editor to ask if she would “like to write about dead Jews”. Shortly after the essay was published, a hate-fuelled gunman attacked the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 and wounding six. The title is derived from the opening lines of her 2018 essay on Anne Frank in the Smithsonian Magazine: “People love dead Jews. Horn addresses these issues her provocative 2021 book of essays, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present. Such as, why do people care so much about how many people died if they really don’t care how people in this famously literary culture actually lived? And why is Jewish identity so often defined by what the outside world did to the Jews rather than what Jews have stood for and accomplished through the millennia? That raises troubling follow-up questions. “My point, of course, is 80 percent of the people who were murdered in the Holocaust were Yiddish speakers,” she said. That’s a far tougher question for most in the room. “I would then ask those same readers: how many people here can name three Yiddish writers?” “That’s often something that many readers can do-or just three concentration camps,” Horn told the Straight by phone. author and essayist Dara Horn has a simple exercise to demonstrate how little most people know about Jewish culture.Īt public events, she asks how many of her readers in the audience can name four Nazi concentration camps.

People love dead jews book