People Love Dead Jews
I just finished a staggeringly good book by Dara Horn called People Love Dead Jews. This collection of essays came out in 2021 and had its genesis in a Smithsonian article About Anne Frank that I remember reading in the magazine in 2018, here retitled as "Everyone's (Second) Favorite Dead Jew." The overall theme is an exploration not so much of anti-antisemitism as of, as one reviewer notes: "Horn explores the phenomenon of many (non-Jewish) people being more comfortable with reading stories about the Holocaust that have uplifting messages about a homogenized humanity than they are with learning anything about living, breathing Jewish people, let alone trying to protect those lives.". And she does it well. Every essay touches different interesting points, and most impressively it takes topics that I know an awful lot about and makes me reconsider everything I've learned previously in light of new angles and information that she brings to the surface.
Given my particular interest in memory, there was a section of the introductory essay "In the Haunted Present" that really resonated with me, so much so that I'm going to reproduce it below. As always, any typographic errors are on me.
When I began writing as a child, my driving force was not the urge to invent stories but the urge to stop time, to preserve those disappearing days. I kept journals that were more like reporter's notebooks, taking minutes on even the most boring events for no other reason than to lock them down on paper. It did not occur to me that most people were not concerned with this problem. It did not occur to me because in my family's religious practice, I found many thousands of years' worth of people who shared my obsession with this problem--and who had, to my child's mind, succeeded in solving it.
One of America's foundational legends is that it doesn't matter who your parents are, or who their parents were, or where you came from--that what matters is what you do now with the opportunities this country presents to you, and this is what we call the American dream. The fact that this legend is largely untrue does not detract from its power; legends are not reports on reality but expressions of a culture's values and aspirations. Judaism, too, has many foundational legends, and all of them express exactly the opposite of this idea. Ancient rabbinic tradition insists that it was not merely our ancestors who were liberated from Egyptian slavery, but that we ourselves were also personally freed by God. When God gave the Israelites the laws of the Torah at Mount Sinai, this tradition teaches, it was not merely that generation of Israelites who were present, but all of their future descendants, both biological and spiritual--stood with them at Sinai. In America, time was supposed to be a straight line where only the future mattered; in Judaism, it was more like a spiral of a spiral, a tangled old telephone cord in which the future was the present, which was essentially the past.
Every essay in this book is far above average. I particularly recommend to you "Legends of Dead Jews," which takes the myth that "our name was changed as Ellis Island" and completely explodes it by looking at the history. First off, nobody wrote down names at Ellis Island; those came from the manifests the immigration ships were obligated to hand over. Second, looking at the records of name change petitions in the 1930s in NYC, 2/3 of them were from Jews looking to make their name sound less Jewish. The reason given? Their name made them subject to antisemitism. Read the whole thing, it's breathtaking.
And while not tied to my personal bugaboo of memory, this excerpt from the near the end of the final essay seems disturbingly on point.
Of all the tedious and self-serving explanations for why this scourge [antisemitism] was apparently reemerging in American life (Guns! Trump! Trolls! Twitter!), the most convincing was actually the most boring, and also the most disturbing. The last few generations of American non-Jews had been chagrined by the enormity of the Holocaust--which had been perpetrated by America's enemy, and which was grotesque enough to make antisemitism socially unacceptable, even shameful. Now that people who remembered the shock of those events were dying off, the public shame associated with expressing antisemitism was dying too. In other words, hating Jews was normal. And historically speaking, the decades in which my parents had grown up simply hadn't been normal. Now, normal was coming back.
I hope that explanation is wrong, but it sure feels accurate.
Go read this book. I'll have to look into Dara Horn's novels, and beyond that this book added a number of entries to my slush list.
Given my particular interest in memory, there was a section of the introductory essay "In the Haunted Present" that really resonated with me, so much so that I'm going to reproduce it below. As always, any typographic errors are on me.
When I began writing as a child, my driving force was not the urge to invent stories but the urge to stop time, to preserve those disappearing days. I kept journals that were more like reporter's notebooks, taking minutes on even the most boring events for no other reason than to lock them down on paper. It did not occur to me that most people were not concerned with this problem. It did not occur to me because in my family's religious practice, I found many thousands of years' worth of people who shared my obsession with this problem--and who had, to my child's mind, succeeded in solving it.
One of America's foundational legends is that it doesn't matter who your parents are, or who their parents were, or where you came from--that what matters is what you do now with the opportunities this country presents to you, and this is what we call the American dream. The fact that this legend is largely untrue does not detract from its power; legends are not reports on reality but expressions of a culture's values and aspirations. Judaism, too, has many foundational legends, and all of them express exactly the opposite of this idea. Ancient rabbinic tradition insists that it was not merely our ancestors who were liberated from Egyptian slavery, but that we ourselves were also personally freed by God. When God gave the Israelites the laws of the Torah at Mount Sinai, this tradition teaches, it was not merely that generation of Israelites who were present, but all of their future descendants, both biological and spiritual--stood with them at Sinai. In America, time was supposed to be a straight line where only the future mattered; in Judaism, it was more like a spiral of a spiral, a tangled old telephone cord in which the future was the present, which was essentially the past.
Every essay in this book is far above average. I particularly recommend to you "Legends of Dead Jews," which takes the myth that "our name was changed as Ellis Island" and completely explodes it by looking at the history. First off, nobody wrote down names at Ellis Island; those came from the manifests the immigration ships were obligated to hand over. Second, looking at the records of name change petitions in the 1930s in NYC, 2/3 of them were from Jews looking to make their name sound less Jewish. The reason given? Their name made them subject to antisemitism. Read the whole thing, it's breathtaking.
And while not tied to my personal bugaboo of memory, this excerpt from the near the end of the final essay seems disturbingly on point.
Of all the tedious and self-serving explanations for why this scourge [antisemitism] was apparently reemerging in American life (Guns! Trump! Trolls! Twitter!), the most convincing was actually the most boring, and also the most disturbing. The last few generations of American non-Jews had been chagrined by the enormity of the Holocaust--which had been perpetrated by America's enemy, and which was grotesque enough to make antisemitism socially unacceptable, even shameful. Now that people who remembered the shock of those events were dying off, the public shame associated with expressing antisemitism was dying too. In other words, hating Jews was normal. And historically speaking, the decades in which my parents had grown up simply hadn't been normal. Now, normal was coming back.
I hope that explanation is wrong, but it sure feels accurate.
Go read this book. I'll have to look into Dara Horn's novels, and beyond that this book added a number of entries to my slush list.