Perhaps there is no deeper understanding to be had. He is treated poorly because there is something repulsive about him, because he is a Jew. He is evil because he is treated poorly. In reality, her son suggests, Shylock’s words might be read as his justification for revenge. In a strange reversal, her son helps her to recognize that she has been conditioned to accept Shylock’s famous soliloquy as Shakespeare’s attempt at humanization.

Toward the book’s conclusion, in a particularly disturbing chapter, the author listens to an audio version of The Merchant of Venice with her ten-year-old.

Fry, the first American to be named a “Righteous Among the Nations,” rescued the anti-Nazi cultural elite, many of whom were Jews, from certain death. She explores the motivations of Varian Fry and those who preserve his memory. She explores fascination with Anne Frank, the recent establishment of a museum to the now defunct Jewish community of Harbin, China, an interest in “uplifting” Holocaust fiction (and the movies made from these bestsellers), and an online archive of the forgotten Jewish communities of North Africa and Asia. In the chapters that follow, the author moves the reader back and forth between examples of the world’s fascination, and at times obsession, with dead Jews and the antisemitic events of Pittsburgh ( 2018), San Diego ( 2019), and Jersey City ( 2019). As Horn concludes in her introduction, the goal of People Love Dead Jews is “to unravel, document, describe, and articulate the endless unspoken ways in which the popular obsession with dead Jews, even in its most apparently benign and civic-minded forms, is a profound affront to human dignity.” Weaving together history, social science, and personal story, she asks readers to think critically about why we venerate stories and spaces that make the destruction of world Jewry a compelling narrative while also minimizing the current crisis of antisemitism.

Why society is fascinated with the death of Jews but cares little for living Jews is the subject of Dara Horn’s newest book.

People Love Dead Jews by Dara Horn