PEOPLE

  LOVE

  DEAD

  JEWS

  Reports from a Haunted Present

  DARA HORN

  W.W. NORTON & COMPANY

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  For Maya, Ari, Eli, and Ronen,

  who know how to live

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  In the Haunted Present

  CHAPTER 1

  Everyone’s (Second) Favorite Dead Jew

  CHAPTER 2

  Frozen Jews

  CHAPTER 3

  Dead American Jews, Part One

  CHAPTER 4

  Executed Jews

  CHAPTER 5

  Fictional Dead Jews

  CHAPTER 6

  Legends of Dead Jews

  CHAPTER 7

  Dead American Jews, Part Two

  CHAPTER 8

  On Rescuing Jews and Others

  CHAPTER 9

  Dead Jews of the Desert

  CHAPTER 10

  Blockbuster Dead Jews

  CHAPTER 11

  Commuting with Shylock

  CHAPTER 12

  Dead American Jews, Part Three: Turning the Page

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  WORKS CONSULTED

  Introduction

  IN THE HAUNTED PRESENT

  SOMETIMES YOUR BODY IS SOMEONE ELSE’S HAUNTED house. Other people look at you and can only see the dead.

  I first discovered this at the age of seventeen in the most trivial of moments, at an academic quiz bowl tournament in Nashville, Tennessee—where, as the only girl from my New Jersey high school, I shared a hotel room with two girls from Mississippi. We were strangers and competitors pretending to be friends. One night we stayed up late chatting about our favorite childhood TV shows, about how we had each believed that Mr. Rogers was personally addressing us through the screen. We laughed together until one girl said, “It’s like Jesus. Even if he didn’t know my name when he was dying on the cross, I still know he loved me, and if he knew my name, he would have loved me too.” The other girl squealed, “I know, right? It’s just like Jesus!” Then the two of them, full of messianic joy, looked at me.

  I said nothing—a very loud nothing. The girls waited, uncomfortable, until one braved the silence. “It seems like people up north are much less religious,” she tried. “How often do you go to church?”

  It so happened that I was very religious. My family attended synagogue services weekly, or even more often than that; my parents were volunteer lay leaders in our congregation, and I had a job chanting publicly from the Torah scroll for the children’s congregation every Saturday morning, which effectively meant that I knew large swaths of the Five Books of Moses in the original Hebrew by heart. On Sundays, I spent four hours learning ancient Jewish legal texts at a program for teenagers at a rabbinical school in New York, and from eight to ten p.m. every Tuesday and Thursday, I studied Hebrew language in a local adult-education class. My public school closed for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but my siblings and I also skipped school for holidays like Sukkot, Simchat Torah, Passover, and Shavuot. I read works of Jewish philosophy for fun, tracking medieval and modern arguments about the nature of God. I often privately began and ended my days with traditional Hebrew prayers.

  All of this and more required an enormous amount of countercultural effort, education, and commitment on the part of my family that vastly exceeded merely “going to church.” But I sensed that this—“this” being the central pillar of my experience as a human being—was irrelevant to the question these girls were asking me. I mumbled something about a synagogue and tried to think of a way to steer us back to Mr. Rogers. But now the girls were staring at me, gaping in disbelief.

  “You,” one of the girls stammered, “you—you have blond hair!”

  The second girl inspected me, squinting at my face in a way that made me wonder if I had acne. “And what color are your eyes?”

  “Blue,” I said.

  The first girl said, “I thought Hitler said you all were dark.”

  In retrospect I can imagine many ways I might have felt about this statement, but at the time I was only baffled. I pictured my hand on the quiz-bowl buzzer I’d been pounding all week, and provided the correct answer: “Hitler was full of shit.”

  After a pause that lasted an eternity, one girl meekly offered, “I guess you’re kind of right.” Kind of. The other girl doubled down, demanding an explanation for my eye color if I were “from the Middle East.” But I was done being nice, if being nice meant defending my own face. I left the room, confused.

  That night I blurted to my mother from a hotel pay phone, “I don’t get it. These girls made it to the nationals. These are the smart people! And they’re getting their information from Hitler?”

  My mother sighed, a long, tired sigh. “I know,” she said, without elaborating. “I know.”

  My mother was the age then that I am now. And now I know too.

  Those girls were not stupid, and probably not even bigoted. But in their entirely typical and well-intentioned education, they 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.

  It took me many years to understand that those girls were not entirely wrong to look at me and think only of a terrifying past. I often felt haunted too.

  When I was a child, I had a question that burned within me, and Judaism seemed to answer it. My question was about the nature of time.

  I was obsessed with the unspoken and unnerving problem of being trapped in an eternal and inescapable present. As I got into bed each night, I would lie in the dark and wonder: This day that just ended is gone now. Where did it go? If I were a character in one of my novels, I would give the character a motivation for that constant longing. But I am not a fictional character. I had few words then for this deep sense of loss, nor any clear reason for it, other than that my mother came from a long line of women who had all died young, and her mourning for her own mother was something I observed and absorbed, without knowing what she or I was missing. The secondary nature of this grief only underscored the inexpressible feeling I had of arriving too late. With nothing to mourn, I nonetheless felt as though something were constantly flowing out of my life, just beneath its relentlessly cheerful surface. 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 reason other 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 many 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.

  This profound difference between these two sides of my identity was not abstract or subtle; it was obvious even to a child. In public school, my classmates and I pledged allegiance to the flag and aspired to form a more perfect union, fully invested in America’s future. But when we learned about the past—Pilgrims and Native Americans, Patriots and Tories, Yankees and Rebels—there was no “we.” In Hebrew school and in the traditional texts I read in synagogue and at home, it was just the opposite. The Hebrew Bible was never discussed in historical context, because we were the historical context. It was our present, and in my family’s religious life, it was treated that way. The creation of the world recurred every week at our Sabbath table, where we chanted Hebrew biblical passages about God resting on the seventh day and sang long medieval Hebrew poems about divine creativity in multipart harmony. On Passover, we ate the same matzah we’d been eating for millennia, still unable to find the time to let our bread rise during our flight to freedom. Every New Year, Abraham once more drew his knife to his son Isaac’s throat, holding our future hostage, fate and free will bound together in a double helix that caught us in its grip.

  When I went to Israel for the first time at the age of nine, I was stunned to discover that there was an actual
answer to my question about where those disappearing days had gone: they were underground. The first time I entered Jerusalem’s Old City, I walked down a flight of stairs that began on the current street level; at the bottom, I was stunned to step onto the paving stones from the street level during the Roman period, as though I had traveled through time instead of rock. The city itself was a kind of tel, an archaeological mound with layers of past centuries piled one on the other, some of which were preserved and exposed. As I grew older, I discovered that people had these layers too—that all people had those vanished days within them, whether or not they knew it. There was an alternative to being trapped in the present: a deep consciousness of memory that transcended any one person or lifetime. I dove into this possibility, body and soul. My studies of Hebrew—the language itself had layers, from airheaded TV shows all the way down to biblical bedrock—led to studies of Yiddish, which led to a doctorate in both, which flowed into my fiction. I wrote my way down into that tunnel through time, burrowing deeper into a past that was in fact the present, a breathing reality just beneath the surface of the current moment, until I was no longer afraid to fall asleep.

  This, to me, was what being Jewish meant, the gift it gave me in the wonderland of a country that long ago gave my family a future. But as I slowly came to understand, this was not what it meant to people who weren’t Jewish, or even to many Jews with little education in the culture. What Jewish identity meant to those people, it turned out, was simply a state of non-being: not being Christian or Muslim or whatever else other people apparently were (in Britain, for instance, more people identify as Jedis than as Jews), being alienated, being marginalized, or best of all, being dead. As thousands of Holocaust books and movies and TV shows and lectures and courses and museums and mandatory school curricula made abundantly clear, dead Jews were the most popular of all.

  For most of my adult life, I had no reason to recall that moment in the Nashville hotel. I had filed it deep in my brain, in the same mental sock drawer where I kept the high schoolers from the adjacent town who cheered for my school’s soccer team to “go to the gas,” or the student in the first college class I ever taught who refused to read an assigned 1933 Hebrew novel because Hebrew was “racist,” or the roommate who sobbed uncontrollably while informing me that I was going to hell. (I reassured her that at least I would know a lot of people there.) These incidents were oddities, weird and even laughable. They weren’t my normal, or the normal of anyone I knew.

  More than twenty-five years later, they still aren’t my normal, though they are now the normal of more than a few people I know. But in recent years I have had the misfortune of discovering the deep vein of normalcy that runs beneath these oddities, which is shared by seemingly good-faith cultural enterprises like Holocaust museums, canonical Western literature, and the elaborate restoration of Jewish historical sites as far away as China. I began to notice a certain gaslighting about the Jewish past and present that I had never seen before, even when it was right in front of me. I had mistaken the enormous public interest in past Jewish suffering for a sign of respect for living Jews. I was very wrong.

  This fact should have been obvious to me from the beginning of my writing career, when my most acclaimed early published piece, the one nominated for a major award, wasn’t the one about Jewish historical sites in Spain but rather the one about death camps. I made a point of resisting this reality, asking people at my public talks if they could name three death camps, and then asking the same people if they could name three Yiddish authors—the language spoken by over 80 percent of death-camp victims. What, I asked, was the point of caring so much about how people died, if one cared so little about how they lived? At the time, I did not appreciate how deep the obsession with dead Jews went, how necessary it was to so many people’s unarticulated concept of civilization, to their unarticulated concept of themselves. But as our current century wore on and public conversations about Israel became increasingly toxic—far beyond any normal political concern—and as public conversations about observant Jews took on the same tone, I came to recognize the mania for dead Jews as something deeply perverse, and all the more so when it wore its goodwill on its sleeve. I dealt with this perversity in the most honorable way possible: by avoiding it.

  For a writer and scholar of Jewish history and literature, this was challenging, because it meant avoiding the subjects my readers and students clearly loved most. Still, I tried. I wrote novels about Jewish spies during the Civil War, about a medieval Hebrew archive in Cairo, about Soviet Yiddish Surrealists, about a woman born in ancient Jerusalem who couldn’t manage to die. In my university courses and lectures, I emphasized the unprecedented revival of Hebrew, the evolving patterns of Israeli fiction, the growth of modern Yiddish poetry and drama out of traditional art forms, the complex internal religious debates that shaped secular writers’ works generations later. I fought hard to keep everything as autonomous as possible, making sure to tell the stories of how Jews had lived and what they had lived for, rather than how they had died. As I insisted to my Nashville roommates long ago, I was not that dark.

  But the past kept seeping into the present. By the end of 2018, after a massacre of Jews in our more perfect union that hardly came from nowhere, the only thing my readers, students, colleagues, and editors wanted me to talk about was dead Jews. I became the go-to person for the emerging literary genre of synagogue-shooting op-eds—a job I did not apply for, but one that I accepted out of fear of what someone less aware of history might write instead. Even outside of those news-headline incidents, I found myself asked, again and again, for my opinions on dead Jews. Perhaps I was expected to approach the subject with a kind of piety, an attitude that would generate some desperately needed hope and grace. After all, I was a living Jew (a writer, a religious person, even a Hebrew and Yiddish scholar), so I was clearly equipped to say something decorous and inspiring, something sad and beautiful that would flatter everyone involved.

  I couldn’t do it. I was too angry. My children were growing up in an America very different from the one I’d grown up in, one where battling strangers’ idiocies consumed large chunks of brain space and where the harassment and gaslighting of others—encounters like those I’d once buried in my mental sock drawer—were not the exception but the rule. My efforts to prove a negative—that we weren’t all dark—had failed, overwhelmed by the reality of being part of a ridiculously small minority that nonetheless played a behemoth role in other people’s imaginations.

  So instead of avoiding and rejecting this haunted-house world, where my family’s identity was defined and determined by the opinions and projections of others, I decided to lean directly into that distorted public looking glass and report what I found there: 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. I wish I did not feel the need to do this. But I want my children, and your children, to know.

  This book explores the many strange and sickening ways in which the world’s affection for dead Jews shapes the present moment. I hope you will find it as disturbing as I do.

  December 2020

  PEOPLE

  LOVE

  DEAD

  JEWS

  >

  Chapter 1

  EVERYONE’S (SECOND) FAVORITE DEAD JEW

  PEOPLE LOVE DEAD JEWS. LIVING JEWS, NOT SO MUCH.

  This disturbing idea was suggested by an incident in 2018 at the Anne Frank House, the blockbuster Amsterdam museum built out of Frank’s “Secret Annex,” or in Dutch, “Het Achterhuis [The House Behind]”—a series of tiny hidden rooms where the teenage Jewish diarist lived with her parents, her sister, and four other persecuted Jews for over two years before being captured by Nazis and deported to Auschwitz in 1944. Here’s how much people love dead Jews: Anne Frank’s diary, first published in Dutch in 1947 via her surviving father, Otto Frank, has been translated into seventy languages and has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, and the Anne Frank House now hosts well over a million visitors each year, with reserved tickets selling out months in advance. But when a young employee at the Anne Frank House tried to wear his yarmulke to work, his employers told him to hide it under a baseball cap. The museum’s goal was “neutrality,” one spokesperson explained to the British newspaper Daily Mail, and a live Jew in a yarmulke might “interfere” with the museum’s “independent position.” 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.