Renowned and beloved as a prizewinning novelist Dara Horn has also been publishing penetrating
essays since she was a teenager. Often asked by major publications to write on subjects related
to Jewish culture-and increasingly in response to a recent wave of deadly antisemitic
attacks-Horn was troubled to realise what all of these assignments had in common: she was being
asked to write about dead Jews never about living ones. In these essays Horn reflects on
subjects as far-flung as the international veneration of Anne Frank the mythology that Jewish
family names were changed at Ellis Island the blockbuster travelling exhibition Auschwitz the
marketing of the Jewish history of Harbin China and the little-known life of the "righteous
Gentile" Varian Fry. Throughout she challenges us to confront the reasons why there might be
so much fascination with Jewish deaths yet so little respect for Jewish lives unfolding in the
present. Horn draws upon her travels her research and also her own family life-trying to
explain Shakespeare's Shylock to a curious ten-year-old her anger when swastikas are drawn on
desks in her children's school the profound perspective offered by traditional religious
practice and study-to assert the vitality complexity and depth of Jewish life against an
antisemitism that far from being disarmed by the mantra of "Never forget" is on the rise. As
Horn explores the (not so) shocking attacks on the American Jewish community in recent years
she reveals the subtler dehumanisation built into the public piety that surrounds the Jewish
past-making the radical argument that the benign reverence we give to past horrors is itself a
profound affront to human dignity.
