Dara Horn’s recent book, People Love Dead Jews: Reports From A Haunted Present, is a collection of essays about antisemitism and the exploitation and co-opting of Jewish history and stories. Horn explores the way stories about Jews are framed, how dead Jews are mythologized and living Jews are often vilified, and how modern antisemitism is downplayed. Her nonfiction writing can be found in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Jewish Review of Books, and The New York Times, among others. She has also won two National Jewish Book Awards and this book is a finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction. This is her first nonfiction book; she is also the author of five novels.
I know this book is extremely timely now, with the increase of antisemitism, particularly on social media. What was the catalyst for writing this book?
It’s something I started thinking about a few years ago, in 2018, when Smithsonian Magazine had approached me and asked me to do a feature for them about Anne Frank. I felt a lot of dread, and so the logical thing to do would have been to turn this assignment down. But I’ve written five novels, and what I’ve learned is that the uncomfortable moments are often where the story is. You would rather avoid where the story really is.
And then I remembered a news story that I had read about something that happened at the Anne Frank House. It’s a museum in Amsterdam that has the rooms where Anne and her family were hiding from the Nazis. It’s the kind of place where you have to book a ticket months in advance. I had seen a news item about how a young Jewish employee at this museum said his employers had refused to allow him to wear his yarmulke to work. They made him hide it under a baseball hat. He appealed the decision to the board of the museum, and then the board deliberated for four months and then eventually let him wear it to work. That’s a really long time for the Anne Frank House to decide whether or not it was a great idea to force a Jew into hiding.
And then in 2017, there was something weird with the audio guides the House had, for visitors that spoke other languages. When you go to museums, there’s usually a big flag next to the language. They have all these languages with the corresponding flags, except for Hebrew. There’s no flag. They did eventually correct this, but these aren’t really mistakes, right?
Something is happening here. And what’s happening is that there’s this requirement that you erase Jewish identity in order to earn public respect. It’s sort of like, the Museum’s mission was, of course, to teach people about the Jews’ humanity—but the nice Jews, that is; you know, like the dead ones. Not like the living ones who are going to do yucky things like practice Judaism or live in Israel. So this is a pattern and once you see it, what you see is total reverence when people are telling a story about dead Jews that makes them feel better about themselves.
And once it’s pointed out, you see it everywhere.
Oh, yeah.
There is so much information in each of these essays. How did you narrow your scope in each essay and keep the focus tight?
In some of them, I probably wrote too much. But now I have a whole podcast where it’s all the stories that are not in the book. It’s all new material. So the podcast is the companion to the book. This was my first non-fiction book. I’ve written five novels. I’ve written non-fiction before, since obviously a lot of the pieces in this book were published before, but it’s not automatic. That’s just not who I am. But what I am is a storyteller. I don’t claim to be this masterful storyteller, but the truth is that writing is thinking for me. I don’t know what I’m thinking about something until I write my way through it. So what I’m doing in each of these pieces, is that I’m encountering this uncomfortable thing, and then I’m taking you along as the reader on my journey to figure out what the problem is.
Is your process different for writing fiction than writing nonfiction?
I’m writing it the same way you’re reading it. I want to know what happens next. I’m working on a novel now; I’m 60,000 words in. And in theory that should be near the end, which implies that I would have some idea where this is going. I’ve no idea.
Do you have a writing routine? How has the pandemic affected it?
It was whenever the children were in school, and then there were the last two years where they weren’t in school, so it was whenever the children were playing video games. Which meant they were playing a lot of video games, so that was unfortunate. Now it’s back to when the children are in school. Or if I have a deadline for a podcast episode or something like that. It’s hard to work when people are around, so I had to just sort of figure it out, and sometimes kind of ignore my children. Or put in a movie or they play Minecraft. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is doing a lot for me. They seem to have an endless supply of movies; they’ve bought me a lot of time.
How do you think the creative community can support those who aren’t cis men, and mothers, especially?
I already feel like as a parent like I’m not part of any kind of writing community at all. I got married really young. I mean, I got engaged at twenty-two years old and I have four children. I’m not going to go to MacDowell Colony and leave my family for four weeks or whatever. I don’t even know how one would do that. It’s happened to me that I’ve been nominated or invited for some scholarships or fellowships where you were supposed to go for several months to Germany or something to work on your book. But because I have four children, I’m not going to go anywhere for three months. I’m also married to someone who has a job, so he’s also not going to pick up and move for several months.
I’m not really a good person to answer that question about being part of a creative community. Maybe the reason I’m not part of a creative community is because I’m middle-aged, in the ‘burbs. When my first book came out. I was living in New York and I was married, and I remember meeting other writers. That sort of thing was casually happening, and then I would do some events and maybe it would be a panel event with other writers, and maybe we go out for drinks afterwards, and I do remember meeting people in those kinds of contexts for a couple of years. But then that all just kind of shut down once I had children, because you’re doing a lot less socializing. I’ve definitely been very isolated as a parent, but it’s a larger problem. We live in a society that doesn’t care. This is a much bigger problem, but it goes way beyond writers.
What books inspire you, and what are you reading right now?
I was just reading David Grossman’s new novel, More Than I Love My Life, because I’m reviewing it. I read a lot of Israeli writers. I just started reading this book called Three Floors Up by Eshkol Nevo. But lately, it’s a lot of stuff that I was reviewing. I wrote a review of David Baddiel’s book, Jews Don’t Count. So that’s very on-brand for me.
I listen to audiobooks, but like, the classic books. So right now, I’m listening to The Aspern Papers by Henry James. And Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.
What do you hope people take away from this book?
Once you see this problem, you can’t unsee it, and you see how pervasive it is everywhere. What I’m really hoping is to reveal this for people who don’t see this as a problem. It’s to show what’s really happening. This exploitation that people just accept as normal. Does this title offend you? Then you’re going to be super offended by what’s inside the book.
And those are the very people that need to read it.
What’s on the horizon for you? I have a graphic novel for children. It’s on a Passover theme. I hired an illustrator to work on it, and now I’m shopping it around for a publisher. I also have support for it, which is nice because I was basically paying the illustrator out of my own pocket, but now I’ve been able to get support for his work. So that’s been terrific. But it’s nice. Yeah, it’s called One Little Goat and it’s about a family at a Passover seder, and they end up traveling through Jewish history and archaeology. So I have that and then podcast taking up a lot of my time. It’s been a lot of fun. And I wrote sixty thousand words of a new novel. So at some point, I’ll return to those pages.
Author photo (c) Michael B. Priest