ARTS&LIFE BOOK REVIEW
BRENDAN SCHULMAN, WIKIPEDIA
Shocking Title, Great Read
A review of People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present by Dara Horn Dara Horn
LOUIS FINKELMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER
E
rnest Hemingway claimed that “a writer’s job is to tell the truth.” The thought goes back a long way. About 25 centuries earlier, Confucius wrote that “Wisdom depends on calling things by their proper names.” That sounds easy, but somehow, people get distracted. We do not see an event that happens in front of our eyes until a sharp-eyed writer names it truly. A sharp-eyed writer means someone like Dara Horn. Horn, a celebrated novelist (who also earned a Ph.D. at Harvard in Yiddish, Hebrew and English literature), in these essays focuses on the evasions we use to avoid recognizing antisemitism. The collection earns its shocking title, People Love Dead Jews. Each essay focuses on different circumstances, but in all the circumstances, we have trouble noticing hatred against Jews and find
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uplifting lessons we can learn from the murder of Jews. Hate crimes happen with disheartening frequency all around the world, and journalists routinely write stories about the latest violence against Blacks, gays, Muslims, Asians, Jews and other stigmatized groups. When reporting about hate crimes against Chasidic Jews, Horn notes, journalists often include a paragraph putting the crime in context: They report that ethnic tensions have grown in this changing neighborhood in reaction to an influx of Jews … or words to that effect. Horn notes that this contextualizing happens even when the perpetrator of the crime does not come from the neighborhood, and even when the neighborhood has shown no other signs of ethnic tension. Horn acidly translates the terminology of “changing neighborhood” and “influx of
Jews” as: “In other words, the cause of bloodthirsty antisemitic violence … Jews, living in a place! Sometimes the Jews who live in a place buy land on which to live” (page 211. Italics are Horn’s). Of course, journalists do not typically provide contextualizing paragraphs about attacks against Blacks, gays, Muslims or Asians. That would be blaming the victim and gaslighting. Contextualizing what Jews have done to provoke hate crimes deserves the name of antisemitism. In the 20th century, thousands of Jews turned to American courts to petition to have their names changed. They explained they wanted names that would not sound foreign, that other Americans could spell and pronounce. With these more Americansounding names, people could more easily fit in to America.
The courts generally allowed Epstein to become Evans, Levi to become Lewis, Finkelman to become Fields and so on. The petitioners avoided mentioning antisemitism, but Horn names antisemitism as the driving force that compelled name changes. She notes with ironic precision that some Americans did not change their hard-tospell foreign-sounding names and still achieved some measure of success with names like Eisenhower and Roosevelt. Horn notes that many of the people who felt they had to change their recognizably Jewish names did not intend to abandon their Jewish commitments. They remained active in the Jewish community. Name changing was often not a rejection of Judaism, but rather a recognition of the power of America’s antagonism toward Jews. Rather than admit that ugliness about
