Speakers: Dar Horn

A two-time National Jewish Book Award winner for her fiction, Dara Horn has also been publishing penetrating essays since she was a teenager, for publications including The New York Times, The Paris Review and The Wall Street Journal. Often asked to write on subjects related to Jewish culture – and increasingly in response to a recent wave of deadly antisemitic attacks – she was troubled to realise what all these assignments had in common: she was being asked to write about dead Jews, never about living ones. In the much-anticipated People Love Dead Jews: Reports From A Haunted Present, 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 traveling exhibition Auschwitz, the marketing of the Jewish history of Harbin, China, and the little-known life of the “righteous Gentile” Varian Fry. She challenges us to confront the reasons why there is so much fascination with Jewish deaths and so little respect for Jewish lives unfolding in the present. As well as her travels and research she also draws on her own family life, from trying to explain Shakespeare’s Shylock to a curious ten-year-old to her anger when swastikas are drawn on desks in her children’s school.