Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
People Love Dead Jews : Reports from a Haunted Present, Paperback / softback Book

People Love Dead Jews : Reports from a Haunted Present Paperback / softback

Paperback / softback

Less than 10 available - usually despatched within 24 hours

Description

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.

Information

Other Formats

Save 5%

£13.99

£13.25

Less than 10 available - usually despatched within 24 hours
Add to Basket
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information