People Love Dead Jews Quotes

“The line most often quoted from Frank’s diary are her famous words, “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” These words are “inspiring,” by which we mean that they flatter us. They make us feel forgiven for those lapses of our civilization that allow for piles of murdered girls—and if those words came from a murdered girl, well, then, we must be absolved, because they must be true. That gift of grace and absolution from a murdered Jew (exactly the gift that lies at the heart of Christianity) is what millions of people are so eager to find in Frank’s hiding place, in her writings, in her “legacy.” It is far more gratifying to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognize the obvious: Frank wrote about people being “truly good at heart” before meeting people who weren’t. Three weeks after writing those words, she met people who weren’t.”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“Since ancient times, in every place they have ever lived, Jews have represented the frightening prospect of freedom. As long as Jews existed in any society, there was evidence that it in fact wasn't necessary to believe what everyone else believed, that those who disagreed with their neighbors could survive and even flourish against all odds. The Jews' continued distinctiveness, despite overwhelming pressure to become like everyone else, demonstrated their enormous effort to cultivate that freedom: devotion to law and story, deep literacy, and an absolute obsessiveness about consciously transmitting those values between generations. The existence of Jews in any society is a reminder that freedom is possible, but only with responsibility—and that freedom without responsibility is no freedom at all.”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“The insane conspiracy theories that motivate people who commit antisemitic violence reflect a fear of real freedom: a fondness for tyrants, an aversion to ideas unlike their own, and most of all, a casting-off of responsibility for complicated problems. None of this is a coincidence.”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“What one finds in Jewish storytelling, though, is something really different: a kind of realism that comes from humility, from the knowledge that one cannot be true to the human experience while pretending to make sense of the world.”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“Judaism has always been uncool, going back to its origins as the planet’s only monotheism, featuring a bossy and unsexy invisible God. Uncoolness is pretty much Judaism’s brand, which is why cool people find it so threatening”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“Here's how much some people dislike living Jews: they murdered 6 million of them. This fact bears repeating, as it does not come up at all in Anne Frank's writing. Readers of her diary are aware that the author was murdered in a genocide, but this does not mean that her diary is a work about genocide. If it were, it is unlikely that it would have been anywhere near as universally embraced.”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“...(O)ver four generations, the Soviet regime forced Jews to participate in and internalize their own humiliation--and in that way, Ala suggested, they destroyed far more souls. And they never, ever paid for it.

"They never had a Nuremberg," Ala told me that day, with a quiet fury. "They never acknowledged the evil of what they did. The Nazis were open about what they were doing, but the Soviets pretended. They lured the Jews in, they baited them with support and recognition, they used them, they tricked them, and then they killed them. It was a trap. And no one knows about it, even now. People know about the Holocaust, but not this. Even here in Israel, people don't know. How did you know?”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“the entire appeal of Anne Frank to the wider world—as opposed to those who knew and loved her—lay in her lack of a future.”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“Love rarely comes up; why would it? But it comes up here, in this for-profit exhibition. Here it is the ultimate message, the final solution. That the Holocaust drives home the importance of love is an idea, like the idea that Holocaust education prevents antisemitism, that seems entirely unobjectionable. It is entirely objectionable. The Holocaust didn’t happen because of a lack of love. It happened because entire societies abdicated responsibility for their own problems, and instead blamed them on the people who represented—have always represented, since they first introduced the idea of commandedness to the world—the thing they were most afraid of: responsibility. Then as now, Jews were cast in the role of civilization’s nagging mothers, loathed in life, and loved only once they are safely dead. In the years since I walked through Auschwitz at fifteen, I have become a nagging mother. And I find myself furious, being lectured by this exhibition about love—as if the murder of millions of people was actually a morality play, a bumper sticker, a metaphor. I do not want my children to be someone else’s metaphor. (Of course, they already are.) My husband’s grandfather once owned a bus company in Poland. Like my husband”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“The freedoms that we cherish are meaningless without our commitments to one another: to civil discourse, to actively educating the next generation, to welcoming strangers, to loving our neighbors. The beginning of freedom is the beginning of responsibility. Our night of vigil has already begun.”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“...Soviet support for Jewish culture was part of a larger plan to brainwash and coerce national minorities into submitting to the Soviet regime--and for Jews, it came at a very specific price. From the beginning, the regime eliminated anything that celebrated Jewish "nationality" that didn't suit its needs. Jews were awesome, provided they weren't practicing the Jewish religion, studying traditional Jewish texts, using Hebrew, or supporting Zionism. The Soviet Union thus pioneered a versatile gaslighting slogan, which it later spread through its client states in the developing world and which remains popular today: it was not antisemitic, merely anti-Zionist. (In the process of not being antisemitic and merely being anti-Zionist, the regime managed to persecute, imprison, torture, and murder thousands of Jews.) What's left of Jewish culture once you surgically remove religious practice, traditional texts, Hebrew and Zionism?”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“between the raindrops" - a Hebrew expression for evading repeated disaster.”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“Think about what we expect from the endings of stories—not just Denise, but all of us. We expect the good guys to be “saved.” If that doesn’t happen, we at least expect the main character to have an “epiphany.” And if that doesn’t happen, then at least the author ought to give us a “moment of grace.” All three are Christian terms. So many of our expectations of literature are based on Christianity—and not just Christianity, but the precise points at which Christianity and Judaism diverge. And then I noticed something else: the canonical works by authors in Jewish languages almost never give their readers any of those things.”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“Destruction and humiliation didn’t matter. Only memory and integrity did. Was the hour I was living through right now different from the hour they were living through then? Did it matter? From what hour does one recite the evening Sh’ma?”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“What one finds in Jewish storytelling, though, is something really different: a kind of realism that comes from humility, from the knowledge that one cannot be true to the human experience while pretending to make sense of the world. These are stories without conclusions, but full of endurance and resilience. They are about human limitations, which means that the stories are not endings but beginnings, the beginning of the search for meaning rather than the end—and the power of resilience and endurance to carry one through to that meaning. Tevye, after grieving for his wife, daughter, and son-in-law and being expelled from his home, finally leaves the reader with a line that would never work on Broadway: “Tell all”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“In fact, Sauvage believes that the reason Fry is so unknown is precisely because he reveals U.S. complicity in the Holocaust. “We live on two myths—that we didn’t know, and that we couldn’t do anything even if we did know,” Sauvage said to me as soon as I sat down in his office. “This is the religion, and it isn’t true. We knew plenty and could have done a lot.”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“One of America’s many foundational legends is that it doesn’t matter who your parents are, or who their parents were, or where you came from—that what matters is what you do now with the opportunities this country presents to you, and this is what we call the American dream. The fact that this legend is largely untrue does not detract from its power; legends are not reports on reality but expressions of a culture’s values and aspirations. Judaism, too, has many foundational legends, and all of them express exactly the opposite of this idea.”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“Here’s how much some people dislike living Jews: they murdered 6 million of them.”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“The line most often quoted from Frank’s diary are her famous words, “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” These words are “inspiring,” by which we mean that they flatter us.”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“But over four generations, the Soviet regime forced Jews to participate in and internalize their own humiliation—and in that way, Ala suggested, they destroyed far more souls. And they never, ever paid for it.”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“But there is also something inherently shameful in the rescuer-rescued relationship - the humiliation of being reduced to depending on another person for survival - and that shame expresses itself and resentment toward rescuers… Gratitude is what makes you hate someone.”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“These stories, I came to understand, were presenting a challenge to the Western idea of the purpose of creativity. Stories with definitive endings don’t necessarily reflect a belief that the world makes sense, but they do reflect a belief in the power of art to make sense of it. What one finds in Jewish storytelling, though, is something really different: a kind of realism that comes from humility, from the knowledge that one cannot be true to the human experience while pretending to make sense of the world.”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“Those girls were not stupid, and probably not even bigoted. But in their entirely typical and well-intentioned education, they had learned about Jews mainly because people had killed Jews. Like most people in the world, they had only encountered dead Jews: people whose sole attribute was that they had been murdered, and whose murders served a clear purpose, which was to teach us something. Jews were people who, for moral and educational purposes, were supposed to be dead.”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“(For the record, the number of actual “righteous Gentiles” officially recognized by Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust museum and research center, for their efforts in rescuing Jews from the Holocaust is under 30,000 people, out of a European population at the time of nearly 300 million—or .001 percent. Even if we were to assume that the official recognition is an undercount by a factor of ten thousand, such people remain essentially a rounding error.)”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“The freedoms that we cherish are meaningless without our commitments to one another: to civil discourse, to actively educating the next generation, to welcoming strangers, to loving our neighbors. The beginning of freedom is the beginning of responsibility.”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“Uncoolness is pretty much Judaism’s brand, which is why cool people find it so threatening—and why Jews who are willing to become cool are absolutely necessary to Hanukkah antisemitism’s success. These “converted” Jews are used to demonstrate the good intentions of the regime—which of course isn’t antisemitic but merely requires that its Jews publicly flush thousands of years of Jewish civilization down the toilet in exchange for the worthy prize of not being treated like dirt, or not being murdered.”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“Sometimes your body is someone else's haunted house. Other people look at you and can only see the dead.”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“There are so few Jews in the world; even in the United States, we are barely 2 percent of the population, a minority among minorities. Who cares if my children have to grow up praying in a lockdown? Statistically speaking, nothing that happens to Jews should be of any consequence to anyone else. Except that it is.”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“When a young employee at the Anne Fank House tried to wear his yarmulke to work, his employers told him to hide it under a baseball cap. The museum's gal was "neutrality," one spokesperson explained to the British newspaper Daily Mail, and a live Jew in a yarmulke might "interfere" with the museum's "independent position." The museum finally relented after deliberated for four months, which seems like a rather long time for the Anne Frank House to ponder whether it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding.”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

“our Jews everywhere that they shouldn’t worry: our old God still lives!”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present