#dara horn

[notaplaceofhonour]

Antisemitism Required Reading

I get a lot of ignorant comments & tags on my posts about antisemitism, and I’ve already spent way too much time & energy engaging with them. So to preserve my sanity, I’ve made the decision not to engage too deeply with any commenters who haven’t at least read all of these in their entirety:

“Jewish Space Lasers” by Mike Rothschild

“People Love Dead Jews” by Dara Horn

“Jews Don’t Count” by David Baddiel

"More Than a Century of Antisemitism", GEC Special Report

If you’re not Jewish, please read all of this literature before adding anything to my posts about antisemitism.

Jews, please add any books you think should be on the list!

#I'll be adding and updating this post as I find & vet anything I feel should be required reading #antisemitism #people love dead jews #jews don't count #jewish space lasers #required reading #reading list #dara horn #david baddiel #more than a century of antisemitism #mike rothschild #jewish history

[dragoneyes618]

"Holocaust novels that have sold millions of copies both in the United States and overseas in recent years are all "uplifting," even when they include the odd dead kid. The Tattooist of Auschwitz, a recent international mega-bestseller touted for its true story," manages to present an Auschwitz that involved a heartwarming romance. Sarah's Key, The Book Thief, The Boy in Striped Pajamas, and many other bestsellers, some of which have even become required reading in schools, all involve non-Jewish rescuers who risk or sacrifice their own lives to save hapless Jews, thus inspiring us all. (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 of 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." In addition to their wonderful non-Jewish characters, these books are almost invariably populated by the sort of relatable dead Jews whom readers can really get behind: the mostly non-religious, mostly non-Yiddish-speaking ones whom noble people tried to save, and whose deaths therefore teach us something beautiful about our shared and universal humanity, replete with epiphanies and moments of grace. Statistically speaking, this was not the experience of almost any Jews who endured the Holocaust. But for literature in non-Jewish languages, that grim reality is both inconvenient and irrelevant." 

- Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

#dara horn #people love dead jews #antisemitism #holocaust #world war ii #the holocaust

[quotesfrommyreading]

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. The 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.

  —  People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present (Dara Horn)

#book quotes #dara horn #people love dead jews: reports from a haunted present #history #antisemitism #holocaust #anne frank #concentration camps

[sopranoentravesti]

Archive link here:

https://archive.ph/AsXvU

#antisemitism #dara horn #important

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

#jews #freedom #dara horn

[readingbooksinisrael]

[The Talmud is]...like a ridiculously long social media thread, complete with pedantic back-and-forths, hashtagged references, nonstop links and memes, and limitless subthreads, often with almost non discernible arc or goal.

-People Love Dead Jews/Dara Horn

#people love dead jews #dara horn #quotes #jumblr

[sh0rtins0mniac]

Everybody would rather blame their problems on somebody else. This is even bigger than that, because this is basically saying my society would be wonderful if it weren’t for Jews. Or the world would be wonderful if it weren’t for Jews. Once you have that in your head, then suddenly that’s the only thing that matters, because if we only could do this, meaning eliminate all the Jews, then everything would be great.

Latest interview with Dara Horn

#dara horn #israel #jumblr #post

[moonshinemagpie]

Some of my past posts on the books assigned in school to teach (or "teach") the Holocaust are being reblogged as International Holocaust Remembrance Day approaches.

It's always interesting to me to see people say, "I read the good stuff— I was assigned Elie Wiesel's Night."

People are adding this in the tags of my posts. People say this to me in person, compulsively. I am not qualified to explain this but there is something pathological behind it.

Elie Wiesel wrote a 900-page memoir in Yiddish about his time in concentration camps. It was called און די וועלט האט געשוויגן; Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Remained Silent).

He then abridged it, translated it, watered it down, made it conform to the storytelling constructions of the West. Even the accusation implicit in the title was taken out; it was reconstructed to make non-Jewish readers comfortable, so that the world might be receptive to some curated, diluted sliver of Jewish trauma.

That is the book that became Night.

What do you know about Yiddish storytelling? What Yiddish literature have you read? How tolerant would you be to a storytelling culture that ignores the literary structures you have been taught are universal? Why aren't any of the most well-known Holocaust narratives translated from Yiddish or Ladino? Why have you never wondered why until now?

When it comes to the Holocaust, to what was lost, you don't know what you don't know. Don't ever think you do.

#holocaust remembrance day #elie wiesel #holocaust #antisemitism #negative #people love dead jews #dara horn #read this book if you want a starting point

[stars-inthe-sky]

#dara horn #antisemitism #the atlantic #the next time you feel so inclined to use ‘zionist’ as an insult #(or want to frame israel as a colonial state or jews as white) #just know the lineage you are part of #this article is a bit heavy on the harvard stuff due to the author's personal perspective and experiences #but the history is deeply relevant and deeply researched. and terrifying. there's a lot i already knew but a lot i learned just reading thi #the author also makes no excuses for how the state of israel has treated palestinians #but also does not excuse hamas and how it has ruled gaza for nearly two decades #and that is fucking relevant too

[farewelldorothyparker]

Sometimes your body is someone else's haunted house. Other people look at you and can only see the dead.

from People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present by Dara Horn

#people love dead jews #dara horn #books

[dragoneyes618]

"Jews have lived throughout the Middle East and North Africa for thousands of years, of ten in communities that long pre-dated the Islamic conquest. But during the mid-twentieth century's tumultuous power shifts in the region between colonial and post colonial control, political instability, and antisemitic violence intensified to create a vast exodus, driving nearly a million Jews to emigrate to Israel and elsewhere, leaving entire countries all but dead of Jews - and leaving behind synagogues, schools, and cemeteries that served these communities for generations. The circumstances of this mas migration varied. In some places, like Morocco, the Jewish community's flight was largely voluntary, driven partly by sporadic antisemitic violence but mostly by poverty and fear of regime change. At the other extreme are countries like Iraq, where Jews were stripped of their citizenship and had their assets seized, and where, in the capital city of Baghdad, a 1941 pogrom left nearly two hundred Jews murdered and hundreds of Jewish-owned homes and businesses looted or destroyed." 

- Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

#dara horn #people love dead jews #antisemitism #history #jewish history #arab history #arab communities #baghdad #morocco #pogrom

[hellochildrenoftheatom]

Finished People Love Dead Jews by Dara Horn

This book is heavy. I do like that it shines a light on much-overlooked Jewish history. Like the Jews of Harbin, China and the good people documenting the nearly forgotten and abandoned synagogues in MENA.

I want to make so many goyim read this book. It was published back in 2021 but many passages are (sadly) relevant to the present moment.

#judaism #jumblr #people love dead Jews #Dara Horn

[writer-at-the-table]

"To me what's amazing about Jewish history isn't the horror, it's the resilience"

#dara horn #jewish #judaism #mine #My posts

[torahtot]

Two distinct patterns of antisemitism can be identified by the Jewish holidays that celebrate triumphs over them: Purim and Hanukkah. In the Purim version of antisemitism, exemplified by the Persian genocidal decrees in the biblical Book of Esther, the goal is openly stated and unambiguous: Kill all the Jews. In the Hanukkah version of antisemitism, whose appearances range from the Spanish Inquisition to the Soviet regime, the goal is still to eliminate Jewish civilization. But in the Hanukkah version, this goal could theoretically be accomplished simply by destroying Jewish civilization, while leaving the warm, de-Jewed bodies of its former practitioners intact. For this reason, the Hanukkah version of antisemitism often employs Jews as its agents. It requires not dead Jews but cool Jews: those willing to give up whatever specific aspect of Jewish civilization is currently uncool. Of course, 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 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. For a few years. Maybe.

-Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews

#*cough* leftist antisemites *cough* #dara horn #people love dead jews #antisemitism #leftist antisemitism

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

he holocaust educators I met across America were all obsessed with building empathy, a quality that relies on finding commonalities between ourselves and others. But I wondered if a more effective way to address anti-Semitism might lie in cultivating a completely different quality, one that happens to be the key to education itself: curiosity. Why use Jews as a means to teach people that we’re all the same, when the demand that Jews be just like their neighbors is exactly what embedded the mental virus of anti-Semitism in the Western mind in the first place? Why not instead encourage inquiry about the diversity, to borrow a de rigueur word, of the human experience?

Back at home, I thought again about the Holocaust holograms and the Auschwitz VR, and realized what I wanted. I want a VR experience of the Strashun Library in Vilna, the now-destroyed research center full of Yiddish writers and historians documenting centuries of Jewish life. I want a VR of a night at the Yiddish theater in Warsaw—and a VR of a Yiddish theater in New York. I want holograms of the modern writers and scholars who revived the Hebrew language from the dead—and I definitely want an AI component, so I can ask them how they did it. I want a VR of the writing of a Torah scroll in 2023, and then of people chanting aloud from it through the year, until the year is out and it’s read all over again—because the book never changes, but its readers do. I want a VR about Jewish literacy: the letters, the languages, the paradoxical stories, the methods of education, the encouragement of questions. I want a VR tour of Jerusalem, and another of Tel Aviv. I want holograms of Hebrew poets and Ladino singers and Israeli artists and American Jewish chefs. I want a VR for the conclusion of Daf Yomi, the massive worldwide celebration for those who study a page a day of the Talmud and finally finish it after seven and a half years. I want a VR of Sabbath dinners. I want a VR of bar mitzvah kids in synagogues being showered with candy, and a VR of weddings with flying circles of dancers, and a VR of mourning rituals for Jews who died natural deaths—the washing and guarding of the dead, the requisite comforting of the living. I want a hologram of the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks telling people about what he called “the dignity of difference.”

I want to mandate this for every student in this fractured and siloed America, even if it makes them much, much more uncomfortable than seeing piles of dead Jews does. There is no empathy without curiosity, no respect without knowledge, no other way to learn what Jews first taught the world: love your neighbor. Until then, we will remain trapped in our sealed virtual boxcars, following unseen tracks into the future.

#dara horn #antisemitism #holocaust #holocaust education #education

[readingbooksinisrael]

Lobbing missles at sleeping children in Israel's Kiryat Gat, where my husband's cousins spent the week...dragging their kids to bomb shelters, isn't an attempt to bring "Death to the Jews", no matter how frequently the people lobbing the missiles broadcast those very words; the wily Jews there figured out how to prevent their children from dying in large piles, so it is clearly no big deal.

-People Love Dead Jews/Dara Horn

#people love dead jews #dara horn #quotes #israel #antisemitism