All About Change - Dara Horn – Author of 'People Love Dead Jews'

Episode Date: March 14, 2022

Award-winning Author Dara Horn’s new book People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Past has a provocative title. And make no mistake, it’s designed that way. She wants you to feel uncomfortable as she explores the world’s fascination with dead Jews. From examples of more subtle antisemitism to machete attacks in Jewish homes and shootings in synagogues, Dara challenges her readers to confront the reasons why we have such little respect for living Jews. Along with her latest work, Dara is also the author of five novels and won a Reform Judaism Fiction Prize and two National Jewish Book Awards.   Listen to the latest episode of All Inclusive as Dara discusses the appeal of Anne Frank’s lasting legacy, why a Jewish city was deserted in China, the limitations of Holocaust education to curb hatred of Jews, and more.  Transcription of episode located here: https://allinclusivepodcast.com/podcasts/dara-horn-author…e-love-dead-jews/  For a link to the Diarna Project, click here: https://diarna.org/.  Photo of Dara Horn: Credit to Michael B. Priest See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Okay, there we go. Hi, I'm Jay Ruderman, and welcome to the All Inclusive Podcast. Stories of activism, change, and courage. This is all wrong. I say put mental health first because if you don't... This generation of Americans has already had enough. I stand before you not as an expert, but as a concerned citizen. Each episode, we bring you in-depth and intimate conversations with inspiring individuals trying to change the world.

That discomfort, it wasn't sorrow. It's rage. And today on our show, Dara Horn. Anne Frank wrote this line about people being truly good at heart three weeks before she met people who weren't. Dara Horn is an award-winning author of six books and the recently published collection of essays, People Love Dead Jews, Reports from a Haunted Present. People love dead Jews. Living Jews, not so much. From Harbin, China to Muncie, New York. From Anne Frank to Shakespeare. From Harbin, China to Muncie, New York, from Anne Frank to Shakespeare, Dara examines the ways in which Jewish history and culture have been memorialized and presented.

What I found is I've now become like this sort of receptacle for all of this pain in the Jewish community that I really didn't know about. It constitutes an effort, she claims, to both minimize Jewish suffering and to whitewash the atrocities and anti-Semitism, both past and present. Today, the consequences are clear. Anti-Semitic attacks in America are on the rise, and Holocaust education is shown to be ineffective at best. This is a timely and important conversation. So, Dara Horn, thank you so much for joining me on all inclusive it's such a pleasure to welcome you to the broadcast thanks so much for having me so dara you gave your book people love dead jews a very provocative title um and by implication they don't like living ones can you explain the title and and the argument for having such a provocative

title? Sure. Well, all I can say is for readers who are uncomfortable with the title, you will be even more uncomfortable with what is inside the book, because it only gets worse after you make it past the cover. This is actually a topic that I avoided for most of my career. And I would say that I spent 20 years not writing this book. I really just never wanted to write a book where Jewish identity was defined from the outside. And this changed for me about four years ago. In 2018, I was asked by Smithsonian Magazine to write an essay for them about Anne Frank. And I got that request and I was overwhelmed with dread because I thought,

wow, I really don't want to write an essay about Anne Frank. And this goes to your question about the title. You know, the normal response to an assignment like that would be to, I should turn it down. But, you know, that would be logical, but I'm a writer, so I'm not a very logical person. And I also sort of feel that what I've learned in my 20 years of writing in publishing books is that the uncomfortable moments are where the story is. And so ultimately by choosing this title and making the reader uncomfortable, I'm sort of inviting the reader into that moment. And the reason I, the source of this title comes from what I ultimately did write for Smithsonian Magazine about Anne Frank, because in that moment when I got that request, I just thought, instead of thinking this is

uncomfortable, I'm going to turn away from it. I thought, this is uncomfortable. That's interesting. Why do I want to, why do I feel so uncomfortable with this? And in that moment, I remembered a news story that I had seen about something that had happened at the Anne Frank Museum earlier that year. This was, again, in 2018. This was a news item that described how there was a young Jewish man who worked at the Anne Frank Museum, and the museum would not allow him to wear his yarmulke to work. They made him hide it under a baseball hat. He appealed this decision to the board of the museum, and the board of the museum then deliberated for four months, and then finally relented and let this young man wear his yarmulke to work. Four months is a very long time for the Anne Frank Museum to ponder whether or not it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding. And, you know, at that point, I realized what this, the source of my discomfort, and I made

it the first line of that piece, which now is, of course, the title of the book, people love dead Jews, living Jews, not so much. And, you know, I really wanted to draw readers into that uncomfortable moment, because I think that there's a lot that we have suppressed about the way we react to those kinds of situations. Do you think the book was written for Jews or for non-Jews? Well, so I will tell you that when I write my books, I'm never thinking about the reader. You know, I've made that mistake in the past. With my very first book, I remember thinking that, you know, if anybody's going to read this other than my mother, it's going to probably be

for a Jewish audience because that book, like all my books, was sort of very deep into Jewish themes. And the editor who bought the book was not Jewish. And she told me, you know, I was reading your book and I felt like I was reading about my own life and my own family. And, you know, since I, this is, as I said, my sixth book, and I sort of have since discovered that I've underestimated my readers. Literature is about communication. So, you know, but with this book in particular, you're correct that there's something, you know, a little bit strange about it in terms of the way audiences react to it.

What I've discovered and what sort of really impacted me about the reception of the book are sort of two things, which are one very negative and one very positive. One is that I've discovered from my Jewish readers that there's something about this book that activates something in them. And what I mean by that is when I wrote this book, it was a very, for me, a very intellectual exercise. But now that I've published this book, I'm now inundated with messages from Jewish readers. Old people, young people, secular people, religious people, people from many different countries. And they're all sending me the very same message. And the message says, I felt uncomfortable my whole life. I never understood why. This book articulated this for me. Thank you. Then it says, I never told anyone this,

but. And then they tell me some horrible story about some degrading experience they've had in their own life. And then they say, thank you for writing this book. And so what I found is I've now become like this sort of receptacle for all of this pain in the Jewish community that I really didn't know about. And that's been very disturbing to me. So that's sort of like one response I've gotten from readers. But then the sort of more heartening thing is I have a whole lot of non-Jewish readers. And what I hear from my non-Jewish readers is like this moment of enlightenment where my non-Jewish readers basically read this book and say, I had no idea. You know, I can't believe that people have been carrying this around with them for all these years.

You know, I learned so much. I want to be a good ally. And now I'm starting to understand how. So I'm a strong believer in allyship. And I think in activism, allyship is very important. But we're going through this period of time where we're seeing more and more anti-Semitism. And we're seeing things that people are taking in different ways. And I'll give you an example. Whoopi Goldberg on The View recently made some comments that were really, she was taken to task for. The Holocaust isn't about race. It's not about race.

What is it about? Because it's about man's inhumanity to man. I mean, this is after you wrote the book, but I'm just wondering, because it's coming up, you know, weekly in our lives in America, what are your thoughts of what's going on? I mean, I have a lot of thoughts about a lot of different things going on. But I mean, yes, it seems like there's this attempt to reenact my book in real time, which I did not engineer. But what I think is, you know, the thing about the Whoopi Goldberg's comments is that it just reflects this deep ignorance

of the, you know, really the non-Jewish American public in general about Jewish history and sort of, and about Jewish identity. And I honestly do think that what's interesting about it is that it reflects the way that Holocaust education has been taught in this country. There's been this attempt to sort of teach Holocaust education as if that's a substitute for teaching people about anti-Semitism. It is not. It is not. And there's also been a very long standing attempt in the past 30 years to universalize the Holocaust. And so what's often done when the Holocaust is taught in schools or in other public education settings, it's taught as like what B teaching the Holocaust rather than sort of making it about what it actually was about, which was the destruction of Jewish civilization. Of course, to be interested in the destruction of Jewish civilization, you'd have to know what the content of Jewish civilization was. And that's what nobody is interested in learning, as the title of my

book proclaims. Can you talk about visiting the Anne Frank Museum, a museum that's really about a Jewish family that is wiped out in the Holocaust, but has been taken in by the non-Jewish community? One of the things that's so celebrated about Anne Frank and the line from her diary that's on the wall of the museum and it's in the, you know, on the book jacket is the line where she says, I still believe in spite of everything that people are truly good at heart. I see the world being slowly, you know, and we say this line inspires us by which we mean it flatters us, right? It makes us feel forgiven for lapses of our civilization that lead to piles of murdered girls. You know, it's like murdered girls. And this is something that's

very deep in non-Jewish Christian civilization, right? It's this idea that a murdered Jew has offered us absolution from our sins. The reality, though, is so much simpler. Anne Frank wrote this line about people being truly good at heart three weeks before she met people who weren't. But you have to sort of dump that reality in order to tell this feel-good story. And that really comes to the sort of the central points of my book are twofold. The first is people tell stories about dead Jews that make them feel better about themselves. And the other is living Jews have to erase themselves in order for that story to be told. You wrote a sort of an op-ed as if Anne Frank had lived. And I found it to be very powerful.

I'm wondering if you would read it on page seven of your book. Sure. So for context, this is this op-ed. It's not an op-ed. I'm sorry. It's an obituary. Sort of a pretend obituary for, you know, an Anne Frank who was not murdered in the Holocaust. And what I'm sort of getting at is maybe she would have had something else to tell us if she had lived to describe her experiences. Anne Frank, noted Dutch novelist and essayist, died this past Wednesday at her home in Amsterdam.

She was 92. A survivor of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, Frank's acclaim was hard won. In her 20s, Frank struggled to find a publisher for her first book, The House Behind, a memoir of her experiences in hiding and in Nazi concentration camps. Disfigured by a brutal beating, Frank rarely granted interviews. Her later work, The Return, describes how her father did not recognize her upon their reunion in 1945. Frank supported herself as a journalist, and in 1961, she earned notoriety for her fierce reporting on the Israeli capture of Nazi henchman Adolf Eichmann, an extradition via kidnapping that the European elite condemned. After covering Eichmann's Jerusalem trial for the Dutch press, Frank found the traction to publish Margot, a novel that imagined her sister living the life she once dreamed of

as a midwife in the Galilee. A surreal work that breaks the boundaries between novel and memoir and leaves ambiguous which of its characters are dead or alive, the Hebrew translation of Margot became a runaway bestseller, while an English-language edition eventually found a small but appreciative audience in the United States. Frank's subsequent books and essays brought her renown as a clear-eyed prophet carefully attuned to hypocrisy. Her reputation for relentless conscience, built on her many investigative articles on subjects ranging from Soviet oppression to Arab-Israeli wars, Soviet Oppression to Arab-Israeli Wars, was cemented by her internationally acclaimed 1984 book, Every House Behind, written after her father's death. Beginning with an homage to her father's unconditional devotion, the book progresses into a searing and accusatory work that reimagines

her childhood hiding place as a metaphor for Western civilization, whose facade of high culture concealed a demonic evil. Every flat, every house, every office building in every city, she wrote, they all have a house behind. Her readers will long remember the words from her first book, quoted from a diary she kept at 15. I don't believe that the big men are guilty of the war. Oh no, the little man is just as guilty. Otherwise, the peoples of the world would have risen in revolt long ago. There is in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage. And until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated, and grown will be cut down and disfigured,

and mankind will have to begin all over again. Her last book, a memoir, was titled To Begin Again. So powerful and puts her perspective on living through this experience in a very different way than the world is consuming her perspective right now. I'd like to shift and talk about Harbin, China. First of all, what brought you to Harbin, China? I was fascinated about you walking around there with layers and layers of clothing, but what was it like to be there? Sure. So for context, Harbin is the city in northeastern China. It's south of Siberia, north of North Korea, which is, you know, as awesome as it sounds. And it's kind of known in, you know, sort of like tourist circles because it has this world-renowned ice festival. Every winter, they have like 10,000 workers come and build this like entire city out of ice. So that's sort of the draw

for tourists to go to Harbin. And I remember sort of considering whether I wanted to go to Harbin and thinking like, well, you know, is it really worth going halfway around the world just to see an ice city? I wonder if there's anything else to see in Harbin. And, you know, just looking on travel websites and it's like, you know, top 10 things to see in Harbin. And it's like ice festival, ice festival, ice festival, synagogue, synagogue, Jewish cemetery, museum, Jewish museum, Jewish cemetery, ice festival. And I felt like, huh, that's weird. And I started looking into this and what I discovered is that the city of Harbin was essentially built by Jews. This was something that happened in the early, late 19th, early 20th century. The Russians had gotten a concession from the Chinese to build a branch

of the Trans-Siberian Railroad into China. They needed educated Russian-speaking entrepreneurs to build this railroad junction for them. They basically needed a town in this extremely underpopulated region. And 20,000 Jews, Russian Jews, moved to Manchuria and built this city, built all the infrastructure of the city. And then what eventually happened is that, you know, as I put it in the book, you already know this story has to end badly. You know, there's various regimes that make life more and more impossible for the Jews until the last Jewish family is evacuated by the Israelis in 1962. Today, there's one Jew who lives in Harbin. And your listeners, I don't say this in the book, but your listeners will appreciate.

This place is so remote that they don't even have a Chabad. So no Chabad, one Jew. But what's interesting about it is the city government, about 10 or 15 years ago, decided to spend $30 million restoring Jewish heritage sites. But what was amazing to me was going to Harbin, and to your point about sort of how it feels to be there, it is very, very strange. Because you're in this entirely Chinese city at this point. I mean, there's certainly no Jewish community anymore. There's one person who actually is an Israeli who settled there 20 years ago for an academic position.

And he's involved in restoring these sites. But what's amazing about it is that you walk through these sites and the way they're restored is so bizarre. Because there's, for example, this is a Jewish museum there. It's in the building of what used to be the synagogue, one of the two synagogues in Harbin. And they have part of their exhibit where you walk into a room and there's like a life-size plaster sculpture of a man sitting at a desk with a typewriter on it. And then the caption says, Real Jewish businessman in Harbin. And then you go to the next room,

and there's two life-size plaster kids playing with blocks. And there's a caption that's like, Real Jewish children in Harbin. You walk through this whole Jewish museum that tells you all about all these wonderful, rich Jews. Notice they're all rich, which was in fact not true in Harbin. You know, what could these wonderful, rich Jews who built all these great businesses in Harbin? Nothing in this museum tells you why this wonderful community no longer exists.

They don't tell you. And, you know, you're walking through these places and, you know, you're like, they weren't so crazy about the Jews when they lived here because that's why there are no more Jews here anymore. To your question about, like, how do you feel to be there? You know, as a Jewish traveler, you feel deeply uncomfortable in these places, or at least I do. There's this deep discomfort. or at least I do, there's this deep discomfort. And as I said before, the uncomfortable moments to me are where the story is, because then I'm thinking, why do I feel so uncomfortable? And what I realized is that every time I've been to one of these places in my life, I have buried the reason for my discomfort. I have told myself that it's sorrow, right? Like,

oh, it's just so sad that this community that used to be here isn't here anymore. And oh, don't I feel grateful to these non-Jewish people here who are so nice and restored this synagogue or made this museum or whatever it is. And what I realized is that I was lying to myself because that discomfort, it wasn't sorrow, it's rage. And I realized that this, you know, my whole life I'm burying this rage. And, you know, in Harbin, it just sort of became so clear to me. I just felt this anger. You know, one of the passages that sort of stuck with me is that when you were in the museum and going through it and you're looking at Jewish artifacts and you see a Seder plate

and the Seder plate, you're looking at it, you're like, oh, this must be an old Seder plate and the Seder plate you're looking at it you're like oh this must be an old Seder plate you're like wait a second this is a modern Seder plate I have the same Seder plate in my house right it was done it was like it wasn't even done that well there's this exhibit where it's like you know these are the real authentic you know Judaica of this family and it's yes a Seder plate under glass in this exhibit. And I'm like, why are there English words all over this Seder plate? Like, they're literally like, it's like an American Jewish Seder plate where it says like, you know, bitter herbs, right? I'm like, why would this Russian Jewish family in China have a Seder plate with English words on it? And the answer, of course, is that they didn't.

They bought the Seder plate, like, on eBay. Like, it was so transparent. Like, there was no attempt to even, like, pretend. But the reality is, like, that level of ignorance, like, you see it everywhere. Right? You see it everywhere. I mean, you know, you mentioned Whoopi Goldberg's comments, like people don't know anything about Jewish culture. You know, they know that Jews got murdered in the Holocaust and that's kind of it. And so, you know, what I find is like, you know, is in the Jewish community, we have this need to sort of defer to these, you know, non-Jewish, you know, these non-Jewish institutions that are like, you know, that we feel like are doing us some kind of favor, that's not really what's happening in a lot of these cases. And that's really what I'm calling out in the book.

I want to talk about something that you write in your book about a project. I hope I'm pronouncing this correctly. The Diarna Project? Yes. Well, so Diarna, and I encourage your listeners to investigate this. It's very available online. It's diarna.org if you go to their website.

This is an online museum of Jewish historical sites mostly in the Islamic world, although they've now expanded it beyond that. This place was full of haystack. So it was a start to clean up the hay, and also all this Hebrew writing that you can see here.

And then I found the hay. This was really an attempt to sort of preserve these sites for future generations, because we were just talking just now about you know jewish heritage sites in europe and in other places where they've like you know local communities have invested money and effort in making this into a tourist attraction you have the opposite thing happening in places like you know tunisia uh where you know they're these places really have just like you know are going to seed going to seed or are threatened with destruction. And what Diyarna does is they send photographers to these places to document these sites. And they also then collect oral histories from Jews who lived in these places before

these communities were decimated. I found it incredibly moving. I found it incredibly moving. What's astonishing is you learn about how old and large and vibrant these countries, communities were. Like, did you know that Tripoli was 25% Jewish in 1940? Right? Tripoli and Libya. How many Jews are in Libya today? Zero. What I found really moving was that these are places where, you know, for the most part, Western tourists can't go. You know, like you really can't, you know, in a lot of these cases, it's like you can't go to Libya, you know, today. So, you know, because there's so much political instability in some

of these places. Syria. There was a woman, there's Christy Sherman, who's a photographer, who went to, she went on an expedition for them in 2009, and she documented this 500-year-old synagogue in Damascus for them. Again, this is the entrance of the synagogue, the sanctuary itself. She was the last person to step into that synagogue with a camera, and it was destroyed during the civil war in Syria about two years later. So, you know, that's sort of like the kind of work these people are doing, is really racing the clock before these sites are destroyed. So, I mean, it's so important, and we're going to put a link to the website, because I think people should check it out and understand that in many different countries around the world, there were vibrant Jewish communities that, as you said, don't exist at all.

I want to talk about literature, and specifically Shakespeare. You have a very moving part in your book with your son, who wanted to listen to a recording of The Merchant of Venice. And I'm wondering if you could start off by reading on the bottom of page 207, where it starts with the trial scene. The trial scene was agonizing. We listened together as Shylock went to court to extract his pound of flesh, as the heroine, chirping about the quality of mercy, forbade him to spill the Christian's blood as he so desperately desired. Take then thy bond, take thou thy pound

of flesh, but in the cutting it, if thou dost shed one drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods are by the laws of Venice, confiscate unto the state of Venice. As the court confiscated his property, along with his soul through forced conversion, as the play's most cherished characters used his own words to taunt and demean him, relishing their vanquishing of the bloodthirsty Jew, my son stopped asking me to explain. Twenty minutes of congratulatory hijinks followed Shylock's final exit, as the cast reveled in their victory and his seized assets. At last, it was over. The minivan fell silent. Then my son announced, I never want to hear that again. You will definitely hear that again, I said.

You will definitely hear that again, I said. So you obviously exposed your 10-year-old son to The Merchant of Venice, which, as you said, is one of the most read pieces of literature. How should we as Jews approach this? I mean, should we do what you did or should we try to hide our children from the xenophobia and anti-Semitism as long as we can? Well, I mean, you're not going to succeed in hiding it. So, you know, why try? But, you know, yeah, what I talk about in the book, the reason I sort of shared this with my son was because, in a sense, I had been gaslit. And what I mean by that is, you know, I've read this play in school, like a lot of people did, and I, you know, sort of have been told by all the teachers the way that all of us were that,

you know, oh, this play's not really anti-Semitic, it's just a product of its time. And, you know, there's the proof is that, you know, oh, it's so much better than other contemporary works. And look, you know, Shakespeare gives the Shylock this monologue where he talks about how he's really just another human, right? He says, I am a Jew, hath not a Jew eye. I am a Jew hands, organs, dimensions. If you prick us, do we not bleed? My son heard this, 10 years old, and says, Mom, this is the evil supervillain monologue that every evil supervillain does in every Marvel movie. My son was like, what idiot would fall for the evil supervillain monologue? And I'm like, well,

I guess me. I have a PhD in comparative literature. Yep, I fell for the evil supervillain monologue. It was that obvious to a child. And, you know, what I would say is like, you know, how do we respond to this? As I said in that passage, like, you know, I don't think it's, you know, the answer isn't like cancel Shakespeare. Right. I mean, because I mean, that's you would have to basically cancel all of Western civilization. Right. I mean, we're living in this. This is what we're living in. I think that the answer is to to not fall for it. Right. To be aware of it, to understand it, and not to fall for it.

Well, it sounds like your son was ahead of his time or mature, that he really got what was going on there. He's watched a lot of Marvel movies. He has. All our kids have. All our kids have. I want to talk about, I think, what was, for me, the most impactful part of the book, because it just felt so real. You know, we're going through this period of time when there are very troubling, violent hate crimes committed against Jews. The Pittsburgh Temple of Life Massacre, the hostage situation recently at a synagogue in Texas.

These made big national news. But there were some incidents that didn't make so much news. And let's talk about what happened in several attacks in New Jersey, some of which were very close to where you lived. And I'm wondering if you could talk about what happened there and how it impacted you. Yes. So there was an attack. This was just before the pandemic in December of 2019 on a this one was on a kosher grocery store in Jersey City that was part of the Satmar community, Satmar Hasidic community there. And this was a gun battle. Five people died, two of whom were assailants and three were people in the store. Turning now to the news, and we are getting our first look at yesterday's attack in Jersey City that left a police officer dead. And what was

amazing to me was the way this attack was portrayed in the media. It was always basically some way of saying that it was the fault of the victims. Investigators are not yet saying Tuesday's violence was a hate crime. Basically, I couldn't find a news article that didn't say something derogatory about the community being attacked while reporting the attack. And in the Jersey City case, it was usually the way that they were portraying it was that these Hasidic Jews were gentrifying a minority neighborhood, which to me is very interesting because, I mean, first of all, these people were fleeing gentrification. They were in Jersey City because they were priced out of Brooklyn, right?

Second of all, these people are highly visible members of the, according to the FBI, the biggest hate crime target in the country. Like, these aren't, you know, white hipsters. And last, you know, is there this murderous rage against gentrification where people are walking into cool coffee shops with AK-47s and, you know, like, blowing away people with man buns? Because, like, I haven't seen that happening. What I realize, like, why are we pretending that this is about gentrification? And the answer is that these articles are all sending a signal. The signal

is that these people deserve it, right? This is victim blaming. It would be very similar to if you're writing a news story about a woman who was sexually assaulted and you spend most of the article being like, just for context, here's what she was wearing. And that's what's sort of most astonishing to me. I spoke at the beginning of our conversation about this idea we have an anti-bigotry education in this country where you teach people not to be bigoted by saying like, oh, look at this group over here. You shouldn't be prejudiced against them because they're just like you and me. They're just like everyone else. But of course, when you teach that, what you're sending, the message you're sending is if somebody isn't like you and me, then it's

fine to hack them with a machete. And that's exactly what we see happening here. And what was so devastating to me was that realization was that actually, there was zero sympathy for the victims of this hate crime, zero. And the reason there's zero sympathy is because, you know, these people don't look like you and me, they have weird hairstyles, and therefore it's totally fine to blow them away with automatic weapons. And that that message came loud and clear. They have weird hairstyles. And therefore, it's totally fine to blow them away with automatic weapons. And that message came loud and clear. I'll tell you a very short story that when I was a very young child, well, way before you were born, I was at a place called Great Adventure in New Jersey. We go there all the time.

I don't know. On that day, there were many, many thousands of Hasidic Jews, and we were in line for a ride, and the person behind us said, oh, these people, they're the cause of all the problems here. And my mother turned around and she said, you know we're Jewish also. And the person's response was, oh, yeah, but you're not like them. the person's response was, oh, yeah, but you're not like them. So I think that what I took away from that is anti-Semitism could be focused on people that look Jewish, but it's actually against everyone that's Jewish. There's a lot of attention on talking about the Holocaust and expecting that

that will have an impact on anti-Semitism. And I think your point that you make throughout the book is that it doesn't go together, that you can teach about the Holocaust and people still can be anti-Semitic. Absolutely. And you know what those people said, like, oh, you're not like them. This is part of what I talked about at the beginning of our conversation. I said, you know, the message of the book is people love to tell stories about dead Jews that make them feel good about themselves. The other piece of that is that Jews have to erase themselves in order to make that story possible. And when that person behind you in line says, oh, you're not like them, what they're saying is Jews are fine as long as they're not Jewish. That goes to that example in the Anne Frank Museum,

where that young man has to hide his yarmulke under a baseball hat. What they're basically sending the message is, is like, you know, Jews are great. We love Jews as long as they're not Jewish, right? Like we want to celebrate the Jews' humanity, the nice Jews, right? Like the dead ones, not the Jews who are doing yucky things like, I don't know, living in Israel or practicing Judaism, right? Like, Jews are fine as long as they're not Jewish is really the message of that. It's this requirement that Jews erase themselves. And yeah, I mean, that's really what you're seeing with that comment of like, oh, you're not like those Hasidic Jews. Like, well, what's your problem with the

Hasidic Jews? Is it that they're Jewish? Because it sure seems like that's your problem. Dara, I really want to thank you for being my guest today on All Inclusive. I know that you've said in the past that anti-Semitism is not a Jewish problem. It's a problem for everyone. I do want to encourage anyone who has not read your book, wherever they buy books, to pick up a copy of People Love Dead Jews, Reports from a Haunted Present. It's a powerful book. It's a book that should be read by everyone. And thank you so much for being with me and spending time with me today.

Thanks so much for having me. All Inclusive is a production of the Ruderman Family Foundation. This show is produced by Yochai Meital and Jackie Schwartz. It was edited by Matt Lippman. If you enjoyed this episode, please check out all of our previous episodes. Look up All Inclusive wherever you get your podcasts. As always, if you have an idea for a guest or just want to share your thoughts, I'd love to hear from you. You can tweet me at JRuderman or email us at allinclusive at rudermanfamilyfoundation.org. If you enjoy our show, please help us spread the word.

Tell a friend or family member, consider writing a review on your favorite podcasting app. That really goes a long way. I'm Jay Ruderman, and join me for the next installment of All Inclusive. I'll be talking with Niyabi Tosh, daughter of the world-famous reggae musician Peter Tosh, founder of the Wailers with Bob Marley and Bunny Wailer, for a conversation about inequality, legalization of marijuana, and how a family tragedy spurred her into action.