Dara Horn’s flowing prose may seem like an irreverent, lighthearted romp through a range of more and less exotic Jewish travel destinations, but People Love Dead Jews has a profound and disturbing insight at its heart. Darting from the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam to the ice festival in Harbin, China, to Beverly Hills mansions of the once rich and famous, Horn comes to a startlingly obvious conclusion: “Hating Jews was normal. And historically speaking, the decades in which my parents and I had grown up simply hadn’t been normal. Now, normal was coming back” (p. 218).  

Striving to pinpoint what makes her uncomfortable about the many municipal Jewish memorials that dot tourist attractions from Europe to Eurasia, the author, leaving the New Jewish Synagogue museum in Harbin, writes: “Suddenly the Jewish Heritage miasma melted away and the realization hit me: Nothing in this museum explained why this glorious community no longer exists.” (p. 36)

This book was triggered by Horn’s “haunted present,” the sudden recurrence of violence against American Jews and synagogues in the last three years – each attack coming closer to the neighborhood in which she and her young family live. Seeking an authentic personal response, she examines her own encounters with anti-Semitism, not as victim but as reader, observer, and chronicler. 

Aside from the tale of Anne Frank, the cases Horn chooses have received relatively little publicity – an oversight she rectifies with empathy and insight. But even as she probes Stalin’s murder of masterful Yiddish actor Benjamin Zuskin, Varian Fry’s valiant efforts to rescue famous Jewish artists from Vichy France, and Jewish literature’s lack of happy endings, Horn is a woman with a mission. Peeling back the layers of these stories, she asks searching questions about Jewish responses to underlying, systemic Judeophobia (as opposed to the kind that smacks you in the face and knocks you down). 

Horn’s answers – particularly in the essay on Jewish name changes and the myth of Ellis Island – edge toward the realization that Jews have a hard time calling out anti-Semitism, thereby perpetuating it. And her own response is to ditch Shakespeare for Daf Yomi, the daily Talmud study program, finding solace in the solidarity of Jews worldwide all turning the same page.