WALL STREET JOURNAL
‘People Love Dead Jews’ Review: Lessons in Remembering
by Martin Peretz
October 4, 2021

This is a beautiful book, and in its particular genre—nonfiction meditations on the murder of Jews, particularly in the Holocaust, and the place of the dead in the American imagination—it can have few rivals. In fact, I can’t think of any. Dara Horn’s project is hers alone: to consider how Jewish-American identity has been “defined and determined by the opinions and projections of others”—most but not all of them well-meaning gentiles—and, leaning directly into “that distorted public looking glass,” to report her findings. Her mission is “to unravel, document, describe, and articulate the endless unspoken ways in which the popular obsession with dead Jews, even in its most apparently benign and civic-minded forms,” is both a “profound affront to human dignity” and a shaping influence on American life, for Jews and non-Jews alike. READ MORE