Yet there were no Nuremburg trials in Russia. For instance, our WWII ally Stalin killed more Jews than Hitler did. But Horn tells of comparable Jewish slaughters that are less familiar. What happened to Jews in World War II is, of course, a well-documented chapter in world history. Harbin’s golden age for Jews lasted one generation and was “a rollercoaster of triumph and horror.” “Harbin was great for the Jews,” Horn writes, “until it wasn’t.” Both Russians and Japanese targeted Jewish businesses, sent influential Jews to gulags, and beheaded Jews. When Russia decided to build a railroad in 1896 - through isolated, rugged Manchuria - to connect Moscow to Vladivostok, a Russian Jew was put in charge. Horn’s history of what happened to the large population of Siberian Jews in Harbin, China, is less well known but all the more interesting because of it. And in Syria, a country, like Libya, now devoid of Jews. And by the 5,000 Czech Jews murdered and displaced in March 1944. It’s the same delusion that was shared among “assimilated” Jews in Nazi Germany prior to the Holocaust. “It couldn’t happen here” is the common conclusion reached by naïve Jews and decent Christians alike. has been deemed “a kind of piety,” along the order of putting a happy ending on bad times. She writes that she felt gaslighted by the notion that having an interest in Jewish suffering is somehow “a sign of respect for living Jews.” Concern over recent antisemitic atrocities in the U.S. Horn’s book makes a point I’d never heard made. The rise of international and domestic reports about defaced synagogues and Jewish cemeteries in San Diego, Boston, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Chicago, and elsewhere are signs that even in America, antisemitism is on people’s mind. When I saw on TV recently masked, menacing men marching at the Lincoln Memorial, I was reminded of the 2017 torch rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where racist marchers chanted, “Jews will not replace us!” As if we wanted to. “I had mistaken the enormous public contract in past Jewish suffering for a sign of respect for living Jews.

She dealt with an idea I’ve thought about for nearly nine decades yet never saw from her perspective: Could it happen here? Horn demonstrates that it already has. Horn’s evidence is overwhelming and scrupulously documented. Her argument is that the “ways we commemorate antisemitism and Jewish tragedy distract from a more direct reckoning…The future was the present, which was essentially the past…People murdering Jews is a three-thousand-year-old global phenomenon.”Įgypt, Spain, Germany, Russia, Baghdad - different eras, same results.

But I was also curious enough to read the book, if only to understand what she meant by her provocative title. When I saw mention of Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews in the New York Times, I was revolted.

Dara horn people love