People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

I think after reading her fiction and her nonfiction, some people are clearly Dara Horn people and I am not those people. Not that anything she wrote was wrong. And she was very clear that her opinion is that Jewish writing doesn't need to have a moral or a narrative thread. But there was no there there. It was just a discussion of the antisemitism in the world and a conclusion that the only choice we have is to keep being Jewish. Most Jews in the world already knew both of those pieces before we even knew the ABC's and most non-Jews, unfortunately, won't read it. The essays didn't necessarily fit. Some of them were, in my opinion, uncharitably picky about just how a Holocaust museum exhibit did or didn't hit Horn's specific personal criteria for what made a thoughtful exhibit, or whether a virtuous gentile was unselfish enough while saving hundreds of Jews and at one point Jewish Shakespeare critics who didn't agree with her ten-year-old son's interpretation of Shylock's monologue. It's too bad it didn't live up to its excellent title.