Tuesday, October 26, 2021
People Love Dead Jews
Something about the news reports in the wake of the December 10, 2019 shooting at a kosher grocery in Jersey City store bothered me at the time, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Novelist Dara Horn, in her new collection of essays, "People Love Dead Jews: Reports From a Haunted Present," fingers it well.
She quotes the Associated Press report, which was picked up by many news outlets: "The slayings happened in a neighborhood where Hasidic families had recently been relocating, amid pushback from some local officials who complained about representatives of the community going door to door, offering to buy homes at Brooklyn prices."
Ms. Horn wonders why other cases of domestic terrorism, like against black churches or nightclubs, aren't similarly "contextualized" in an attempt to explain what motivated the murderer. And she muses further that "Like many homeowners, I too have been approached by real estate agents asking me if I wanted to sell my house. I recall saying, no, although I suppose murdering these people would also have made them go away."
That dagger of a comment is one of many marvelously acerbic observations in Ms. Horn's book.
Like her further observation on the Jersey City massacre, that when it comes to identifiably Jewish Jews, the crime for which they are persecuted, even killed, is the sheer audacity of "Jews, living in a place!"
Or like the story she tells at the book's beginning, about the Anne Frank museum in Amsterdam, about an employee who donned a yarmulke one day and was told to cover it with a baseball cap. The museum relented after four months' deliberation, which, Ms. Horn writes, "seems like a rather long time for the Anne Frank House to ponder whether it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding."
Zing.
Anne Frank inspires a further observation from Ms. Horn, about the most famous quote from the young girl's diary, "I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart."
Ms. Horn: "It is far more gratifying to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognize the obvious: Frank wrote about people being 'truly good at heart' three weeks before she met people who weren't."
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