WOMEN ON THE MOVE DARA HORN

Prizewinning novelist Dara Horn finally got fed up with being asked to write about dead Jews in response to the recent wave of fatal antisemitic attacks across the world.

Why so much reverence for past Jewish misery and so little respect for Jewish lives in the present?

She tackles that question in an essay collection that quickly became a New York Times Notable Book and a Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present. Writing about the blockbuster traveling exhibition Auschwitz; the marketing of the Jewish history of Harbin, China; Shakespeare’s Shylock; and her own anger at having to discuss swastikas drawn on desks in her children’s schools, she makes the radical argument that public piety about dead Jews is, in fact, a profound affront to human dignity.

She will be in conversation with her sister, Jordana Horn, contributing editor to Kveller, host of the Call Your Mother podcast and former New York correspondent for the Jerusalem Post.