Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

People Love Dead Jews: Reports From a Haunted Present, by Dara Horn. 2021. W. W. Norton & Company, New York

Love Dead Jews: Too Much of a Good Thing for Jews From Holocaust Education

Love dead Jews? The title of this book is based on the author’s complaint that neither Holocaust education, nor the proliferation of Holocaust museums, has eliminated anti-Semitism or created an obvious appreciation for current Jews. (e. g, p. xviii, 190). This, of course, assumes that such was the purpose of these institutions. What if these institutions were established in order to advance Jewish interests, regardless of whether they were successful in eliminating anti-Semitism or not?

Besides, anti-Semitism can always be weaponized in any case. When anti-Semitism is increasing, Jews say that this proves the need for (what else?) still more Holocaust education. But when anti-Semitism is stable or decreasing, Jews say more Holocaust education is needed in order to make sure that it stays that way. Heads I win, tails you lose.

HOLOCAUST EDUCATION, BY ITS VERY NATURE, CREATES AN OBSESSIVE FOCUS ON DEAD JEWS

Here is the ironic consequence of Holocaust education. Horn reacts to some unwelcome comments, “Those girls were not stupid, and probably not even bigoted. But in their entirely typical and well-intentioned education, they had learned about Jews mainly because people had killed Jews. Like most people in the world, they had only encountered dead Jews: people whose sole attribute was that they had been murdered, and whose murders served a clear purpose, which was to teach us something.” (p. xiv. Emphasis in original.) But that is exactly what Holocaust education is all about!

THE POWER OF HOLOCAUST INDOCTRINATION

The author recounts her high school experiences in which her school’s Jewish soccer team was derided by another team by means of a “Go to the gas” remark. (p. xviii). Why would today’s teens, safely removed an entire continent and safely removed many decades from WWII, and having a beef against some of today’s Jews, reflexively invoke the Holocaust? Is this not itself a testimony to the power of the Holocaust over the American public imagination? No other genocide enjoys this privilege.

ANNE FRANK: A FACT-FREE AND UNDESERVED HOLOCAUST POSTER GIRL

Author Dara Horn does a little bit of iconoclasm on the Anne Frank Diary. She writes, “The line most often quoted from Frank’s diary are her famous words, ‘I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.’ These words are ‘inspiring’, by which we mean that they flatter us…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’ before meeting people who weren’t. Three weeks after writing those words, she met people who weren’t. Here’s how much some people dislike living Jews: they murdered 6 million of them. This fact bears repeating, as it does not come up at all in Anne Frank’s writings. Readers of her diary are aware that the author was murdered in a genocide, but this does not mean that her diary is a work about genocide.” (pp. 9-10).

Let us go a little deeper. Horn’s line of critical thinking tacitly assumes that Anne Frank has merited her exalted position. She has not. Anne Frank has been conscripted, and made into a poster girl of the Holocaust, for the purpose of capturing the public imagination, and doing so at the expense of other genocides. Victims of non-Jewish genocides, of course, are in no position to popularize their own poster girls.

Not mentioned is the fact that Anne Frank is an example of the sentimentalizing of the Holocaust. No other genocide has the privilege of being well publicized, let alone sentimentalized.

LOVE DEAD JEWS: THE HOLOCAUST A MORALITY PLAY

Let us expand this. Horn levels this complaint, “And I find myself furious, being lectured by this exhibition about love–as if the murder of millions of people was actually a morality play, a bumper sticker, and metaphor. I do not want my children to be someone else’s metaphor. (Of course, they already are.)” (p. 191).

Her objection is ironic to say the least. It was the Jews that made the Holocaust a morality play in the first place! In Holocaust education, the Jews are the good guys, and the goyim (with a tiny few exceptions) are the bad guys. In terms of specifics, all Jews are victims, and no Jew ever did anything wrong. The bad guys consist of a contrived assortment of de-Germanized Nazis, anti-Semitic Poles dragged-in, and all the goyim that could have acted on behalf of Jews but failed to do so (the bystander of Holocaustspeak).

This is all a Judeocentric morality play. Needless to say, no other genocide is ever made into a morality play.