In 2021 Dara Horn received the National Jewish Book Award for Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice for People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present (2021), a collection of essays about antisemitism. In a review of the book for the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, Juliana Pilon, Senior Fellow, The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI), calls the book a “masterpiece.”
Dr. Pilon describes Horn’s volume as much more than a penetrating study “of the centuries-old dysfunctional relationship of Jews with the gentile world” but “a reflection on freedom and individuality, on respect and self-respect, on faith and tradition, on time, and on death itself.”
Horn has sobering thoughts on memory and the uses to which it is put. She began to understand that “her own conception of being Jewish, intrinsic to her American identity, was foreign to others for whom it was defined principally as a sort of negation.”
In a powerful observation, Dr. Pilon writes, “In an age of identity politics, the same applies to everyone. When each is defined as ‘not-the-other,’ all traditions are perverted at once, a sinister reductio ad absurdum achieved by the nihilist scalpel plied with satanic precision. And all are pitted against all with equal vacuity yet maximum vehemence.”
Leave A Comment