The provocative title of one of Dara Horn’s most recent and acclaimed works was “People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present” (W.W. Norton & Co.).
But Horn, an award-winning novelist, essayist and literature professor, still holds out hope for the future of American and world Jewry.
She will deliver the 2025 Jerome S. Cardin Memorial Lecture on Tuesday night, Oct. 21, at Loyola University Maryland. Her talk, titled “In the Haunted Present: Dara Horn’s Dream for Living Jews,” is free of charge and open to the public.
Since the publication of “People Love Dead Jews” and the Oct. 7th attacks, Horn has become a prominent speaker on antisemitism. She is the founder of Mosaic Persuasion; a nonprofit committed to teaching about Jewish history and the roots of antisemitism in schools.
Jmore recently spoke with Horn, 47, who lives in northern New Jersey, about her upcoming talk and her views on the contemporary Jewish community.
How would you characterize your feelings about this moment in Jewish history?
Like all of us, I’ve been better. In the Jewish community, the last two years have been kind of an underlying nightmare.
I’ve had a front row seat to a lot of these sorts of things for the American Jewish community because — as one of my sisters calls me — I’m the ‘Antisemitism Lorax.’ One feature of being the ‘Antisemitism Lorax’ is every Jew in America has to come to me and told me their horror stories.
I speak to a lot of different audiences, both Jewish and non-Jewish, and one thing I have found actually kind of encouraging is that there is a lot more ignorance than malice. I think that’s a real opportunity. Most American [non-Jews] just don’t know anything about Jewish life or experience.
In schools, the only thing that students in the United States are required to learn about Jews is that Jews are people who were murdered in Europe between 1933 and 1945. And anything else about Jewish life, we have outsourced to TikTok, and we are now living with the results of that.
Do you ever get hecklers at speaking engagements?
I frequently have had hostile people in the audiences who will ask a deliberately bad faith question. But what I think is really interesting is that I’ll answer the question, and I always expect them to keep heckling me. And they never do.
They will raise their hand and say something like, ‘Zionism is genocide. What do you think of that?’ And then I’ll give an answer, and they don’t respond. I used to be puzzled by this. Their comment ‘Zionism is genocide’ is the beginning and the end of what they’ve got.
It’s actually really easy to pop this balloon because people just know absolutely nothing. That was just so shocking to me. Often, Jewish students would come to me afterwards and say, ‘We’ve been so scared of those students and you just destroyed them in like a minute.’ I’m like, ‘I didn’t destroy them. I just answered their question.’
How did your ideas crystalize into ‘People Love Dead Jews’?
I was writing these novels about Jewish life and really focused on trying to not make the story about what people did to the Jews. I spent my whole career sort of avoiding this topic.
I started thinking about this differently in 2018 when Smithsonian Magazine asked me to write this piece about the Anne Frank House [in Amsterdam]. I had read about this young Jewish employee at that museum who was told [for the first six months of his tenure] that he wasn’t allowed to wear a yarmulke to work. I was like, ‘Wow, six months is a really long time for the Anne Frank Museum to ponder whether or not it was a great idea to force a Jew into hiding.’ I just was like, ‘This is interesting, right? Like, there’s something going on here,’ and then ‘People Love Dead Jews’ was looking into why this was.
I traveled around the world looking into this subject and realizing what I mean by ‘People Love Dead Jews’ is that non-Jewish societies tend to honor and respect Jews only when Jews are powerless.
What are you working on these days?
In the past year, I’ve founded a nonprofit to educate the broader American public about Jewish life and civilization. We’ve been focused on pilot programs that we have going in schools, and we’re hoping to expand it.
Anybody who’s an educator or who is interested in getting involved should reach out to me. That’s been most of the focus of a lot of my attention.
Have you visited Baltimore in the past?
I have spoken in Baltimore before. One of the first places I ever spoke for my first book [2003’s ‘In The Image’] was Chizuk Amuno [Congregation]. My son spent the summer at a camp program at Hopkins. Moving my son in and out of Hopkins over the summer, we always were stopping for kosher food in Pikesville.
There’s a lot of people [in Baltimore] living a really intense Jewish life, which you don’t see everywhere. That’s exciting to see, and it’s just wonderful to be in a place where people are invested in Jewish life and in the Jewish future.
Dara Horn will deliver the 2025 Jerome S. Cardin Memorial Lecture on Tuesday, Oct. 21, at 7 p.m. at Loyola University Maryland, McGuire Hall-Andrew White Student Center, 4501 North Charles Street in Baltimore. For information, visit loyola.edu/events/cardin-lecture.
Anna Lippe is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance writer.
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