People Love Dead Jews is an arresting title.

It's designed to make the reader uncomfortable.

The author of a new book by that name

can't believe that her editors allowed her to keep that title, and I can't either.

But making the reader uncomfortable is the point, and the book makes an argument that changes

the way you'll think about the function of the Jews in the conscience of the West.

Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver.

My guest today is Dara Horn, the celebrated novelist,

who joins me to discuss her first collected work of nonfiction essays.

In writing about themes as disparate as Anne Frank, American literary criticism,

the Chinese city of Harbin,

and Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, Horn argues that Jewish communities and Jewish figures abstracted symbols of the Jews have come to serve a moral role in the Western imagination

that when you take a step back and look at it,

is bizarre and grotesque.

It's easy, you see, to acknowledge the darkness of the Shoa, and to marvel at the optimism

despite everything of Anne Frank.

But Horn detects in that acknowledgment something insidious. For one can feel cleansed by acknowledging

that someone else in some other time harmed the Jewish people and nod reverentially about how one would

never acquiesce to wholesale harm coming upon the Jews today.

But at the very same time that such pieties are devoutly felt by well-meaning visitors

to Holocaust Museum exhibits, Orthodox Jews are being beaten in the streets of New York,

and the Jewish state, that is, the Jewish people's own answer to the Holocaust,

...