unbossed:imageofvoid:drek-odradek:your-daughters-shall-prophesy: Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: R
unbossed:imageofvoid:drek-odradek:your-daughters-shall-prophesy: Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present The book is great and here’s the essay where this is from. You should read it. [ID: 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. They make us feel forgiven for those lapses of our civilization that allow for piles of murdered girls – and if those words came from a murdered girl, well, then, we must be absolved, because they must be true. That gift of grace and absolution from a murdered Jew (exactly the gift that lies at the heart of Christianity) is what millions of people are so eager to find in Frank’s hiding place, in her writings, in her “legacy.” 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. If it were, it is unlikely that it would have been anywhere near as universally embraced. /end ID] “What would it mean for a writer not to hide the horror? There is no mystery here, only a lack of interest. To understand what we are missing, consider the work of another young murdered Jewish chronicler of the same moment, Zalmen Gradowski. Like Frank’s, Gradowski’s work was written under duress and discovered only after his death—except that Gradowski’s work was written in Auschwitz, and you have probably never heard of it.“ I just finished reading this! It is a powerful book, though, like most collections of essays, a bit uneven. The Anne Frank essay is the first one in the book, and I think it’s the best. But the essays on the Tree of Life shooting, an almost forgotten Holocaust rescuer named (really!) Varian Fry, and the Auschwitz: Not Long Ago, Not Far Away exhibit are also right up there.You should read this book, especially if you’re not Jewish. Non-Jews should read this book so that you can start to imagine what it might feel like to be us, and how some cultural touchstones might appear to someone whose narrative isn’t yours. The essay on The Merchant of Venice isn’t Horn’s best – it’s a little narrow and kind of precious, and she proves elsewhere in the book that she’s capable of better writing – but read it anyway. You need to know this perspective on The Merchant of Venice. -- source link
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