Dara Horn, College Applications, and Jewish Identity
This was a college application essay I wrote in late 2023. Here was the prompt:
Is there a book, film, podcast or life experience that has made you feel more connected to your personal history/identity, and what is the most important thing you learned from it?
In a particularly strange scene in John Green’s popular young adult novel The Fault in Our Stars, the two main characters share their first kiss in the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam to the applause of the surrounding tourists. The Fault in Our Stars did not make me feel more connected to my Jewish identity, but researching the debate over that controversial scene led me to a different book that did. Dara Horn’s provocatively titled essay collection People Love Dead Jews argues that scenes like that one, and the Anne Frank House itself, are part of a global pattern in media: dead Jews are frequently mentioned, but rarely living ones. In the first of People Love Dead Jews’ twelve essays, Horn purports that the entire mythos surrounding Anne Frank is misguided and distracting. People celebrate Anne Frank diarizing that she “still [believes] that people are really good at heart,” but as Horn writes, that was before she was reported to the Gestapo and placed on a cattle car to Auschwitz. One begins to notice a pattern: the media looks towards Jews who suffered immense tragedy to deliver inspiring aphorisms, when in reality, they are just Jews who suffered immense tragedy. This notion is confusing and distressing. I find inspiration in the stories of my ancestors’ struggles, but Dara Horn asks: is it ethical to use those stories for my own motivation? Then again: what is Jewish identity without stories of trauma and displacement?
People Love Dead Jews is not only a criticism of the collective consciousness surrounding the Holocaust. In her next essay, Frozen Jews, Horn recounts the story of an ephemerally flourishing Jewish community in the northern Chinese city of Harbin, where fleeing Russian Jews made their way down the Trans-Siberian Railroad into freezing Manchuria to set up what was once the largest Jewish community for thousands of miles in any direction. They built synagogues, schools, bakeries, and retirement homes. From scratch, Russian Jews built what is now a ten million-strong metropolis (its distinctly European urban planning style remains to this day). However, we all know how the stories of Jewish enclaves tend to end. The synagogues of Harbin were burned and the wealth of the local Jews was stolen. Now, the Chinese government is funding slightly inaccurate museums about Harbin’s Jewish history in order to “attract business investments” while paving over the last remaining Jewish cemetery to build an amusement park. Before reading People Love Dead Jews, I had never heard of the city of Harbin, but its Jewry’s rise and collapse is a microcosm of the ancestral memories ingrained in every Jew. We live in stability, something goes awry, and we set up shop somewhere new and succeed again. I’m reminded of my great-great-grandfather who founded perhaps the first synagogue in Suffolk County, which still operates in a modern facility on land that was once his dairy farm. Curiously, reading about a tiny Jewish community on the opposite side of the world cemented my identity as an American Jew: a product of refugees who worked tirelessly to create a beautiful community for generations to come.
People Love Dead Jews taught me about the tendency to glorify victims of antisemitic atrocities and about perhaps the most far-flung Jewish community of the 20th century. But Dara Horn’s essays did not consider whether skepticism and glorification of recounting Jewish suffering can exist in tandem. In reading her essays, I believe they can. I will look back at the tragedy my ancestors endured, but more importantly, I will look at the prosperity my descendants will inherit.