It’s created and written by Dara Horn, and produced and edited by Josh Kross and Robert Scaramuccia. We hope you’ll check it out.Īdventures with Dead Jews is brought to you by Tablet Studios and Soul Shop. It's also available as an audio book from Recorded Books. For further background, see also Napoleon, the Jews, and the Sanhedrin and The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus.ĭara Horn’s new book, People Love Dead Jews, is published by WW Norton and is available wherever books are sold. Jonathan Helfand’s work on Jewish identity in France can be found here and here. Hobson, and twentieth century American Jewish culture can be found here, here, and here. Rachel Gordan’s most recent work on Gentleman’s Agreement, Laura Z.

In this bizarre Napoleonic game show and the spectacular gory failures that unspooled from it, we can begin to see the unarticulated limits of what we now think of as diversity-and to consider, in profound ways, how we might do better. To investigate this requirement that Jews erase their differences in order to deserve respect, we go back to a bizarre moment in 1806, when Napoleon convened an ancient rabbinic court to ensure that the Jews were sufficiently Just Like Us. The movie’s premise is hilariously blunt: People shouldn’t hate Jews, because Jews are Just Like Us! Of course, this premise contains an unspoken compromise: If Jews aren’t Just Like Us, hating them might actually be fine after all. To find out, host Dara Horn rewinds back to the stunning success of Gentlemen’s Agreement, a 1947 Oscar-winning Hollywood blockbuster in which Gregory Peck plays a journalist who poses as a Jew in order to expose American antisemitism. But recent years have also seen an undeniable rise in antisemitism. So they crafted and clung to the tale of the funny thing that happened to Grandpa at Ellis Island.Holocaust education has proliferated in the United States, along with a nationwide emphasis on anti-bias education. But to tell their children that story would prove that America is not all that different, that here, too, Jews face prejudice, discrimination and violence. Then they discovered that they couldn’t get a job as Rosenberg but could get hired as Rose. They had come to a land that they thought promised the American Dream. Her answer: If Jews tell the truth about American antisemitism, they look like fools. Relying on the historian Kirsten Fermaglich’s meticulous research into New York City name-changing petitions that proved, beyond a doubt, that immigrants’ names were not altered at Ellis Island, Horn asks why Jews cling to the fiction that some misguided immigration agent changed their ancestors’ names. She turns away from Varian Fry rescuing Jewish artists in Vichy France and the Syrian synagogue smashed to rubble on her flickering screen.

Encountering murderous antisemitism on American soil forces Horn to confront history closer to home.

Dara horn new book