Dara Horn

A startling and profound exploration of how Jewish history is exploited to comfort the living.

Reports from a Haunted Present

People Love Dead Jews

Krys C

Jews were people who, for moral and educational purposes, were supposed to be dead. 

And here is the most devastating fact of [Anne] Frank's posthumous success, which leaves her real experience forever hidden: we know what she would have said,  ecayse other people have said it, and we don't want to hear it. 

The line most 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 "inspirational" by which we mean 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.

You can't go back. No one ever can. But it's still worth trying. 

Because of Diarna, I see my own American landscape differently. I pass by the tiny eighteenth century cemeteries near my home with its revolutionary War graves and I think of the histories that might lie unseen alongside the ones we enshrine, wondering whether there might be a Native American burial ground under the local Walgreens, whether I am treading on someone else's ancient scared space. I know I must be. We are always walking on the dead. 

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