Adventures with Dead Jews

In the first episode of this new limited-release series, Dara Horn ponders a prickly question: Why are so many people so moved by the memory of dead Jews, yet so disinclined to truly embrace the ones who are very much alive?

The question first presented itself to Horn when she was a teenager, sent by a teen magazine to cover the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She filed a moving report, but an elderly acquaintance, a Holocaust survivor, was having none of it, challenging Horn to rethink the way she approached memory, history, and other things Jews spend a lot of time contemplating. The result was People Love Dead Jews, Horn's new book and her first work of nonfiction, and this companion podcast, a hilarious and thought-provoking look at how we wrestle with our past and how, behind our backs, our past still wrestles with us. 

Archives of “The Eternal Light” radio show, featured in this episode, are available here, including the complete episode, “The Voice of Rachel.” Other episodes of “The Eternal Light” dealing with the Holocaust include, among others, “Chronicle of the Dead,” “The Day of the Shadow,” “Girl Without a Name,” “The Search,” “The Congregation of the Dead,” and “A Song for the Conqueror.”

Material cited here about the Anne Frank House can be found in greater detail in “Everyone’s (Second) Favorite Dead Jew,” in People Love Dead Jews by Dara Horn.

Adventures with Dead Jews is brought to you by Tablet Studios and SoulShop. It’s created and written by Dara Horn, and produced and edited by Josh Kross and Robert Scaramuccia. The managing producer is Sara Fredman Aeder, and the executive producers are Liel Leibovitz, Stephanie Butnick, Gabi Weinberg and Dan Luxenberg. We hope you’ll rate and review it wherever you get your podcasts, so that more people can join us on our adventures.

Dara Horn’s new book, People Love Dead Jews, is published by WW Norton and is available wherever books are sold. It's also available as an audio book from Recorded Books. We hope you’ll check it out.

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This companion podcast to Dara Horn’s new book People Love Dead Jews takes listeners beyond the book to some of the strangest corners of Jewish history, exploring how the popular mania for dead Jews warps our understanding of both past and present.

In this series, you’ll meet flamboyantly gay Civil War Jewish spies, Japanese “Jewish specialists” trying to build their own Jewish state, genius Victorian identical twins and genius Lubavitcher identical twins, American and Soviet Jewish moviemakers hoping to become Hebrew prophets, adorable imaginary Jewish children, and a very righteous Tyrannosaurus Rex. 

With these strange, dark, hilarious, and fascinating stories, Dara Horn guides listeners through the outsized role that dead Jews play in other people’s imaginations— and sometimes still play in ours. Join us on our Adventures with Dead Jews!

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