“They were doing it in a really openly cynical way. But that hasn’t stopped the Chinese from pulling out all the stops in their efforts to attract investors for Jewish heritage projects, including a museum that makes no mention of why the Jewish community no longer exists, and an ice cream chain that has appropriated the name and countenance of a murdered local Jewish leader and businessman.
One would be hard-pressed to find Jewish tourists in Harbin. Now there is but one Jew left in Harbin, an elderly Israeli journalist who is the self-appointed Jewish historian of the city. It was a great place for 20,000 Jews to live in the early 20th century, but they only lasted there for three decades. Harbin, a city along the Trans-Siberian Railroad in Manchuria, was built by Jews.
The author reached distant, ice-bound Harbin, China, where she discovered a very cynical take on the preservation of local Jewish heritage. Viewing herself as a storyteller, Horn decided to tackle the subject that way, rather than as a polemicist.Īl Pacino as Shylock in the Michael Radford-directed 2004 production of Shakespeare’s ‘The Merchant of Venice’ (courtesy Sony Pictures Classics) I did not apply for this job,” she said with the kind of dark humor that she laces throughout the essays in the book, some of them previously published. “I became the go-to person for this emerging literary genre - synagogue shooting op-eds. “I started noticing in the past several years that every time my editors from mainstream publications would ask me to write something, it was about dead Jews or antisemitism,” Horn said. Norton & Company)Īfter writing five well-received novels grounded in different eras in Jewish history, Horn, 44, turned her attention to “People Love Dead Jews” (and her parallel podcast, “ Adventures With Dead Jews,”) after being asked to write opinion pieces and articles responding to events such as the fatal shooting attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in October 2018. ‘People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present’ by Dara Horn (W.
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