People love dead Jews
If freedom of speech laws need to be changed to stop incitement to violence, then so be it.
I know this title may be startling.
It may even seem a bit extreme.
But I don’t think it is.
And I think there is some real truth to this, so let me explain.
Before I get to that, it would be wrong not to say that this article is very much based on Dara Horn’s book, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present. Her argument is simple and confronting: the world is far more comfortable with dead Jews than with living ones.
She explains how Jewish suffering, especially the Holocaust, is widely memorialised, curated, and even sentimentalised, while actual Jewish people, Jewish life, Jewish continuity, and Jewish self-defence are ignored, misunderstood, or resented.
I felt this deeply after the Bondi massacre, which my baby and I, by the grace of G-d, survived. Even writing that still feels surreal.
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