people love dead jews reports from a haunted present

Thoughtful new explorations of the topic from the likes of Ken Burns and Tom Stoppard have recently premiered on television, on Broadway and off books about the Holocaust and/or the Nazis regularly dominate Amazon’s “Best Sellers in Jewish History” list.

The Shoah is an equally prominent presence in cultural life. A participant in the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol wore a sweatshirt emblazoned “Camp Auschwitz.” Marchers in the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, displayed swastika flags and pins and threatened Jews. And then there are those who admire and identify with the Nazis directly. President Trump’s disgraced national security adviser Mike Flynn claimed last year that Republicans were being marched to “death camps.” Opponents of vaccine and mask mandates have sported yellow Stars of David. Politicians, provocateurs, and protesters of various kinds have cast themselves as Jewish victims of Nazi persecution. So they crafted and clung to the tale of the funny thing that happened to Grandpa at Ellis Island.The Holocaust has long loomed large in the American imagination, but in recent years it has come to seem ubiquitous, with Holocaust-related symbols and slogans infiltrating political discourse, flooding social media, and even spilling over into the streets.

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.

People love dead jews reports from a haunted present