Temple Sinai: Cooper Bernstein Scholar-in-Residence Event: Dara Horn

Dara Horn will be speaking at Temple Sinai about her book, People Love Dead Jews. Dara is the award-winning author of six books, including the novels In the Image (Norton 2002), The World to Come (Norton 2006), All Other Nights (Norton 2009), A Guide for the Perplexed (Norton 2013), and Eternal Life (Norton 2018). One of Granta magazine’s Best Young American Novelists, she is the recipient of two National Jewish Book Awards, the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, the Harold U. Ribalow Award, and the Reform Judaism Fiction Prize, and she was a finalist for the JW Wingate Prize, the Simpson Family Literary Prize, and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.

People Love Dead Jews reflects on subjects as far-flung as the international veneration of Anne Frank, the blockbuster traveling exhibition called ​“Auschwitz,” the Jewish history of the Chinese city of Harbin, and the little known ​“righteous Gentile” Varian Fry, Dara Horn challenges us to confront the reasons why there might be so much fascination with Jewish deaths, as emblematic of the worst of evils the world has to offer, and so little respect for Jewish lives, as they continue to unfold in the present.

Horn draws on her own family’s life — trying to explain Shakespeare’s Shylock to a curious 10-year-old, her anger when swastikas are drawn on desks at her children’s school in New Jersey, the profound and essential perspective offered by traditional religious practice, prayer, and study — to assert the vitality, complexity, and depth of this life against an anti-Semitism that, far from being disarmed by the mantra of ​“Never forget,” is on the rise.

2:30pm: Book Signing (Books will be available for purchase $18)
3:00pm: Book Talk and Q&A
4:00pm: Dessert Reception