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Join us for a lively conversation with author and journalist Dara Horn and Ilana Cone Kennedy, Chief Operating Officer at the Holocaust Center for Humanity, as they discuss Dara Horn's thought-provoking new book, People Love Dead Jews, Anne Frank, Schindler's List, antisemitism, and our understanding of the Holocaust today.
Renowned and beloved as a prize-winning novelist, Dara Horn has been publishing essays since she was a teenager. Often asked by major publications to write on subjects related to Jewish culture―and increasingly in response to a recent wave of deadly antisemitic attacks―Horn was troubled to realize what all of these assignments had in common: she was being asked to write about dead Jews, never about living ones. In these essays, Horn reflects on subjects as far-flung as the international veneration of Anne Frank, the mythology that Jewish family names were changed at Ellis Island, the blockbuster traveling exhibition Auschwitz, the marketing of the Jewish history of Harbin, China, and the little-known life of the "righteous Gentile" Varian Fry. Throughout, she challenges us to confront the reasons why there might be so much fascination with Jewish deaths, and so little respect for Jewish lives unfolding in the present.
Dara Horn is the award-winning author of six books. 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. Her books have been selected as New York Times Notable Books, Booklist’s Best 25 Books of the Decade, and San Francisco Chronicle’s Best Books of the Year, and have been translated into eleven languages. Her nonfiction work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, and The Jewish Review of Books, among many other publications, and she is a regular columnist for Tablet. Horn received her doctorate in Yiddish and Hebrew literature from Harvard University. She has taught courses in these subjects at Sarah Lawrence College and Yeshiva University, and has held the Gerald Weinstock Visiting Professorship in Jewish Studies at Harvard. She has lectured for audiences in hundreds of venues throughout North America, Israel and Australia. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and four children.
Special thanks to our program partner, Temple De Hirsch Sinai.
Questions? Email Ilana Cone Kennedy, Chief Operating Officer, at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
A special thank you to our community partners:
Congregation Beth Shalom
Herzl-Ner Tamid Conservative Congregation
Israeli-American Council (IAC) Seattle
JConnect
Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle
Seattle Jewish Chorale