By Kim Adler, Chief Operating Officer and Lisa Lurie, Guest Writer
The Jewish Federation is thrilled to welcome award winning author Dara Horn to Sarasota-Manatee on February 27, 2025, at 7pm at the Hyatt Regency Sarasota.
Dara is the author of six books, including the essay collection People Love Dead Jews (Norton 2021). 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.
Dara’s talk will focus on antisemitism, courage, and meeting the moment as living Jews. In preparation for her visit, we had the opportunity to ask her a few questions about her book, her work, and her thoughts on the challenges facing our Jewish community today.
Q: We know there are some people who have taken offense with the title of your book, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present. How do you address these complaints?
Well, I also made a podcast based on the book called “Adventures with Dead Jews,” and the production team and I were always joking about making merch! Coffee mugs, tote bags, etc. Obviously if the title makes you uncomfortable, what’s inside the book will make you even more uncomfortable. This is intentional on my part. The book is about the role that Jews play in non-Jewish societies, and how often living Jews are required to erase some aspect of themselves to make other people feel comfortable.
Q: We know you will discuss this topic in greater detail at our upcoming event, but what do you think drives people to revise the history of dead Jews?
Antisemitism is not merely a social prejudice. At its foundation, antisemitism is a lie. The lie is that Jews are collectively evil and have no right to collectively exist. This means that antisemitism is actually a righteous fight against evil. This requires explaining away Jews’ existence and experiences by claiming that what happened to Jews actually happened to other people, or to “everyone.” Some examples include the Romans, who massacred, enslaved, and exiled the Jews of Judea and then renamed it “Palestine” after the Jews’ ancient enemies the Philistines– this was an early form of the denial of Jewish history whose only purpose was to disempower Jews not only by physically removing them but by denying even the memory of their existence. Another example would be the Soviet Union’s lie that the Holocaust was an assault on “Soviet citizens” rather than Jews: the USSR’s memorial to the tens of thousands of Jews murdered at Babyn Yar, for instance, only claimed that “Soviet citizens” were murdered, making it seem like the target was ALL Soviet citizens. This was a similar propaganda lie to the Romans’ erasure of Jews from Judea; it’s a denial that what happened to Jews actually happened to them and appropriating that experience as if it happened to someone else instead. We still see this denial of the facts of Jewish history today from people claiming Israel is a “settler colonialist” country. And of course, we’ve seen similar denial of the realities of the October 7 massacre. These lies are comparable to Holocaust denial, and that isn’t a coincidence, because they serve the same purpose. Antisemitism is based on the denial of the reality of Jewish experience and existence, because its foundation is the idea that Jews are collectively evil and need to be erased in any way possible.
Q: In your book, you mention that many Americans believe the common story that Jews were forced to change their surnames at Ellis Island. You refer to this as a myth; why?
Because it’s a myth! This myth is in the same category as Washington chopping down the cherry tree and the CIA killing Kennedy. It never happened. No one at Ellis Island wrote down immigrants’ names. Immigrants’ names were obtained from ships’ manifests, which were compiled from state-issued documents (i.e. passports and visa) at the port of origin– exactly as we do today when boarding an international flight or going through airport passport control. So nope, hapless clerks never changed anyone’s name. You know what IS documented, though? The tens of thousands of court records of American Jews who went to court in the US to change their own names. THAT’s where American Jews’ names changed– by their own free will, in court, often years or even a generation after their families’ immigration. This isn’t my amazing super-secret research. It’s the first thing the park rangers tell you on the tour at Ellis Island National Park.
To me, what’s interesting is that so many American Jews who are so well educated and wouldn’t believe this level of nonsense about anything else are so attached to this myth. I think this myth is doing emotional work for them. It is much easier to think of America as a magical exception to Jewish history where antisemitism was never more than a nuisance, where a name change was something that happened because of a cute funny story about a clueless clerk– rather than a choice American Jews made in response to the truly life-limiting experience of American antisemitism. Early and mid-20th century America, for Jews as well as other minorities, was a segregated society where Jews were redlined and actively discriminated against. I’m not talking about “oooh you can’t join that country club.” I’m talking about systemic life-limiting discrimination, like not being able to get a job or rent an apartment or stay at a hotel. These things were no joke, but the name-change story is. The joke is a lot more fun.
Q: You argue that it is important for Jews to feel uncomfortable. Why is that?
I think it is important for everyone to feel uncomfortable, because one thing I’ve learned in my 25 years as a published author is that the uncomfortable moments are where the story is. My goal is to make you uncomfortable, because the moment you approach an idea that you didn’t want to consider is the moment when you’re about to learn something you could have gone your whole life not knowing.
Q: What do you hope your audience will understand or feel empowered to do after your talk?
To understand that you can’t fight antisemitism without talking about the realities of Jewish civilization, which happens to be an amazing and inspiring story with great value to anyone interested in opposing tyranny. Ultimately the way to defeat this lie is with the truth of Jewish life.
Don’t miss your opportunity to hear from Dara live in Sarasota-Manatee on February 27th. Tickets start at $36 and are available at jfedsrq.org/events.