Learning From Modern Responses to the Holocaust
‘People Love Dead Jews’ by Dara Horn
A couple months ago, Dara Horn released People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present. It’s a collection of personal essays about antisemitism, especially in the United States, with special consideration of how people remember stories of Holocaust survival or non-survival.
The Depths of Evil and the Heights of Goodness
Hannah Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, argues that Eichmann’s evil was due to his “inability to think.” Horn, however, disagrees. To Horn, Eichmann seemed like
“someone who had spent a rather astonishing amount of time thinking, absorbing ideas and translating them into action. It was just that he had been thinking about bullshit, and in the process had become buried so deep in it that extraction had become impossible.”
Suppose we shift to looking at good people, then? What about, say, the non-Jews during this time period who rescued Jews? To what did they owe their goodness?
Well, Horn notes, “there is something tautological about claiming that the traits that foster righteousness can be expressed only in a situation involving righteous conduct.” What about “the remainder of one’s life”…
