I had mistaken the enormous public interest in past Jewish suffering for a sign of respect for living Jews. I was very wrong. This fact should have b… - Dara Horn
" "I had mistaken the enormous public interest in past Jewish suffering for a sign of respect for living Jews. I was very wrong. This fact should have been obvious to me from the beginning of my writing career, when my most acclaimed early published piece, the one nominated for a major award, wasn't the one about Jewish historical sites in Spain but rather the one about death camps. I made a point of resisting this reality, asking people at my public talks if they could name three death camps, and then asking the same people if they could name three Yiddish authors-the language spoken by over 80 percent of death-camp victims. What, I asked, was the point of caring so much about how people died, if one cared so little about how they lived? (Introduction)
About Dara Horn
Dara Horn (born 1977) is an American novelist, essayist, and professor of literature. She has written five novels and in 2021, released a nonfiction essay collection titled People Love Dead Jews, which was a finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize in nonfiction. She won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award in 2002, the National Jewish Book Award in 2003 and 2006, and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize in 2007.
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The only real difference between Webster’s project and YIVO’s is that, for six million devastating reasons, YIVO’s failed and Webster’s succeeded. Its success can be measured by the millions of viewers who watched this year’s national spelling bee — and by the bee’s many gifted contestants, who are too young to appreciate the pain and loss that hides behind so many of the words they get “right.”