Panel Discussion: Why Antisemitism? Lafayette College Students Reflect on the Writings of Dara Horn

In this panel discussion, Lafayette College professor Monika Rice and her students reflect on author Dara Horn’s book, People Love Dead Jews, a collection of essays about the role of Jewish persecution in modern-day world consciousness. Monika Rice and her students reflect on author Dara Horn’s book, This event is free and open to the public.

Over several months, Lafayette College professor Monika Rice and her students studied author Dara Horn’s collection of essays and then were given the opportunity to work with the author during her recent presentation at Colton Chapel. This program explores their reflections on that experience.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Renowned and beloved as a prizewinning novelist, Dara Horn has also been publishing penetrating 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.