In her new book People Love Dead Jews – Reports from a Haunted Present, author Dara Horn quotes from a letter she received from Denise, a women who had read Horn’s novel The World to Come, the protagonist of which was a pogrom survivor. Denise chastised Horn for writing a dismal book, instead of one that enabled “people to laugh, enjoy and be uplifted.” Denise would be well advised to stay away from People Love Dead Jews because Horn’s latest book is a profoundly depressing account of the world in which today’s American Jews have found themselves but is all the more important for that. Horn covers an enormous amount of ground in her short, beautifully written book. She throws into stark relief the paradoxical effects of the Western world’s fetishization of the Holocaust, excelling at pointing out bizarre ironies. Her account of the behavior of the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam is particularly striking. This institution, dedicated to tell the story of the Holocaust’s most celebrated victim, instructed an employee to hide his yarmulke because, in the Museum’s own words, the Museum’s stance was one of “neutrality,” and having an openly Jewish employee would “interfere” with the museum’s “independent position.” Dead Jews are fine—live Jews not so much. The Holocaust as “must see” education and memorialization began in the 1970s; now almost every European nation as well as numerous American cities can boast a Holocaust memorial or museum. From Poland to China (Horn’s chapter on the Jewish Museum in Harbin, China is one of her funniest), a Jewish traveler can get a tour from a non-Jew of a recreated Jewish town, complete with ersatz Jewish music and ersatz Jewish food. All these re-creations lack are actual Jews who have, as Horn points out, vanished, for reasons that these living dioramas never explain. Jews had hoped that Holocaust education, which became a mandatory part of school lessons in much of the United States and Europe during the same period, would serve as a continuing antidote to Jew-hatred. But, as Horn notes, Holocaust education instead may have made lesser anti-Semitic actions more acceptable because “anything short of the Holocaust is, well, not the Holocaust, “ so the “bar is rather high.” Moreover Holocaust museums have increasingly seen their mission as one of general anti-genocide education, with genocide increasingly interpreted as covering a far vaster swath than its original definition of the “killing of a people.” But by putting the Holocaust within a framework of earlier and later depredations, these museums deny the specificity of the Shoah. What made the Holocaust unique is that the German government and people, together with willing accomplices in conquered territories, using the tools of law and order, as well as war and occupation, made it a primary goal to murder every last Jew of the face of the planet. This war against the Jews was not an outgrowth of a war of conquest, nor was it a byproduct of imperialism or exploitation, but was an end in and of itself, which Germans and collaborators vigorously pursued until the day the Second World War ended. Universalizing the Holocaust, well intentioned that it might have been, has instead led to the Shoah’s trivialization and normalization, which reached an absurd low when various anti-Vaxxers took to wearing yellow Stars of David to protest Covid vaccine mandates and passports When Horn moves from the subject of dead Jews to discussing murder of American Jews because of their Jewishness, during the last decade, her book becomes truly alarming. Horn delineates how the progressive world of academia and journalism, which has become hypersensitive to narrative appropriation, invidious comparisons, and perceived racism or prejudice, has no problem with making Jews the exception to the rule and, as such, fair game. Why else, as Horn observes, would numerous media accounts “explain” the murder of Jews in a kosher supermarket in Jersey City by men who set out specifically to kill Jews, by pointing to Jewish “gentrifying” of a “minority” neighborhood? Horn “was not able to find any similar “‘context’ in media reports” after the 2015 shooting in a Charleston Black church or the 2016 massacre at an Orlando LGBTQ nightclub. The obvious but existentially painful explanation for this disparity is that “Jews Don’t Count,” a phrase that British author David Baddiel used to title his newly published account of British progressive Jew-hatred. As Kenneth L. Marcus pointed out in these pages recently, left Jew-hatred and its mate, Zionophobia, were “forged in Soviet propaganda, in the context of the Cold War and the rise of post-colonialism” and “fuse[s] age-old anti-Semitic stereotypes, European conspiracy theories, left-wing anti-nationalism and post-Cold War geopolitics.” For decades American Jews have comforted themselves that anti-Zionists were not anti-Semites. But within the last five years, it has become apparent that anti-Zionism is just another iteration of the world’s oldest hatred. The steady accretions of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are eroding the place of Jews in American society. The recent Brandeis Center survey of college students who have a strong sense of Jewish or Zionist self- identity revealed that 65 percent of the respondents have felt unsafe on campus because of their Jewish/Zionist identity and more than 50 percent have reported hiding their Jewish/Zionist identity. Whole academic departments have endorsed the BDS movement while municipalities across the country have debated adopting their own boycott Israel resolutions. What to do? Horn turns to the Talmud for comfort, which is one answer. The Brandeis Center provides another by utilizing U.S. federal and state laws to defend Jewish individuals and entities who are “stigmatized, excluded or attacked” or whose civil rights are otherwise violated. Bari Weiss, writing in How to Fight Ant-Semitism, advises that American Jews should fight as Americans “because American and Jewish ideals are harmonious.” But influential segments of American society have adopted a new ideology that sees “American ideals” as poisoned, white supremacist, colonialist settler constructs that must be rejected in their totality. It is not clear whether American Jews have a place in that 2021 American Brave New World.