Adventures with Dead Jews

Dreyfus: A Very Modern Affair is an October 7th story, but one that begins not in 2023, but in October of 1894 with the arrest of French military officer Alfred Dreyfus, who also happened to be a Jew. The implications of his framing, arrest, incarceration and the fallout of his eventual exoneration reverberate today. Over this five-episode series, we examine how these events unfolded, and how they connect to the antisemitism that exists today. Visit https://www.tabletmag.com/dreyfuspodcast or search for Tablet Studios on your podcast app for the rest of the series.

What topic is more controversial, sensational, and endlessly captivating than college admissions? It’s a billion-dollar industry. It sends celebrities to jail. The Supreme Court is weighing in on who gets in and why. We might think we have read all there is to read on the issue, and heard all there is to hear. But if you want to understand everything that’s going on with college admissions today—not just the battles over diversity, but the very existence of college applications, the essays and interviews and standardized tests—you have to look at the first group that tried to diversify elite schools. You have to look at the Jews. Gatecrashers, an 8-part podcast series launching Sept. 13, 2022, tells the story of how Jews fought for acceptance at elite schools, and how the Jewish experience in the Ivy League shaped American higher education, and shaped America at large.

Holocaust education has proliferated in the United States, along with a nationwide emphasis on anti-bias education. But recent years have also seen an undeniable rise in antisemitism. How did we get here? To find out, host Dara Horn rewinds back to the stunning success of Gentlemen’s Agreement, a 1947 Oscar-winning Hollywood blockbuster in which Gregory Peck plays a journalist who poses as a Jew in order to expose American antisemitism. The movie’s premise is hilariously blunt: People shouldn’t hate Jews, because Jews are Just Like Us! Of course, this premise contains an unspoken compromise: If Jews aren’t Just Like Us, hating them might actually be fine after all. To investigate this requirement that Jews erase their differences in order to deserve respect, we go back to a bizarre moment in 1806, when Napoleon convened an ancient rabbinic court to ensure that the Jews were sufficiently Just Like Us. In this bizarre Napoleonic game show and the spectacular gory failures that unspooled from it, we can begin to see the unarticulated limits of what we now think of as diversity—and to consider, in profound ways, how we might do better. Rachel Gordan’s most recent work on Gentleman’s Agreement, Laura Z. Hobson, and twentieth century American Jewish culture can be found here, here, and here. Jonathan Helfand’s work on Jewish identity in France can be found here and here. For further background, see also Napoleon, the Jews, and the Sanhedrin and The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus. Dara Horn’s new book, People Love Dead Jews, is published by WW Norton and is available wherever books are sold. It's also available as an audio book from Recorded Books. We hope you’ll check it out. Adventures with Dead Jews is brought to you by Tablet Studios and Soul Shop. It’s created and written by Dara Horn, and produced and edited by Josh Kross and Robert Scaramuccia. The managing producer is Sara Fredman Aeder, and the executive producers are Liel Leibovitz, Stephanie Butnick, Gabi Weinberg and Dan Luxenberg. We hope you’ll rate and review it wherever you get your podcasts, so that more people can join us on our adventures.

Our stories so far have explored relationships between Jews and non-Jewish societies that have ranged from awkward to, well, murderous. But in this case, the social snubbing of Jews actually worked to everyone’s advantage, resulting in the biggest historical discovery in the history of the world. Here, two genius Scottish identical twins match wits with one half of a pair of genius Hasidic Romanian identical twins in order to track down some of the oldest existing manuscripts of the bible. They embark on an Indiana-Jones style adventure in 1890s Egypt, and wind up with much more than they bargained for: hundreds of thousands of centuries-old Hebrew manuscripts that are still changing the way we think about the past. Horn also brings us to current-day attempts to preserve ancient Jewish sites in the most volatile parts of the Middle East, to uncover the rewards and perils of trying to preserve Jewish history. How do we decide what’s worth saving? Chrystie Sherman’s photographs of the Eliyahu Hanavi-Jobar synagogue in Damascus are available in the online museum of Diarna. Janet Soskice’s biography of Margaret Gibson and Agnes Lewis is The Sisters of Sinai. Ben Outhwaite directs the Taylor Schechter Genizah Research Unit. Marina Rustow’s most recent book is The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue. More information about the Cairo Genizah is also available in Sacred Trash by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, Sacred Treasure by Mark Glickman, and A Jewish Archive from Old Cairo by Stefan Reif, as well as in the documentary film by Michelle Paymar, From Cairo to the Cloud. A fictionalized version of the Genizah’s discovery can be found in Dara Horn’s novel A Guide for the Perplexed. Dara Horn’s new book, People Love Dead Jews, is published by WW Norton and is available wherever books are sold. It's also available as an audio book from Recorded Books. We hope you’ll check it out. Adventures with Dead Jews is brought to you by Tablet Studios and Soul Shop. It’s created and written by Dara Horn, and produced and edited by Josh Kross and Robert Scaramuccia. The managing producer is Sara Fredman Aeder, and the executive producers are Liel Leibovitz, Stephanie Butnick, Gabi Weinberg and Dan Luxenberg. We hope you’ll rate and review it wherever you get your podcasts, so that more people can join us on our adventures.

In this episode, Dara Horn revisits Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Holocaust movie Schindler’s List, along with Spielberg’s blockbuster dinosaur movie Jurassic Park-- which he worked on simultaneously, returning from the brutal Polish concentration camp set each evening to edit brutal velociraptor footage. Together these movies reveal many aspects of what we expect from Hollywood storytelling. What’s the cost of applying that narrative arc to a story about the Holocaust? And what might be the moral motivations of a Tyrannosaurus Rex? Horn takes us through Spielberg’s elaborate process (which involved building an entire concentration camp from scratch), revisits the film and its rapturous reception, and speaks with a historian, a film critic, and a filmmaker focused on Holocaust rescuers to parse out what the movie gets wrong and also what it gets right-- and why watching it today feels so painfully different from how it felt in 1993. More information about Spielberg’s experiences filming Schindler’s List and editing Jurassic Park can be found in The Making of Schindler’s List: Behind the Scenes of an Epic Film by Franciszek Palowski. Spielberg expresses some of his own thoughts about it 25 years later here. Sara Horowitz’s and Omer Bartov’s essays detailing their responses to the film can be found in Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List, edited by Yosefa Loshitzky. Pierre Sauvage’s documentary film on the rescuers of Le Chambon in France is Weapons of the Spirit. His forthcoming documentary And Crown Thy Good: Varian Fry and the Refugee Crisis, Marseille 1940-1941, is a comprehensive look at the American rescuer. More information is available here. Further exploration of Varian Fry and the questions raised by his work can be found in “On Rescuing Jews and Others” in People Love Dead Jews by Dara Horn. Adventures with Dead Jews is brought to you by Tablet Studios and Soul Shop. It’s created and written by Dara Horn, and produced and edited by Josh Kross and Robert Scaramuccia. The managing producer is Sara Fredman Aeder, and the executive producers are Liel Leibovitz, Stephanie Butnick, Gabi Weinberg and Dan Luxenberg. We hope you’ll rate and review it wherever you get your podcasts, so that more people can join us on our adventures. Dara Horn’s new book, People Love Dead Jews, is published by WW Norton and is available wherever books are sold. It's also available as an audio book from Recorded Books. We hope you’ll check it out.

In the first episode of this new limited-release series, Dara Horn ponders a prickly question: Why are so many people so moved by the memory of dead Jews, yet so disinclined to truly embrace the ones who are very much alive? The question first presented itself to Horn when she was a teenager, sent by a teen magazine to cover the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She filed a moving report, but an elderly acquaintance, a Holocaust survivor, was having none of it, challenging Horn to rethink the way she approached memory, history, and other things Jews spend a lot of time contemplating. The result was People Love Dead Jews, Horn's new book and her first work of nonfiction, and this companion podcast, a hilarious and thought-provoking look at how we wrestle with our past and how, behind our backs, our past still wrestles with us. Archives of “The Eternal Light” radio show, featured in this episode, are available here, including the complete episode, “The Voice of Rachel.” Other episodes of “The Eternal Light” dealing with the Holocaust include, among others, “Chronicle of the Dead,” “The Day of the Shadow,” “Girl Without a Name,” “The Search,” “The Congregation of the Dead,” and “A Song for the Conqueror.” Material cited here about the Anne Frank House can be found in greater detail in “Everyone’s (Second) Favorite Dead Jew,” in People Love Dead Jews by Dara Horn. Adventures with Dead Jews is brought to you by Tablet Studios and SoulShop. It’s created and written by Dara Horn, and produced and edited by Josh Kross and Robert Scaramuccia. The managing producer is Sara Fredman Aeder, and the executive producers are Liel Leibovitz, Stephanie Butnick, Gabi Weinberg and Dan Luxenberg. We hope you’ll rate and review it wherever you get your podcasts, so that more people can join us on our adventures. Dara Horn’s new book, People Love Dead Jews, is published by WW Norton and is available wherever books are sold. It's also available as an audio book from Recorded Books. We hope you’ll check it out.