People Love Dead Jews

People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present by Dara Horn, W. W. Norton & Company, 2021. 

Love After Death

It has been widely discussed in recent years that today’s antisemites make a distinction between Jews who are Zionists and Jews who are not Zionists, favoring the latter. Horn points out that today’s antisemites also make a distinction between Jews who are alive and Jews who are dead, favoring the latter. She also tells two fascinating and little known stories about Jews in Russia and Europe. 

Manchuria

Count Sergei Witte, minister of finance, decided to populate, with Jews, a stop on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Mikhail Gruliov, a Russian Army General selected the site of Harbin, Manchuria. In 1898 Jews started moving there. Later, Jews fleeing pogroms and Whites fleeing the Russian Civil War settled there. 

Rescuing Jews

Varian Fry, Albert Otto Hirschman, Miriam Davenport and Mary Jayne Gold, were prominent members of the Emergency Rescue Committee, which rescued hundreds of talented European Jews from the Nazis.