Weekly Book Discussions: “People Love Dead Jews” with Dr. Josh Andy

This program is geared for educators, but open to all.(Act 48 credit hours or a letter of participation is available upon request.)

The book discussions will be offered on the following dates and times:
NEW DATES!
December 7, 2021 | 4:00-5:00pm
December 14, 2021 | 4:00-5:00pm
December 21, 2021 | 4:00-5:00pm
About The Book

A startling exploration of how Jewish history is exploited to flatter the living
Reflecting on subjects as far-flung as the international veneration of Anne Frank, the blockbuster traveling exhibition called ​“Auschwitz,” the Jewish history of the Chinese city of Harbin, and the little known ​“righteous Gentile” Varian Fry, Dara Horn challenges us to confront the reasons why there might be so much fascination with Jewish deaths, as emblematic of the worst of evils the world has to offer, and so little respect for Jewish lives, as they continue to unfold in the present.

Horn draws on her own family’s life — trying to explain Shakespeare’s Shylock to a curious 10-year-old, her anger when swastikas are drawn on desks at her children’s school in New Jersey, the profound and essential perspective offered by traditional religious practice, prayer, and study — to assert the vitality, complexity, and depth of this life against an anti-Semitism that, far from being disarmed by the mantra of ​“Never forget,” is on the rise

Dr. Josh Andy

Dr. Josh Andy is a full time teacher at Winchester Thurston School, and an educational programs leader and Holocaust scholar with Classrooms Without Borders. An accomplished and award winning educator, Dr. Andy holds a Ph.D. in Russian and East European Studies from Birmingham University and teaches in the Upper School. In addition to teaching Genocide and Holocaust Studies, he teaches a course on the modern Middle East, Multicultural America, and AP European history. Next year he will teach Russian history. He has traveled internationally to study global cultures and issues as part of his work to design engaging courses for his students. He earned WT’s Mary Houston Griffin Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2014, which funded his trip to Amman, Jordan, to develop his Middle East course.

About the Author: Dara Horn

Dara Horn is the award-winning author of six books, including the novels In the Image (Norton 2002), The World to Come (Norton 2006), All Other Nights (Norton 2009), A Guide for the Perplexed (Norton 2013), and Eternal Life (Norton 2018), and the essay collection People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present (Norton 2021). One of Granta magazine’s Best Young American Novelists (2007), she is the recipient of two National Jewish Book Awards, the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, the Harold U. Ribalow Award, and the Reform Judaism Fiction Prize, and she was a finalist for the Wingate Prize, the Simpson Family Literary Prize, and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.

Her books have been selected as New York Times Notable Books, Booklist’s 25 Best Books of the Decade, and San Francisco Chronicle’s Best Books of the Year, and have been translated into eleven languages. Her nonfiction work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, and The Jewish Review of Books, among many other publications, and she is a regular columnist for Tablet Magazine. Horn received her doctorate in comparative literature from Harvard University, studying Yiddish and Hebrew. She has taught courses in these subjects at Sarah Lawrence College and Yeshiva University, and held the Gerald Weinstock Visiting Professorship in Jewish Studies at Harvard. She has lectured for audiences in hundreds of venues throughout North America, Israel, and Australia. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and four children.

For those that would like to plan ahead our next book for December & January will be: ‘ All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler’ by Rebecca Donner (Author)