Growing up in the Forever Wars and People Love Dead Jews - Miami Book Fair Authors

Grant spoke with Miami Book Fair authors Jerad W. Alexander and Dara Horn about their upcoming appearances at the Miami Book Fair 2021 at Miami-Dade College's downtown Wolfson campus this November 14th-21st.  Jerad W. Alexander wrote Volunteers: Growing Up in the Forever War.  His appearance at the fair will be available digitally on demand starting Friday, 11/19. The book takes readers deep into the "kingdom"—the insular realm of military families growing up on bases around the world—and vividly evokes a childhood infused with all things war. The minute he is old enough, he enlists, like his parents and stepfather and grandparents before him, and he, too, lands in Iraq as an eager Marine, desperate to see some action. Soon, though, he comes to realize he is fighting a lost cause, a skirmish in the ongoing war on terror that is really about a fruitless display of American might. Everything Alexander has based his life on, has obsessed over, he realizes, is a mirage.  Dara Horn wrote People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present which is currently the #1 selling book on the history of Judaism on Amazon. Her appearance at the fair will be available digitally on demand starting Thursday, 11/18. The book is a startling and profound exploration of how Jewish history is exploited to comfort the living. Dara Horn has 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. As Horn explores the (not so) shocking attacks on the American Jewish community in recent years, she reveals the subtler dehumanization built into the public piety that surrounds the Jewish past—making the radical argument that the benign reverence we give to past horrors is itself a profound affront to human dignity. This live recording was made November 1st on Twitter Spaces and uses paid affiliate links.