Dara Horn Quotes

Children are often envied for their supposed imaginations, but the truth is that adults imagine things far more than children do. Most adults wander the world deliberately blind, living only inside their heads, in their fantasies, in their memories and worries, oblivious to the present, only aware of the past or future.

Time itself is created through deeds of true kindness.

...she smiled - and time was created.

I believe that when people die, they go to the same place as all the people who haven’t yet been born. That’s why it’s called the world to come, because that’s where they make the new souls for the future. And the reward when good people die” – her mother paused, swallowed, paused again – “the reward when good people die is that they get to help make the people in their families who haven’t been born yet. They pick out what kinds of traits they want the new people to have – they give them all the raw material of their souls, like their talents and their brains and their potential. Of course it’s up to the new ones, once they’re born, what they’ll use and what they won’t, but that’s what everyone who dies is doing, I think. They get to decide what kind of people the new ones might be able to become.

Judaism has always been uncool, going back to its origins as the planet’s only monotheism, featuring a bossy and unsexy invisible God. Uncoolness is pretty much Judaism’s brand, which is why cool people find it so threatening

The insane conspiracy theories that motivate people who commit antisemitic violence reflect a fear of real freedom: a fondness for tyrants, an aversion to ideas unlike their own, and most of all, a casting-off of responsibility for complicated problems. None of this is a coincidence.

What one finds in Jewish storytelling, though, is something really different: a kind of realism that comes from humility, from the knowledge that one cannot be true to the human experience while pretending to make sense of the world.

the entire appeal of Anne Frank to the wider world—as opposed to those who knew and loved her—lay in her lack of a future.

between the raindrops" - a Hebrew expression for evading repeated disaster.

Destruction and humiliation didn’t matter. Only memory and integrity did. Was the hour I was living through right now different from the hour they were living through then? Did it matter? From what hour does one recite the evening Sh’ma?

His dreams contained no stories at all, but only the hard stones of thoughts: the unimaginably unlikely coincidence of being alive at the same time as the love of your life, the frequency with which a person was expected to bear the body and the burden of someone else, the idiocy of thinking that kindness can protect the person who is kind, and worst of all, the bottomless pit of truth that he had suddenly, sickeningly seen: that the world to come was not an afterlife at all, but simply this world, to come- the future world, your own future, that you were creating for yourself with every choice you made in it.

The freedoms that we cherish are meaningless without our commitments to one another: to civil discourse, to actively educating the next generation, to welcoming strangers, to loving our neighbors. The beginning of freedom is the beginning of responsibility. Our night of vigil has already begun.

There's no such thing as a problem that's yours and not mine.

The line most often quoted from Frank’s diary are her famous words, “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” These words are “inspiring,” by which we mean that they flatter us. They make us feel forgiven for those lapses of our civilization that allow for piles of murdered girls—and if those words came from a murdered girl, well, then, we must be absolved, because they must be true. That gift of grace and absolution from a murdered Jew (exactly the gift that lies at the heart of Christianity) is what millions of people are so eager to find in Frank’s hiding place, in her writings, in her “legacy.” It is far more gratifying to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognize the obvious: Frank wrote about people being “truly good at heart” before meeting people who weren’t. Three weeks after writing those words, she met people who weren’t.

Here's how much some people dislike living Jews: they murdered 6 million of them. This fact bears repeating, as it does not come up at all in Anne Frank's writing. Readers of her diary are aware that the author was murdered in a genocide, but this does not mean that her diary is a work about genocide. If it were, it is unlikely that it would have been anywhere near as universally embraced.

But over four generations, the Soviet regime forced Jews to participate in and internalize their own humiliation—and in that way, Ala suggested, they destroyed far more souls. And they never, ever paid for it.

Hair in darkness doesn’t feel the way it does in light. In light, you can touch a person’s hair and not feel it at all - you might think you are feeling it, but really you are seeing its color, seeing its shape, seeing the light and the shadows intertwined between the hair and your own hands. But in darkness, her hair poured across his palms like molten music between his fingers. Skin in darkness is different, too. In light, you don’t notice skin, distracted as you are by eyes watching you, eyes you are afraid to trust, eyes that could be waiting for your shame. But in pure darkness, her skin was warm and trembling and alive - secret whorled passageways of ears, soft fingertips tracing circles on his neck, the living heartbeat-shudders of falling-closed eyelids, cheeks erupting into lips and giving way to his tongue. And in light you don’t think of how warm a person is, of how a person can enfold you, enclose you amid arms and clothes and ribs in pure primeval underground darkness, the heat between you glowing like an ember that you are afraid to put out.

The line most often quoted from Frank’s diary are her famous words, “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” These words are “inspiring,” by which we mean that they flatter us.

The bathroom was made of the finest materials, but underneath it all was nothing but shit.

Here’s how much some people dislike living Jews: they murdered 6 million of them.

Most of the other visitors were chained to their audio guides, looking only at what their little headsets told them was worth seeing.

Did you ever notice that when you read the same book again and again, the book doesn’t change, but you do?

Since ancient times, in every place they have ever lived, Jews have represented the frightening prospect of freedom. As long as Jews existed in any society, there was evidence that it in fact wasn't necessary to believe what everyone else believed, that those who disagreed with their neighbors could survive and even flourish against all odds. The Jews' continued distinctiveness, despite overwhelming pressure to become like everyone else, demonstrated their enormous effort to cultivate that freedom: devotion to law and story, deep literacy, and an absolute obsessiveness about consciously transmitting those values between generations. The existence of Jews in any society is a reminder that freedom is possible, but only with responsibility—and that freedom without responsibility is no freedom at all.

I mean that we control the way we remember the past, and that’s what matters in the present. We choose what is worthy of our memory. We should probably be grateful that we can’t remember everything as God does, because if we did, we would find it impossible to forgive anyone. The limit of human memory encourages humility.

...(O)ver four generations, the Soviet regime forced Jews to participate in and internalize their own humiliation--and in that way, Ala suggested, they destroyed far more souls. And they never, ever paid for it. "They never had a Nuremberg," Ala told me that day, with a quiet fury. "They never acknowledged the evil of what they did. The Nazis were open about what they were doing, but the Soviets pretended. They lured the Jews in, they baited them with support and recognition, they used them, they tricked them, and then they killed them. It was a trap. And no one knows about it, even now. People know about the Holocaust, but not this. Even here in Israel, people don't know. How did you know?

In fact, Sauvage believes that the reason Fry is so unknown is precisely because he reveals U.S. complicity in the Holocaust. “We live on two myths—that we didn’t know, and that we couldn’t do anything even if we did know,” Sauvage said to me as soon as I sat down in his office. “This is the religion, and it isn’t true. We knew plenty and could have done a lot.

Think about what we expect from the endings of stories—not just Denise, but all of us. We expect the good guys to be “saved.” If that doesn’t happen, we at least expect the main character to have an “epiphany.” And if that doesn’t happen, then at least the author ought to give us a “moment of grace.” All three are Christian terms. So many of our expectations of literature are based on Christianity—and not just Christianity, but the precise points at which Christianity and Judaism diverge. And then I noticed something else: the canonical works by authors in Jewish languages almost never give their readers any of those things.

The freedoms that we cherish are meaningless without our commitments to one another: to civil discourse, to actively educating the next generation, to welcoming strangers, to loving our neighbors. The beginning of freedom is the beginning of responsibility.

But there is also something inherently shameful in the rescuer-rescued relationship - the humiliation of being reduced to depending on another person for survival - and that shame expresses itself and resentment toward rescuers… Gratitude is what makes you hate someone.

Do you think I'm deaf?" the deaf beggar asked. "I'm not deaf at all. It's just that it isn't worth hearing a whole world full of people complaining about what they lack." He told the story of a wealthy country where people believed they were living 'the good life.' The country had a garden of riches, of so many sights and smells and sounds that the people in the country literally lost their senses, spoiled by everything they had already seen and heard and smelled and tasted and touched, until the beggar taught them how to use their senses again.

Daniel Ziskind had once learned that time is created through deeds of true kindness. Days and hours and years are not time, but merely vessels for it, and too often they are empty. The world stands still, timeless and empty, until an act of generosity changes it in an instant and sends it soaring through arcs of rich seasons, moment after spinning moment of racing beauty. And then, with a single unkind deed, a single withheld hand, time ceases to exist.

These stories, I came to understand, were presenting a challenge to the Western idea of the purpose of creativity. Stories with definitive endings don’t necessarily reflect a belief that the world makes sense, but they do reflect a belief in the power of art to make sense of it. What one finds in Jewish storytelling, though, is something really different: a kind of realism that comes from humility, from the knowledge that one cannot be true to the human experience while pretending to make sense of the world.

our Jews everywhere that they shouldn’t worry: our old God still lives!

I only mean that people find what they wish to find, and remember what they wish to remember, regardless of the evidence presented to them," Margaret said.

Maybe it’s still worth it to me, even if it doesn’t last forever,” he said. “Maybe you’re still worth it to me.

What makes the soul who it is, if not the choices the person makes while he’s alive?

another remarkable thing about the dead is that they are all ages, preserved at every age you ever knew them, and at no age at all

What one finds in Jewish storytelling, though, is something really different: a kind of realism that comes from humility, from the knowledge that one cannot be true to the human experience while pretending to make sense of the world. These are stories without conclusions, but full of endurance and resilience. They are about human limitations, which means that the stories are not endings but beginnings, the beginning of the search for meaning rather than the end—and the power of resilience and endurance to carry one through to that meaning. Tevye, after grieving for his wife, daughter, and son-in-law and being expelled from his home, finally leaves the reader with a line that would never work on Broadway: “Tell all

One of America’s many foundational legends is that it doesn’t matter who your parents are, or who their parents were, or where you came from—that what matters is what you do now with the opportunities this country presents to you, and this is what we call the American dream. The fact that this legend is largely untrue does not detract from its power; legends are not reports on reality but expressions of a culture’s values and aspirations. Judaism, too, has many foundational legends, and all of them express exactly the opposite of this idea.

...Soviet support for Jewish culture was part of a larger plan to brainwash and coerce national minorities into submitting to the Soviet regime--and for Jews, it came at a very specific price. From the beginning, the regime eliminated anything that celebrated Jewish "nationality" that didn't suit its needs. Jews were awesome, provided they weren't practicing the Jewish religion, studying traditional Jewish texts, using Hebrew, or supporting Zionism. The Soviet Union thus pioneered a versatile gaslighting slogan, which it later spread through its client states in the developing world and which remains popular today: it was not antisemitic, merely anti-Zionist. (In the process of not being antisemitic and merely being anti-Zionist, the regime managed to persecute, imprison, torture, and murder thousands of Jews.) What's left of Jewish culture once you surgically remove religious practice, traditional texts, Hebrew and Zionism?

Ben, everything is going to get better," he heard her say in the void. "Really. It has to get better, because it can't get worse." Ben opened his eyes with a jolt, staring at himself in the mirror. That's not true, he suddenly thought. It can definitely get worse. As he nodded at Sara and pretended to smile, he understood that it was the first intelligent thought he had ever had.

Love rarely comes up; why would it? But it comes up here, in this for-profit exhibition. Here it is the ultimate message, the final solution. That the Holocaust drives home the importance of love is an idea, like the idea that Holocaust education prevents antisemitism, that seems entirely unobjectionable. It is entirely objectionable. The Holocaust didn’t happen because of a lack of love. It happened because entire societies abdicated responsibility for their own problems, and instead blamed them on the people who represented—have always represented, since they first introduced the idea of commandedness to the world—the thing they were most afraid of: responsibility. Then as now, Jews were cast in the role of civilization’s nagging mothers, loathed in life, and loved only once they are safely dead. In the years since I walked through Auschwitz at fifteen, I have become a nagging mother. And I find myself furious, being lectured by this exhibition about love—as if the murder of millions of people was actually a morality play, a bumper sticker, a metaphor. I do not want my children to be someone else’s metaphor. (Of course, they already are.) My husband’s grandfather once owned a bus company in Poland. Like my husband

Many days and years and people had passed before she understood that the details themselves were the still and sacred things, that there was nothing else, that the curtain of daily life itself was holy, that behind it was only a void.

Then there were other reasons for living too, ones that mortals rarely thought of but that raged like fires in Rachel’s mind: To correct mistakes. To avoid regret. To accept regret. To change. But none of these seemed possible either.

Before being born, his mother explained, babies go to school. Not a school like Boris’s, but a different kind of school, where all the teachers are angels. The angels teach each baby the entire Torah, along with all of the secrets of the universe. Then, just before each baby is born, an angel puts its finger right below the baby’s nose—here she paused to put her finger across his lips (could he see the blood under her skin, or did he only imagine it?)—and whispers to the child: Shh—don’t tell. And then the baby forgets. “Why does he have to forget?” Boris had asked, moving his lips beneath her finger. He didn’t want to know, not really. But his mother’s back had stiffened, and he could feel that she might get up at any moment, put out the light, walk away, disappear. She pulled her hand away from his face, resting it on her own stomach. “So that for the rest of his life,” she said, “he will always have to pay attention to the world, and to everything that happens in it, to try to remember all the things he’s forgotten.

Yet it was this granddaughter, of all of her articulate descendants, who announced online to the universe: My grandmother just told us she can’t sign off on her will because she CAN’T DIE. #crazyoldlady Oh child, she thought, you have no idea just how crazy I am.

School is a terrible place, I have decided. There is nothing good about it except for math class. Everything else is a total waste of time. As I mentioned before I have done a lot of reading about prisons, and I notice that they always describe them as painted in very dull colors, and my school is also painted in these kinds of colors, with greenish lockers and brownish walls and grayish floors. Actually they recently fixed up one wing of the school, and now that part of the school is just the opposite—all the colors are really bright, with bright red and yellow lockers and blue doors and shiny white floors that are already all scuffed up. It's funny because I thought the other colors were terrible but these are much worse, because they make it seem like it's normal to be happy there when it isn't.

Eventually Honi asked God to kill him, because he realized he had become superfluous. Which in fact was the entire purpose of life, to live in such a way that one made oneself superfluous. And therein lay the root of the problem. There was no point in any of it, none at all, unless one had plans to leave.

There is a moment that has happened over and over again, in every place children have ever slept, on every dark night for the past ten thousand years, that almost everyone who was once a child will forever remember. It happens when you are being tucked into bed, on a dark and frightened night when the sounds of the nighttime outside are drowned out only by the far more frightening sounds in your head. You have already gone to bed, have tried to go to bed, but because of whatever sounds you hear in your head you have failed to go to bed, and someone much older than you, someone so old that you cannot even imagine yourself becoming that old, has come to sit beside you and make sure you fall asleep. But the moment that everyone who was once a child will remember is not the story the unfathomably old person tells you, or the lullaby he sings for you, but rather the moment right after the story or song has ended. You are lying there with your eyes closed, not sleeping just yet but noticing that the sounds inside your head seem to have vanished, and you know, through closed eyes, that the person beside you thinks that you are asleep and is simply watching you. In that fraction of an instant between when that person stops singing and when that person decides to rise from the bed and disappear -- a tiny rehearsal, though you do not know it yet, of what will eventually happen for good -- time holds still, and you can feel, through closed eyes, how that person, watching your still, small face in the darkness, has suddenly realized that you are the reason his life matters. And Sara would give her right leg and her left just to live through that moment one more time.

Because once you're born you might feel all of those things," Boris was saying. "In any order. And you can't control it." Daniel looked up, but Boris had turned away from him, his eyes staring at the ground. He held him tighter. "Maybe it will never happen," Boris said, and blinked. "I hope it never will. But if it does, I want you to be prepared.

She didn’t know exactly when she had first felt the sensation of regret. It was a physical sensation, a shudder that began deep in the stomach and traveled up through the throat; it was distinct from remorse, which one felt first in the throat and only later in the gut. Yet it was regret that she couldn’t handle. She did anything she could to avoid it—including the initial bargain, the one that began everything. And now this one.

When a young employee at the Anne Fank House tried to wear his yarmulke to work, his employers told him to hide it under a baseball cap. The museum's gal was "neutrality," one spokesperson explained to the British newspaper Daily Mail, and a live Jew in a yarmulke might "interfere" with the museum's "independent position." The museum finally relented after deliberated for four months, which seems like a rather long time for the Anne Frank House to ponder whether it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding.

And the reward when good people die" - her mother paused, swallowed, paused again - "the reward when good people die is that they get to help make the people in their families who haven't been born yet. They pick out what kinds of traits they want the new people to have - they give them all the raw material of their souls, like their talents and their brains and their potential. Of course it's up to the new ones, once they're born, what they'll use and what they won't but that's what everyone who dies is doing, I think.

His unfinished book had become his obsession. He rarely left his room, which he insulated with sheaves of paper scribbled with beginnings and endings, nailing ideas to the walls and stretching long strips of sentences from the window to the door. Tall stacks of scenes and chapters sprouted from the floor, as if the papers had reincarnated themselves back into trees. The paper forest around him glimmered in the sun from the windows, weaving rays of light in yellow and purple and blue. Hunger squeezed his throat, but he turned his ravenousness toward writing. He almost never slept. During the shortages, he wrote between the columns of old newspapers, or on pieces of cardboard, or on bark pulled from trees. He traded potatoes for ink.

It had been a long time, perhaps years, since she had heard a man apologize

Another remarkable thing about the dead is that they are all ages, preserved at every age you ever knew them, and at no age at all.

Why are children so much smarter than adults?

No one is anything more than a cloud that vanishes, and the best anyone could hope for was not to be the last.

When he finally fell asleep, his dreams contained no stories at all, but only the hard stones of thoughts: the unimaginably unlikely coincidence of being alive at the same time as the love of your life, the frequency with which a person was expected to bear the body and the burden of someone else, the idiocy of thinking that kindness can protect the person who is kind, and worst of all, the bottomless pit of a truth that he had suddenly, sickeningly seen: that the world to come that his parents had always talked about was not an afterlife at all, but simply this world, to come--the future world, your own future, that you were creating for yourself with every choice you made in it.

Or worse, he could be born perfect, and then, through some error she would never perceive, grow up and destroy someone else's life--for there are thousands of ways to destroy someone's life, Sara knew, but to improve someone's life, there are so few, so few!

It was possible, probable even, that the world could be rebuilt.

he wondered if it was even possible to have happiness in a story, when one was required to imagine both a beginning and an end.

youth is like a good card, which one can either play or hide under one’s vest.

No one ever understands what happened with Adam and Eve. That story isn’t about sex. It’s about death. The forbidden desire isn’t love or lust—you can get that stuff anytime down at the public bath, even on earth. The forbidden desire is immortality.

The artwork is just the settings, or the other characters. You have to make the plot yourself.

EVERYBODY AROUND HERE likes to pave their roads with good intentions,” the already-was Daniel muttered, “but those roads never seemed to get me anywhere. So I built this one out of stupid mistakes instead.

Mistakes are a very durable building material,” the mortal Daniel was saying. “Most people just throw them away as soon as possible and never realize that you can learn from them. But if you do, they can actually hold you up pretty well.

What made her angry was art that no one looked at, things that were hidden that needed to be seen.

You don’t believe in evil,” she said slowly. “For you everything is just a misunderstanding.

There’s no such thing as a problem that’s yours and not mine.

Sometimes you can only have something you like for a short time, and after that you just have to be happy to have had it when you did, and enjoy the memory of it.

The third shooting happened at a kosher grocery store abut twenty minutes from my house. Antisemitic screeds found in the attacker’ vehicle and in their social media postings told a different story, as did the tactical gear they wore, the massive stash of ammunition and firearm they brought along, and security camera footage showing them driving slowly down the street, checking addresses before parking and entering the market with guns blazing. The real targets, authorities surmised, were likely the fifty Jewish children in the private elementary school at the same address, directly above the store – huddled in closets, listening to their neighbors being murdered. Reporting within hours of the attack gave surprising emphasis to the murdered Jews as “gentrifying” a “minority” neighborhood This was remarkable, given that the tiny Hasidic community in question, highly visible members of the word’s most visible members of the world’s most consistently persecuted minority, came to Jersey City fleeing gentrification, after being priced out of long-established Hasidic communities in Brooklyn. The “context” supplied by news outlets after this attack was breathtaking in its cruelty. The sole motivation for providing such “context” in that moment is to inform the public that those people got what was coming to them. People who think of themselves as educated and ethical don’t do this because it is both factually untrue and morally wrong. But if we’re talking about Hasidic Jews, it is quite literally a different story.

She raised her children, all of them. She raised them, nurtured them, watched them love or hate or succeed or fail, gave each of them her private excesses of possibilities, observed, sometimes from afar, what they did with them, watched her own ideas wither or grow. Then she finally watched her children die, and she was jealous.

There are so few Jews in the world: even in the United States, we are barely 2 percent of the population, a minority among minorities... Statistically speaking, nothing that happens to Jews should be of any consequence to anyone else. Except that it is.

Sophisticated readers don't insist on Garfield and happy endings, but I've found that even educated readers who appreciate tragedy still secretly expect a “redemptive” ending...

I don’t believe that the big men are guilty of the war, oh no, the little man is just as guilty, otherwise the peoples of the world would have risen in revolt long ago! There’s in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage, and until all mankind without exception undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated and grown will be cut down and disfigured, and mankind will have to begin all over again.

Evil' may or may not be banal, but killing Jews sure is.

The past is alive, trembling within the present.

Those girls were not stupid, and probably not even bigoted. But in their entirely typical and well-intentioned education, they had learned about Jews mainly because people had killed Jews. Like most people in the world, they had only encountered dead Jews: people whose sole attribute was that they had been murdered, and whose murders served a clear purpose, which was to teach us something. Jews were people who, for moral and educational purposes, were supposed to be dead.

Sometimes your body is someone else's haunted house. Other people look at you and can only see the dead.

Harvard—a place, I slowly came to understand, that could teach me many things, including how to think, but that could not teach me goodness. Not because it taught the opposite, but because moral education is simply not what secular Western education or secular Western culture is for.

I’m just saying that there’s a lot we can’t know,” he concluded, and looked at her again. “Actually what we can’t know is infinite.

You can’t only think about endings,” he said. “There’s no point to that. Endings are something you and I will never understand.

That's the problem. We don't grow. We're like an old book, full of stories and also full of errors, and no one can completely understand us, even though many people try. But the problem is that we don't change. Only the people around us change.

Seine eigene Familiengeschichte hatte Daniel Ziskind, Ben und Saras Vater, eins gelehrt, dass die Zeit durch Akte wahrer Güte geschaffen wird. Tage, Stunden und Jahre sind nicht die Zeit, sondern deren Gefäße, und die sind allzu häufig leer. Die Welt steht still, zeitlos und hohl, bis eine besondere Großherzigkeit sie urplötzlich anstößt. Und dann beschert sie uns üppige Jahreszeiten und rauschende Augenblicke rasender Schönheit. Eine einzige schmähliche Tat jedoch, eine einzige nicht gereichte Hand - und die Zeit hört auf.

Denn, wie einer von Daniels Lehrern zu sagen pflegte: "Die ZEit an sich wird erst durch Akte wahrer Menschlichkeit erschaffen.

In that fraction of an instant between when that person stops singing and when that person decides to rise from the bed and disappear-a tiny rehearsal, though you do not yet know it, of what will eventually happen for good-time holds still, and you can feel, through your closed eyes, how that person, watching your still, small face in the darkness, has suddenly realized that you are the reason his life matters.

Most people have never seen the inside of a womb—or, rather, everyone has seen it, but almost no one remembers it.

It was a cruben, the great one-horned scaled whale of Dara and sovereign of the seas: two hundred feet long and as large next to an elephant as an elephant would be next to a mouse. Its eyes were so dark that they sucked in all sunlight like deep wells, and when the great fish exhaled through its blowhole, the fountain shot as high as a hundred feet.

No one had any idea of how thick a layer of arbitrary conventions enshrouded a naked soul.

But you and I are the only ones who know we’ll never get there, that nothing is ever over. I feel like I’m always falling. I’ve been falling without landing

two thousand years.” “Maybe you’ve been flying,

Either brave or stupid, Rachel thought. Of course, everything brave was also stupid. Sadly the same could not be said of the reverse.

The last few generations of American non-Jews had been chagrined by the enormity of the Holocaust—which had been perpetrated by America’s enemy, and which was grotesque enough to make antisemitism socially unacceptable, even shameful. Now that people who remembered the shock of those events were dying off, the public shame associated with expressing antisemitism was dying too. In other words, hating Jews was normal. And historically speaking, the decades in which my parents and I had grown up simply hadn’t been normal. Now, normal was coming back.

The last few generations of American non Jews had been chagrined by the enormity of the Holocaust which had been perpetrated by America’s enemy, and which was grotesque enough to make antisemitism socially unacceptable, even shameful. Now that people who remembered the shock of those events were dying off, the public shame associated with expressing antisemitism was dying too. In other words, hating Jews was normal. And historically speaking, the decades in which my parents and I had grown up simply hadn’t been normal. Now, normal was coming back.

Louis Goldstein declared his name “un-American, uneuphonius, and an economic handicap”—a petition that was rejected by the judge, whose name was also Louis Goldstein.

All you can do is submit to it, publicly agree with it, announce in court of your own free will that your name is “un-American,” that the very essence of who you are is unacceptable. If you tell that story to your children, you’d be confirming two enormous fears: first, that this country doesn’t really accept you, and second, that the best way to survive and thrive is to dump any outward sign of your Jewish identity and symbolically cut that cord that goes back to Mount Sinai—