Show Notes
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
More from 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Covering Their Tracks is the extraordinary story of a young man’s escape from a moving train bound for the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust, and his fight to hold the French national rail company, the SNCF, accountable for their actions as they later bid for lucrative high-speed rail contracts in the United States.
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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