Dara Horn’s 8 Days of Dead Jews

[View this email in your browser]( Why do dead Jews play such a large role in the world’s imagination, and how does that distortion still affect us today? In her Tablet Studios podcast, [Adventures with Dead Jews]( author and host Dara Horn takes you on a ride through some of the most bizarre, disturbing, wondrous, tragic, and accidentally hilarious moments of Jewish history, and dives deep into their repercussions in the present. For Hanukkah, we present you with 8 Dead Jews—one for each crazy night—who make appearances in our show. Some of these people are worth knowing about for their enduring achievements. Others… not so much. But all of them are fascinating for the strange and unexpected ways they navigated the weird worlds they lived in—which turn out not to be so different from our own. [Jacob Schiff]( A crazy-rich American Jew who got revenge for Russian pogroms by making massive loans to Japan that turned the tide of the 1905 Russo-Japanese War, earning himself an audience with the Japanese emperor—and accidentally generating an outrageous concept of Jews in the Japanese imagination. [Judah Benjamin]( Louisiana senator, Supreme Court nominee, and the Confederacy’s Court Jew as its Secretary of War and Secretary of State, until his successful 1865 escape involving multiple shipwrecks and a talking parrot—and the subject of one of the most unnerving Confederate monument stories of the 2020 protests. [Solomon Mikhoels]( One of the biggest names in 20th century Russian show business, star of stage and screen, director of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater, and leader of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, for which he was sent on a phenomenally popular world tour in 1943 to raise money for the Red Army to save the Jews—but in the Soviet Union, the hero’s journey does not end in a house in Malibu. [Laura Z. Hobson]( A massively popular author whose 1946 bestseller, Gentleman’s Agreement, became an Oscar-winning blockbuster that schooled a generation of Americans in how not to be antisemites—while in her own life, she herself enacted that Gentleman’s Agreement, the unwritten contract that has governed Jews’ acceptance by non-Jewish societies since the time of Napoleon. [Solomon Schechter]( A hundred years before Indiana Jones, this Cambridge professor (and former Lubavitcher Hasid) went hunting for Bible secrets in Cairo, trying to track them down before his evil rivals could get their hands on them first—and wound up with a treasure so vast that it’s still changing the way we think about, well, everything. [Stephen Wise]( An enormously influential Reform rabbi who was a close advisor to both Woodrow Wilson and FDR and, some say, failed to speak up for the Jews when he could—and who had to decide what to do when a Japanese emissary showed up in his office to offer him a Japanese-run Jewish homeland… in Manchuria. [Issachar Zacharie]( Who was this charismatic, plagiarizing, synchophantic, flamboyantly gay podiatrist—and why did his patient, Abraham Lincoln, think he would make a fantastic spy? [Avrom Sutzkever]( A wildly talented Yiddish poet who rescued an entire national archive, fought in a partisan unit, wrote a poem that convinced the Soviets to send a plane to save him, and testified at Nuremberg. [HEAR THEIR STORIES]( Copyright © 2021 Tablet Magazine, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you signed up at our website, www.tabletmag.com. Our mailing address is: Tablet Magazine P.O. Box 20079New York, NY 10001 [Add us to your address book]( Want to change how you receive these emails? You can [update your preferences]( or [unsubscribe from this list](. [Mailchimp Email Marketing](