{"id":87045,"date":"2025-04-04T14:11:07","date_gmt":"2025-04-04T19:11:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/?p=87045"},"modified":"2025-04-04T14:11:07","modified_gmt":"2025-04-04T19:11:07","slug":"dara-horns-gonzo-time-traveling-childrens-passover-book-wants-people-to-love-living-jews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/dara-horns-gonzo-time-traveling-childrens-passover-book-wants-people-to-love-living-jews\/","title":{"rendered":"Dara Horn\u2019s gonzo, time-traveling children\u2019s Passover book wants people to love living Jews"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL<\/p>\n<p>(JTA) \u2014 \u201cAll of my books are the same book,\u201d said Dara Horn, the author of seven novels and the 2021 essay collection, \u201cPeople Love Dead Jews,\u201d which may be the most talked-about Jewish book of the past several years.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_87046\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/one-little-goat-dara-horn.webp\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-87046\" class=\"wp-image-87046 size-medium lazyload\" data-src=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/one-little-goat-dara-horn-300x167.webp\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"167\" data-srcset=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/one-little-goat-dara-horn-300x167.webp 300w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/one-little-goat-dara-horn-1024x569.webp 1024w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/one-little-goat-dara-horn-768x427.webp 768w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/one-little-goat-dara-horn-1536x853.webp 1536w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/one-little-goat-dara-horn-2048x1138.webp 2048w\" data-sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" src=\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==\" style=\"--smush-placeholder-width: 300px; --smush-placeholder-aspect-ratio: 300\/167;\" \/><noscript><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-87046\" class=\"wp-image-87046 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/one-little-goat-dara-horn-300x167.webp\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"167\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/one-little-goat-dara-horn-300x167.webp 300w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/one-little-goat-dara-horn-1024x569.webp 1024w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/one-little-goat-dara-horn-768x427.webp 768w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/one-little-goat-dara-horn-1536x853.webp 1536w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/one-little-goat-dara-horn-2048x1138.webp 2048w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/noscript><\/a><\/p>\n<p id=\"caption-attachment-87046\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Dara Horn&#8217;s latest book is a graphic novel featuring a time-traveling talking goat. (Norton Young Readers)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>The subject, she said, is time \u2014 how Jews mark it, how they preserve it, how they understand where a moment goes once it is passed. Her 2006 debut, \u201cA World to Come,\u201d toggles between present-day New Jersey and 1920\u2019s Russia. Her 2018 novel \u201cEternal Life,\u201d meanwhile, is about an immortal woman, born in Jerusalem, who experiences countless lives over 2,000 years.<\/p>\n<p>She took the title of her 2009 Civil War novel, \u201cAll Other Nights,\u201d from the Passover Haggadah, which she calls a book about \u201cthe collapse of time,\u201d expressed in its injunction that \u201cin every generation a person is obligated to see themselves as if they left Egypt.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s a verse that becomes literal in her latest book, the middle-grade graphic novel \u201cOne Little Goat: A Passover Catastrophe.\u201d In it, a young boy escapes a seemingly endless family seder in the company of a talking goat, who drags him back through a \u201chole in interdimensional space-time\u201d and to the seder tables of historically iconic Jews, including Sigmund Freud, the 16th-century philanthropist Do\u00f1a Gracia Nasi and the Talmudic tag team known as Rav and Shmuel.<\/p>\n<p>The book is both a history lesson, and a lesson about history.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe seder is not just about the Exodus from Egypt. It\u2019s also a commemoration of a commemoration of a commemoration,\u201d said Horn, noting how the traditional Haggadah itself includes descriptions of at least two prior seders, the very first one in Egypt and one held in the Land of Israel after the destruction of the Second Temple. Quoting the late American historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Horn said Jewish culture makes a distinction between history and memory, and Jews are more interested in memory: investing a historical event with eternal, inheritable meaning.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen I say I write about time, I mean specifically, how do we live as mortals in a world that outlasts us?\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s the central question that I\u2019m exploring as a writer.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>History and memory were the subjects of \u201cPeople Love Dead Jews,\u201d where Horn proposes that in its fascination with the ways Jews suffered and died, the world either overlooks or devalues the way they actually lived and live. Even well-meaning efforts like Holocaust-education mandates and Shoah memorials ignore the layers and layers of Jewish history and complexity, leaving Jews as convenient abstractions for antisemites and conspiracy theorists.<\/p>\n<p>The conversation sparked by the book \u2014 \u201c\u2018People Love Dead Jews\u2019 ate my life,\u201d she jokes \u2014 turned the novelist and Hebrew and Yiddish scholar into a go-to expert on the recent rise in antisemitism. An alumna of Harvard, she gave an interview to a Congressional committee as a member of Harvard\u2019s Antisemitism Advisory Group, formed in the wake of Hamas\u2019 Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. In recent months she launched a nonprofit, Mosaic Persuasion, which aims to supplement Holocaust and history of religion units in K-12 education with curricula about the foundations of Jewish civilization and the causes of antisemitism.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere are 29 states in this country where people are required by law to learn in school that Jews are people who were murdered,\u201d she said, referring to Holocaust education mandates. \u201cThere\u2019s not a single state in this country where anyone is required to learn, like, who are Jews? What\u2019s Israel? What the hell do they have to do with the Middle East? We\u2019ve outsourced that to TikTok.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOne Little Goat\u201d appears to be adjacent to that project \u2014 helping middle-schoolers understand the way their own family history is an accumulation of Jewish lives and experiences reaching back through time and marked each year at the seder table.<\/p>\n<p>The story was inspired by two seders that Horn, who was raised and still lives in Short Hills, New Jersey, grew up attending. At the first, hosted by her parents, Horn and her three siblings would perform songs and skits, riffing on pop culture. The second she describes as a \u201clarge multigenerational gathering\u201d that included Holocaust survivors, including some who had participated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising on Passover of 1943, and former Soviet \u201crefuseniks\u201d were active in the Free Soviet Jewry movement.<\/p>\n<p>Although frustrated that the kids played only a supporting role in the second seder, it left her with a kind of vision. \u201cI felt like the room I was in was a lighted box that\u2019s sitting on a tower of lighted boxes of other seders, including the seders that these people at this table have been at in the past,\u201d she said.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>The idea germinated for years before she contacted the decorated graphic novelist and illustrator Theo Ellsworth, a favorite of her children, and suggested they collaborate. Ellsworth, who is not Jewish, seemed to get it: If he wasn\u2019t familiar with the Passover story, he understood its potential as a children\u2019s adventure. Horn calls their book a \u201cportal\u201d story, like the Harry Potter books or C.S. Lewis\u2019s Narnia tales, in which children slip through a passage into a fantastic world beyond.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThat\u2019s so resonant for children because children\u2019s lives are really small, and they\u2019re completely managed by the adults in their lives,\u201d said Horn. \u201cThat\u2019s why children are looking for that access point to a life bigger than theirs.\u201d<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_87114\" style=\"width: 1034px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/one-little-goat-dara-horn2.webp\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-87114\" class=\"wp-image-87114 size-large lazyload\" data-src=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/one-little-goat-dara-horn2-1024x569.webp\" alt=\"\" width=\"1024\" height=\"569\" data-srcset=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/one-little-goat-dara-horn2-1024x569.webp 1024w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/one-little-goat-dara-horn2-300x167.webp 300w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/one-little-goat-dara-horn2-768x427.webp 768w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/one-little-goat-dara-horn2-1536x853.webp 1536w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/one-little-goat-dara-horn2-2048x1138.webp 2048w\" data-sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" src=\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==\" style=\"--smush-placeholder-width: 1024px; --smush-placeholder-aspect-ratio: 1024\/569;\" \/><noscript><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-87114\" class=\"wp-image-87114 size-large\" src=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/one-little-goat-dara-horn2-1024x569.webp\" alt=\"\" width=\"1024\" height=\"569\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/one-little-goat-dara-horn2-1024x569.webp 1024w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/one-little-goat-dara-horn2-300x167.webp 300w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/one-little-goat-dara-horn2-768x427.webp 768w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/one-little-goat-dara-horn2-1536x853.webp 1536w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/one-little-goat-dara-horn2-2048x1138.webp 2048w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/noscript><\/a><\/p>\n<p id=\"caption-attachment-87114\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">The art by Theo Ellsworth for &#8220;One Little Goat&#8221; lean into the dark themes of the Passover story, and the dry humor of Horn&#8217;s text. (Theo Ellsworth; Norton Young Readers)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Horn said Ellsworth\u2019s art \u2014 black and white, heavily inked, with an underground comics sensibility \u2014 appealed to her because it wasn\u2019t \u201ccute and cuddly.\u201d Which raises the question: When are children ready to encounter a Jewish history of persecution and slaughter?<\/p>\n<p>One answer is provided during the seder itself, which often ends with the traditional song \u201cChad Gadya,\u201d or one little goat in Aramaic. It\u2019s a \u201ccumulative\u201d song about a baby goat that is eaten by a cat, who\u2019s killed by a dog, who\u2019s beaten with a stick, culminating with the Angel of Death being slain by God. One interpretation is that the goat represents the Jewish people, and the climax of the song signals the redemption of the Jews. It\u2019s a dark theme smuggled into an upbeat if macabre children\u2019s song.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Making light of the seder\u2019s darker themes is a Passover tradition all its own, and Horn is on board with it.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBy the time children are old enough to appreciate [the darkness], they own the story. They\u2019re characters in the story, and they know that about themselves and that this is a story about us,\u201d said Horn.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Horn embraces that darkness in her book, which includes an appearance or two by the Angel of Death. Horn recalls that the seder in the Torah is described as the Night of Watching. It takes place before the actual flight from Egypt, with the Jews at the table uncertain if they will survive.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI can\u2019t look at that scene anymore, of that first seder, without thinking of a ma\u2019amad, the bomb shelters and safe rooms, where people in Israel were hiding on Oct. 7, and where everybody goes during missile attacks, where you\u2019re hiding with your family trying to wait out the Angel of Death,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s where my mind was when we were finishing the book.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Horn\u2019s own seders are hardly grim affairs. She, her husband and four children stage extravaganzas, with a sort of Passover funhouse experience in the basement, laser lights and fog machines to simulate the parting of the Red Sea, and homemade movie and television parodies.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>For Horn, Passover is a story about how Jews lived and how they survived. The history of persecution can\u2019t be avoided but it is only part of the story.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Before \u201cPeople Love Dead Jews,\u201d said Horn, she would speak in bookstores about her novels and ask the audience two questions: How many people can name four concentration camps? And, how many people can name four Yiddish writers?&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Most could answer the first question and few could answer the second.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI\u2019d say, \u201885% of the [Jews] killed in those concentration camps were Yiddish speakers. This is a very literary culture. Why do you care so much about how these people died when you really don\u2019t care about how these people lived?\u2019<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat I find really important about Jewish history is not this litany of horror \u2014 which I don\u2019t think you can avoid talking about \u2014 but that the story of Jewish life is about this amazing creative resilience.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div style=\"padding-bottom:20px; padding-top:10px;\" class=\"hupso-share-buttons\"><!-- Hupso Share Buttons - https:\/\/www.hupso.com\/share\/ --><a class=\"hupso_toolbar\" href=\"https:\/\/www.hupso.com\/share\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" data-src=\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/buttons\/share-medium.png\" style=\"border:0px; padding-top: 5px; float:left;\" alt=\"Share Button\" src=\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==\" class=\"lazyload\" \/><noscript><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/buttons\/share-medium.png\" style=\"border:0px; padding-top: 5px; float:left;\" alt=\"Share Button\"\/><\/noscript><\/a><script type=\"text\/javascript\">var hupso_services_t=new Array(\"Twitter\",\"Facebook\",\"Google Plus\",\"Pinterest\",\"Linkedin\",\"Tumblr\",\"Email\");var hupso_background_t=\"#EAF4FF\";var hupso_border_t=\"#66CCFF\";var hupso_toolbar_size_t=\"medium\";var hupso_image_folder_url = \"\";var hupso_url_t=\"\";var hupso_title_t=\"Dara%20Horn%E2%80%99s%20gonzo%2C%20time-traveling%20children%E2%80%99s%20Passover%20book%20wants%20people%20to%20love%20living%20Jews\";<\/script><script type=\"text\/javascript\" src=\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/js\/share_toolbar.js\"><\/script><!-- Hupso Share Buttons --><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7135,8382],"tags":[14555,14553,12941,2175,14554],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87045"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87045"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87045\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87115,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87045\/revisions\/87115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}