By Esther Gaon
Can Holocaust education actually contribute to the very problem it seeks to prevent? That question was the core of Dr. Trapedo’s conversation with author Dara Horn at Stern College to launch Horn’s new book, The Final Solution to the Jewish Question.
About 100 attendees gathered on Wednesday, September 9, in Koch Auditorium for Dara Horn’s book launch, hosted by Stern Honors and the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought. The first 50 attendees even received a free copy of the publication.
When Horn realized what she had become for the Jewish people—more of a therapist than an author for those at her book signings lamenting their ever-growing antisemitic encounters—she named herself (and the introduction to her book) what her sister called “the Jewish Lorax.” Like the Lorax, she speaks for the Jews, but has no real way of stopping the axes from mowing down every tree in the forest.
Horn explained that while these individual attacks and encounters started well before October 7, it was only after that something changed, and antisemitism became institutionalized. Dara Horn, author of eight books, with her latest reaching #6 on the New York Times Best Sellers List and three-time National Jewish Book Award winner, served on the Harvard Antisemitism Advisory Board following the attacks on campus after October 7. Suddenly, it wasn’t just individuals and their individual problems, but Harvard and Congress calling on Horn for advice. In response to her experience, she started the Tell Institute.
After her last book, people would ask, “So what’s your solution to this problem [institutionalized antisemitism]?” While her response was, “Do you really want me to give you the final solution to the Jewish question? Because I’m not prepared to give this to you,” in reality, she did start thinking of what the solution could be. But before delving into the solution, Dr. Trapedo asked Horn to discuss a little bit more about the problem itself.
Jews from all over the country told Horn about their struggles with antisemitism, and she has been studying antisemitism for years, but things hit home when her son faced online discrimination and simply asked, “Is Israel committing genocide?” At the time, her fourteen-year-old son was on a Discord server with 50,000 members, where people posted fan art of the video game Rain World. On the server, despite having nothing to do with the content being posted and not having been instigated in any way, someone announced that Zionists would no longer be tolerated on the server because “Zionists are committing genocide.” So he asked, and she went into a conversation no parent thinks they would be having with their ninth grader.
Her son decided he wanted to speak up on the server, even though he was nervous about losing all the online friends who he had made (friends who he knew nothing about other than their love for Rain World and their time zone from when they answered his messages). So they crafted personal messages to his online friends whom he felt he had strong enough relationships with and educated them about Hamas before sending a general message on the server explaining who Hamas is and their goal. His friends’ response: “I’m so sorry, I don’t really know a lot about this” or “I just posted it because everyone else did.”
“What you realize,” said Horn, “is there’s just so much more ignorance than malice, and that’s actually an opportunity.” And that opportunity is what got Horn to start thinking about antisemitism differently—what got her to find her solution. The big idea that streams throughout the book, and that Dr. Trapedo pointed out is: The power of education, for harm and for good.
Horn makes a somewhat surprising and bold statement in her book as to what is part of the problem of antisemitism: Holocaust education in and of itself. It was a chapter that Horn published as a piece for The Atlantic Magazine before October 7 about Holocaust education in America. She spent a year researching and traveling to Holocaust museums around the country. She met with the curators of the museums, people who designed curricula for schools, state legislators who passed the mandates on what needs to be taught and attended conferences where teachers were trained to teach the material. What she realized was that the Holocaust is the only thing Americans know about the Jews—to such an extent that when visiting the Dallas Holocaust Museum, a guide told her that students often ask if Jews are still alive today. This education gap, Horn claims, is a large part of the huge problem of Holocaust denial in this country.
Now, this is not to say there should not be Holocaust education, and Horn never means to say that; she claims that it should not be the only thing people learn about the Jews. Jewish education shouldn’t start in 1935 and end in 1945, because that was exactly what the Nazis wanted. Their agenda was not just to end the Jewish line but to erase Jewish civilization, and by ending our education there we are participating in this erasure.
Jews become part of the null curriculum in schools, the part of education that is not taught in a classroom but left for students to learn about in life. By doing that, we are outsourcing teaching about Jews to TikTok, where it doesn’t get verified as truth. So to anyone in this category, Horn puts it, “Jews are people who got murdered in Europe, like a hundred years ago… [and now] Jews are white, European colonizers who have no business in the Middle East and are stealing land from righteous brown people.” Those two things don’t contradict if the Holocaust is all you’ve ever learned about the Jews. It also sets the bar for antisemitism at murdering 6 million Jews, leaving room for someone to say a racist comment to a Jew on the street or paint a swastika on a college campus.
Horn believes that the Holocaust shouldn’t be something removed from history. It should be a part of a larger story of Jewish history that spans far longer than ten years. Like the Yiddish speakers of the Holocaust felt when they named it the churban, it is just another destruction in the series of devastations since the fall of the Beit Hamikdash. It is a recurrence, not an anomaly or one-time event.
And on top of that, Horn explains how the Holocaust should not be taught as a case study of why you should be nice to all people, with an emphasis on how Holocaust survivors were people “just like you and me.” She gave the example of Anne Frank—an atypical Holocaust victim who was not Yiddish-speaking but German-speaking, irreligious and was helped by a righteous gentile—who is seen as the desirable archetype of a victim because of how relatable she is to the public. But the problem with that is, as Horn states, that we have spent the last 3000 years not being like everyone else; it is a major premise of who we are.
From this we get to our solution: The Tell Institute.
The Tell Institute is a new eight-lesson curriculum for teaching Jewish History in public middle and high schools. And not just including new information, but a new way of framing it, too. The curriculum teaches how Jews have been an anti-tyrannical movement for thousands of years. How we are different because of that fact. When you really think about it, a story like the one we tell on Pesach was pretty radical for its time. Most stories we hear about ancient times, Horn reminds us, consist of a strong, powerful leader overtaking the weak and “taking his rightful place in the palace.” But here, we have a group of slaves that escaped the hand of one of the greatest civilizations in human history.
Back in the ancient world, it was incredibly unusual to have a nation of monotheists like the Jews. Horn explains how while today we think of this as a religious idea, at the time it was a political idea; the Egyptians were polytheistic, one of their gods being Pharaoh. But the Jews don’t bow to Pharaoh or any other god. This idea follows through to the story of the Megillah with Mordechai, the only man who won’t bow to Haman. This relates to the history of antisemitism because, as Horn phrases it, “when you have an antityrannical movement, it pisses off tyrants.”
At The Tell Institute, Antisemitism isn’t taught as bigotry or a bias, but “a lie used to gain or maintain power.” And the lie is always the same: “Jews are destroying what you value the most.” Whatever that thing is varies based on the time and place, but the lie stays the same. The “big lie,” they call it in the program, can be used to evaluate every part of Jewish history by asking “What’s the value?” and then following with what the lie became.
50 high schools have already signed up to start teaching the curriculum this fall, and they have even made a special program for Jewish teens going to public school so they can learn how to stand up for their heritage. The program highlights the essentials of Jewish civilization that aren’t found in other ancient cultures, like close reading of religious texts, civil discourse or the fact that the Jewish king has to follow the laws like everybody else.
All these ideals were unconventional and atypical for the time and culture they were written in, and we, girls who grew up in a Jewish Day School, can very easily forget that fact. Horn moves on to tell us to remember just how unusual that is, and why it therefore becomes our job to find the words to educate others. Remember that it is uncommon for people to be trained to be curious and have that skill. When you remember that, you can see the skill set you already have in educating someone who comes up to you and says that they are “not antisemitic but anti-Zionist.” Ask them why, be genuinely curious in asking how they learned that. Play dumb. And when you do that, when you model the curiosity you want them to have, you can expose what they saw or read as being funded by and/or benefiting from Hamas without having them tune you out. From there you can explain to them how anti-Zionism, not antisemitism, is what led to millions of Jews being emptied out of Islamic countries. How anti-zionist propaganda was written by a Nazi in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
When we reeducate, we can redefine what Jewish History is. And that is the final solution to the Jewish question.
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