By Sara Tehilla Goldstein
In September of 2021, Jewish American author Dara Horn published her first nonfiction book, provocatively titled People Love Dead Jews, wherein she described the tendency of the modern world to commercialize and exploit the stories of dead Jews while ignoring living Jews. Due to the popular and critical success of this work and the novel perspective she espouses, she has somewhat fortuitously become a person whom many look to as an outspoken public advocate for Jews. As such, she describes the overwhelming reality of listening to the reports of antisemitism from hundreds of concerned members of the community, whether on campuses, in workplaces, or in other social settings. Bearing witness to so many frightening stories adds up. They proved to Horn that there was more than enough testimony to constitute a pattern and indicate lachrymose foreshadowing for the future of Jews in America. In addition to the anecdotes, she describes being asked on many occasions the dreaded question: what can we do about it? Since October 7th, and the explosion of hate crimes and antisemitism that followed, this question has taken on a tone of desperation.
In The Final Solution to the Jewish Question, Horn proposes an answer. But not before looking at all the things that didn’t work.
Dr. Dara Horn is a Harvard alumna, as well as an award-winning writer of six novels, two non-fiction books, and a children’s book. She received three National Jewish Book Awards and has been a teacher at Harvard and Yeshiva University. The Final Solution is written with her characteristic blend of scholarship and gallows humor, debunking the lies of the anti-Zionist movement matter-of-factly.
Horn posits that antisemitism is not mere bigotry, but rather a lie: a lie that has pervaded endless societies, past to present – the lie that the Jews are destroying what society values most. She has an incredible way of making connections between contemporary events and historical precedent in order to make this point. She takes the reader back in time to the Jew-hating convention that called itself UN WCAR in Durban, 2001; to Soviet Russia and its engineering of the rhetoric “Antizionism isn’t antisemitism.” She traces the insidious spreading of “anti-Zionist” propaganda by the Nazi Johann von Leers in Germany to Cairo and the Hamas charter, eventually landing on the Twitter pages of the so-called “right side of history,” showing that the messaging was co-opted and upcycled from those times, until it remains in use today. She unravels the behavior of each anti-Zionist movement as just another brick in the wall of antisemitism that would seem familiar to Jews from all eras of history.
Horn discusses what doesn’t work to debunk this Big Lie in the cultural consciousness. Holocaust education has failed to actually prevent antisemitism – as it turns out, people loving dead Jews doesn’t mean they’ll be any kinder to those living. According to Horn, most Holocaust museums function more to praise the viewer for understanding “nazi = bad” than effectively giving over the “universal lessons” that they claim to. What is worse, they actually do a disservice to Jews by tokenizing their brutal murders as a “universal lesson.” She then interjects – the Nazis weren’t just trying to kill us. They were trying to erase our culture. Why are we doing their work for them? This was tacitly achieved for decades via the post-WWII American “gentleman’s agreement” between the Jews and the rest of America to silently rebrand Judaism as merely a religion instead of an am (nation). Jews will be Jewish in the synagogue but Americans in the streets as a part of this Faustian bargain.
She also points out a further concern in an educational gap she calls “the null curriculum,” a concept which posits that what teachers don’t talk about is its own kind of lesson. When educators don’t teach about Judaism, they leave a vacuum where propagandists can spout the most baseless, blatantly false propaganda, without the students having any reason to doubt if what they are hearing is true.
Horn dedicates a long chapter to Harvard, using it as a case study for how purposeful antisemitic messages and the null curriculum combine to create the perfect storm. Reflecting on her experience both as an alumna and a member of their Antisemitism Advisory Group, she observes how it was a breeding ground for misinformation that grew from both the influence of deliberately bad actors (such as the Qatari royalty) and the ignorance born from the lack of critical thinking perpetuated by flawed school systems. She recounts the reluctance, and eventual failure, of Harvard to redress the wrongs brought up by Jewish students and the advisory group.
After discussing everything that failed to prevent antisemitism, Horn leads us through a realization that the “positive” and palatable aspects of Jewish culture that are erased and the “negative” aspects of life as a Jew facing antisemitism are, in fact, the same aspect. We didn’t just win Shirley Jackson’s lottery because society needed a scapegoat. It is our radical difference that builds hatred among those who cannot tolerate diversity.
At the book launch on the Beren campus, Horn encouraged us to realize how radical Judaism really is. It is an anti-tyrannical movement, the refusal to bow to other gods at a time when pharaohs called themselves gods, or anytime the rulers began to encroach on free will. It is a non-conformity movement, without a goal to “fit in” to a caste system. Fundamental Jewish social laws were incomprehensible to early civilizations — one is obligated to take care of widows and orphans, give everyone a day of rest (even the peasants!), and one cannot resort to filicide as an answer to parenting problems. These principles were both baffling and offensive to other early civilizations.
She frames the history of the Jewish people as a love story between us and God, as a story where safeguarding literacy leads to the preservation of a culture and nonconformity. The opposite of hatred isn’t love, says Horn, it’s curiosity.
In order to share the story that is missing in today’s education, she created the Tell Institute — a curriculum that provides an accessible way to teach students about the Jewish story, which is a pluralist, anti-tyrannical movement. It also encourages students to engage in civil discourse and educates them about the Big Lie. It aims to create students who, equipped with alternate perspectives and the ability to think critically when confronted with a variety of claims, will not fall so easily into believing antisemitic tropes.
Horn’s solution isn’t trying to plead our worth as a nation defensively, as if on trial. Neither is it a lamentable recounting of the gruesome details of our historic torture. Her solution, as she explained to us at the book launch, is through modelling curiosity, having open conversations, encouraging dialogue, and teaching critical thinking. She believes in a future where combating antisemitism isn’t just a job for Jews. It can be done by any educated person within their own worldview. When we confront hate with a real appreciation for the radically important nature of the Jewish story, and when we are active participants in our culture, when we confront hatred with curiosity, we become part of the solution.
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