I spent Labor Day weekend listening to 14 hours of Dara Horn’s provocatively titled new book, The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living. Not the typical way to spend a 3-day weekend.
And yet, despite not exactly being a chipper beach-read, the book is surprisingly invigorating. Horn is funny and writes with a brilliant fury. Her previous book, People Love Dead Jews, explored why the world is often more comfortable talking about the trauma of Jewish history rather than dealing with living Jews who have agency and the ever-so-annoying habit of remaining alive. That book became a favorite of mine. If memory serves, Horn jokes at one point that people love dead Jews so much they built an entire religion around one.
Her new book makes an argument I found even more clarifying. Horn reframes antisemitism not as a hate or a social prejudice but as a lie. Horn’s definition is pretty simple. Antisemitism is a lie people use to gain or hold onto power. The lie changes depending on the time and place but the basic trick is the same. Find whatever people value most and blame the Jews for threatening it. Suddenly treating Jews badly can feel righteous.
Listening to the audiobook, you really hear how much that word infuriates her. Every time Horn says lie, you can practically hear the capital letters. She sounds pissed. It is the vocal equivalent of underlining a sentence three times in red ink.
The Big Lie changes with the fashions of the time. Antisemitism is good at changing costumes. As Horn says, antisemitism takes whatever a society values most and finds a way to put Jews on the wrong side of it. That is what makes the lie so effective. Most people do not usually think of themselves as bigots. If they are convinced Jews are standing in the way of something good, then treating Jews badly can start to feel justified.
Horn thinks part of the reason Jews often fail to recognize this pattern is because we get dragged into the mud of countering misinformation. Someone says something insane about Jews, and our first response is usually to dispute every falsehood.
No, Jews don’t control the banks. No, Israel isn’t a genocidal nation of “baby-killers.” Here are eleven historians and an Alan Dershowitz book to debunk you. #Fail
Horn’s point is that once Jews start answering every accusation on the accuser’s terms, we are already losing.
She also writes about assimilation during the post-war golden age of American Jewry. After World War II, Jews gained acceptance in institutions that had long kept us out. Horn argues, however, that some of that progress came at a cost. As Jews became more integrated into American life, Jewishness was increasingly explained in terms the broader culture already understood.
Jews became another religious group. Synagogue was Jewish church. A rabbi was a Jewish priest. Hanukkah was Jewish Christmas.
It kind of worked.
But it also flattened what Jewishness actually is.
Jews are so much more than just a religion. We’re a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture. Compress all of that into the American checkbox marked RELIGION, and eventually even Jews forget who we are.
I was reminded of this recently on a date this past Friday with a guy who told me he was “Jewish, but not really.”
Naturally, I had questions.
He said that both of his parents are Jewish but that only his dad really cared.
“So I guess you’re not celebrating Rosh Hashanah.”
“Is that the one where you fast?” he asked.
Sir. You are from Long Island. WTF.
He also doesn’t celebrate Hanukkah, dislikes both Seinfeld and Curb, and somehow had never heard of Tel Aviv despite being a savvy world traveler, at which point his Jewishness became the least confusing part of the evening.
This whole exchange is funny in hindsight, but also illustrates Horn’s point. If Jewishness is reduced solely to religious observance, someone can have two Jewish parents and grow up around Jews thinking they’re not Jewish if they didn’t attend synagogue.
The problem goes beyond one confused guy from Long Island. Horn argues that when Jews are presented as simply “just like everybody else,” people lose sight of what has kept Jewish identity alive for thousands of years. That makes antisemitism harder to recognize, too.
