Dara Horn Is Brilliant. Teach about Jewish Living

There is a ritual of modern travel that I have many of us have come to know well.

Visit enough cities in Europe or the United States and eventually you will find yourself standing before a Holocaust memorial.

Berlin. Vienna. Paris. Washington. Miami.

Sometimes it is a museum. Sometimes a field of stones. Sometimes a railway car, a collection of shoes, a wall filled with names, photographs of children who never had the privilege of becoming old.

And we go, and we take our children.

I want the testimony preserved and the names remembered. I want the documents protected from those who would deny what happened. I want us to stand in those places and understand, insofar as we ever can, the enormity of what human beings did to other human beings.

Judaism commands memory.

Zachor.

We do not abandon the dead.

But Dara Horn is asking a different question, and I have come to believe it is one of the most important Jewish questions of our time:

What if we have become so successful at teaching the world how Jews died that we have neglected to teach the world how Jews live?

Her new book, The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living, arrives September 1. Even the title announces that Horn has no intention of being polite. Five years after People Love Dead Jews, she has returned not simply with a sequel but with an answer to the question readers kept asking her: If contemporary antisemitism is as deeply embedded as she described, what exactly are we supposed to do about it?

Horn’s answer begins with a startling claim.

We have misunderstood antisemitism.

It is not fundamentally a prejudice.

It is a lie.

And the lie is extraordinarily useful.

Jews, in Horn’s telling, repeatedly become the people supposedly responsible for destroying whatever a particular society values most. The accusation changes because societies change, but the architecture remains.

The Jew can be capitalist or communist.

Rootless cosmopolitan or tribal fanatic.

Racial contaminant or racial supremacist.

Weak parasite or terrifyingly powerful conspirator.

Enemy of nationalism in one century, embodiment of nationalism in another.

Today, the vocabulary often comes dressed in the language of colonialism, oppression and liberation.

The costume changes.

The Jew remains.

Horn’s forthcoming book is explicitly both diagnosis and prescription. After years of conversations following People Love Dead Jews—and especially after October 7—she concluded that she was encountering far more ignorance than malice. That realization led her toward the educational project at the heart of the Tell Institute: teaching Jewish civilization alongside the recurring patterns of antisemitism, so students learn not merely that antisemitism is wrong but how to recognize the lie when it changes form. (Dara Horn)

That distinction matters.

Because if antisemitism is simply hatred, then much of what we have been doing makes perfect sense.

Teach tolerance.

Teach empathy.

Teach children where hatred leads.

Take them to Holocaust museums.

Show them Auschwitz.

Teach Anne Frank.

Explain the yellow star.

Repeat “Never Again.”

For decades we have assumed that if people understood the Holocaust, they would understand antisemitism.

But those are not necessarily the same thing.

Ruth Wisse warned about precisely this problem years before Horn’s new project.

In her deliberately provocative 2020 essay, “The Dark Side of Holocaust Education,” Wisse asked whether there was actually good reason to believe that expanding Holocaust education would decrease antisemitism. More fundamentally, she worried that teaching antisemitism primarily as an extreme form of “hate” misunderstood its political function. Antisemitism has historically been used to organize resentment, identify an enemy and acquire or consolidate power. (National Affairs)

And Wisse identified another danger.

If the principal way students meet Jews is through the Holocaust, then they meet Jews at the moment of maximum Jewish helplessness.

Starving.

Humiliated.

Hunted.

Behind barbed wire.

Waiting for someone else to liberate them.

That is not false history.

But it is catastrophically incomplete Jewish history.

Ruth Wisse warned us about the limitations of Holocaust education. Dara Horn is now showing us what should replace those limitations not less memory, but more Jewish knowledge.

That is the heart of Horn’s argument.

Consider what we have managed to create.

A student can know what a yellow star looked like without knowing what Shabbat looks like.

A student can recognize Auschwitz without understanding Jerusalem.

A student can know the name Anne Frank while never having encountered Abraham, Akiva, Maimonides or Herzl.

A student can spend weeks studying six million murdered Jews and never be asked what it actually meant that they were Jews.

What civilization did they belong to?

What did they believe?

What did they argue about?

What texts did they study?

What languages did they speak?

Why did they face Jerusalem when they prayed?

Why did Jews in Warsaw and Baghdad, Vilna and Fez understand themselves as somehow belonging to one another?

Why did a people scattered across continents continue counting its years according to its own calendar?

Why did Jerusalem remain in Jewish prayers for two thousand years?

Why, after expulsions, crusades, inquisitions, pogroms and genocide, did anyone bother remaining Jewish at all?

If we do not teach those questions, we teach the Holocaust without really teaching Jews.

And then we act surprised when the same young person opens TikTok and encounters a completely different Jewish story.

Now Jews are not powerless.

They are too powerful.

They are not stateless refugees.

They are colonialists.

They are not a persecuted ancient people.

They are European interlopers who appeared in the Middle East sometime around 1948.

They are not the people from the Holocaust museum.

They are something else entirely.

And because we never taught enough Jewish history, the contradiction goes unnoticed.

This may be the most consequential insight in Horn’s work.

If your moral imagination has been trained to recognize Jews primarily as victims, what happens when Jews cease behaving like victims?

What happens when Jews have a state?

What happens when Jews have an army?

What happens when Jews exercise power?

What happens when Jews defend themselves?

What happens when Jewish sovereignty involves the same agonizing questions of security, force, morality, responsibility and error that confront every sovereign nation?

Suddenly, the Jew we learned to pity becomes a Jew we must actually understand.

And understanding is much more demanding than pity.

The dead Jew makes few claims upon us.

The living Jew does.

The living Jew may disagree with us.

The living Jew has attachments we may not share.

The living Jew insists that Jewish particularism is not a moral defect.

The living Jew says that Jerusalem is not merely a political problem but a place woven through Jewish consciousness for millennia.

The living Jew may refuse to apologize for surviving.

This is why October 7 changed this conversation so profoundly.

For nearly three years, we have watched people who would never dream of denying the Holocaust struggle to make sense of living Jews exercising agency.

There is no contradiction in their minds because Holocaust remembrance and Jewish understanding were never the same thing.

A person can cry at Auschwitz and know very little about Jews.

A person can admire Anne Frank and know virtually nothing about Judaism.

A person can condemn Nazis while remaining unable to recognize an antisemitic accusation unless someone has helpfully attached a swastika to it.

History, however, rarely repeats itself with that kind of courtesy.

The antisemite of 2026 has no obligation to sound like the antisemite of 1936.

That is why Horn wants pattern recognition.

Her educational project introduces students to Jewish civilization and then places examples of antisemitic claims from different eras beside one another. The technologies change scrolls, printing presses, radio, television, the internet but students begin to see the recurring structure underneath them. (SAPIR Journal)

This is education worthy of the name.

Not simply: “Hatred is bad.”

But: What is being claimed here?

Why are Jews being blamed?

What social anxiety is the accusation exploiting?

What does believing this claim allow someone to justify?

Have we heard this story before?

Horn’s other great insight is even simpler.

The opposite of hatred, she says, is not love.

It is curiosity.

There may be no more rabbinic idea in the entire book.

Judaism does not begin by demanding agreement.

It begins with questions.

Our most famous educational ritual, the Passover Seder, imagines four children, including she-eino yode’a lishol the child who does not know how to ask.

What does the Haggadah command us?

At petach lo.

Open for that child.

Create the question.

Open the story.

We do not demand that the child first love Judaism. We do not condemn him for what he does not know.

We teach him enough to become curious.

That may be what we need now.

Not another campaign demanding that the world love Jews.

I am increasingly uninterested in whether strangers love us.

Love is far too much to ask.

Knowledge will do.

Curiosity will do.

I would settle for a student walking out of a Holocaust museum understanding not only what was destroyed but what those murdered people belonged to.

A civilization.

A people.

A library stretching across millennia.

A culture of law and argument.

A calendar.

Languages.

Songs.

Rituals.

Families.

A homeland.

A relationship with God capacious enough to contain devotion, anger, protest, gratitude and doubt.

A people stubborn enough to spend eighteen centuries arguing over what one rabbi meant on a single page of Talmud and audacious enough to believe the argument still matters.

Earlier this month, I wrote that we cannot memorialize our way to the Jewish future.

I meant that as a challenge to Jews. No community survives because it becomes exceptionally good at mourning itself. We survive because there is something sufficiently beautiful, demanding and meaningful about Judaism that we choose to give it to our children.

Horn has made me realize that the argument must also be directed outward.

The world cannot understand Jews by studying our graves.

There is something almost grotesque about defining a civilization by the moment when its enemies came closest to annihilating it.

Imagine teaching Christianity primarily through Christians being fed to lions.

Imagine teaching African-American civilization primarily through lynching photographs.

Imagine teaching Native peoples almost entirely through massacres.

Suffering matters.

Memory matters.

But the victimizer should not get to determine the curriculum.

Hitler does not get to explain the Jews.

That is the point.

By all means, go to Auschwitz.

Go to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Walk through the memorial in Berlin.

Read the names.

Look at the photographs.

Stand silently.

Cry.

Remember.

But then leave.

Go to a Shabbat table.

Open a page of Talmud.

Listen to Hebrew being spoken by children.

Study a Jewish argument that began centuries before anyone had heard of Germany.

Walk through Jerusalem.

Encounter Jews praying, building, disagreeing, loving, failing, succeeding, defending themselves, driving one another crazy and continuing to insist upon being Jews.

Teach the Holocaust.

But teach it as one horrifying chapter in the story of the Jewish people, not as the story itself.

Because six million Jews were not important because they were murdered.

They were murdered because they were Jews.

The Jewishness came first.

The lives came first.

The civilization came first.

And after all the machinery of Nazi Germany had finished its work, astonishingly, Jewish life came afterward too.

That is what Dara Horn understands.

People Love Dead Jews gave us the diagnosis.

The world has often found us most lovable when we are silent, powerless and buried.

Her new book asks us to insist on something better.

Not less reverence for Jewish death.

More knowledge of Jewish life.

Not less memory.

More curiosity.

Not fewer Holocaust museums.

More people who understand what Hitler was trying to destroy.

Remember the dead.

Of course.

But teach the living.

Because Judaism was never a civilization about how to die.

It is a civilization about how to live.

And Dara Horn is absolutely right.