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Dara Horn’s bitter syllabus for solving antisemitism
The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living
By Dara Horn
Simon & Schuster, 384 pages, $30
A few days after I started reading Dara Horn’s new book, I was called a “kike” for the first time to my face.
It was a sunny afternoon and I was wearing my Newsguild shirt. A person on the sidewalk, deshabille, possibly collecting junk, asked what union I was in. Against my better judgment I engaged, believing them to be a fellow worker. I said I was a journalist. They then decided I was a “fascist” and “complicit.”
“Do you like writing about the genocide in Palestine? The war in Iran?” they asked me, trailing me past a Judaica story in a very Jewish neighborhood. They told me they had written their honors thesis on Nazi Germany and how Goebbels seized the news media. An easy A, they assured me, that had echoes of today.
Because they seemed so fluent in the wrongs of the Third Reich, I wasn’t expecting what was said next. I was anticipating their accusation that I am insulated, white and rich and so therefore unaffected by whatever is going on in the Trump administration (which of course is famously kind to members of the press). I wasn’t prepared to be called a “fucking Jew,” or for this person to then insist they weren’t antisemitic and in the next breath utter the k-word.
I can’t speak to the mental state of this person. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were unhoused. I don’t consider them any kind of ambassador for the pro-Palestine movement. But, based on the way they spoke and a reference to their college commencement speaker — a famous journalist who they proudly said they withheld applause for — I can only assume they were educated.
Horn’s The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living, her latest provocatively-titled nonfiction book is a survey of antisemitism past and present and the ways Jews explain ourselves to the world. At its heart, it is about education.
It begins with Horn discussing her reluctant role as educator and confidante to her troubled landsmen after the publication of her 2021 bestseller People Love Dead Jews. She became what her sister termed the “antisemitism Lorax,” alone on her stump denouncing a great evil, and feeling feckless. But from that unofficial position, Horn received an actual appointment: She was tapped in the wake of Oct. 7, for an antisemitism advisory group at her alma mater, Harvard.
The climate of today’s academy makes Horn uncomfortable. Gone are the problem-solving Ivy Leaguers of her younger days — both in the student body and the administration. (In a chapter called “Cowardice at Harvard, she diagnoses a disengagement with challenging ideas.) The dogma de jour is anti-Zionism, which she fashions without the hyphen, claiming that it, like antisemitism, is “an ideology unrelated to anything real about Jews.”
Harvard and its protests, now the stuff of high-profile federal lawsuits, are not a free speech issue, she insists, but a failure in pedagogy.
Her concerns have merit, and are backed up by anecdotal evidence she had access to as a committee member and later as a speaker at a Jewish alumni event, where she was escorted through Harvard Yard by an armed guard. But she can’t help sensationalizing the atmosphere on campus. The protest movement’s slogans are likened to Nazi Germany or Hamas. (She writes, twice, of the argument that “‘intifada’ just means ‘uprising,’” in the same way that “‘Sieg heil’ just means ‘hail victory,’” and compares the usage of “Free Palestine” to “a kind of greeting and farewell to signal cult membership, the way people once used ‘Heil Hitler.’” )
She’s at her most engaging in another chapter, where she makes a robust argument for an intellectual lineage connecting Nazi propaganda to Soviet emanations of antisemitism and contemporary Islamist movements. Her explanation flows through a Nazi named Johann von Leers, who might be called both the father and the Forrest Gump of anti-Zionism.
Von Leers worked with Goebbels, absconded via a ratline to Argentina after the war where he took a job at the Egyptian embassy during the tenure of president Gamel Abdel Nasser, produced anti-Zionist tracts that were later reprinted in Russia and died at a ripe old age after converting to Islam with the encouragement of the Nazi-allied Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini. If these disparate ideologies have the same playbook for vilifying Zionists, she reasons, it’s because he wrote it.
This history is enlightening, if familiar to a follower of pro-Israel academics on X. But in claiming it as a skeleton key that unlocks the conspiracy behind the conspiracy of anti-Zionism, she flattens a movement she faults for flattening Zionism. She mostly appears to know she’s committing the same sin of simplification. It still made me wince.
In the same way she asserts that “Zionist” is really a euphemism for Jews, she simply refers to Hamas militants as “antizionists,” implying an equivalence between a designated terror group and someone like, I don’t know, Naomi Klein. The children in Gaza who danced in the ghoulish procession of the Bibas family caskets are also “antizionists,” children who she insists, excessively, were “well-fed.”
Horn’s fix for indoctrination is a new kind of lesson plan. I’ll save you the suspense: This is a very readable, often furious 384-page brochure for her new initiative, The Tell Institute, a curriculum on Jewish civilization. In her listening sessions with Jewish educators desperate to bring a primer on Jewish life to districts without Jewish people, she writes how she sees more curiosity than hostility.
This stands in contrast to some of the more frantic episodes she spends the book illustrating: the rash of antisemitic attacks from the streets of Boulder to the beaches of Bondi; the data-poisoning of the internet to influence AI models; the Qatar-backed Jew-hate campaign that she says is duping kids on quads into thinking Israel is a settler-colony; celebrities on red carpets wearing ceasefire buttons that she claims bear “the same red handprint” that demarcated Jewish businesses during the Farhud (I’d heard another antisemitic explanation for that choice of symbol, but sure).
Her proposal is that we use some of the history she outlines in the book to overhaul how we teach the world about Jews. This requires breaking down the midcentury “Gentleman’s Agreement” (named for the film and book) that collapsed Jewish identity into a religion to better suit the gentile gaze. It will teach how antisemitism is the Big Lie that Jews are the enemy of whatever a society values in any given moment. And, it will teach a kind of Jewish exceptionalism.
Horn argues that it was a mistake for the organized Jewish community to vie for acceptance by presenting Jews as like everyone else when “Jews have spent the past three thousand years not being like everyone else.” It was on the grounds of this difference that Jews were so often murdered, but Horn reasons that teaching why Jewish life developed as it did, and why it prompted such hate, will help deprogram some of the pupils of a Nazi-Soviet-Islamist plot to shape public opinion. (Whether this will dissipate their concern for Palestinians, perhaps premised more on a flood of horrific videos from the Gaza Strip or the occupied West Bank than any long-running scheme to smear Israel, goes unanswered.)
She’s heard the objections to her presentation of Jews as extraordinary.
“It was apparently in poor taste to point out the basic fact that Jews were the world’s first monotheists,” she writes. (This claim is debatable for fans of the pharaoh Akhenaten and his cult of Aten; scholars have diverse views about the dating and monotheistic character of Zoroastrianism.)
“[O]r,” she goes on, “that Jews had invested thousands of years in the idea and practice of legal debate.” (Got it, Jews are legalistic — never heard that one before.)
Or “[t]he commitments that Jews worldwide have made to help other Jews in peril.” (Regarding the particularism of Jewish largesse — itself a canard — Horn insists “you aren’t a chauvinist for giving more support” to one of your own.)
The issue — and this is a running problem with the book’s slighter focus on rightwing bigotry — is that this framing of Jewish history is already well-known among circles that don’t exactly have the warm-fuzzies for us.
“We have to emulate the Jews,” opined one admirer named Nick Fuentes. “The way they stick together, the way they help each other, the way they focus on what matters — they’re learned.”
“Noticers,” the self-assigned moniker for those who sound the alarm against “Jewish supremacy,” need not be informed of our contributions — they know and despise them as Horn’s Nazi mastermind Johann von Leers did.
What they detest, Horn says, is that Jewish civilization, maintained through a series of countercultural decisions like emphasizing literacy and following God’s law instead of one dictated by despots, is an “anti-tyrannical movement” that shaped the world. This story demands to be taught because “it shows that freedom and pluralism are possible.” But how does one tailor the teaching to a group that may have already decided Jews (or Israel) are tyrannical — unanswerable to international law and trampling the freedom of others — because a TikTok algorithm, podcaster or Twitch streamer told them?
Students already seem to resent, or at least question, the amount of mandated time schools spend on the Holocaust versus other atrocities (the book republishes much of Horn’s insightful 2023 Atlantic piece on Holocaust education). So how are they likely to feel if their school ups the content concerning 0.2% of the population by revisiting a watershed moment like the “Zionism is racism” conclusion of a 2001 UN conference in Durban, South Africa? It feels more than niche — it comes off as agenda-driven, because it is.
Horn herself is unsure this experiment will work, but she’s right to say it’s better than doing nothing or continuing on a course that’s clearly not equal to the challenge. At the very least, she thinks Jews should take pride in their own accomplishments, and is pitching her curriculum to synagogues as well.
We are dealing with an intractable problem of a shapeshifting hate that always forces us to prove a negative, whether it about eating babies or control of global finance. I can’t dismiss antisemitism as simply overblown when an example — by no means representative, but an example nonetheless — spat invective in my direction.
But that person who stalked me down the street and called me a kike may have known about Johann von Leers; they did say, after all, that they wrote their thesis on the Nazi takeover of the press. Their education didn’t inoculate them to prejudice, it gave them a parallel to throw in my Jewish face.
The issue may not be ignorance, but a dangerously wrong reading of history.
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For graphic novelist Joann Sfar, drawing after Oct. 7 was a way to put stones on Jewish graves
For many Jews, the morning of Oct. 7 remains seared into memory. In Joann Sfar’s case, it was also the day of his birthday party, which included “as many Muslims as Jews,” he told me. Amidst tragedy, Sfar felt a profound gratitude for life, which seemed especially precious. It was a day of fear and uncertainty, followed by many more over the following months. For Sfar, drawing was the only way out.
To Life is Sfar’s illustrated journal of his experience after Oct. 7, a reflection of his fierce peace advocacy coupled with a profound connection to Israel. It follows several previous books by Sfar, who is a French Jewish graphic novelist best known for The Rabbi’s Cat. His works touch on his Sephardic heritage, highlighting a history of friendship and brotherhood between Arabs and Jews.
To Life is the English translation of Nous Vivrons, which was published in June 2024 as the first of a three-part series. It was followed by Que Faire Des Juifs? (What To Do with the Jews?), a nearly 600-page graphic novel that chronicles the history of the Jewish people. Sfar concluded the series with Terre de Sang: Le Temps du Désespoir (Land of Blood: The Time of Despair), which shares Palestinian voices and which Sfar describes as the “saddest” volume of the trilogy.
I spoke with Sfar in July after reading To Life, which will be officially released on September 8. At present, the translations of the second and third volumes are not yet scheduled to be published. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Now that you’re expanding To Life’s audience to English speakers, what do you expect non-French audiences to learn? What do you hope that they take from your piece?
What I would really love is a new vision on the Middle East. I’m really surprised how New York has made the Middle East American, using it in the Trump and Mamdani debate, which I have to say has very little interest from Europe. What I would love is for people to see real lives from the Middle East to see how similar people are. I come from a part Ukrainian and part Algerian Jewish family. When I went to Palestinian cities, I was surprised how many Palestinian seniors look like my father, and how many Moroccan Jews from Israel look Palestinian.
These are people who are very similar and who are trapped in a conflict which is older than them. I really would love readers to dig into personal experience, rather than abstractions. I think embracing this region is really putting hope into individuals, because if you start to put faith into narrative, you’re lost.
In your work, you make an interesting distinction between individuals denying each other’s peoplehood on both sides — Israelis saying there was never a Palestine, anti-Zionists saying Israel never existed — and your emphasis on interviews in your piece. Why was it important for you to have such a connection to real humans throughout the process?
It’s a very strange thing to say because there was real tragedy, but it made me happy because I love these people. I’ve been lucky enough to spend a lot of time in Palestinian and Israeli cities. If you take it from an individual level, I believe in them and I have a hope for them. Something beautiful is that even if they don’t want it, they are interconnected. Their economies are interconnected; no one is going to exterminate anyone. They’ll be there still.
In this region, no one ever talks to me about Zionism. People deal with their everyday issues; they have no idea what’s going to occur in two months. I know people who are smarter than me have a big political essay about this region, but that’s not my job. My job is to do what I love, like an adventure novel, where you go to the place, you meet the people, and you bring back a story.
Were there any illustrations in the book that you found particularly interesting or meaningful?
There are some photographs that are so shocking you cannot see them in the news, and making a drawing makes it more acceptable. One picture that blew me away is the burial of a father who was killed during October 7. His kid is crying on the grave, and there are the small stones you put on Jewish Ashkenazi tombs. This kid is a Jew, but he could be an Arab, and he mourns his father with a stone. I did a very simple drawing, and somehow that’s what war is about. War is not about heroism, it’s not about glory, it’s not about victory, it’s about kids who are going to mourn their fathers or mothers or family.
This reminds me of a quote from the book where you say that your writing “is like putting little rocks on top of Jewish graves.” Are there any moments in the book that you feel are the most important to hear and remember?
In some fields of France today, and especially among artists, it’s almost forbidden to recall October 7 because of the mass murder of Gaza. But my feeling is you need to be able to cry for both. October 7 was the worst murdering of Jews after WWII, and the mass massacre in Gaza is something we shall remember in 100 years. We should be able not only to cry for both, but also to consider the situation as a whole and to say, okay, what’s next? Are we waiting for the next slaughter or can we do better than this?
As an American, I know about the Jewish experience in the U.S. over the past few years, but I didn’t know exactly what was going on in France and the antisemitism there that you described in your book. Can you tell me more about your experience?
I’m more worried about America because for French Jews, we never let people harass us without responding. We still have a very strong connection to the Arab world, so when people try to oppose Jews and Arabs in France, it somehow doesn’t work. I would love to say that in an optimistic way, but there’s also a lot of violence and harassment. The minute a Jewish artist starts to work, there’s a threat of boycott and everyone starts to treat him like a ‘genocidal Zionist.’
I’ve been talking of Palestine for 30 years, doing reporting in Palestinian towns for two years, but somehow it’s not enough. But we really fight back, because violence here is very often. I had a performance in Marseille, and people gathered at the front to prevent me from drawing on stage. Luckily, many people showed up to defend me, because they knew my show was humane, about peace. At some point, it’s because I’m a Jew that pisses them off. But we know it’s a fight, and we’re ready for it.
What were people’s reactions to your book when it first came out in France? I’m especially curious about the non-Jewish and anti-Zionist population, and whether they read your work.
Everything online is hell. In bookstores, it’s heaven. For To Life, it’s been two years of performing in huge bookstores. I also went to all the universities in France which were blocked by the pro-Gaza crowd, like Columbia, but in France I went to talk in front of them and they were very nice talks. The book sold more than 60,000 copies in France, which is huge. It has a very mainstream audience, not just a Jewish audience. When you go to bookstores, people are very okay to talk, and especially when you go to my meetings, it’s okay to disagree. At my meetings, you can be pro-Palestine — you’re welcome. You can be pro-Israel — you’re welcome, and you can know nothing and you’re welcome also.
I’ve been dealing with Arab and Jewish topics for more than 30 years, and I have a huge amount of readers in France. The Arabs and Jews of my age know what they lost, in the real brotherhood and friendship we had fighting against the extreme right party. We have political history together, and many people remember that. I have a lot of hope, but we need to stay vocal.
Since the book was written in 2023, are there any moments that feel surprising or strange for you to read today?
One thing which is really surprising is that October 7 is less than three years ago, and it’s almost as if everyone forgot. Somehow, people have made political use of this slaughter by any means. The historical moment is almost forgotten. If my book is worth something, it is as an immediate report on the immediate aftermath of October 7 on site. I was in the south of Israel, I was with kibbutzniks, I was with the military, I was with Arab people. One thing we risk is to forget what occurred on October 7, and then forget what occurred during the Shoah, because in France today all the memory sites for WWII are being attacked as pro-Israel. So, we need to keep our memory. Without memory, there’ll be no peace.
One moment in your book that I found very powerful was when you parallel a famous image of Jews being shot in the Holocaust to one of two teenagers being killed on October 7. I’d love to hear more about your thoughts connecting October 7 to previous tragedies, especially with how you refer to the events as a pogrom.
In France, most of the people don’t know about the Jewish oppression in the Arab world, how many of us had to leave the Arab countries after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. When October 7 occurred, in many Sephardic families and Jewish families from Israel, it recalled what occurred in many oriental countries. There’s a history of killing Jews in the Arab world, and it’s as if people awake to that. We have memories — nothing is the same — but we have a history. Amongst the things that really terrify me today is the dislocation of the link between Israeli Jews, American Jews, and European Jews. I was sad to see how many young American Jewish readers have no connection at all to Israel. You can criticize Israel, it’s okay, but pretending you have no connection to Israel is a lie to the face of your family.
In your opinion, why do you feel like this is the case for so many American Jews? Is there a way that you feel like this changes?
I would say Israel is also to blame because Israel has taught the diaspora Jews that it should be a constant exchange. You cannot raise a child making him guilty about not being pro-Israel enough. I’m not asking anyone to be pro-Israel — it’s a very dysfunctional country with an extreme right government. But the connection exists through your parents, your grandparents, their history. Pretending there is no connection is a lie. In the Jewish story, every moment a Jew tries to pretend he’s not part of the Jewry is going to be the first to be slaughtered. I’m not an Israeli, but I’m part of this history and I’m really proud to be part of this history.
Throughout the book, you imagine many conversations with your late grandfather, and I was interested in why this was something that felt so connected to you at this time. Why did you want to include this dialogue in your book?
He really raised me, and everything I do or say is considering what my grandfather would have said. He did not believe in any narrative. He was not a nationalist; he would not believe in all the right wing crap about pride, country, anything. It was only about survival. Regarding Europe, he was very pessimistic. He was saying that we’ll have some decades of peace after Auschwitz, and then it’s going to go back to normal Jew hatred. I’m afraid to say he was right.
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Christian lawmakers want Trump to fast-track Jewish Canadians to the U.S. Tulsa says it’s ready.
Eitan Israelov, 34, was noshing on bagels and coffee at a co-working space in downtown Tulsa, when he met the city’s mayor, Monroe Nichols.
Israelov and his family — wife, Nicole, 31, and their two children, Liam, 10, and Melody, 8 — were among nearly 50 Canadian Jews who traveled to Oklahoma in February, part of an audacious recruitment trip to lure Jews worried about rising and often violent antisemitism north of the border, to leave Canada and move to the U.S.
Nichols greeted the group like a host welcoming guests into his home. “As a Black man in America,” Nichols said, “I can identify with some of the hate that you all have felt.” Then he used a word that landed differently in a room full of people who’d begun to wonder whether they still belonged where they came from.
“Tulsa,” he said, “is a refuge.”
For Israelov, the words spoke volumes. “For us,” he said, “it’s a piece of heaven.”
Six months later, it sounds prescient.
Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt sent a letter to Trump in July, pledging that “Oklahoma would proudly welcome” any Jewish families who “lawfully come to the United States in search of safety and opportunity.”
Now a group of Christian lawmakers are appealing to President Donald Trump to fast-track immigration for Jewish Canadians, touting Tulsa as a destination of choice. “These individuals and families should not be viewed merely as people fleeing hatred,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter last week. “They are prospective neighbors.”
Trump shared the letter in a social media post on Sunday, signaling his support, but did not commit his administration to anything specific — no order, no directive, no timeline. But for Canadian Jewish communities that have spent three years watching antisemitism intensify with little response from Ottawa, the presidential spotlight was still notable.
Since the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, Jewish schools, synagogues and businesses across Canada have faced harassment, vandalism, bomb threats and violence. B’nai Brith Canada counted 27 violent antisemitic incidents in just the first six months of 2026, nearly triple all of 2025.
In early August, an arsonist gutted Nöam, a kosher restaurant in Montreal. Even Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has acknowledged the scale. Jews, he’s noted, are roughly 1% of Canada’s population but the target of two-thirds of its religiously motivated hate crimes.
“Canada’s civic compact,” he said, “is failing Jewish Canadians.”
The letter Trump shared was drafted by Jason Rapert, founder of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, asking Trump to “establish an appropriate lawful immigration and humanitarian pathway for Jewish Canadians who are experiencing persecution.”
Fifty-four people signed it including sitting state legislators from across the country, as well as Sam Brownback, the former U.S. ambassador for international religious freedom.
The letter cited Tulsa as an example of where a “willingness already exists,” and which has spent the better part of a decade building exactly the kind of pipeline that letter is describing.
Tulsa Tomorrow is a Jewish community-run recruitment program that started in 2017. It flies prospective transplants in for a weekend of house tours, meet-and-greets and a pitch for why they should relocate. So far, 144 people have come through, and 113 have stayed.
Lately, more of them have been Canadian. Of 52 people on a trip in February, 41 came from Canada, and organizers expect the roughly 50 people signed up for another trip in October to skew just as heavily north of the border.
Two people helping with that pitch are Canadian transplants themselves. Joe Roberts, who leads Jewish Tulsa — the umbrella organization overseeing the city’s federation, JCC and Jewish museum — moved there in 2024 from Ontario. Michael Sachs, senior director of the Jewish Federation of Tulsa, moved from Vancouver last year.
“Oklahoma is a state where these people can feel openly Jewish, and feel that as a Jew they’re valued,” Sachs said.
The families waiting
Getting there is another story. Israelov works in IT for a mining company headquartered in Canada, and he said the company won’t let him work remotely from the U.S. — closing off the route that would let an employer sponsor his visa. Another route, a visa that would require Israelov to invest $800,000 in a U.S. business, is out of reach financially.
Fear compounds the financial obstacles. In January 2024, someone was caught on the Israelovs’ home security camera cutting an Israeli flag off their front porch and fleeing into the night.
Later, a neighbor told Israelov, “I heard you’re Jewish,” and that “your kind is in the wrong place.” He belonged in Israel, the neighbor said, “but not here.”
Not everyone watching this unfold from inside the Canadian Jewish community is rooting for the exodus. Jesse Brown, a Canadian Jewish journalist who has spent years documenting the country’s rising antisemitism, says he fears “the next Bondi Beach massacre,” the December 2025 Hanukkah attack in Australia that killed 15 people, “is going to take place in Canada.”
But watching fellow Jews plan their departure unsettles him in a different way. “There’s a sadness,” he said. “I’m not enthused or compelled by what I see as a re-shtetling.”
A murkier picture
It’s hard not to notice the echo of last year’s program resettling white South Africans as refugees, which critics called selective and its architects called a response to persecution. Roberts sees Canadian Jews less as refugees than as candidates for what he calls “a legal humanitarian pathway that’s expedited.”
The timing also invites skepticism. The NACL letter and Trump’s post came in the middle of a trade war between the U.S. and Canada. Fifty percent tariffs on roughly $20 billion of Canadian goods took effect Aug. 22. Canada has announced a matching retaliation.
Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, visited Ottawa in early August and said: “You need to do better,” citing 788 antisemitic hate crimes reported to Canadian police in 2025, up from 492 in 2021.
Carney’s office said new laws and funding show the government is responding. A spokeswoman said officials want “a country where our differences are honored and where Jewish Canadians can live visibly, fully, and joyfully in public life.”
But Rapert, who is based in Arkansas, sees things differently. When Trump shared the letter on Sunday, Rapert was leading a delegation of U.S. elected officials on a tour of Israel. They had just visited the Ghetto Fighters’ House Holocaust museum, which has on display the glass booth used in the trial of Adolf Eichmann for his role in the Holocaust.
Canada’s climate, he said, is “not unlike what you were beginning to hear in the early days of Germany, that led to government decisions that brought forward what we now all know is the Holocaust.”
Rapert’s letter is far from his final push. He hopes to persuade U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and U.S. Rep. Marlin Stutzman of Indiana to hold congressional hearings on the issue. And he’s working on setting up a meeting with Trump.
“My prayer is that Donald Trump paves the way for the people that want to come, to come,” he said. “But what would be even better is if Prime Minister Carney apologized and repented.”
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California lawmakers pass bills to address antisemitism, deem ‘Jewish’ an ethnicity, and protect religious observance
(JTA) — California is poised to become the first state to deem “Jewish” an ethnic and racial identity, after lawmakers gave final approval to the groundbreaking legislation on Monday.
The SB 1387 bill, which would expand the definition of ethnicity “to include Jewish identity” in demographic data collection, will now head to the governor’s desk. If the legislation becomes law, state agency forms that allow for voluntary disclosures of ethnicity or race would also need to offer a “Jewish” option.
Both the State Assembly and Senate granted final approval to the bill in the last few hours of California’s 2026 legislative session, which concludes at the end of the day on Monday. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, has until Sept. 30 to sign bills into laws or veto them.
The SB 1387 ethnicity legislation has been a priority among many California Jewish organizations, who argue that Jewish peoplehood should be connected to much more than just religion — and that the law should reflect that understanding.
This bill, which would take effect in 2030, would affect forms issued by agencies ranging from public schools to unemployment offices to prisons. Data collected would serve to inform research initiatives, identify disparities and guide policy decisions, while banning the disclosure of personal information, per the bill.
Joining SB 1387 in heading to the governor’s desk are five other bills that are relevant to the state’s 1.2 million Jews and that had the support of the Jewish California coalition.
On Sunday, the legislature passed AB 1853, a bill that bars threatening false and misleading information from California voter guides. Jewish California, which represents 43 organizations, praised the legislation’s advancement, stressing that 54 Jewish groups voiced their support for the bill within 48 hours of its introduction.
“Hate speech does not belong in a state-approved document paid by tax dollars,” David Bocarsly, CEO of Jewish California, said in a statement.
“AB 1853 boldly declares that our state’s official election documents can’t be used to spread conspiracy theories and bigotry,” added Bocarsly, whose coalition was not only a sponsor of this bill but also of SB 1387.
Also on Sunday, lawmakers approved AB 2664, the Safe Worship Zone Act, which would create a 100-foot zone around the entrances of houses of worship, where no one would be able to come within 8 feet of a congregant without their consent.
The bill, which received the backing of a wide-ranging interfaith coalition, is modeled after Colorado’s bubble zone law that offers patients protection around reproductive health clinics.
“The rise of antisemitism is undeniable, and our communities must be protected,” Democratic Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, the bill’s author, said in a statement.
“AB 2664 gives communities an important tool to push back against harassment and intimidation and protect the sanctity of our houses of worship,” Bauer-Kahan added.
Meanwhile, on Thursday, the legislature approved AB 395, which would require government agencies, K-12 schools and public universities to avoid scheduling major events or meetings on days “that members of the public would be unable to participate or be present due to the ritual observance of a religious, cultural, or ancestral holiday.”
Among the Jewish observances that would be codified on a list of such holidays are Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and the first and last two days of Passover.
“For too long and in too many communities, religious minorities and other people of faith have been asked to make difficult choices on the days that matter most to them,” Democratic Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel, the bill’s author, said in a statement.
“This legislation would help to prevent that injustice and ensure that Californians of all backgrounds can fully participate, particularly when important decisions are being made,” added Gabriel, who chairs the California Legislative Jewish Caucus.
Lawmakers on Thursday also approved another Gabriel bill, AB 1836, which seeks to close a gap in the current structure of the California State Nonprofit Security Grant Program. Because the program allocates security funds only for a nonprofit’s physical building, off-site events like menorah lightings on Chanukah were not eligible.
A fifth bill relevant to the Jewish community, AB 1763, is also heading to Newsom’s desk, after passing in the legislature last Tuesday. This bill would include religious holiday observance as a type of excused absence in schools, without requiring a written request from a parent or guardian.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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