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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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Synagogue attacks were part of massive ISIS-inspired plot last week, FBI says
(JTA) — A 21-year-old man from Valencia, Pennsylvania, suggested poisoning food in synagogues as part of a mass attack in support of the Islamic State group last week, according to the FBI.
The suspect, Jonathan Kramer, said in an online forum using the pseudonym “Hamza Al Rashid” that “i wish to inject ricin or cyanide into places such as grocery stores inside water/food with a syringe, or going to food events, preferably synagogues and putting the chemicals in their food and drink…,” according to a sworn FBI affidavit.
The prospective poisoning was part of a broader plot of mass violence that included “repeated attempts to encourage and coordinate violence through encrypted platforms, such as advising others on attack methods, discussing chemical poisons, arson, vehicle attacks, drone delivery explosives and firearm based assaults,” FBI Special Agent in Charge Richard Evanchec said at a press conference last week.
The Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh said in a security update on Friday that no synagogue had been specified by the FBI. , “We are in close contact with our law enforcement partners and federal prosecutors, and if we learn of anything concerning, we will share that immediately,” the organization noted.
Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Eisenberg announced last Tuesday that Kramer was “preparing for a mass shooting that could have taken many lives, having already secured a rifle and approximately 190 rounds of ammunition for what he called his ‘mission.”
Efforts to reach Kramer’s public defender Jake Morrison were unsuccessful.
FBI agents arrested Kramer in a hotel parking lot in Cranberry, Pennsylvania, the Justice Department said. They seized a semiautomatic rifle, five rifle magazines, a rifle bipod and scope, a total of 190 rounds of rifle ammunition and about 30 knives following a search of him, his house and his hotel room.
Kramer was charged with receiving a firearm and ammunition believing they would be used to commit terrorism. He appeared in court last Wednesday to waive a preliminary hearing, according to CBS News. A court date has not been set for Kramer’s next proceedings, the network reported.
Kramer had been on the FBI’s radar since 2023, when he was charged by Pennsylvania state authorities “for his role in a plot to commit a mass casualty incident” and sent to a juvenile detention facility, FBI special agent Gregory Battaglia said in a sworn affidavit.
Nearly eight years ago, 11 worshippers were killed at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Proposed U.S. $24.3 billion sale of F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia advances
(JTA) — The State Department has approved a possible $24.3 billion sale of 48 F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia — a move that would make the kingdom the second Middle Eastern country after Israel to have the world’s most powerful combat aircraft.
“This proposed sale will support the foreign policy and national security objectives of the United States by improving the security of a major non-NATO ally,” the department said in a statement.
Israel wants the sale attached to a normalization deal with Saudi Arabia, but that doesn’t appear to be on the horizon. However, there is a small chance that Congress could keep the sale from happening.
When President Donald Trump first confirmed that he was considering the sale last November, Israeli officials told Axios that while they don’t oppose the sale itself, they wanted it “to be subject to Saudi normalization with Israel.”
Although Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly brushed off the deal’s significance last fall, a security source at the time warned on CNN that the possibility of Saudi Arabia acquiring “the same capabilities” as Israel was “very concerning.”
The prime minister was more vocal in his opposition to a July announcement from Trump that he was weighing selling the advanced jets to Turkey as well, telling CNN that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is “not exactly a model ally of the United States.”
Israel has already purchased 50 F-35 jets, in two procurement rounds that occurred in 2016 and in 2017, according to the Israeli Defense Ministry. However, local media reports indicate that two of the 50 have yet to arrive, meaning that just 48 are on the ground – the same number of planes that the State Department has approved for Saudi Arabia’s potential purchase.
Israel would have many more F-35s than Saudi Arabia for the time being, because its Defense Ministry announced in 2024 that it would be procuring 25 more of the planes, slated to begin arriving in 2028. Earlier this year, the Defense Ministry revealed that it would be procuring yet another squadron of the jets, although the quantity remained unclear.
Congressional approval is not assured; wariness of the Saudi regime, stemming in part from the state-sanctioned 2018 murder of a U.S.-based journalist in Turkey, crosses party lines.
The U.S. Arms Export Control Act requires the executive branch of the government to notify Congress regarding major defense equipment sales to most countries. Congress can then deem a country ineligible to participate in a sale through a joint resolution. The president can then veto the resolution, which Congress would need a two-thirds supermajority to override.
Additionally, U.S. law requires the president to ensure that Israel maintains “a qualitative military edge over military threats” when considering arms sales to other Middle Eastern countries. Israel, per the law, must be able “to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat” from both other nations and “non-state actors.”
“The proposed sale of this equipment and support will not alter the military balance in the region,” the State Department said on Thursday. It called Saudi Arabia “a force for political stability and economic progress in the Gulf region,” adding that the sale would help “deter current and future threats by strengthening its homeland defense.”
The department maintained that not only would the sale improve Saudi Arabia’s defense capabilities, but it would also boost “interoperability” with both U.S. forces and other players from NATO and the region.
As for the potential deal’s logistics, Saudi Arabia has requested 48 of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter Jets, as well as 49 Pratt & Whitney engines, according to the State Department.
The kingdom is also seeking to acquire other non-major defense equipment, such as cryptographic devices, precision navigation, secure communications, simple key loaders and support for electronic warfare databases, maintenance and personnel training.
Producing and delivering these planes can take many years.
Meanwhile, just a day before Trump’s announcement, The New York Times surfaced intelligence concerns that China could acquire F-35 technology by spying on Saudi Arabia or through its partnerships with the kingdom.
U.S. House Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democrat from Illinois, warned in a statement on X that “Beijing has spent decades stealing American intellectual property” and that this deal could “help them do it.”
“Our own intelligence community is warning that it could put the crown jewels of American military technology within reach of the Chinese Communist Party,” Krishnamoorthi added.
The Biden administration reportedly ended a past F-35 deal with the United Arab Emirates — secured by the first Trump administration — due to similar concerns about the country’s connections to China, as well as to Russia.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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After outcry, Texas lieutenant governor says schools should teach Holocaust books ‘Night,’ ‘Anne Frank’
(JTA) — The lieutenant governor of Texas says his recent call for the state’s public schools to remove “over 2,000 titles” of “dirty, filthy and vulgar books” was not meant to include books about the Holocaust.
Dan Patrick’s statement, provided exclusively to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday, comes after a month of confusion following a press conference in which he and a conservative Christian activist threatened schools with potential loss of state funding if they did not comply with his directive to purge their libraries.
“I believe Texas students must learn about the Holocaust, and that includes reading books such as ‘Night’ by Elie Wiesel, ‘The Diary of Anne Frank,’ and other books about the Holocaust,” Patrick told JTA, singling out two books on the removal list he had promoted – one of which, “Night,” that he previously explicitly called for removal from middle schools.
Patrick added that his initiative was “focused on age-inappropriate, sexually explicit books in public school libraries across Texas.” At his earlier press conference, he had directed viewers to an online list compiled by an activist group that features several books about the Holocaust and Jewish identity.
Patrick’s threats have teeth. In Texas, lieutenant governors are more powerful than in many other states, playing central roles in shaping the budget and determining the legislative agenda.
Patrick also appeared to walk back some of the harsher proclamations from his Aug. 19 press conference, at which the Republican had stated, “We’re coming for the books.”
“As the law states, local communities have the right to make their own decisions about their public school libraries,” he told JTA Friday.
The lieutenant governor, who is up for reelection this fall, appeared at the conference with Bonnie Wallace, the head of the activist group Recover America, and told viewers to “go to RecoverAmerica.com.” That group has circulated a list of more than 2,100 “Harmful Books in Libraries.” Its list, which it describes as “books with harmful, sexually explicit, and vulgar content,” includes more than a dozen titles of particular import to Jewish readers.
Recover America’s flagged books include both volumes of Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” a comic-book adaptation of Frank’s diary and Bernard Malamud’s novel of a blood libel “The Fixer” — all books that have been removed from school districts in Texas and other states in the past amid broader conservative-led library culture wars. In some cases those books were restored to the districts following public outcry, but spurred deeper dialogue about the state of Holocaust education and antisemitism awareness in public schools.
Patrick’s latest push would go much further than a handful of districts, affecting the more than 5.5 million students in public schools across the state.
One book of particular contention on Recover America’s list was “Night,” Elie Wiesel’s bestselling memoir of surviving Auschwitz and Buchenwald, which has been taught in schools for decades. After a Houston Chronicle story noted the book’s inclusion on the Recover America “harmful” list, Patrick initially doubled down on “Night,” saying that it was not appropriate for middle schools owing to its “violence.”
“If ‘Night,’ by Elie Wiesel, were made into a movie, it would likely be rated R,” Patrick wrote on the social network X on Aug. 26. “‘Night,’ which includes depictions of graphic violence and the machine-gunning of babies, should not be available to sixth graders in middle-school libraries. High school is more age-appropriate.”
His tweet appeared to contradict the state’s own K-12 required reading list, passed this summer, which mandates that “Night” be taught in the eighth grade beginning in 2030.
Now, in response to questions from JTA, the lieutenant governor said he would defer to the Texas State Board of Education on the appropriate grade to teach “Night.”
“The State Board of Education decides the appropriate grade level for books and will determine whether ‘Night,’ by Elie Wiesel, is at the appropriate grade level,” Patrick told JTA in his statement.
He continued to insist that books in schools should be held to “FCC standards,” referring to the Federal Communications Commission, an agency that governs broadcasting content and does not regulate publishing.
The head of the Texas Holocaust, Genocide and Antisemitism Advisory Commission, a governor-appointed panel which advised the state on the inclusion of “Night” and other Holocaust texts on its required reading list, did not return a JTA request for comment.
In a statement, the Texas Educational Authority, which drafted the required-reading list, told JTA, “When Texas students learn about the Holocaust, they will be exposed to the horrors of the Holocaust. That is why the SBOE placed the book in 8th Grade to ensure age appropriateness for students.”
At the Emmys this week, when “The Librarians,” a documentary about librarians facing book removal threats, won an award, retired Texas librarian Carolyn Foote joined the producers on the stage and held up a copy of “Night” in protest.
“I felt like it was very symbolic to bring ‘Night,’” Foote, a subject of the film and a co-founder of the librarian activist group FReadom Fighters, told JTA. “Having read it, I just know the importance of not forgetting our past. And that’s part of Elie Wiesel’s whole legacy, is remembrance, and so it just felt very important for me to carry that book, coming from Texas.” Another librarian onstage for the win held up “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation.”
Elisha Wiesel, Elie’s son and chair of the Elie Wiesel Foundation, told JTA that “Texas deserves credit for recognizing that Holocaust education belongs in the eighth-grade curriculum.” Yet, the younger Wiesel suggested, Patrick’s concerns about the book’s violence were misplaced.
“‘Night’ contains violence because the Holocaust was violent; its purpose is not to shock young people, but to help them understand where hatred and indifference can lead,” he wrote in an email. “With context and guidance, students should not be shielded from this history. They should be equipped to confront it.”
Despite having directed viewers to Recover America’s book list during his press conference, Patrick’s new statement to JTA said, “I do not have a book list.” He pointed instead to a law passed in the state legislature in 2025 regulating school books that he said districts were required to follow.
Yet some districts in the state have removed every book on Recover America’s list from their own libraries out of fear of losing funding, Foote told JTA. While the list nominally contains a ratings system, many of the books do not have a rating.
Besides “Night,” “Maus,” “Anne Frank’s Diary” and “The Fixer,” other books about Judaism and the Holocaust on Recover America’s list of “Harmful Books” include:
- “Annexed,” a young-adult novel about Peter van Pels, who hid in the Amsterdam annex with Anne Frank
- “The Berlin Boxing Club,” a young-adult historical novel based on German boxer Max Schmeling, who helped young Jews during Hitler’s rise to power
- “Black, White and Jewish,” a memoir by Rebecca Walker, the mixed-race Jewish daughter of author Alice Walker
- “Caste: The Origins of our Discontents,” a nonfiction book analyzing the “caste systems” of Nazi Germany. “Caste” had been included on an earlier, Wallace-spearheaded list of books for removal from a Texas public library in a case that the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear in 2025, allowing the removals to proceed.
- “Kasher in the Rye,” a memoir by Jewish comedian Moshe Kasher
- “Pride: the story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag,” a children’s picture-book biography of the pioneering Jewish LGBTQ legislator
- “Sophie’s Choice,” the bestselling Holocaust novel for adults
- “The Violin Maker’s Daughter,” a historical novel about a Jewish family of musicians during the Holocaust
- “White Bird,” a young-reader graphic novel about a Jewish girl in Nazi-occupied France
In response to JTA sharing a list of the above books, Patrick’s statement mentioned only “Night” and Anne Frank by name. The Recover America list is largely made up of romance and fantasy novels, many with an LGBTQ element, while also including classics such as “The Glass Menagerie” and “Cat’s Cradle” and some picture books for children.
Recover America did not immediately return a JTA request for comment Friday on Patrick’s new statement. Wallace, the group’s leader who has also appeared on Patrick’s podcast, previously told the Houston Chronicle that she had “thought long and hard” about including “Night” on her list.
She ultimately did so, she said, because “an eighth-grade student is 13 years old. Do they need to read about soldiers massacring, throwing up babies, and killing them with machine guns?”
She added, “It’s not to say this doesn’t happen in life. And the Holocaust was maybe the worst tragedy in the history of the world.”
For Cameron Samuels, a Jewish alum of Texas public schools and founder of the activist group Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, such efforts do not help Jewish students.
“Non-Jewish people are deciding for us what’s best, and making this public policy,” Samuels said. “We can’t readily access these books and stories. And that makes students feel alone. It also means that our classroom peers are not learning authentic Jewish narratives.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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