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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.
The post Dara Horn’s bitter syllabus for solving antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
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Staunch Israel supporter Coons expected to win Delaware Democratic Senate primary handily
(JTA) — Delaware incumbent Sen. Chris Coons, a longtime supporter of Israel, is expected to easily win Delaware’s U.S. Senate primary on Tuesday, despite criticism from party progressives.
Coons, a mainstay of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has repeatedly backed measures to bolster Israel’s capacity for self-defense. He also joined a bipartisan delegation to visit Israel immediately after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks.
But the senator has faced pushback in recent months for his refusal to back measures that would cut military aid to Israel.
This past spring, he was one of just seven Democrats to join Republicans in voting against a resolution authored by independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, which sought to stop the sale of military bulldozers to Israel. Coons was among just 11 Democrats who opposed a second Sanders resolution that proposed similar sales bans on massive bombs and other defense equipment.
Coons has served nearly three terms in the Senate. He won a special election in 2010, about a year after Joe Biden resigned to become U.S. vice president, and then went on to secure two full terms in 2014 and 2020.
In Tuesday’s primary, he will face off against artificial intelligence systems builder and historian Jeff Appelhans, naval architect and marine engineer Mary Louve and a former business executive who changed his legal name from Eric Hansen to E. No-Trump Hansen.
While Coons has earned endorsements from establishment Democrats, such as Delaware Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester and Gov. Matt Meyer, he has drawn criticism from party progressives for both his support of Israel and the financial backing he gets from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobbying group.
Of Coons’s opponents, the most vocal critic on Israel-related policy has been Appelhans, whose campaign priorities included ending U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza. Appelhans slammed Coons for voting against the Sanders bills, writing on his campaign site that “the liberal consensus moved to block the sales.”
Appelhans condemned Coons’s voting record on “moving armaments to Israel,” noting in a recent interview that “there’s never been a vote that he’s stopped” on this issue. He was speaking with Delaware Public Media last week as part of a series of candidate interviews.
Regarding the conflict in Iran, Appelhans slammed “Congress’ unwillingness” to challenge the president, noting that “there was very much a sense that Israel would be a staunch ally and they could sort of get this done really easily.”
In the same radio series, another candidate, Louve, expressed uncertainty as to “why we’re still backing Israel,” while acknowledging the country’s history as a U.S. ally.
“Is it worth us continuing to step up for a bully?” she asked. “It’s aggression that is unnecessary that’s continuing to escalate because we’re helping it.”
Hansen did not participate in these conversations, Delaware Public Media stated.
This summer Coons pledged to stop taking donations from the data company Palantir, which has come under scrutiny for its work with the Israel’s Defense Ministry, the U.S. military and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to the nonprofit news site Spotlight Delaware.
Despite his more centrist reputation, Coons has had significant criticism for the Trump administration’s strategies in Iran. In his own Delaware Public Media interview, Coons accused the president of selling the conflict “as a cheap, quick war.”
While little polling data was available ahead of Tuesday’s race, the Polymarket predictions site gave Coons a 99.7% chance of winning as of Monday evening. In his last primary in 2020, Coons defeated a progressive opponent, Jessica Scarane, with nearly 73% of voter support.
Regardless of Tuesday’s outcome, the victor is expected to easily defeat the Republican challenger in the November general election, with the Cook Political Report deeming Delaware “solid” Democratic territory.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Noah Wyle wins an Emmy for playing one of TV’s most Jewish doctors
(JTA) — Noah Wyle on Monday night won his second consecutive Emmy for playing Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch on “The Pitt.” The win also marked a second victory for one of television’s more fully realized Jewish characters.
The actor won Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for the HBO Max medical drama, which also won Outstanding Drama Series for the second year in a row. In his acceptance speech, Wyle recalled growing up in Los Angeles and said, “This is all I’ve ever wanted to do, and this is the only club I’ve ever wanted to join.”
For Jewish viewers, the significance of Wyle’s victory goes beyond the actor’s own Jewish ancestry. In the first season, Robby was seen reciting the Shema at one of his lowest moments, turning what might have been a throwaway piece of character background into an intimate expression of fear and faith.
In the second season, Wyle, who is also a writer and executive producer on the show, pushed that dimension further. An episode he wrote dealt with the trauma of the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, while also exploring Robby’s complicated relationship with his Jewish faith.
Wyle has described Robby’s faith as something he is still “grappling” with — including the question of whether he has faith at all. The Shema scene, he said, functioned almost like a child’s primal plea for help.
Wyle was not the only Jewish winner of the night. Saul Metzstein, the Scottish Jewish director whose father was the prominent modernist architect Isi Metzstein, won Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series for “Slow Horses.” Metzstein had been competing against Wyle, who was nominated for directing an episode of “The Pitt.”
Those two wins were among the relatively few Jewish victories at this year’s ceremony. Jewish actors including Jason Segel, Lisa Kudrow, Harrison Ford and Hannah Einbinder were among the nominees but did not win in their categories.
“Nobody Wants This,” the Netflix show about a rabbi’s romance with a non-Jewish podcaster, was nominated for Outstanding Comedy Series but lost to “Widow’s Bay.”
An Emmy was also awarded to a Jewish actor and director whose death in 2025 stunned the industry and a legion of fans. Rob Reiner, who was killed in December with his wife, Michele, won a posthumous Emmy for his guest role as a kind dispenser of business advice on “The Bear.” Reiner’s award was presented at the Creative Arts Emmys earlier this month, rather than Monday’s televised ceremony.
Reiner, before going on to direct Hollywood classics like “This Is Spinal Tap,” “The Princess Bride” and “When Harry Met Sally” won his first two Emmy awards in 1974 and 1978 for playing Mike Stivic, the liberal son-in-law of Archie Bunker on “All in the Family.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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NAZA exposes Israel’s crisis of credibility over Gaza
More than two decades ago, when I was the The Associated Press bureau chief for Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, the Israeli military called off an attack on a senior Hamas leader after learning at the last moment that family members and children were inside the targeted building.
What stayed with me was what happened next. The military sent a senior officer to my office to explain the decision.
This was during the Second Intifada, the murderous explosion of terrorism launched by armed Palestinians after Israel had offered the Palestinian Authority an independent state in over 90 percent of the territory it sought. Hamas leaders sent suicide bombers into Israel on a daily basis to blow up buses, restaurants, malls, cafes. I checked for explosives whenever I got into my car, perhaps with my little daughters, Maya and Noa.
Yet Israeli officials understood that demonstrating concern for civilian life was part of maintaining the country’s credibility. Maybe they also thought that concern for innocent life, even on the enemy side, was the Jewish thing to do. I want to believe this, as both a Jew and as a manager who had colleagues in Gaza, some of whom were hurt over the years.
That memory returned to me amid the uproar surrounding NAZA, the new documentary by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, who shared in the 2024 Oscar for No Other Land, a critique of Israel’s practices in the West Bank.
The new film, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival and won the Special Jury Prize, is titled after the Hebrew acronym for “collateral damage” (and is also a play on “Gaza”). It examines Israel’s targeting practices in Gaza through testimony from 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence personnel who allege the IDF used artificial intelligence.
Some of those soldiers, the filmmakers say, operated or helped design the AI systems at the center of the film. Their identities are concealed in various ways, yet their testimony portrays a disturbing picture about how technology, intelligence and estimates of civilian casualties intersected in decisions to strike.
The reaction in Israel has been ferocious. Culture Minister Miki Zohar – from the governing Likud Party led by Benjamin Netanyahu – has called the filmmakers traitors and raised the prospect of revoking their citizenship.
Former football star and prominent television personality Eyal Berkovic has similarly argued that loss of citizenship should be the best-case scenario for Israelis who harm their country. As the film moves beyond Venice, efforts to prevent its screening in Israel seem likely.
That reaction creates a sad irony. One of the strongest criticisms of NAZA is that its highly combustible testimony comes from anonymous sources – and that is a valid criticism indeed. Yet threats directed at the filmmakers offer a fairly vivid illustration of why soldiers and intelligence officers making explosive allegations about their own military might fear speaking publicly. The filmmakers say anonymity was necessary to protect people who could face serious consequences for revealing classified information. I can credibly assess they’d end up in jail.
Nonetheless, the anonymity remains a serious weakness. Claims that are this grave demand intense scrutiny, and viewers have limited means of establishing whether the witnesses held the positions they claim, possessed the knowledge they describe or represent the targeting system accurately. The IDF has challenged precisely this aspect of the film and rejected its portrayal of Israeli targeting practices.
That said, and not for the first time, the military is more reasonable than the government and the IDF’s spokesman invited the filmmakers to screen it for the military. A detailed military response to the evidence presented in NAZA would provide an essential counterweight.
The central dispute also reaches beyond whether Israel used artificial intelligence. The IDF says decisions to select and approve strikes are made by human personnel. The more consequential question is what information those people received and what weight they gave to civilian lives when making those decisions. If a system identified a Hamas operative inside a residential building, what level of civilian harm was considered acceptable in order to kill him? To what degree was AI part of the decision-making process?
Amid a global uproar over fears of AI, and in particular systems operating independently in ways that harm humans, this film catapults such questions to a very high place in the global discourse.
The AI questions lead to others. Did the permissible number of civilian casualties change according to the importance of the target? How confident did intelligence officers have to be that the intended person was actually present? What happened when information indicated that children or other family members were inside? How frequently did commanders cancel strikes because the expected civilian toll had become too high?
NAZA offers disturbing answers, and its central concern is ultimately a human one: what values and tolerances were built into the targeting process, and how were they applied by the people responsible for approving strikes?
Israel, this time around, has provided only a limited public account of those calculations during the war. Officials have emphasized the extraordinary difficulties of fighting Hamas in densely populated Gaza, the organization’s use of civilian areas for military purposes and Israeli estimates of a civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio that they say compares favorably with other episodes of urban warfare, including Mosul. The precise civilian death toll in Gaza also remains contested, particularly the division between civilians and combatants.
There is no doubt in my mind – none whatsoever – that Hamas is the embodiment of evil. It is obvious to anyone paying attention that the jihadist group engineered the entire war to maximize casualties on its own side in order to make Israel an international pariah. But it is also rather obvious by Israel’s conduct in the war and the tens of thousands of civilians who have died, that Israel to walked into the trap laid by Hamas.
Aggregate ratios tell only part of the story. They reveal little about why a particular building was struck, how many civilians were expected to be inside, what military advantage commanders anticipated or how that anticipated advantage was weighed against the likely human cost. Repeated incidents involving substantial civilian casualties have often been followed by broad explanations rather than detailed accounts of the decision-making that produced them. Foreign journalists, of course, have not been freely allowed in.
That is where my memory from more than 20 years ago feels especially relevant. The military that sent an officer to my office understood the value of a transparent process. It understood that credibility depended partly on demonstrating, in specific cases, that civilian lives carried meaningful weight in operational decisions. During the Gaza war, amid extraordinary civilian loss of life, that instinct has been far less visible, to say the least.
Why did Israel act this way? Part of it has to do with the unspeakable trauma of the Oct. 7 Hamas invasion and massacre, which left Israelis in no mood for explanations, and placed its government in a defensive posture. Part of it is the nature of that government – an ultranationalist assemblage of highly illiberal and astoundingly cynical politicians. And part of it is the global demonization targeting Israel – so thorough and unfair that it almost explains the surrender of any serious effort at PR.
None of this was smart. The resulting information vacuum has given NAZA much of its power. A documentary built substantially around anonymous testimony carries an obvious credibility burden, particularly when its allegations concern classified practices that outsiders have little ability to examine independently. Yet Israel’s sparse public accounting of its targeting decisions has left relatively little detailed evidence against which those accounts can be measured. The filmmakers have supplied one version of what happened inside the targeting system; a detailed Israeli account could provide another.
Demonizing a couple of filmmakers based on the idea that they meant to do Israel harm will not convince intelligent people and will deepen Israel’s isolation. Israel needs to explain to its own people how it failed so utterly to protect the massacre of Jews. It needs to explain to the world what went on in Gaza. In fact, it needs to explain that to its own people as well.
All of that will await another government. This will not come from Netanyahu.
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