What if all the clever ideas about dealing with antisemitism, including focusing on Holocaust education, are failing?
That’s the question posed by JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin with respect to the unprecedented surge in Jew-hatred. He’s joined in this week’s episode of “Think Twice” by Dara Horn, author of the seminal 2021 collection of essays, People Love Dead Jews: Reports From a Haunted Present and the new The Solution to the Jewish Problem: A Love Story for the Living.
Horn says that since the publication of her People Love Dead Jews, she’s become a magnet for Jewish men and women who want to share stories of how they’ve been impacted by a surge of hatred. Because of this, she’s been dubbed by family members as the “Antisemitism Lorax,” a reference to the Dr. Seuss book. Because of this, she’s spent the past few years researching efforts to combat Jew-hatred and come to some firm conclusions.
One is that Holocaust education, while important in and of itself, is not curing the world of antisemitism or achieving the goal of many involved with it to teach non-Jews to be nicer. On the contrary, since it doesn’t teach about Jewish civilization or about Jew-hatred per se, it does little or nothing to deal with the problem.
She also believes that American Jews are wrong to believe that the so-called “Golden Age” of American Jewry after the Second World War was the result of non-Jews deciding not to be antisemitic because of the Holocaust. Instead, it was created by American Jewish activism, which asserted the rights of Jews to be treated as equal partners.
The problem was that the implicit deal that Jews sought to make with the non-Jewish world created more trouble in the long run. The “Gentleman’s Agreement,” which was the name of a famous novel and an Oscar-winning 1947 film about antisemitism, hinged on the idea that Jews are like everyone else, rather than a group whose civilization was always based on their being different.
Antisemitism thrives, Horn says, because it is not so much a virus as “lie” that tells people that the Jews are to blame for whatever it is they fear most. That applies to every variety of Jew-hater, including those at Harvard University, where she served on the ill-fated Antisemitism Advisory Group.
The only effective answer to it—the “final solution” that she references in the title of her book—is for Jews to stop trying to make others like them and instead concentrate on educating themselves and others about their own heritage. The answer, she says, is the same that has sustained Jews throughout their history.
Listen/Subscribe to weekly episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, iHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Watch new episodes every week by subscribing to the JNS YouTube Channel.
