DARA HORN: THE JEWISH VOICE WE DIDN’T KNOW WE NEEDED
To begin this week's commentary, a program note about this Friday's Shabbat service. For reasons I will share on Shabbat, I've postponed my planned presentation about AI data centers. I definitely plan to come back to this topic. We may even host a guest speaker or two about it. Considering that New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott are apparently now in roughly the same camp when it comes to putting the brakes on data-center development, this issue might be that rarest of American phenomena: one on which we can set aside our political reflexes and solely apply our Humanistic tools of reason, evidence, and rational thinking! (Not that we don't do that with everything....)
Instead of data centers, I'm going to do something a little more in my wheelhouse. On Shabbat I want to introduce you to a luminary of Jewish scholarship and contemporary Jewish thought, Dr. Dara Horn. We'll learn more about her through a fascinating interview from 2025.
Talking about Dr. Horn has been on my agenda for quite some time. I'm currently reading her just-released book, The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living. It is a follow-up of sorts to her remarkable 2021 book, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present. That one was the subject of a lively discussion among my Humanistic rabbinic colleagues at our summer meeting, and with good reason.
Dr. Horn is one of the most widely respected contemporary writers and thinkers on Jewish life (and, unfortunately, antisemitism). A novelist as well as an essayist and scholar, she holds a doctorate in Hebrew and Yiddish literature from Harvard. She's taught Jewish literature there and at both Yeshiva University and Sarah Lawrence. Dr. Horn has also won three National Jewish Book Awards. You may have encountered her through her fiction or her contributions to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic and many other publications. After October 7, she also served on Harvard’s Antisemitism Advisory Group (she addresses that in the interview).
Her basic question in People Love Dead Jews and this interview is deliberately provocative: Why are so many people fascinated by Jews who died—especially in the Holocaust—while often knowing remarkably little about Jews who are actually alive?
It's a question that opens the door to many others, and Dr. Horn explores them with a combination of historical knowledge, sharp analysis and a wonderfully dry sense of humor. How did the very word “antisemitism” come into being? Why has Jewish nonconformity so often made Jews threatening to dominant cultures? What happens when young Jews feel pressure to hide parts of themselves in order to gain acceptance? How did modern antizionist language develop? And perhaps most provocatively, why does she believe that Holocaust education, when it teaches almost nothing about living Jewish civilization, actually fails to combat contemporary antisemitism—sometimes even reinforcing distorted notions about Jews?
Sometime in November, I will devote a Friday night talk to the new book, The Final Solution to the Jewish Question, which takes these questions further and asks what we might actually do about them.
The interview was featured on Being Jewish with Jonah Platt, a hugely popular and highly rated Jewish podcast. Platt is an actor, writer and Jewish advocate whose weekly program features candid, insightful interviews and discussions about Jewish identity, culture, Israel, antisemitism, and contemporary Jewish life with an impressive range of guests.
His conversation with Dr. Horn is accessible, lively, funny, occasionally startling, and filled with the kinds of questions that I think are very much worth our time.
I hope to see you at Shabbat services this Friday, October 2, at 7pm. It also marks the beginning of Simchat Torah, which three years ago corresponded to October 7, 2023—that nightmare of a date that Dr. Horn also addresses.
