When people show up at a literary event clutching copies of a book for an author to sign, usually it’s a novel.
But on the first evening of the Jerusalem International Writers Festival at Mishkenot Sha’ananim on Monday night, admirers of essayist and novelist Dara Horn, who had come to hear her speak, brought her 2021 essay collection, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present. Some had multiple copies in their tote bags.
They had come to hear words of wisdom from a rare American Jew who had broken through all the noise surrounding antisemitism and Israel with bluntness and humor, and she did not disappoint.
Her candor has been a beacon of light for many over the last few years, the opposite of the dissembling from so many others – Jews and non-Jews – who have sought to deny and minimize antisemitism. She insisted in her talk on Monday that honesty is not just a contrast to this denial but a weapon against it.
In a conversation with Suzanne Nossel, a human-rights advocate and the former CEO of PEN America, Horn spoke about how she came to write People Love Dead Jews, why she was not all that surprised by the upswing in antisemitism following October 7, and, most tantalizingly, about solutions to the problems she has identified.
“People Love Dead Jews was, for me, like a detour from what I thought was my real work, writing novels. I had had five novels before that book. And it is a book about the role that dead Jews play in a non-Jewish world’s imagination,” she said.
She described the 2018 incident that inspired her to write the book: an employee of the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam appealed to the museum’s board after he was forbidden to wear his kippah at work, and the board took six months to respond.
'People love dead Jews. Living Jews, not so much'
“Six months is a very long time for the Anne Frank Museum to ponder whether or not it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding. This should have been obvious to them, right? But apparently not,” she said.
She also spoke about how the museum’s audio programs did not display an Israeli flag next to the Hebrew option, unlike the flags of the other national languages.
Horn realized that these two incidents were a sign of a larger problem: “These are maybe PR mishaps, but they’re not mistakes. And so that’s where this line comes from: People love dead Jews. Living Jews, not so much.”
Summarizing the premise of her book, she said, “It’s that non-Jewish societies usually only find Jews acceptable if Jews have no power, whether that means they’re politically disempowered, or they’re dead… It’s just as simple and depressing as that.”
Nossel joked with her about how she was the only one who was not surprised by the explosion of antisemitism that followed the Hamas massacre on October 7, 2023, and Horn said she saw it coming, “Because I’m a prophet of doom.”
But joking aside, she said, “The ferocity and the instantaneousness of the reaction, and the immediate turning on Diaspora Jewish communities, was very intense, and that was very surprising.”
While before October 7, she found herself inundated by stories readers shared with her about how they had experienced antisemitism, in the aftermath, she began to hear “institutional horror stories,” much of which had to do with antisemitism in universities.
“I got recruited to be part of this antisemitism advisory group to the now-former president of Harvard, who didn’t really like our advice, as you may have heard… Every time we told them what they should do, they would give us a reason why, in that particular instance, they couldn’t do it.”
She spoke in detail about the more egregious incidents she heard about at Harvard. When Nossel asked why Harvard’s new president, Alan Garber, who happens to be Jewish, had not responded more forcefully, she said, without hesitation, “Cowardice. Cowardice. That’s all.”
She admitted, “When I published [People Love Dead Jews], I made a stupid mistake because I did not understand at that time that when you write a nonfiction book about a problem, people expect you to solve the problem at the end of the book.”
When people asked her about it, she said, “My very obnoxious reply was, ‘Do you really want me to give you the final solution to the Jewish question?’ Because I wasn’t prepared to give that to you… But now I’m prepared.”
'The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem'
The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem will be the title of her upcoming book, she said. “I’m in Israel, so people appreciate this. My publisher, Simon & Schuster, is very nervous about that.”
Regarding efforts toward a genuine solution, she said she had developed two approaches: one for non-Jews and one for Jews.
Speaking about non-Jews, she said, “There is so much more ignorance than malice… I discovered this when talking to non-Jewish audiences. I speak at a lot of universities and colleges in the [United] States. There’d always be some person with a keffiyeh who’d get up and ask me obnoxious questions, and I’d answer the questions.
“And they’d be like, ‘Wow, I never thought of it that way.’ And I’m like, ‘Why, are you really dumb?’ But then I realized, it’s not that you’re really dumb. You’re really ignorant. They really don’t know anything. That’s actually an opportunity.”
To this end, she has created the Tell Institute, a nonprofit with the mission “to significantly reframe and deepen what people know about who Jews are.” The institute has created many kinds of programs, including lesson plans for public schools.
In response to a question from The Jerusalem Post about the fact that Israel still does well in certain cultural arenas around the world, such as Eurovision or with television shows like Fauda and Bad Boy on Netflix, she said, “Yes, I think there’s a lot of opportunity that people are not exploiting. Most people are not fans of the jihad.”
For Jews, the solution comes from acknowledging the depth and reality of the problem, and she gave some examples. Before she spoke at a non-Jewish US private school, she said, “Some faculty members said, ‘You might want to avoid using the Z-word, because that might offend people.’ And I said, ‘In that case, should I also avoid using the J-word, because I don’t want to offend anybody who hates Jews? I wouldn’t want to disturb their ideas.’
“And then they were like, ‘Oh, no, no, you don’t understand. We have Muslim faculty at our school. We have Muslim students, and it’s a very delicate situation.’ And I just looked at them and said, ‘I don’t understand why there’s a problem. I’m sure that your Muslim students and faculty are not fans of federally designated terrorist organizations. We’re all on team anti-terror. We’re all on team anti-tyranny. So I don’t really get what the problem is.’ Then they just looked at me.”
The lesson she gleaned from this incident was, “I went there and used the Z-word. I said, ‘Let’s talk about Zionism. This is a national movement, like all the other national movements around the world. They all arose at the same time, the 19th and 20th centuries, because that’s when all the empires were crumbling. All those empires got partitioned into nation-states, and in every single case, there was massive population upheaval. Let’s talk about it.’”
Jews need to be unapologetic and tackle the issues head-on, she said.
Horn also spoke passionately of Nossel’s achievements as the head of PEN America, and how the organization “destroyed itself” by aligning with anti-Zionist and antisemitic pressure groups.
“When [Nossel] was at PEN America… it was not just a free speech advocacy organization but one doing really heroic work, rescuing writers who had been imprisoned as dissidents in many countries around the world, getting them asylum in the United States, fighting to liberate writers who had really been persecuted for their work, for their art. By caving to this [antisemitic] movement, which is 100% the work of tyrannical regimes, I feel like this organization destroyed itself,” Horn said.
She ended by taking questions from the audience. One woman asked what she thought about Jewish students continuing to study at elite universities rather than attending schools that provide safe and just environments.
Horn did not give an absolute answer but said, “You do need people to stay in these institutions, but I also think you have to recognize that maybe these institutions aren’t as great as you thought they were.”
The last comment came from a man who said that while he appreciated Horn’s work, he felt that her proposed book title, The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem, was offensive and urged her to change it.
She was sympathetic to his concern but insisted, “We are all facing the same monster… That is what this book is about… People in Israel understand this viscerally. You don’t even have to explain it to people in Israel. In America, people don’t get it. That’s why I use this title deliberately, really, for the shock. And the book is exactly this, exposing the monster. So, I thank you for saying this. I really appreciate it.”
As the event ended, audience members showed how much they appreciated her by speaking to her as if she were an old friend, and she responded in kind – and also signed their well-thumbed copies of her book.