By Charlotte Lawson
Wednesday, September 02, 2026
Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, is alive.
At least six days a week, American tourists peer over the
heads of Israeli schoolchildren to get a glimpse of the Hall of Names, a
circular room in which researchers have compiled the identities of 5 million of
the Shoah’s 6 million victims. Teenage soldiers in green uniforms wordlessly
crisscross the museum’s long central hallway, guided by the dim light leaking
through the sloped A-frame ceiling. Holocaust survivors share their stories in
four different languages.
Here, Jewish civilization is not an artifact but a
living, breathing reality. The museum’s chronological exhibits end with the
“Return to Life,” which tells the story of how the She’erit Hapleita,
“surviving remnant” in Hebrew, has gone about rebuilding a peoplehood that
existed before the Holocaust and stubbornly continues to exist after it.
Unsurprisingly, much of that story unfolds in Israel, the biblical Jewish
homeland and center of modern Jewish revival.
In the United States, this “Return to Life” has looked
quite different. In the aftermath of World War II, Jews sought to demonstrate
to Americans that they were “just like everyone else” and thus undeserving of
persecution, whether at the hands of Nazi executioners or U.S. employers. They
still erected Holocaust museums and pushed for mandatory Holocaust
education—both of which are good things. But unlike Yad Vashem’s focus on
Nazism’s ultimately failed endeavor to destroy Jewish civilization, Americanized
Jewish monuments and programs attempted to teach children the dangers of
prejudice by universalizing the Jewish experience. They also introduced many
American students to what it means to be Jewish through the narrow lens of
victimhood.
The problem with this understanding of antisemitism, as
Dara Horn argues in her latest provocatively titled book, The Final Solution
to the Jewish Question, is that the Jewish experience is not just
victimhood and Jews are not “just like everyone else.” On the contrary, Horn
makes the case that embracing a sanitized version of Jewishness inadvertently
accepts the antisemite’s premise that anything Jewish—a broad category often
including but not limited to a shared religion, lineage, history, and, yes,
homeland—is implicitly suspect. Temporary tolerance in the United States has
come at a high price, she writes, and “American Jews are still paying it.”
Horn set out to write the book after her other darkly
named nonfiction tome, People Love Dead Jews, brought to her doorstep
thousands of readers who had experienced antisemitism in their own lives,
ranging from one-off jokes about moneylenders to physical violence. The nation
founded on the radical Jewish notion of human equality, that all people are
“created in the image of God,” was increasingly failing its own Jews.
Understanding why means being able to identify what Horn describes as the “big
lie.”
Rather than portray antisemitism as a form of cyclical
grassroots hatred, satiated only when its consequences—often, the mass killings
of Jews—inspire repentant majorities to change their ways, Horn argues that
waves of antisemitism have historically begun with a lie by a figure or faction
with something to gain.
One of Europe’s most far-reaching blood libels, in 1475,
was orchestrated by the Austrian noble Prince-Bishop Johannes Hinderbach, who,
upon the discovery of a dead toddler, saw the opportunity to rally medieval
Christendom behind his secular and religious leadership. With the help of the
newly invented printing press, Hinderbach circulated the baseless accusation
that the Jewish community of Trent had murdered the child to use his blood to
make unleavened bread for Passover, using the resulting public discontent in a
pressure campaign against the Vatican, which had a policy of shielding Jews
from prosecution in exchange for payment. The ploy worked, giving Hinderbach
new sway over Rome, and the Jews of Trent paid the price: They were rounded up
and either murdered or forcibly converted, and broader European Jewry was
deemed guilty until proven innocent of demonic rituals for centuries to come.
Subsequent waves of antisemitic violence, from the
pogroms of czarist Russia to Hamas’ October 7, 2023, massacre, have followed
similar patterns. But not everyone participating in the dehumanization of Jews
is in on the big lie—in fact, most of them are not. The lie’s ability to
inspire popular movements stems from a phenomenon that historian David
Nirenberg outlined in his 2013 book Anti-Judaism: the tendency of
majority cultures to define themselves in opposition to “Judaism,” even if the
values they claim to oppose have little if anything to do with actual Jews.
“If piety was a society’s ideal, Jews were impious
blasphemers; if secularism was the ideal, Jews were backward pietists. If
capitalism was evil, Jews were capitalists; if communism was evil, Jews were
communists,” Horn summarizes. “If a society was nationalist, Jews were
globalists; if globalism was celebrated, Jews were nationalists. If military
valor mattered most, Jews were warmongering human-rights abusers. If a society
was racist, Jews were an inferior race; if a society was anti-racist, Jews were
racists.”
Under this framework, singling out Jews is not a form of
bigotry but a righteous cause. It’s easy, then, to see how antisemitism finds
supporters among even (and sometimes especially) society’s most well-meaning
and best-educated. Horn chronicles this paradox extensively, documenting how
Iranian, Soviet, and even Nazi propaganda continues to stain respected
institutions.
In one notable example described by Horn, at a United
Nations conference “against racism” in 2001, posters of Adolf Hitler papered the wall and Jewish envoys
were shouted down with chants of “Jew, Jew, Jew.” At the end of the gathering,
thousands of prominent NGOs agreed to a resolution that accused only one
country in the world of racism: Israel. In another, Harvard University students
and faculty cheered on the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust in real
time in October 2023. And the newly popular claim by progressive-minded
politicians and activists that Israel is committing genocide? It originated
with the Soviets, who used anti-Israel propaganda as a way to win over Arab
allies during the Cold War.
Lest her readers attribute each of these incidents to
“anti-Zionism, not antisemitism,” Horn meticulously traces the two movements’
shared roots and message, including by documenting Nazi propagandist Johann von
Leers’ lasting influence in the Middle East. Anti-Zionism is effective for the
same reason as antisemitism: Most of its adherents don’t know they’re being
bigoted, and when Jews object to their own victimization, they’re accused of
weaponizing antisemitism to silence criticism of Jewish conduct. (This, as Horn
points out, was one of Hitler’s preferred tactics.)
So why the Jews? This is perhaps the most ambitious
question the book explores, and according to Horn, the answer dates back to the
Book of Exodus. The Torah commands, “You shall not bow down to them or serve
them.” In the ancient world, Horn argues, this rejection of idolatry was also a
radical rejection of the pharaoh’s divine power. And the Jewish refusal to
accept what they view as false gods has continued ever since, making Judaism
the ultimate “counterculture” across centuries of evangelizing faiths—and the
ultimate threat to rulers demanding obedience and submission.
“The story of antisemitism is consistent for thousands of
years,” Horn writes, “and inseparable from the content of Jewish civilization,
because it all traces back to the Jewish people’s radical proposition that
people don’t need to conform to agree, that people don’t need to bow to
tyrants.” Perhaps this defiance should be the first thing American students
learn about Jews.
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