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- [00:00]
Aviv Ovadya
Foreign. Welcome to a special episode of Ask Aviv Anything. I'm very, very pleased. I'm honored to have brought on to this podcast one of my teachers. And it's funny saying that because Dara Horn and I have never met in person. This is our first, I think, direct conversation.
- [00:20]
Dara Horn
Yes. And I'm equally honored to be here. And I feel the same way about you teaching me.
- [00:25]
Aviv Ovadya
You heard it here, folks.
- [00:26]
Dara Horn
Yes.
- [00:28]
Aviv Ovadya
But I have learned from Dara a vocabulary for dealing with a lot of the insanity of the last two years, in depth, in seriousness. And I want to ask her to take us on a little bit of a journey into the Jewish bookshelf. If you're a regular listener to this podcast, you know that I love my Jewish bookshelf. And occasionally we'll just give some midrashic source for something or try to pull some meaning or deep advice for difficult times out of. Out of that. I have a bit of a religious education. Dad's a rabbi. I had no choice in the matter, and I'm very, very glad for it. And reading Dara is therefore very much reading someone who's very much in the. In that kind of mental space, mental world. And one of the other things I want I asked Dara to come on for was because she believes that this is a moment where Jews need to be strengthened and find within themselves the strength to deal with some of the very difficult problems and challenges that they're facing and that they're going to face going forward. And the way to summon that strength is to know their story. And if you happen to have heard me say that on occasion, several hundred times over the course of the last 50 or so episodes, then Dara has actually founded an organization that is committed to that very task. So I'm glad she's here. Very much an ally. And we're going to try and parse out. First of all, we're going to have some fun with Jewish literature, because it's more fun than that sounds, I promise. I'm sorry for saying that that might just. As a literature professor, I just want you to know not everybody thinks that's exciting, but they're wrong.
- [02:15]
Dara Horn
Weird. Weird.
- [02:18]
Aviv Ovadya
And then we're going to dive into this moment. Anti Semitism. We are recording on October 9th. So, you know, we're a little giddy because we are all following the news of the hostage release deal that Israel has signed on to, Hamas has signed onto. You might hear this after, you know, what happened three days from now, ten days from now. But everything is really positive now. And People are celebrating in the streets of both Israel and Gaza and there's no reason not to not to celebrate an end to just a mass massive tragedy. And hopefully this is that. So let me tell you that Dara Horne is the award winning author of seven books, including five novels about Jewish life. Like fun novels about, for example, people who live forever, but written Jewishly, not science fiction. So it's big and complex and we're going to talk about that. A Passover themed graphic novel and an essay collection. That is what I'm talking about when I, that's when she came on my radar and on a lot of people's radar, really became a teacher for a lot of people. An essay collection called People Love Dead Jews. She has won the National Jewish Book Award three times and many other literary honors. She writes frequently for publications and created the podcast Adventures with Dead Jews, which sits unerasable on my phone. She has a PhD from Harvard in Hebrew and Yiddish literature and taught at Sarah Lawrence and Harvard and Yeshiva. All that silly stuff. And, and of course, of course she's the founder of a new nonprofit called the Tel Institute devoted to educating the broader American public about Jewish history, Jewish civilization and K through 12 schools and other channels. So I'm going to have this conversation, I'm going to dive right into it. But first, as you know, I want to tell you really quickly about our sponsors, who they're wonderful sponsors in this episode. First is the Greenberg family, Bob, Freda and Sarah Greenberg. They sponsored the episode, Freda Bab and the daughter Sarah Rose. And they asked me to read this out and it's embarrassing, but wonderful for them. This podcast is not only essential in the struggle for the survival and thriving of Israel and Jews everywhere, but it has become their headspace where Chaviv provides both the enrichment and the calm reason so needed in the midst of so much chaos. Thank you. Please don't make me read things like that again. The Greenbergs would also like to recognize their cousin, the award winning playwright Richard Greenberg, who passed away far Too Young on July 4th. Richard represented all that was right and wonderful about being a Jew. His work was filled with insights and the irony and humor of being a Jew in 20th century America. And more important than his work was who he was as a person. He created his own family and community based on the truest values of listening and doing good to others. And this episode is also dedicated to the memory of Tal Moshowitz, a young reserve soldier who fell in Gaza in June of 2025 during the while the war with Iran was happening. Tal served as a deputy company commander in the 7086th Combat Engineering Battalion. In the reserves, he was killed by an explosive device planted in a building in Khan Younis. He left behind a wife and two small children. His death was a little bit swallowed up in the news cycle. So we wanted to make sure to bring his name out here and remember him today. And folks, last last thing to tell you. I want to invite you to join our Patreon. It helps keep the lights on, it helps cover our costs and you ask the questions that guide the topics we choose to talk about. If you join the Patreon, there's a discussion forum there. We talk about I'm there. Rahel is there. We discuss the episodes, news thoughts throughout the day. People bring all kinds of new resources I hadn't seen and once a month we have a live stream where I answer your questions, whatever they may live. And it's fun and exciting and usually goes way longer than expected. So please join us at www.patreon.com askaviv anything. The link is obviously in the show notes. Dara, thank you for joining me.
- [06:29]
Dara Horn
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It is absolutely an honor to be here.
- [06:34]
Aviv Ovadya
I want to start with the absolutely non timely thing that secretly is the actual thing that matters over the long term. I want to start with you as a literature professor. You have a theory that I love so much and helps me articulate what's weird about Jews in a western world that is obsessed with Hollywood redemption arcs, that is obsessed with, you know, the good guy's always winning but there being an exact and specific arc of the hero through exactly the particular kind of challenge. And every Hollywood movie is the same damn movie is what I'm trying to say. And also I think a kind of a religious sensibility of perfectionism. And you talk about Jews having not literature so much as anti literature where we don't have perfect endings and we don't have in Jewish literature these very simple arcs. And it's to me so much more enjoyable because we're also very sarcastic and funny about it. Yiddish literature. And can you tell us what that is? What is Jewish anti literature? You gave a talk once titled what are stories for that put me onto this. But what do you mean by that? And then I want to just bat it back and forth a tiny bit and then get into this moment and antisemitism and the big heavy things.
- [08:08]
Dara Horn
Sure. So this is a topic as you mentioned, I've spoken about it before and there's a chapter in my book, People of Dead Juice. It's a little bit about this. And in that chapter, I talk about just like a reader email that I got about one of my novels. I don't even remember how many years ago where it was some reader who said something like, I got to this. Whatever depressing scene there was in one of my books, which wasn't even at the end of the book, that she's like, when I got to this scene, I threw the book across the room. And then she says, I think the purpose of literature should be so that people can laugh and enjoy and be uplifted. You know, and then she's like, you know, love Denise. And, you know, I wrote but did not send a reply to Denise where I said, you know, dear Denise, sorry about this, you know, scene where someone's beating a horse. You know, it was actually a reference to Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, which is another book that you really ought to avoid. And then I'm like, you also should steer clear of the Hebrew Bible. Not a great book for people who like to laugh and enjoy. However, I do have some Garfield comics I could recommend to you. But I was sort of thinking about this, and, you know. Yes, well, right. And so I did not actually send to Denise. No. Yeah, no, But I, you know, I was thinking about this because this, you know, was sometime around, you know, my second novel. And I had. Was finishing graduate school and studying comparative literature. And I had just sort of noticed that there was this idea of this narrative arc, as you say, and there was this expectation that. Well, let me put it this way. I was at the time, I was studying literature and doing this doctorate, but I also was writing novels at the same time. So for me, this was, you know, it was almost like. To me, it was like training and, like, you know, like, how should I be writing a book? How should I structure a book? And it was kind of fascinating to me that I had these readers like Denise who were, like, writing to me, asking for these happy endings. But the thing is that this work that I was studying was actually Hebrew and Yiddish literature. And I just started to notice that there's this very different expectations in these literatures in Jewish languages. And I started thinking about what English language readers expect from a book. And, you know, some of them are explicit, like Denise, who just, like, want to laugh and enjoy. Okay. But even people who are more serious readers, there's this expectation, as you say, if it's narrative arc, but, like, often people would use this language like, you know, if they didn't want a happy ending, at least they wanted a, you know. You know, the main character has to have an epiphany, right? Or there needs to be a moment of grace, right? It's like, you know, or like, even in, you know, a Hollywood movie, like you said, it's like, you know, the good guys have to be seen saved. And I just started thinking, like, how Christian these terms are. You know, grace and epiphany and, you know, the characters being saved. And I notice how Christian these terms are. And then I also noticed that, you know, I'm studying, you know, I'm reading all these sort of, you know, classics of Hebrew, modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature and these writers, like, none of them give you any of these things. Like, you know, the characters are certainly never saved, right? Like, nobody ever has an epiphany. Nobody realizes anything. Nobody has a moment of grace. But instead there's this sort of endurance and resilience, and that's the structure of the story instead. And I'm gonna, you know, I'm not gonna, like, teach my whole, you know, course in modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature, but I'm just gonna give one example that a lot of English speakers, I think they think they're familiar with it, but they're not. Which is the Tevye the Dairy man stories, which were ostensibly the basis for Fiddler on the Roof, but Fiddler on the Roof left out a lot. You know, I don't even know where to begin. Tevye in the book does not live in a shuttle, you know, I mean, one of the daughters kills herself. Like, I mean, there's all kinds of fun stuff that happens. What's interesting about that? I mean, that book is interesting for a lot of reasons. But the way that book is written is actually, there are very few other books in which this happens. It's written. It's published serially in real time. So it covers 25 years of Tevye and his family's life, and it's published serially over 25 years. So the characters are aging. Like, when you first meet Tevy, he's like a young man with little kids. And then at the end, he's a widower. And, you know, all of his children are grown. And, you know, and also his environment has changed. 25 years have passed. There's been the first Russian Revolution. And, I mean, there's all kinds of political. Political upheavals. And there's been a Russian Russo Japanese War. And. And, you know what's amazing about it, though. And it's. Tevye never changes. Like, he doesn't. Like, he never realizes anything. He never really words anything, right? He doesn't really. You know, he certainly never gets a moment of grace. He's definitely never saved. But instead, what's amazing about it is how he sort of keeps enduring. He's like this. And the structure of the book is it's conversations he's having with the narrator, who's the author, Sholem Aleichem. And he just keeps meeting him again and again at these different really horrible, tragic moments in his life. And the way the book. It doesn't even end. I mean, the way the book ends. The last line is something that would never make it on Broadway, where he just says to sholem Aleichem, you know, you're a writer. Please, when you publish your book, tell all of our Jews everywhere that our old God still lives. And it's like just this master class in resilience. I mean, it's just that there's just no structure of like, you know, that there's some kind of redemption or we're tying something up in a bow. That's just not the story. That was just really fascinating to me as a reader and a writer.
- [14:13]
Aviv Ovadya
One of my favorite moments in Hebrew literature is Mendelemo Mendele, the bookseller.
- [14:20]
Dara Horn
See, And I would call this Yiddish literature, but he actually wrote it in both languages. He has versions of that book in both languages.
- [14:25]
Aviv Ovadya
Yes, yes, my Yiddish is rusty in the sense that it's just four curse words. But in the beginning of this book, there's this moment that I've never forgotten, and I've literally read to my kids where it's this bookseller and he's. He's bent over on his card, going between the little Jewish villages, the little shtetls, and he's bent over a book. And I hope I'm saying it right. I'm saying it from memory. But he's looking at his book and he's reading his book like a good Jew should. And all around him, the birds are singing and the flowers are blooming and the sunshine is gorgeous and the spring has come. And his eye sort of. Sort of pulls aside to it. But no, he pulls back because he knows he's a good Jew. And he's back in the book and he's depressed and he's sad and he's in the book and then pulls. And every single time the. The beauty of the world around him attracts him. He says, but that's not my Point. And he moves on. And. But that's not my point is this recurring theme. And every single time he says, but that's not my point. That is exactly his point. What he is talking about is the thing that he says. But never mind that. Then you should be paying attention. And it's these kinds of what. What's real is the little stuff is the nitty gritty stuff, is the experience of the world rather than is the being pulled by the tradition and being pulled into the beautiful world. And there's also a little bit of a modern critique of the old world and all of these things all at once. But that grittiness, that grittiness to it. And then you start to read the Bible the way Jews read the Bible, and you notice that none of the heroes are perfect. There is no Jesus. There's no Muhammad in the sense of perfection. They're all terribly broken, disastrous people. They're all living like really painful lives. And what. How they're living those painful lives is. Is the story. The brokenness is. Is the narrative, is the. Is the information, right? Is the actual arc. The Kotsko Rebbe famously said, there's nothing more perfect than a broken heart. Leonard Cohen's line, what was it? The. The world is broken. That's how the light gets in. Something like that, which is just. Just drawn directly out of this Hasidic version of exactly this kind of. Anyway, anti literature is for me a way to frame. I don't know if I'm just rambling, but anti literature is for me a way to frame. Why the Jewish bookshelf to me is such a more living place now. I love Terry Pratchett and I read Terry Pratchett to my kids.
- [16:52]
Dara Horn
Okay.
- [16:53]
Aviv Ovadya
Just want to say, I love arcs. I love humor. I love when the story ends the way Hollywood wants it to end. I love it not at all critiquing Denise. But then there's this other world, which is funny. And you can be very shallow there. And still it's very. It absorbs you and it entices and I find it absolutely amazing. And people don't read it anymore. The Jewish literature is.
- [17:15]
Dara Horn
Yeah, well. So a couple things about this I just want to say about Mendele. Well, I know him as Mendele Moyersvoram. As you know. You know that line when he's looking at his book and he doesn't want to be distracted by the landscape. Of course. This is from. I mean, this from the Talmud, right? How if you were to look up from Your studies, you know, studying and say, how beautiful is this tree, that you know, that you've sinned against this text, or, you know, something like that. You know, that's what he's building, a parody of that. Right. I mean, that's like, what I think is so. And this is what made me into a Jewish writer, honestly, was. Because I remember, like, you know. Well, there's more I could say about this, but, like, I felt like there's, you know, I found these layers in Jewish literature that I didn't find in, you know, literature in, you know what American Jewish literature in English, I felt like was lacking these layers and that this is what I was sort of trying to build into it in my novels. Like a moment like that in Mendel and Mulhar's story and where he's, you know, basically, he's making an inside joke about the Talmud. Right? And it might go over your head and it might not, but, like, for his audience, it's probably not going to go over their head.
- [18:27]
Aviv Ovadya
Modernity and also about the.
- [18:28]
Dara Horn
Yes, of course. Oh, exactly. That's what it is.
- [18:31]
Aviv Ovadya
It's the attraction of the West.
- [18:32]
Dara Horn
It's the attraction of, oh, and, you know, Europe. And in Yiddish, there are two different words for books, for Sephora and Bichlach. So it's like religious, you know, books that are about the tradition and then Yiddish books that are about other things. But there are a lot of people who are merging these. I mean, like, you mentioned, like, oh, I like reading Terry Prashant and fantasy and all that, you know. Who did this is Nachman Bratzlav. Nachman Braslaw studied the Brothers Grimm and studied Russian folklore. Yes. Oh, his stories are rewritings of the Brothers Grimm, but without the redemptive endings. So it's like his story about the lost princess. It's about this princess is taken and her father, the king, know, accidentally curses her or whatever, and she gets put into this castle. And then it's got all the same elements. There's like a quest, and knight goes on a quest to go rescue her from the palace and whatever, but at the end, he doesn't rescue her or like. Or it doesn't let me know. It's not that he says, eventually he did free her, but I can't tell you how. So. But the thing is that the reason. So Nachman did this, like, where he took these Brothers Grimm stories and he rewrote them without happy endings. And for him, this was a religious purpose because he's writing about living in an Unredeemed world, right? For him, this is like. It's like a Kabbalistic idea about, you know, that we're living in this broken world and our job is to reconstruct it, right? This is like this very. And that's exactly. You know what I mean? And for him, it's like the Lost Princess is like, you know, the Shekhinah, the presence of God. And, you know, there's all these kinds of religious elements to it. But what's amazing then is then Kafka reads Nachman stories and he rewrites some of Nachman's story. So it's like, you know, there's all this, like, this, like, long chain of layers and layers. To me, it's like an archeological tell, right? It's like all these layers of stories and civilization that are building up above, on top of each other. And I. You know, when I was growing up, I found this. I mean, there's a deeper story about this, about how I became a writer, which has to do with my subject as a writer is time. And, you know, just this idea of, you know, how do we live in a world as mortals, in a world that outlasts us? And I didn't have the language to understand that. That was my interest as a child. I just sort of thought, like, I would get into bed at night and be like, this day that just happened is gone. Where did it go? And I was sort of, to me, my interest, my purpose in writing was to preserve this lost time. Preserve lost time was like, my purpose as a writer. And I sort of as a. I sort of as a child, I was drawn to so many aspects of Jewish tradition because I felt like here was like, thousands of years of people who, to my child's mind, seemed to have solved this problem because by creating this historical consciousness, right? Like, this whole idea of, you know, all of us came out of Egypt, all of us were standing at Sinai, right? Yosef Chaim Yerushalmi says in his book Zachor, the past is not a series of events to be contemplated at a distance, but rather a series of existential situations into which one is drawn. And the reality is, like, I feel like that is how people experience time. And certainly in the Jewish community, this is so resonant with how we experience our reality, right? I mean, it's never. I mean, and we've seen that in the past two years of this war, right? I mean, it's never just this war, right? It's about so many other things. And, you know, I. But what I loved is, like, the language. What I started to notice when I learned Hebrew and Yiddish and was able to read books in those languages was like, how? Look, I mean, every language has an archeology of belief that's under it. There are these aspects of a culture that are, you know, that are illustrated in a language that are so basic to the language that, like, native speakers don't even hear it. So I'm going to give you a couple examples. So, like, as an English speaker, if I say to somebody, go the extra mile, I'm not sitting here thinking, like, oh, I'm quoting the Gospels, but I am, right? Nobody knows that. I mean, maybe religious Christians know that, but, like, it's part of the language because that's the, you know, that's the culture from which this language evolves, right? Or, like, you know, if I say, well, you know, well, for better or for worse, this is what's going to happen. I'm not thinking, oh, I'm quoting the Anglican marriage ceremony, but of course I am, right? And it's like, you're not even conscious of it. So, like, in what I. And this was sort of just like, really stood out to me as a, you know, as I was learning Hebrew and Yiddish was like, how all of those kinds of just expressions are built on this archeology of the Torah and the Talmud and the Sidur and sort of like, you know, this whole edifice of texts. And in a way, again, that like, no native speakers wouldn't even necessarily hear, I just felt like this was missing from the American Jewish life. Felt very kind of thin to me and culturally when I was growing up, and I eventually sort of attributed that to the lack of a Jewish language. And when I first started out as a writer, my purpose was to write in English as though English were a Jewish language. And so what I mean by that is not like, I'm gonna write books with a lot of words and italics, but that I'm gonna write the kind of books that are built on this archaeology of meaning and in a way that any English language reader could understand. So, yep, that's the archaeological talent stories that ended beautifully.
- [24:13]
Aviv Ovadya
Yeah. Episode two of this podcast is an argument that I brought from Arthur Hertzberg about American Jewry, which is that they're all the peasants and all the elite stayed behind. And there was a lot of anger at the elites because of the tsarist recruitment, that the elites would all send the poor kids, children to the tsarist armies. And all these different reasons he lays out for why American Jews are actually the first generation of American Jews are actually the most ignorant, the most Jewishly ignorant, the most impoverished, the most desperate, the most who don't care about Europe and the most who, inasmuch as they care about the Jewish communities they left behind, don't like those communities. And so there's this rebellion of turning to Americanness and forgetting the culture that they left behind, a shedding of it that's purposeful. And so one of Arthur Herzberg's conclusions is that there is this thinness, there is this ignorance, there is this forgetfulness. And it's for deep and powerful and important reasons that if American Jews learn the reasons, that itself is the beginning of the construction of more depth and understanding of who and what they are. So that it's. It. It feels like from the literary side, you stepped into this. This kind of gap that is enormous. Yawning, desperate. Other than Jewish literal religion, I mean, literal, what is an American Jewish culture? Is that too far? Am I taking that too far?
- [25:33]
Dara Horn
There are certain decisions that were made by American Jews at different points that made sense for the times they were in. And a lot of those decisions actually do have to do with antisemitism, very much so, in ways that American Jews themselves don't even appreciate.
- [25:58]
Aviv Ovadya
They think culture to Americanize more quickly and easily, and that's a simple way.
- [26:03]
Dara Horn
Of putting it, but it's actually more strategic. I mean, that's true for, I mean, any immigrant group of the United States. I mean, that's part of. You could see that trajectory with any immigrant group. It isn't just, oh, we decided to assimilate, you know, like all immigrants do. It's not that. Because, I mean, it isn't just that. My friend Rachel Gordon, who's a. She teaches Jewish studies at University of Florida, she has a book that came out about a year ago called Post War Stories that's about really the active decision making on the part of American Jewish cultural leaders and even rabbinic leaders in the mid 20th century, basically, to rebrand and Judaism as a religion. And this was a very deliberate and explicit effort, which was made in part, you know, after the Nazi Holocaust, because the Nazis had defined Jews as a race. So part of it is moving away from that. Part of it is that there was this, you know, as happens periodically in American life, there was like a religious revival going on at that time in the 1950s. This is when a lot of these, you know, suburban churches are being built, and then you have suburban synagogues get built. And, you know, you have, you Know, this is also part of the Cold War where, you know, we're all, you know, on team, you know, team God against the godless Soviets or something like this. You know, there's this. There's sort of like a moment where this is actually, you know, in a sense, a strategic decision on a part of American Jews to become sort of an American religion. And, you know, also, like, you know, and part of that is in the effort of fighting antisemitism. You know, she traces a lot of these sort of what she calls anti. Anti Semitism books and films from that period. Things like Gentleman's Agreement, other books and movies like that that were sort of, you know, making anti Semitism look anti American. And the way they did that was really by pushing this idea that, like, you know, you shouldn't hate Jews because Jews are just like everybody else. Right? And that was, you know, and they're just. Go to a different kind of church or something like that. Right. I mean, and this was sort of. This was a decision, is my point. And it wasn't a. I mean, you know, it wasn't a bad decision at that time, you know, because, you know, there's this mythology now that we hear that like, oh, you know, after the Holocaust, you know, anti Semitism just died down because, you know, non Jews felt guilty or something. That's completely false. I mean, you know, I. When you think about that movie, the Gentleman's Agreement, that movie was made in 1948. It wasn't made in 1938. Right. And it's about this just like abject, you know, this abject discrimination against Jews. I mean, you know, what's not about.
- [28:48]
Aviv Ovadya
The people who haven't seen.
- [28:49]
Dara Horn
Sorry. So, gentlemen, I mean, there's. I mean, this is like just a classic of American film. It's called Gentleman's Agreement. It came. It's. I think it's 1947 or 48. I think it's 48. It's about this. It's Gregory Peck, who's this, like, you know, was, you know, this movie star at the time. Not Jewish actor, but he plays this non Jewish journalist who decides to go undercover for six months as a Jew to see if it changes how people treat him. Spoiler alert. It changes how people treat him. You know, and it's. That's. That's the movie. And, you know, this is like, you know, and everybody, like, you know, words, their lesson. And it's an American movie. You know, we all learn not to be bigoted after all. So, you know, it's that and, but what's the thing is that like. And Rachel Gordon, my friend who wrote this book about this, she. She tells about this. This joke that was told about that movie, which was one of the, you know, the. The screenwriter was on the set and one of the stagehands comes up to him and just said, you know, I just really want to say how much I love this movie. You know, I think it's wonderful. It has a really great moral. And, you know, the screenwriter's pleased and says, you know, what do you think the moral was? And he says, I think the moral is that you shouldn't be mean to a Jew because he might turn out to be a gentile.
- [30:06]
Aviv Ovadya
He might turn out to be Gregory Peck. Not any gentile.
- [30:08]
Dara Horn
He might turn out to be Gregory Peck. Well, but this is what it tells you is like, you know, basically there was this embrace of this idea in America that, you know, you know, the. That antisemitism was wrong because Jews are just like everyone else.
- [30:22]
Aviv Ovadya
Right.
- [30:23]
Dara Horn
And, you know, you shouldn't. And that's, you know, you shouldn't be bigoted against Jews because Jews are just like everyone else. I mean, and ultimately that's a great.
- [30:31]
Aviv Ovadya
Yeah.
- [30:32]
Dara Horn
Well, the problem with this premise is that Jews spent 3,000 years not being like everybody else.
- [30:41]
Aviv Ovadya
Yeah.
- [30:42]
Dara Horn
You know, uncoolness is Judaism's brand.
- [30:46]
Aviv Ovadya
Yeah.
- [30:46]
Dara Horn
Right. I mean, this goes back 3,000 years to the ancient near east to, you know, everybody else is worshiping their Marvel Cinematic Universe of sexy deities, and the Jews are the losers in the school cafeteria. They have their bossy, unsexy, invisible God. Like, you know, Jews have never been cool. And that's actually the premise. And I mean, I could go deeper into this, but, like, to me, this is. And, you know, ultimately the idea that by turning. By sort of rebranding American Judaism, by rebranding Jewish identity in America as a religion, you know, I think that what has happened is then people did not. Were not able to sort of. We within the Jewish community understood that. Actually, no, we're not really a religion. Right. I mean, or we have a religion, but we're not a religion. But like, we. We deliberately did not take on that project of presenting ourselves in any other way to a non Jewish public. And, you know, that has come crashing down our heads in the 20th, in the 21st century, because suddenly, you know, you have. People are like, you know, why does a religion need its own country? And it's like, you know, first of all, you know, there are 50 Muslim countries and 30 Christian countries or whatever. But in the meantime, also, there's this other thing, which is that Jews aren't a religion. They often speak on college campuses and in the United States, and it often happens if someone will sort of ask this question, they're like, you know, are Jews a religion or Jews a race or Jews a nationality? And, you know, there's actually. This isn't like this baffling thing that we have to have a long conversation, but there's actually a very simple answer to that. Jews predate all of those categories. Predate the concept of, certainly the modern concept of race, the way we think about it in America. Obviously not relevant. Predate the modern concept of nationality, predate the concept of religion. I mean, I don't remember from. I think it's Eliezer Bed Yehuda when he has to come up with, yes, he has to, like, pick a word to mean religion. And he picks the word dot, which is like, you know, it's in the. It's in the megillah, you know, when the. You know, when Haman tells Ahasuerus, you know, there's this people whose customs are not ours. It doesn't mean what people from universal religions like Christianity and Islam used to mean that word. And. But it's like, my point, My point only is that, like, it's like modern Hebrew linguists had to sort of come up with a word in the 19th, late 19th century to mean religion because Hebrew didn't have one. Right. Like, that's how, like, alien this concept was. And, you know, there's actually an answer, a very simple answer to who Jews are. Jews are a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture. And that was a sentence in English and in Hebrew, it is one word and it is two letters long.
- [33:36]
Aviv Ovadya
Yeah.
- [33:36]
Dara Horn
Yep. Jews are Am Yisrael, the people of Israel, and that's who we are. Yeah, yes, exactly. This is what I mean when I say about the language change. And so, you know, when you're speaking in non Jewish language, you're using all of the frameworks of that culture that do not fit a Jewish culture. So. Yeah. Okay, so we don't remember where we're going with this. Yeah.
- [33:57]
Aviv Ovadya
We need to find a word that means in English and produce a bookshelf that you have begun to produce that is rich Jewish context and content that creates connotations and depth and real baggage to vocabulary. So that there is this cultural world, and it is rooted and also gives access to ordinary Jews into the older, greater, bigger, gigantic, you know, complex Jewish world which has anti Literature in it, which is the best kind of literature. Okay, so that's where.
- [34:26]
Dara Horn
And many other things as well. Yes, great.
- [34:28]
Aviv Ovadya
So we've sorted it.
- [34:31]
Dara Horn
I personally am never done with literature. I'm never done with literature.
- [34:35]
Aviv Ovadya
But yes, I thought we, I thought we'd encompassed it all. Okay. All right. So we are speaking on a day where it's easy to be happy, but also in the middle of horrific tragedy, constant everywhere. And this podcast deals a lot with the war. I mean literally earlier today I recorded a comment on the war and on the strategy and on Hamas and what it means and what Trump did. So not going anywhere near that. I want to ask you about the other half of the Jewish experience of this two years, which is anti Semitism. I know too many at this point. Thousands of Jews that I personally have met traveling the Jewish world who have experienced the last two years as an absolute shock to the system. They didn't know it was there. They didn't know it was powerful and mobilizing. They didn't expect it from the pro Israel right of the Republican party around Trump with the Tucker Carlson's. They did not expect Tucker Carlson to elevate a Daryl Cooper who is apparently a Nazi. Mother Jones has the sole profile of his alter egos on the Internet. He's just literally a Nazi pretending to not be a Nazi. Why is everyone calling him a Nazi when he's constantly platformed by Tucker Carlson explaining that Hitler wasn't that bad and that's new. It's not that Joe Rogan will occasionally platform weirdos like Ian Carroll talking about the great Jewish conspiracies. It's that that's ubiquitous now. Millions of young people, especially in his case young men, watched the interview with Ian Carroll. Watch Tucker Carlson, watch Candace Owens. It's a vast media experience and it's not happening to the 70 year olds. So they don't know it's happening, but it is happening to the 20 and 30 year olds. These concerns about is social media contagion making our kids trans was a whole discourse in the last three years. Well, it's definitely making kids Nazi. Not all the kids, not most of the kids, but wow, surprising numbers of the kids are being swept into through these social media networks that their parents have no idea. I think everybody learned on the Charlie Kirk assassination that there's these weird sections of the Internet. None of us have any idea what our kids are doing on TikTok. And it's there and it's powerful. Antisemitism is back in a big way. I have heard that hundreds of times. I've heard that among right wing Jews and left wing Jews. I've heard that among surprising number of non Jews who want to show up to my talks, which are very self selecting kind of groups of Jews who do believe there's an anti Semitic problem and who say it's huge and it's everywhere and we don't know where it came from. So I want to start this systematically. First of all, I want to get into People Love Dead Jews, your whole thesis and just walk through it a little bit for people. Some of the people listening to this podcast have heard it. About 40% of the listeners or viewers on YouTube don't come from America. They might not have heard it. And I want to introduce them them to your work. Let's start with what is anti Semitism? What is happening? Why who cares about Jews? You know Jews. I know Jews. They're not that amazing, they're not that special. I know that if you live in the particular part of Manhattan, all the Jews are clever bankers. But you know what? My car mechanic is a Jew too. They're not all clever bankers. They're every kind of person on earth. They're not a conspiracy to take over the world because they're not that organized. Why? Why do Jews solve Tucker Carlson's problems with America's social decline as he sees it? And also anti colonialism on the left, and also all the issues in French culture and society and also in Islam and also why the Jews? There, I said it.
- [38:19]
Dara Horn
Okay, I'm gonna fix this all for you. So yeah, so you heard it here, folks.
- [38:24]
Aviv Ovadya
Here we go.
- [38:25]
Dara Horn
Yes, here we go. So look, People Love Dead Jews was a book I wrote. It was like a detour from my novels. I had been avoiding this topic of antisemitism for 20 years as a writer, and I actually got there. I only started thinking differently about this a few years ago. This is in 2018, when. So the origin story of this book is in 2018. An editor from Smithsonian magazine, American magazine, asked me to do a very long essay for them about Anne Frank. And I got this assignment. I was full of dread because I'm like, wow, I really don't want to have to write some like long pious essay about Anne Frank that's going to be distributed in doctor's offices across America. That's what happens to Smithsonian magazine. And you know, the smart thing to do would you. Or like the normal thing to do would be to turn this assignment down. But you know, I'm a writer, so I'm not a normal person. And instead I'm like, this is interesting. Why don't I want to do this right? And that was when I remembered a news item that I had read a few months before. Again, this was in 2018, about a young man who worked at the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam, right? This is where, you know, this young Jewish woman who was, you know, hiding from the Nazis with her family. This is like this building where in which they were hiding. It's now this blockbuster museum. They got, you know, several million visitors a year. The young Jewish man worked at this museum, and the museum would not allow him to wear his kippah to work. They made him hide it under a baseball hat. He appealed this decision to the board of the museum. The board of the museum then delivered.
- [39:58]
Aviv Ovadya
Your book opens with this. What was the reasoning again?
- [40:02]
Dara Horn
Oh, the museum wants to be neutral. You know, we have a position of neutrality. You know, we don't want to do anything.
- [40:11]
Aviv Ovadya
They literally don't want to be too Jewish. It's the Anne Frank house, but they don't want.
- [40:15]
Dara Horn
It's even better. Yes, yes, exactly. And then it's like, you know, you know, he appeals his decision to the board of the museum, Board of the museum then deliberates for six months and then finally relents and lets this guy wear his kipa to work. And as I put it in the book, six months is a very long time for the Anne Frank house to ponder whether or not it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding. Like, you'd think they'd know this, right? And then, you know, I discovered. And I remembered that story. But then as I was looking it up, I discovered something equally stupid and perhaps more relevant to our experiences in the last few years that had happened at the same museum a few months earlier in 2017. This was, you know, it's a big international museum. They have I don't know how many languages, 10 or 15 languages, for their audio guide. And visitors had noticed, like, in whatever the places where you pick up or download your audio guide, you know, it says English, and there's a British flag, and it says Francaise. There's a French flag, Espanol, Spanish flag, Hebrew. No flag. No flag. You know, I mean, the museum has since corrected these things, but I'm like, you know, at this point, I'm like, these are PR Mishaps. They are not mistakes. And so I went to Smithsonian magazine and I said, you know, I will write that piece for you. And it was not the piece they probably expected because the first line of this piece was people love dead Jews. Living Jews, not so much. Right. Because it's like the museum, like you said. What was their reasoning? It's like, you know, they didn't want to do anything that would disrupt the visitors experience of the Jews humanity. The humanity of the nice Jews. Right? The dead ones, not the ones who did anything gross like practicing Judaism or living in Israel where half the world's Jews live. Like that's gross. We like the dead Jews. And so ultimately like, you know, I leaned into this topic and I sort of just dove into this and I traveled around the world and wrote. And just like this phenomenon in many different contexts, ultimately the thesis of People Love Dead Jews Jews is that Jews are only acceptable to a non Jewish society when they are powerless, whether that means politically impotent or dead. And there's many, many ramifications for that which we've been living with in the past two years. But ultimately. So to go to your larger question about what is anti Semitism? What is sort of like which your question is not that it's like what is its purpose? So I have been evolving on this topic for a long time and there's many steps between me. I mean that book People have dead Jews. Oh, but I want to go to this. So let me go to this. So I wrote this book. To me, this book was like a detour from my real life as a novelist. I was like, okay, I've been writing a lot on this topic. Let me just staple this together and then I'll publish this book and I'll go back to writing novels. After I published People of Dead Jews, it was the end of 2021. You know, it's like, it was like the floodgates open because. And it. But it was just my personal experience because suddenly I had like every Jew in America telling me their horror stories of their own personal experiences with anti Semitism.
- [43:34]
Aviv Ovadya
And what, for example, is there something that sticks out?
- [43:38]
Dara Horn
I mean there's many things, but.
- [43:42]
Aviv Ovadya
I want to. There's a one. I knew this at some point, in some way. I've read so many of these history books and learned very well. I was a history major at Hebrew University with some really, truly phenomenal teachers, but I had never really known it. I read in People Love Dead Jews. Your explanation of Anne Frank was fascinating because the turning of Anne Frank into the symbol of the Holocaust is a complete misrepresentation of the Holocaust. And Frank is the Jew who looks like me. But what if 85% of the Jews killed are the Jews from the provinces of Hungary who didn't look like you, who spoke Yiddish, not Dutch, looked weird. What if they're actually strange? What if they don't look like me then? What does the Holocaust mean then? Can I access it then? In other words, if in order to get people to have a serious grappling with the human catastrophe and collapse of the Holocaust, you have to erase the difference of the people who died, you're not actually grappling, you're not actually teaching the tolerance you claim this is all about. You are actually sanitizing, erasing their actual story and identity.
- [44:56]
Dara Horn
Correct order to.
- [44:58]
Aviv Ovadya
In order to actually just have it be something that serves my own little whim and teaches me, incidentally, because I get to walk through the Anne Frank house, that I'm a good person.
- [45:08]
Dara Horn
It is exactly so. I mean, you know, there's a lot of things about this like, so, you know, look, that example I gave of the erasing of the Israeli flag, right, Is, you know, to me that was so, you know, poignant because Anne Frank's sister Margot was like a passionate Zionist who was active in Dutch Zionist youth groups. She was studying Hebrew. Her plan was to emigrate to the, to the land of Israel to become a midwife in the, in the Galilee. That was her dream. I mean, and that's her sister. And number one, number two, so it's the yo. But also, and as you say, 85% of the Jews murder in the Holocaust are Yiddish speakers. A huge percentage of them are religious Jews. You know, this is like we picked this person who's the least, like, you know, the most, the most atypical. Also atypical for being saved and you know, not saved, but protected by her non Jewish neighbors. I mean, you know, there's so many stories about, you know, about, oh, these, you know, righteous gentiles, like, unfortunately, these people are statistically insignificant. Statistically insignificant.
- [46:11]
Aviv Ovadya
So, you know, places the Nazis could not have taken the Jews if the locals hadn't helped. That's the vast majority.
- [46:19]
Dara Horn
Yes, of course, of course. So, you know, so that's exactly so. I mean, you know, it was extraordinarily rare what happened to her. You know, not rare that she was murdered. But the other piece of this is, you know, that exactly as you say, you know, the, you know, people tell stories about dead Jews that make them feel better about themselves. And ultimately, you know, which is, that's the whole emphasis on righteous gentiles is an example of that. The whole emphasis on Jews who are just like, you and me is an example of that. But also, I mean, to me, the deeper issue is that, you know, the Nazi project was not about murdering 6 million people who were just like you and me. The Nazi project was about erasing Jewish civilization. Right? I mean, that's why they're also, you know, not just, you know, slaughtering Jews, but also, you know, burning books, you know, like, ripping up Jewish gravestones. Right. Like, why would you need to do that? Right. I mean, it's literally like, it's a complete destruction of Jewish civilization. So erasure Jewish civilization. So, you know, what my question is, is like, like, why would we participate in that erasure? Right? And that is what you are doing is participating in that erasure by claiming, oh, you know, the reason this is sad is because these people are just like you and me. So, you know, that is like the beginning of this. But ultimately. So that is the premise of people love dead Jews. And, you know, I was writing about this, and, you know, I write about this sort of phenomenon in other places. I write about, you know, what are called Jewish heritage sites, you know, in various places around the world that used to have Jewish communities and don't anymore. And, you know, as I put it in the book, like, Jewish Heritage sites. It's such a wonderful marketing term because it sounds so much better than, you know, property seized from dead or expelled Jews. Right? Like, who wants to go to that on their vacation? You know, Jewish heritage sites. It sounds so nice. You know, there's many different circumstances where I looked at this and, you know, I.
- [48:05]
Aviv Ovadya
It's. You call it moral branding at one point.
- [48:09]
Dara Horn
It's moral, yes.
- [48:11]
Aviv Ovadya
And it's about great. Rather than about actually grappling with a place where my society is not about the fact that.
- [48:18]
Dara Horn
That. Exactly. That, like, why are there no more Jews in your country? Right. And this is sort of. Look, look. So I was. I wrote this book as an intellectual exploration, right? To me, it wasn't about my personal life. It wasn't about, you know, here's something that happened to me or to people I know. It really was like, looking at this as, like, historical phenomenon and intellectual exercise. It was just like a phenomenon I had noticed in my work. But what happened was it turned out that for my readers, this was a very personal experience. So I had this, like, flood of readers who were just like, as I said, just telling me their horror stories with anti Semitism. And, I mean, I don't even know where to begin. I mean, it's like, you know, violence. You know, I mean, it's like, you know, literally, like, you only hear about it when somebody's. When someone's dead. Right. You don't hear about all the times when someone isn't dead. Right. Like, I remember went to speak in Columbus, Ohio. This is before October 7th. It was like, in 22. And, you know, I get off the plane and this, you know, you know, I'm speaking at some synagogue and the rabbi's picking me up at the airport, and he says, you know, I get in the car and he's like, you know, we're going to have lunch and I wanted to just chat with you and get to know you in this car ride, but I have to tell you what you're walking into. He says, you know, there's a threat against the K to 12 Jewish day school here in town. You know, they just arrested the guy last night. Community just found out about it this morning. So we're all really shaken. And I'm like, you know, wow, that's a really terrible thing. And then I'm like, that's. Then he goes, no, that's not the terrible part. I'm like, what's the terrible part? He goes, who was this person? Who is. He's like, this person was planning to shoot up the school and murder the parents on the carpool line at the pickup. And then the terrible part is, who was this person? It was the school security guard. So there's the kind of story we're talking about. So I mean, a lot of stories like that. Many, many stories like that. And then many just, like more interpersonal stories about, you know, people who had lost jobs. I mean, like, people who couldn't get jobs. And they knew this was, you know, it was very, you know, told that this was why. I mean, this is bottomless. Bottomless. And that was before October 7th.
- [50:23]
Aviv Ovadya
So since October said for me, it wasn't before. Since October 7th, was speaking and in Florida, at one point, in Illinois, in New York, people telling me that they'd had this. This run in this abusive conversation or this abusive actual violence or this, you know, defacing of synagogues. Every synagogue I speak to now, this wasn't true five years ago. Every synagogue I speak to has fences like. Like banks. And you just.
- [50:48]
Dara Horn
Can't you kill me at my events? Yeah, yeah, that's. Yeah. I mean, that's happened to me. So, I mean. Yeah, it's like, you know, this is sort of just. Yes. So since October 7th just become outrageous and, you know, look, I got dragged into this even more. I can talk more about this, if you want. Like, I was right after October 7th, I got. Got pulled into this anti Semitism advisory group at Harvard, advising the former president of Harvard on this topic, who did not take a whole lot of our advice. It was an absolute disaster. And in fact, it went so badly that I ended up as a witness in one of these congressional investigations of Harvard. So that was a total nightmare.
- [51:30]
Aviv Ovadya
Let me just ask. You found them actually deeply uninterested. The whole thing was an exercise in, as we say in Hebrew, covering your ass.
- [51:38]
Dara Horn
Well, I. You know what? It didn't start that way. It did not start that way because that was initially what I thought. And I was concerned about joining this group for that reason. And I was actually at first, very surprised that. I mean, people were like, oh, this is just lip service, like you said. I wish it was lip service, because I was, like, at these meetings with the president and the provost and, like, all these, you know, the top, you know, administrators at Harvard, like, twice a week for hours. I mean, this was huge amount of time they devoted to this. You know, so it was not initially that, but what happened was like, you know, it's like the minute my name became public that I was on this committee, it was just this fire hose of students coming to me and other people on the committee asking for help. And it was just like this absolute. And then, you know, we're dealing with this. Just this fire hose of incidents that's just like, nonstop all day long. And it's just so overwhelming. And, you know, and we were giving them recommendations about what to do about it. And it was like. It just sort of slowly became clear that, like, at every step of the way, it was like, we would give them a recommendation they just wouldn't do. There would be a reason why they wouldn't do it. That was specific to that incident. Yeah, right. It was like, you know, we can't do this video. It's like, you know, there's. Yeah, it was. It was everything. Right. And then ultimately, what was revealed in that congressional hearing, you know, the sort of infamous, infamous congressional hearing where she ended up losing her position from. This was ultimately. I was like, you have to, like. The thing that you needed to say was, this is a hostile environment. And they were not willing to say that. And even though it's just so. It was so obviously clear.
- [53:20]
Aviv Ovadya
Okay, so all of that was fascinating. These are things I have learned from you. These are, as I said at the beginning, vocabularies. I did not have to explain what was happening. Happening to Jews I knew, and now I do, and thank you for that. But you didn't answer my question. What the heck is anti Semitism? Where does it come from? Why does it make sense to anybody? I mean, speaking of Jew, what a wild thing to believe.
- [53:43]
Dara Horn
Yes. So look, I actually have thought about this very much in creating the TEL Institute, which is my new educational nonprofit. So I'm going to line this up with a couple things. I noticed that this project came out of these two experience of mine in the past couple of years. One was this experience of this disaster at Harvard from which I concluded, wow, college, too late for education, people intervening. But the other thing that was I had done a project the year before that for the Atlantic magazine where I spent about a year just sort of studying Holocaust education in America. And, you know, sort of just realized it was this people of Dejus thing where it was, you know, people were, you know, it was this worship of powerless Jews. And. But what I noticed, though was, you know, I'm going to give just the one example is that, you know, in. I was at the Dallas Holocaust Museum, and I asked the docents, you know, when the students come through the museum, what do they usually ask? And this one docent told me, he's like, you know what they asked? They say, are there still Jews alive today? Because, you know, if you went to this museum, like, you know, you kind of wouldn't know because, like, well, because Holocaust education in America, like, there are no, they're only Jews between 1933 and 1945 in Europe. And their job is they have one job, which is to die, right?
- [55:07]
Aviv Ovadya
And what I started thinking about Jews before.
- [55:11]
Dara Horn
Nothing. Nothing. Before or after. Right, nothing. And so, you know, what you learned about Jews is that there are people who died in Europe between 1933 and 1945. The end. And if that's the only thing you knew about Jews and, you know, then TikTok tells you that they're white European colonizers who have nothing to do with the Middle East. Like, you know, that completely comports with what you learned in school that Jews are these people who died in Europe. It's like, you know, this sort of ridiculousness of like, well, why aren't we teaching people who Jews are in public school? In public school? And, you know, you could say, like, oh, you know, there's. If you think about, like a school curriculum, like, you could say, like, oh, look, there's a lot of people who are maybe not in this high school history textbook. You know, the Yazidis probably aren't in that high school history textbook either. But the problem with that argument is like, you know, Yazidis are not foundational to world history and Western civilization. I mean, yeah, if I was teaching history in Syria, okay, but it's like you can't understand a lot of Western civilization and world history if you don't know anything about Jews. Like, you can't understand Christianity, you can't understand Islam, you can't understand the Enlightenment. It's like, you know, there's so many things that make no sense. So. But to go back to your question of anti Semitism, why the Jews? At first I thought like, okay, what's missing here is telling this like, you know, quote, positive story about Jewish civilization and that's what's missing instead of just telling this, quote, negative story about anti Semitism. But I actually now have come to this realization and this is the realization around which I've built this tel Institute. My realization is that actually these are not two separate stories. They are the same story. The story of the foundations of civilization and the story of the dynamics of antisemitism for 2,500 years. It's the same story. Because the foundations of Jewish civilization are if you just think about the very basics of this, like monotheism, belief in one God, resistance to idolatry, resistance to other gods. You know, today we hear that, we think it's like a spiritual idea. In the ancient near east this is a political idea. Because in the ancient near east you have all these societies that have lots of gods and usually one of the gods is the dictator. So when the Jews say that they don't bow to other gods, what they're saying is that they don't bow to tyrants. And you know, even if you think about the whole, you know, another basic premise of Jewish civilization is this like text based law, right? That you know, in Jewish belief this is a God given law. But you know, and you can look at this and say like, oh, you know, some of these laws that are in the Torah, they're also in the code of Hammurabi. But here's what's distinct about it. What happens when Hammurabi dies. You have this idea of this law that is above any, you know, that that isn't tied to an individual ruler, it's not tied to a dictator, right? You have also in Jud is in this idea of interpreting the law, that this is a constant ongoing process that's about productive debate, right? It's about Mahloka, Lashem, Shamayim argument for the Sake of heaven. And that that's the only way that you're going to get to the meaning of the law in a particular situation, that this is a living thing. You know, those ideas are very, you know, natural to people who are Jewish who have grown up in this, in this culture and civilization. Ultimately, you know, Jewish civilization is an anti tyrannical movement and it's an anti hierarchical movement and it's a non conformist movement. When you have an anti tyrannical movement, it pisses off tyrants. When you have an anti hierarchical movement, when you have a non conformist movement, it pisses off dominant societies that need everybody to be just like them in order to validate their opinion. And that, you know, so to me, so ultimately the way we designed this.
- [59:12]
Aviv Ovadya
And so reconverting ideology, whether it's a monotheistic one or exactly whether anybody who thinks everybody has to agree is gonna have a problem with Jews.
- [59:23]
Dara Horn
Correct, Correct. So ultimately, you know, this is an anti tyrannical movement. That's why like ultimately this is like a foundational, civilizational idea about freedom and responsibility. So I say both of those things. Freedom because we have this liberation narrative and responsibility because we have this legal concept of interpreting law. I mean, those are foundational things and it is always going to piss off tyrants. And so ultimately the way we teach about antisemitism in this Tel. In the Tel Institute. So I'll back up for a moment what the tell Institute is. I founded this just this year. This is. We are just. Our website just went live. Thetellinstitute.org, our purpose is to teach about. Thank you. The foundations of Jewish civilization to a broader public starting in K to 12 schools. Not specifically. Oh, oh no, specifically everybody. Yes, exactly. So, you know, so I encourage your listeners, if anyone is, you know, especially people who are educators who want to be involved, please come Visit us@thetel institute.org we have created a sort of a start here set of curriculum lessons for introducing this idea of Jewish civilization and the dynamics of anti Semitism and ultimately living Jewish civilization in public school. And the way this is set up is like it's a frame for whatever you might already have. Like it's a frame that can go around. Let's say if you already are required to teach Holocaust education in school, right? If you already have, you know, ancient civilizations in your school. If you already have, you know, there's a variety of other places where it can go in a curriculum. We also have a program that's. We actually have one of Our pilot sites is in the Jewish community, it's in a large Reform synagogue where they're doing this as part of their B' Nai Mitzvah program. So again, that goes to your question about, you know, creating this thickness of Jewish experience. But our goal ultimately is in the same way that we now expect any educated American to know the very basic facts of the Holocaust, which unfortunately, as you point out, is being eroded. But in the same way we expect any educated American to know the basic facts of the Holocaust. I would expect, expect any ancient, any educated American to know the very basic facts of Jewish civilization. So ultimately, the way we teach about anti Semitism in this curriculum, we do not teach it as this is a social prejudice, it's, you know, bigotry. We teach it as a lie that people use to gain or maintain power. And the lie is always the same. The lie is, is Jews are the obstacle to what you value most. And the only thing that changes through different historical moments, different settings is what you value most.
- [62:05]
Aviv Ovadya
Yeah.
- [62:06]
Dara Horn
And the lie is consistent. And so that is, that is the way we structure this. And we have case studies where we look at this that are, some of them are, you know, they're certainly pre Holocaust. There's even some that are pre Christian. We have post Holocaust case studies, including our last case study that we look at actually is the Durban conference, the UN Durban conference in South Africa in 2001. It was a conference against racism that became this just the anti Semitic hate fest. We look at how that happened. So but ultimately it all to me this, it is intricately connected to the content of Jewish civilization because. And the challenge that Jewish civilization pulls, I'm going to say that again, it is intimately connected. Anti Semitism is intimately connected to the content of Jewish civilization because it is a response to the challenge that Jewish civilization poses to any society or group of people who want to conform and dominate.
- [63:09]
Aviv Ovadya
I want to say two things. I have met a lot of young Jews on college campuses who came to my talks. So I guess that would be self selecting nerdy young Jews. But nevertheless, they don't know their story. And when they learn the most basic outline of their story, they are immunized. If I see a kid on a campus, whether it's Harvard or Brown or Columbia, and they say to me, everybody around me is anti Zionist. And then we have a five minute conversation about how Israeli Jews are actually desperate refugees who had literally nowhere else to go because of immigration quotas everywhere. The British weren't giving them visas to India, never mind visas To Britain, including after the Holocaust, where there are hundreds of thousands rotting in DP camps that are former concentration camps like Bergen Belsen, still on German soil till 1946 and 47 and 48. They literally are refugees with no other choice. We walk through this history and these kids, you know, dozens of times and from emails I've gotten, from talks that I did with this material online hundreds and hundreds of times, and I like to think not everybody writes an email. I like to think many thousands have told me, you know, I didn't just become right wing instead of left wing. Like that doesn't mean Israel is behaving okay in, you know, I don't know what settlement policy in the West Bank. I did not change your policy politics. But what you will do if you know the Jews actual story, your own actual story is you're no longer able to be. You're totally inoculated and immune to the bigotry, to the demand that the Jews of Israel stop existing. These last living Jews of the Eastern hemisphere. You become immunized to the bigotry and you become better at actually preaching your values and your own politics. In other words, if you have a critique of Israel, but you know who the Israelis are, you can actually convince Israelis, Israelis and talk to Israelis and you won't fall into the traps that they're trying to sell you in these activist crowds, in these anti Israel crowds about Israel being dismantleable or there being a morality and actually wanting Israel destroyed. And so these kids find their footing. They feel a kind of psychological stabilizing because they live inside this whirlwind, this libel campaign, this attempt to minimize them and shrink them. And the second point just I wanted to make about this is that just this deep phenomenal ignorance is the Jews weakness right now. And American Jews and Canadian Jews and British Jews, their kids don't know their story. And so someone else is stepping in to write their story for them. And it is ahistorical and deeply bigoted. Because if you're obsessed with the story of the Jews, you're probably not telling it right. That's just a thing. Why would you be obsessed with. And so you're solving, I don't know, other initiatives like this. And this is phenomenally important. And I want to use just this tiny little platform of this podcast to say people have to get behind you and download this material, teach it to your kids. Okay, I'm not talking to donors here. Also donors, by the way, Derek could use the help. This is the answer. This is the Answer to the great crisis on college campuses. This is the answer to the great crisis in Jewish day schools. This is the answer. Dozens of people working in different day schools, including the heads of curriculum or the heads of schools all over the United States, literally Jewish day schools, have asked me for help in history curriculum. I'm an Israeli journalist who moonlighted as a side hustle, as an informal history teacher. And. And there's so little that they can they even find themselves coming to me. And so this is.
- [66:46]
Dara Horn
So this is what happened to me, Khabib. Because, look, I. Like, I was getting asked all these questions too, and I'm like, literally, I'm a novelist, and my next book is a comic book about a talking book goat, right? I'm like, why are you coming from. I realized, as you said, yes, you're in literature. Yeah, but like, I. What I had to do is, like, you know, but I'm not a teacher, right? I mean, I'm a professor. But, like, you know, there's a whole different skill set for teaching, you know, classrooms and public schools and all those sorts of things. And I want to be clear, like, you can't, like, go to my website, just download this. Like, this is like a trade. You know, what's going to happen is, like, contact us, let us know, you know, what kind of setting you're in, and then I can, you know, then we can talk about, like. Like, I have this curriculum, and then I would be able to train your staff on. This is basically what it comes down to in, you know, in a public school, in a. Yeah, so, like. Yeah, no, I don't just, like, slap stuff up online because, you know, the other. And I will tell you, the reason we don't slap it up online is because we're. This is new. We are testing this. I have a hypothesis, right? This is a hypothesis that this kind of education can change people's minds and attitudes. But, you know, I don't know if I'm right or right or right or not. So, you know, in each place where I'm doing this, I'm gathering, you know, I want. I'm going to want to do surveys and gather data and things like that and adjust it to, you know, what works and what doesn't. And so that's why I'm not just like, here's a curriculum that came out of my brain and my team's brain. No, I want to refine it. So. But I. And I'm also looking for partners in this. And I will tell you, this goes, you know, you talked about it from a Jewish point of view of people, you know, having this sort of core of integrity and knowing their story. And that is part of our project. We are, like I said, we, you know, we're doing this and we have. One of our pilot sites is a Reform synagogue doing this as part of their B' Nai Ni Mitzvah program. Love to do more of those in the Jewish community. But this is. Our pilot sites already have been in non Jewish schools and we've already done. So we haven't, we haven't yet done the student facing piece. That was what we're testing now this fall. So I don't have like results back for that yet. But what I have seen already is the teacher trainings that we've done for predominantly non Jewish teachers. And I will tell you, it's kind of mind blowing because there's just so much more ignorance than malice. There is so much more ignorance than malice. And that is such an opportunity. And you know, the teachers who have come to our trainings who are, you know, these are people who are not Jewish. They're just like, this story is amazing because it is an amazing story. And you know, I've had people like, I remember this one woman who is an African American principal at Title 1 school. This is a school that gets a lot of federal assistance. It's majority, mostly minority students. She came up to us after one of our presentations and just had her tears in her eyes and just said, I, these are her words. I want to bring this story back to all of my black and brown students because they need this story. I mean, I've had these, you know, and it's been fascinating to me speaking to these teachers and, you know, from a very diverse groups of teachers, you know, blue states, red states, you know, there are the teachers who are in there during the beginning of the training, you know, know, yelling about a genocide in Gaza at the beginning of the training. And then at the end we're having a dialogue. And, you know, there are the teachers who are starting out by being like, you know, the problem is people are so unchurched in this country. And, you know, then we're having a dialogue. And, you know, so I mean, this is like something that is resonant with a lot of people because ultimately it is a story about freedom and responsibility. I mean, that's ultimately what it is. And, you know, this is a story that's, you know, resonant, you know, for a lot of people and certainly for a lot of Americans. So, you know, I think that there's just an I think that there's, yeah, there's a lot more ignorance than malice, and that is an opportunity. So, yes, I hope that some, you know, any of your listeners who are interested in this project will look into it, and especially those of your listeners who are educators who will want to be involved.
- [71:02]
Aviv Ovadya
DARA People of Dead Jews was felt like the opening shot of An American Jewish return reawakening. And that felt like to me, and apparently it's a bestseller, so I'm not an idiot. Like that apparently was a lot of people. Thank you for everything you do and thank you for coming on.
- [71:22]
Dara Horn
Thank you for everything that you're doing. And I hope this day that we're recording will fulfill our many hopes for the future and looking to better days for all of us. Thank you for everything you're doing towards that end.
- [71:33]
Aviv Ovadya
Amen.