Mijal: Hi everyone, welcome to Wandering Jews with Mijal and Noam. I’m Mijal.
Noam: And I’m Noam.
Mijal: and this podcast is our way of trying to unpack big questions being asked by Jews and about the Jews. We absolutely don’t have it all figured out, but we’re gonna try and figure some things out together, whether we make it there or not. It’s really about the process of wandering together and living every episode feeling like we’ve all learned something.
Noam: So as we say every single week, we really do love hearing from you. It’s actually our favorite, favorite part. So please continue to share your questions, your suggestions, your feedback, whatever is on your mind. Shoot us a note at our new and improved email address, wonderingjews@unpacked.media. Again, that’s wonderingjews@unpacked.media. And we have a special, special episode today. What is it, Mijal?
Mijal: Well, this episode is coming out the week of Yom HaShoah, in which we commemorate, we remember we mourn the Holocaust. So we were thinking about, who do we want to have here talking with us, discussing this with us. And we couldn’t think of a better person to have than Dara Horn. We’re so excited to have you here, Dara.
Dara is an award-winning author of six books, including several novels and the essay collection, People Love Dead Jews. Dara, I want to know how you came up with that title.
She’s had a lot of essays and nonfiction work and articles appearing in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and many other publications. She’s also, want to just highlight here, not only somebody who’s written about how people loved dead Jews in the past, but also has been involved in some very contemporary and very visible questions around antisemitism, especially at Harvard, which we might talk about. And most recently, Dara is the founder and the president of a new nonprofit, Mosaic Persuasion, which is devoted to educating the broader American public about Jewish civilization. Dara, it’s really great to have you here.
Dara Horn: Thank you so much. It is a total treat to be with both of you. Thank you for having me.
Mijal: Well, Dara, can I just ask you how did you come up with the title of People Love Dead Jews?
Dara Horn: Gosh, well, so I actually just want to say at the top that, you you said I’m author of six books. As of this month, I’m an author of seven books because I just put out a new book called One Little Goat, a Passover catastrophe, which is a graphic novel for kids with a Passover theme. So I’ll just put that over here, but we’re going to talk about, we’re back to Dead Jews. Here we are.
Noam: Yeah, Dara, I was going to say that one little goat that that story is is about a lot of destruction as well. so so people do people do people love dead goats.
Dara Horn: Yes, absolutely.
I mean, yeah, well, the go to the book is the scapegoat, the reason for everyone’s problems. So yes, and guides the main character through a sort of little tour of Jewish history. So yes, it’s very on brand for me.
So, Mijal, so the title, People Love Dead Jews, which I still cannot believe my publisher let me keep this title. This came from actually a piece that’s in the book that I published a few years prior to that. This is back in 2018, I was approached by Smithsonian Magazine who asked me to write a piece for them about Anne Frank. And I remember getting this assignment and just being overwhelmed with dread, because I’m like, wow, I really don’t feel like writing like, you 5,000 word piece, essay, about Anne Frank that’s going to be distributed in doctor’s offices across America, which is what happens to Smithsonian Magazine.
And I thought, you know, normal people would have turned this assignment down, but I’m a writer, so I’m not a normal person. And instead I thought like, well, this is interesting, right? Like, why don’t I want to write about this? And that was when I remembered this news story I had seen about something that had happened at the Anne Frank Museum. Again, this was back in 2018. There was a young Jewish man who was working at that museum and the museum would not allow him to wear his yarmulke 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 deliberated for six months and then relented and let him wear his yarmulke to work. And I had seen this news story and I just thought like, wow, six months is a really long time for the Anne Frank museum to ponder whether or not it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding.
And I was thinking like, did this really happen? Did I dream this? And then I went and looked it up and I saw first of all, yeah, it really happened, but also something equally stupid had happened at the same museum six months earlier, 2017.
It’s a big international museum. They’ve got 15 languages for their audio guide. And there’s that place where you pick up or download your audio guide and it says English and there’s a British flag, France, French flag, Hebrew, no flag. No flag.
The museum has since changed this and corrected this, but I just thought something interesting is going on here. And so then I went back to Smithsonian and I’m like, I will write this article for you. And it was not the article they expected because it was about these kinds of shenanigans that were being done in the memory of the Holocaust.
And the very first line of that piece was, people love dead Jews, living Jews, not so much. And I thought I was getting this out of my system, but I just kept finding myself in situations like this where my editors at mainstream general interest magazines and newspapers kept asking me to write about dead Jews. And I just thought, there’s something deeper going on here that I wanted to dig into and that was what turned into that.
Mijal: Dara, can you say sharply what is your thesis around why people love dead Jews more than living ones?
Dara Horn: Yes. Ultimately, the conclusion of that book is that people only appreciate Jews in a non-Jewish society when Jews are powerless. So whether that means politically impotent or dead. That is the way that Jews are universally acceptable in a non-Jewish society is when they do not have any power. Basically what I realized is, the original conclusion of that book are twofold. It’s people tell stories about dead Jews that make them feel good about themselves. And then the second half of that is living Jews have to erase themselves in order to gain public respect.
But ultimately, and this is something I’ve been thinking about much more since I published that book, is that really is about that Jews are only acceptable if they have no power.
Mijal: Wow. Let me, I I really want us to go and speak about the way the Holocaust is taught and thought about. But before that, let me just quickly come to this current moment. With that thesis that you have, that Jews are loved or acceptable in non-Jewish society when they are powerless. How are you interpreting this moment in terms of the rise of antisemitism post-October 7th? Because on the one hand, I would think October 7th, greatest massacre of Jews, lots of dead Jews, unfortunately, a lot of like a sense of powerlessness and at the same time, tremendous rise in antisemitism. So how do you understand that?
Dara Horn: Because Jews have sovereignty and that is unacceptable.
Mijal: So if this would have happened, Godforbid massacre like this, but without sovereignty, it would have drawn sympathy, but because it happened and then sovereignty and Jews fought back, that made it unacceptable.
Dara Horn: Yes, Jews are not allowed to have power. So you don’t have to hypothesize about this. If it can be attached to Jews having power, basically anything after the Holocaust is Jews, or anything after the foundation of State of Israel, you can already tie this back to the existence of the State of Israel, which is a situation where Jews have sovereignty and agency.
Mijal: Why do people not like it when we have power?
Dara Horn: I mean, this is a longer answer.
Mijal: On one foot, on one foot.
Dara Horn: Yeah. Well, on one foot. I actually, and this is part of the foundational things that I’m digging into with my new organization as we develop these materials for schools and for a broader American public.
We are purchasing this through foundations of Jewish civilization and dynamics of antisemitism. And I actually feel that those two things are connected. And generally when we think about describing antisemitism, we tend to describe it with this, we talked about the goat before, like this scapegoat model where it’s, know, are Jews are an easy target, like any minority and that sort of thing.
I actually think that there’s something in foundational to Jewish civilization that is also part of this dynamic. I’m going to explain this, you, and I’m still working on the language to describe this. If you think about the foundations of Jewish civilization, the most fundamental idea in Judaism is monotheism, right? Belief in one God, resistance to idolatry. And today we think of that as this spiritual idea, right? A religious idea, an emotional idea.
In the ancient Near Eastern context, it is a political idea. Because all of these other surrounding ancient Near Eastern societies have many, many gods and one of the gods is the dictator. We see that in the Passover story. I’m not citing the Passover story as historical, I’m citing it as part of the foundational legend of how we Jews think about their own origins. But it is true in Egyptology that the Pharaoh is considered one of the gods.
Pharaoh is a manifestation of the gods. And this is a very common thing for the dictator to be one of the gods. So if you think about that context then when the Jews say that they don’t bow to idols or they don’t bow to other gods, what the Jews are actually saying is that they don’t bow to tyrants. This is ultimately, Am Yisrael, the people of Israel are this anti-tyrannical movement.
Noam: Mmm.
Dara Horn: Obviously do not always live up to that ideal. No one ever lives up to their ideals, unfortunately. This is ultimately founded as this anti-tyrannical movement. It’s a radical, radical concept. And this concept pisses off tyrants. It pisses off tyrants. And it’s more than just that, because it’s also an anti-tyrannical movement. It’s a non-expansionist movement. This is not a proselytizing movement.
Right? This isn’t a movement that thinks, I’m right and everyone else is wrong and everybody else has to come agree with me. There’s, you know, other cultures that are imperial, right? Whether that’s politically imperial, whether conquering land or whether that’s, you know, ideologically imperial where, everybody has to follow my beliefs or my ideology. or even if it’s just something, you know, more benign and passive, it’s a dominant society where everybody is part of the same culture.
And, you know, Jews are this counterculture that runs through world history of people who are refusing to conform. And that pisses off dominant societies that need to be validated by everyone agreeing with them. So, you know, this is ultimately the sort of message about freedom and nonconformity that is intolerable to many societies that don’t have the self-confidence to not need every single person on the planet to agree with them. So that was a lot.
Noam: Yeah, no, but there seems to be to then be a paradox in your thesis, which is if the whole vision of Judaism is to be countercultural and be anti-tyrannical, then what happens when the Jews become the majority and become the culture, then how does that work?
Dara Horn: So if you think about the content of this civilization, monotheism isn’t a counterculture for the sake of counterculture. It’s a counterculture in the context of all these other cultures that are, you know, taking this imperial approach.
It’s not a counterculture just for the sake of opposition. It’s not that. But the content of this civilization, there’s a lot of things. IOne that’s relevant here is the idea of constructive disagreement becomes central to Jewish civilization. Not at exactly the same moment as the introduction of monotheism, it develops later.
But that’s the whole foundation of the rabbinic tradition is this idea of civil discourse, right? Like why is the Talmud 3000 pages long? It’s because it includes everyone’s opinions, not only the opinions of the people who won the argument, right? The whole concept of Machloket was Shem Shemayim, argument for the sake of heaven, right? That the argument itself is a sacred act, right? The idea of this constant engagement with what is the meaning of Torah, right? What is the meaning of the basis in text? I mean, there’s a lot of things passed like, oh, we believe in one God, we reject tyrants, we reject idolatry. It’s a lot of things past that. But those things do stem from the idea of monotheism because even if you think about what is that whole rabbinic tradition about, all those debates that we’re having, the whole idea of interpreting the laws, if you think about these laws as coming from this covenant with God. And again, this is not, making a spiritual argument here. o me, this is about a civilization. is irrelevant whether or not you believe in God, whether or not you engage with this on some sort of emotional or spiritual level.
Making a historical claim. If you look at the laws in the Torah, there are similarities to other societies. If you look at Hammurabi’s law and you look at some of the laws that are in the Torah, they’re very similar. Here’s what’s different about it. What happens when Hammurabi dies? What happens when his dynasty falls? Right? I mean, these are laws that are attached again to, you know, maybe a more benevolent dictator, but these are laws that are still attached to a human ruler who is assumed to have the absolute power to be able to even, you know, grant the people these rules. Right?
This is a very different concept of how you build a civil society where there’s this concept of law that is outside of any individual, or any person holding onto power. That is, it’s a very different concept from what you have in the ancient Near East.
Mijal: So, there, I just want to take a step back. So you are explaining right now, first of all, how important it is to understand Jewish civilization, not just antisemitism, but you were explaining that the more totalitarian like a society is and the less confident it is in its own identity, the less tolerance it has for Jews who are non-conformist, especially when they have power, because it threatens the rule of a dictator-like ruler. Is that a fair thing to say?
Dara Horn: Yes, yes, absolutely. This is, yes.
Mijal: Okay, great, Yeah, so how do we explain this rise in antisemitism in America right now, which is still like a liberal democracy, not a totalitarian regime, and where many of us, we don’t tend to think in an everyday way that we are facing a totalitarian culture. We think we are facing a diverse culture with many ways of being, and the Jews are just one more flavor.Let me just read some polls to you. Roughly seven in 10 Jewish adults report experiencing antisemitism online or on social media in the last, since October 7th. If you go younger, it’s 83%, it goes even higher. 77 % of American Jews say they feel less safe as Jews in the U.S. because of October 7th.
I think it’s undeniable and you lived this at Harvard in a very particular way. So how does your thesis play out in America, this contemporary liberal democracy?
Dara Horn: Absolutely. So when I say that this civilization is a threat to people who want to maintain power.
That can look a lot of different ways. So it can look like a political, you know, like a dictatorship. I think, and in that case, that is relevant here because if you think about what is happening in the Middle East, this is driven by autocratic regimes, right? I mean, if you think about Hamas as a franchise of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic Republic of Iran.
If you think about Hezbollah, is that, you think of the Houthis, is that. If you think about this whole sort of ring of fire around the state of Israel, this is all created by, exclusively by autocratic regimes that are trying to cling to power. So that piece is there. And also you see the influence of those regimes in our online life in the West. And that’s absolutely undeniable that you have autocratic regimes overseas that are influencing our discourse here. So that is one piece of it.
However, when I say people who want to maintain power, it does not have to be that direct and that openly explicit. It does not have to be an authoritarian regime. It can be the kids in the middle school who need to stay being the popular kids. Right? mean, can be, right? It can be these people in the United States who feel like, you know, whatever I consider my group used to be, you know, on top in this hierarchy of this society, and now we aren’t anymore, and we’ve been unjustly demoted or something like that, right? It can be humanities professors who see that, you know, their entire field has cratered. They’ve lost, you know, all of the prestige and funding and graduate students and interest in their subjects and, you know, their students who they have are dwindling and the ones that they do have can’t even finish reading a book and how do I maintain my relevancy? Right? Like it doesn’t have to be as grand as like, you know, a tyrannical regime. This is about people who need to maintain some semblance of feeling like they have some kind of power and who are feeling insecure in that. So, I mean, it seems a much broader idea than justl, you know, regimes battling each other. It doesn’t have to be that explicit.
Mijal: Right. So I want to actually shift a little bit and talk about America and talk about Holocaust education in America. because as I was preparing for this conversation, I realized that I… that I wasn’t sure that I could make the case as to why Holocaust education is important. Like I’m asking this genuinely, why is Holocaust education for a non-Jewish audience important? I think that I used to have a gut reaction, if we teach about this, we’ll help prevent it in the future. And I’m not sure that education and people work this way. Again, I’m just being very honest here. I don’t know if it works this way that if we teach people about a certain catastrophe,
Noam could make the case as to why Holocaust education is important. Like I’m asking this genuinely. Why is Holocaust education for a non-Jewish audience important? I think that I used to have a gut reaction if we teach about this, help prevent it in the future. And I’m not sure that education and people work this way. I don’t know, I’m being very honest here. I don’t know if it works this way that if we teach a teaching about a certain catastrophe.
Mijal that will make sure they don’t replicate it. So I’m just really curious almost from like a first principles perspective, if you had to make the case as to why it is important to teach about the Holocaust, let’s pretend for a second in the correct way, but why it’s important to teach about the Holocaust to a non-Jewish audience, what would that reason be?
Noam: And before you answer that, I was thinking about this in a broader context outside the Jewish world of, there are other genocides throughout history, right? There’s the Cambodian genocide from 75 to 79. There’s the Armenian genocide from 1915 to 1917. There’s the Rwandan genocide in 1994.
There are multiple genocides, sadly, that have happened in the past 75 to 100 years or whatever it is. And so it’s a question. Why is this important?
Dara Horn: I was going to say there’s also other genocides of Jews. If you think about during the Russian Civil War, was from 1918 to 1921, it’s like minimum credible estimate of 100,000 Jews who were massacred in Ukraine during those years. And actually directly relevant to the Holocaust because it created this refugee crisis which sent all these people to Western European capitals, which became this talking point for the Nazi regime, rise to power 10 years later because you had this like massive flood of penniless Jewish refugees in Western cities in Europe.
Yeah, there’s, oh gosh, there’s a lot I could say about this. To me, I think it makes no sense to teach about it without having a larger context of Jewish history and civilization. To me, I don’t see the purpose of it other than that, except that I think it has other purposes in terms of teaching about the rise of truncal regimes, those kinds of things.
If you think about teaching about the way new media works, how you can quickly change social norms by activating older social norms. Like, I mean, there are things like that that you can, you can bring into it. I think that it makes a lot of sense to teach about it. If you are teaching a broader story of the role of Jews in Western civilization, which frankly, you can’t understand Western civilization without understanding Jewish civilization and history.
So I think in that case, it has to be taught. I mean, and that is because this was an attempt to eradicate not only Jews, but Jewish civilization. And this is a really interesting and powerful dynamic for the way that these, you know, that Western societies think about themselves. And for that reason, it needs to, you know, you need to understand it.
But the problem that has emerged is like very different from all of those first principles questions. Look, I wrote a book called People Love Dead Jews. That book came out the end of 2021. I dove much deeper into this specific topic of Holocaust education for a piece I wrote for the Atlantic that came out in the spring of 2023. So before October 7th is important to note, but, and I was researching it mostly for the previous year. This was a piece that I spent about a year researching. I traveling around the country, I interviewed about a hundred people for that piece, not all of whom made it into the piece. you know, speaking with students at schools, speaking with teachers, meeting with people who create curricula for schools, legislators who pass mandates about this for state legislatures, meeting with museum designers, going to teacher training events, going to conferences. So gigantic project.
And it was just stunning to me to realize that the way this was actually being used in schools was as a case study in morality. This was a way of teaching morality in a secular context. And it was extracted from not just Jewish history, often from any kind of history. Sometimes it was taught in a social studies class in the context of world history or American history or World War II, but often it was taught in an English language arts class around a book or something like that, and it was sort of taught in isolation, but certainly absolute isolation from Jewish life and history.
And it was just striking that there’s like 28 states in this country where you’re required to learn in school that Jews are people who were murdered in Europe during this period from 1933 to 1945. To be clear, it should be 50 states. I’m not making an argument against Holocaust education. I’m not saying that this shouldn’t be taught or something like that. The problem to me is that there’s not a single state in this country where anyone is required to learn who are Jews. And this is so glaring.
I was at a conference for teachers over the summer at the Dallas Holocaust Museum. And so I asked the docents at this Holocaust Museum in Dallas, what do students typically ask when they come on their trips through the museum? Docents told me, you know what they ask? They ask, are there still Jews alive today? Because if you went to this museum, you kind of wouldn’t know. You kind of wouldn’t know, and it was just really striking. The total erasure of Jewish life.
Mijal: So Dara, what’s the morality tale? You said it’s a morality tale. What’s the morality tale in this 28 schools in the state, sorry, where it’s mandated?
Dara Horn: I mean, the worst version of it is like, this shows that people can be are really mean to each other and you should be nice. I mean, like literally like this is something like that. There’s actually one I think was a British Holocaust scholar where he said, you know, essentially the lessons of the Holocaust, that you know, people should be kind to each other, are essentially the same lessons that were being taught in Germany in schools before World War II. Right? you know, like you don’t need genocide of six million people to tell you you should love your neighbors, right? I mean, this is kind of absurd. So yeah, that was, I mean, what was really striking to me was this like absolute ignorance and total lack of interest in anything about who are Jews.
And yeah, there’s this idea in education called the null curriculum, right? Like, null like N-U-L-L like zero, which is what’s not taught in schools. And the reason educators like to think about this is because the idea is that the null curriculum is also part of the curriculum. Because you’re sending students a message by what you’re not teaching. And the message isn’t, learn this. The message is, don’t learn this from me. So it’s like a sex education in schools a few generations ago, right? would be, the teachers weren’t saying, don’t worry about sex, they were saying worry about sex from your older brother instead of wording it for me. And so that is what this education system has done with Jewish civilization. This has been outsourced to TikTok.
Mijal: Dara, I think what I’m hearing you say, Dara, is that we’ve got a generation of young people that if they’re exposed to the Holocaust, they’re exposed to Jews only through the Holocaust in their formal education, where they learn of Jews as victims with simplistic morality tales and without any context about who Jews are and they get that from other sources, which I’m hearing a little bit of implication that for this to be done right, it would actually include something about this is who Jews are. These are some of the factors that led to the Holocaust. This is what the Holocaust did. And this is a little bit about who Jews are today, post Holocaust as well. Am I understanding you right?
Dara Horn: It’s bigger than that because a couple of things. First of all, one problem is, as you say, like, you know, this is what, you know, look at what people did to the Jews. Jews are these totally passive victims. I gotta say that that is one of the reasons that that is the sort of story that has sunk in and has really been latched onto by American educators in a non-Jewish context. I hate to say it because it’s very resonant, I think, for people who have sort of this cultural Christian beliefs that they’ve imbibed with whether they’re religious Christians or not. Like this is just part of the non-Jewish culture. This idea that like, you know, there is like some murdered Jew who died for your sins. You know, that’s like a reason. Yes, there’s something that feels familiar about that, I think to a lot of people in a deep cultural level that maybe, you know, that’s not even conscious is this attraction to this like idea of this like passive Jewish tortured victim.
Mijal: So you’re saying it’s attractive, there’s something almost like attractive.
Dara Horn: So I do think that there’s a piece of that and that and that that is something wonderful and redemptive and that’s gonna make you learning about that’s gonna make you a better person. That’s like an idea that’s like deep in Christianity that people aren’t even conscious. I think that they’ve inherited. So that’s one piece.
Another piece is that another problem with you, you teaching the Holocaust about in this way and is that you know, as you say like with you know, you were correct. I mean that this is this total erasure of Jewish life is that that is very concordant with the Nazi project. You know, the Nazi project wasn’t about killing 6 million people who were just like you and me. The Nazi project was about erasing Jewish civilization. You know, making sure that there’s no trace of Jewish civilization in any part of ours.
lMijal: Right, so you’re pointing out the irony of teaching about the Nazi project in a way that inadvertently reifies the same goal of only offering the Jews as victims and essentially erasing Jewish civilization and how the Holocaust is taught.
Dara Horn: Yes, because even the way it’s taught where it’s like, look, Anne Frank, she’s just like you and me. It’s like, well, Anne Frank is actually a quite atypical Holocaust victim for like 10 different reasons, one of which is that this is a person who’s speaking a non-Jewish language living in a Western country. like 85 % of the Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust were Yiddish speakers. Huge percentage of them were religious Jews. Right?
That’s the civilization that was destroyed in the Holocaust was Ashkenazi Yiddish speaking civilization. And that is, you know, there’s only some new versions of it and remnants of it that have been revived. I mean, that is the civilization was destroyed. So that’s one piece of it. But then also another piece is that genocide, you know, having antisemitism be introduced in the context of genocide. It’s like. What?
Mijal: I feel like we’re giving people ideas, by the way.
Dara Horn: Yeah, well, I that’s what I do. I said that in People Love Dead Jews. You’re giving people ideas about your standards, right? It’s like, you know, anything short of genocide is like, you know, kind of looks great, right? Like, the entire Muslim world, know, had occasional massacres, ethnically cleansed all of their Jews, had centuries of basically Jim Crow style segregation. And then in the modern period, expelled every last Jew from like, you know, and millions of, you know, of places and, millions of square miles of territory, you know, all of Middle East and North Africa’s Judenrein, and all of their assets were seized and on the way out, hundreds of people were massacred. That looks great compared to the Holocaust.
Mijal: get this by the way, often as someone who studies Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, people will often, when I speak about the fact that Jews fled or were expelled or left due to fear, they will say, yeah, but it wasn’t as bad as Christian Europe or the Holocaust. I’m like, yeah, that’s like not the best, you know, it’s like not the best point. Yeah. Yeah.
Dara Horn: the bar is kind of low here. yeah, yes, exactly. Exactly. But also what it eliminates and also teaching the Holocaust. And this is the biggest piece. The biggest problem here is if your goal in using in teaching Holocaust is to combat antisemitism, teaching the Holocaust in isolation, even if you teach it, even with that slightly longer context of like, we had a little lesson about the blood libel or something, you you’ve eliminated the possibility of pattern recognition. There’s no pattern recognition when the one case you’re showing of antisemitism is mass murder. Because most antisemitism doesn’t take the form of mass murder. And as you said, there isn’t even a name for the destruction of all the Sephardi, like every Sephardi and Mizrahi community on the planet, except for like 12. Right? I mean, there isn’t even a name for that. Like that doesn’t have a word, right? But also like there’s no pattern recognition for like, how does antisemitism work? Right? It’s just like, don’t hate people. It’s like, well, usually it doesn’t look like hating people. It looks like defending your society’s ideals.
And there’s absolutely no way of teaching people that when you have zero context and you’ve deliberately eliminated the possibility of pattern recognition.
Mijal: So let me actually use this as jumping off point to ask Noam. Noam, you’ve been the principal of a Jewish school. Now you’ve done a lot of work in independent schools, really coming in and telling the Jewish story, often to a majority non-Jewish audience. Also, by the way, Unpacked is going to be doing a lot of new Holocaust videos. So I know you’ve thought a lot about Holocaust education. What would you say are top two bad things, like don’t do, that you’ve seen? And maybe some constructive recommendations or bright spots that you’ve seen about how to do this well.
Noam: So yeah, I like that description of the Jewish and in the non-Jewish environment. I think we have to always, at end of the day, I’m an educator. I just think about the end first, and then how you’re gonna arrive at the end. Like what’s the goal? And then what are the activities to arrive at that goal? And the bad that I’ve seen, and when I say bad, I wanna acknowledge that it still comes from a good place, but still in my style of education, what I’m trying to accomplish, not good.
So number one is the instrumentalization of the Holocaust. I think that it’s instrumentalized to accomplish something else in some curricula. I’ll give you a good example, teaching the Holocaust as a way to teach about the bystander effect. I don’t view that that should be the goal of Holocaust education to teach about the bystander effect.
Do I think the bystander effect was a problem during the Holocaust? Of course it was. Do I think the Evian Conference was a problem, when you have Golda Meir standing there, sitting there as an observer and not as a participant, and there were bystanders of dozens of countries? Yeah, I think it was a problem. But the goal is to teach what happened and in that moment not to teach what happens when you’re a bystander if someone doesn’t share their applesauce with a friend of yours. That’s not, that’s an instrumentalization of the Holocaust in a way that I think is
Frankly, It’s also a problem, so that’s number one.
Problem number two is when teaching the Holocaust, I think, Yair Rosenberg said this the first time, teaching the Holocaust as a way to teach antisemitism is like teaching slavery as a way to teach racism. It’s such a silly thing to do when the learner on the other side will be like, okay, so it’s not a big problem anymore. yeah, no, slavery, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, of course, bad, it’s bad. Genocide against your people, gas chambers, bad, bad, bad, bad, for sure. But like, you guys are doing pretty well right now. Like, it’s a really, really strange way to teach these topics, and it kind of reduces the significance of them.
So, and now I’m gonna defend it for a second, this is my style. The value of doing these sorts of things is it’s, and not even the value. The reason behind it is it’s an attempt to universalize it. It’s an attempt to say, hey, all 50 states in the United States of America should be teaching Holocaust education. And this is the best way to do it. It’s a way to universalize a very, what I believe is a very particular story.
Mijal: And that’s very American, Noam, to make it apply to all Americans, to bring in like the role of America. You know what I’m saying?
Noam: Yeah, it is. it’s a way to… Everyone needs to have a seat at the table, right? That’s what my original question was, like, there should be, you know, mandatory Cambodian genocide education, mandatory Armenian genocide education, mandatory… And then you start saying, well, here’s why the Holocaust is really important to understand. And of course, those things are important to understand also, like the Null Curriculum. I’m not trying to minimize the value of learning history, like, yeah, everyone should learn these stories. There is something different about the Holocaust, I believe. And it’s important to name that and to see that. And Darah, you’ve done that already. You have to understand Jewish civilization, to understand Western civilization, or to understand yourself, right? Like that’s, and what the future should therefore hold. It’s all part of, it’s happened together.
What I think is good, Mijal, is in two different ways. Again, think about the goal of a curriculum. If you’re in a Jewish context, I really think it’s important to ask theology questions, faith-based questions, and to say, how do we think about God and man in the context of such a tragedy to fall upon the Jewish people? How do we think about that? To ask national questions. Well, why is sovereignty so important? And then to understand the context of the pogroms and the Holocaust, and the like, why are these things so important to, theologically and nationally? And then a broader question, which I think is important for everyone to understand, is the history of this time period. This is good for everyone to understand, to understand the history surrounding it, to understand how it could happen, understand that it actually can only happen.
I remember saying this to our, when I was the principal of the school, the top history teacher said to us, when people asked, how could this happen in Germany? His answer was, it could only happen in Germany. And it was a fascinating understanding then of how a mechanized slaughter like this could potentially take place. I think a good curriculum will include the fact that, kind of like Dara is saying, here’s what happens when it’s viewed as though the Jews have an exaggerated sense of power.
And that’s the pattern throughout history that there’s an exaggerated sense of power that Jews have. And here’s the result of when you have a misunderstanding of the Jewish people. Like there’s a lot of good education.
The last thing that I’ll say though is, here’s the first goal. And Dara said this also already. When we’re creating Holocaust education, you know what the first video that we’re making about Holocaust education is? And Dara knows this I think, is who are the Jews? What does it mean to be Jewish? And it is so true that without understanding who the Jews are and what Judaism is, you can’t understand the Holocaust. And without understanding the Holocaust, in my opinion, you can’t understand the Jews. But when you have those theological questions mixed in with those historical questions, know, like David Weiss-Halifni talked about the two great revelations. And the students understand this, the revelation of Sinai and the revelation of God’s presence. And Auschwitz is the revelation of God’s absence.
And that’s a really, really powerful thing to understand in a Jewish context. So those are the different bads and the goods of the way I see of Holocaust education.
Mijal: All right. And I like how you’re framing that some things are important in Jewish educational settings and some in broader educational settings. Dara, our time is going to run out soon, but I have two questions for you before we finish. One is that even though I really like the title of your book, I wish I didn’t, but People Love Dead Jews. It’s very compelling. But there is a growing number of people who don’t like Dead Jews even. So I’m thinking right now about a lot of Holocaust denialism at the fact that Candace Owens and others have such huge followings like in podcasts, the fact that you had some Tucker Carlson having people who were like, you I don’t know if they’re like Holocaust deniers, but like World War II denialists of sorts. So there is like a growing number of people who are fueled by social media, you know, denying the Holocaust. How can you explain the rise of that?
Dara Horn: Okay, so the People Love Dead Jews argument is about exactly as Noam said the instrumentalization of the murders of Jewish communities. But to your question, Mijal, about denial, the basis of antisemitism is denial. The promotion of truth and the promotion of lies at the expense of truth is the foundation of antisemitism. The way that my new nonprofit frames the idea of antisemitism is around the idea of the big lie. In other words, all antisemitism is better understood rather than just a social prejudice, that this is, and it’s not even just a conspiracy theory, it is a lie. And conspiracy theories are one example of that.
Holocaust denial, as you point out, is a huge example of that. So is denial of the atrocities on October 7th is an example of that. The whole somehow magically Jewish civilization is not native to the land of Israel is an example of that. All of these are attempts to deny the reality of Jewish life and experience. And all of these lies are in service of the foundational big lie. The foundational big lie is Jews are the obstacle to whatever you value most. And therefore Jews are collectively evil and shouldn’t exist. That is the foundational big lie of antisemitism that you can pull through all of Jewish history. It predates Christianity. You see it in ancient Greece and Rome and other ancient civilizations prior to Christianity and Islam. You can pull it through to post-Holocaust, because this is another thing, Noam just spoke very eloquently about ways you can frame this in a Jewish context, a way that I think is essential if you care about combating antisemitism, to frame it in a non-Jewish context, is to talk about broader political movements of antisemitism after the Holocaust. And if the through line is Jews are the obstacle to whatever your society values most, what changes is simply what your society values most?
So, there’s a society that during the period of, let’s say post-Enlightenment leading up to the Holocaust is the rise of science as this universal value that everyone should value most. And then the distortion of that is this pseudo racial science, right? This bogus quote science of like, well science just determined that Jews are an inferior race. But that, that was already replacing a previous version of what your society values most, which would be something like, you know, let’s say Christianity or Islam, depending on where you are in that, that’s the supreme, you wonderful, supposedly universal value, right? The Jews are somehow corrupting or polluting or disrupting.
But I think you can pull this past World War II to see others. And you can pull this past World War II to see other strains of it. You see it in actually in the way that we teach this, we do actually two sections that are post World War II in the dynamics of antisemitism. And when we look at international institutions that rise after World War II, when we look at the Soviet Union and anti-Zionism and the framing of anti-Zionism as Zionism is now this disruption to what your society values most, which is these international groups like the common turn, in that case, the Soviet bloc, where we’re all supposed to be workers united without nations or something like that. And then you have other versions of that in other, Arab League and things like that.
But then you also can look at a more 21st century version of this, where you look at after the fall of the Soviet Union, the new thing that’s universal is human rights and the rise of non-governmental organizations. And when I say non-governmental organizations, two forms of that, right? One is what we think of as charitable organizations or non-governmental watchdog type organizations or political organizations and also non-state actors, as we would say, right? I mean, they’re part of that and the rise of Iran as a regional superpower in the Middle East and how they’re able to move into the former Soviet Union’s takeover. But then what has happened is that we have a whole section on the Durban Conference where, and I mean, that is a direct line. When you look at the Durban Conference as a United Nations Conference Against Racism in 2001 in Durban, South Africa, which became this antisemitic hatefest that conference was captured by Iran.
Anyway, there’s more I can say about this. I’ll stop. When you talk about the rise of Holocaust denial, that is consistent with this entire pattern of antisemitism going back to ancient times, is this pattern of basically that it’s foundational on this lie, which is based on denying the reality of Jewish identity and civilization.
Noam: It’s based on when it’s foundational on this lie which is based on denying the reality of Jewish identity and civilization.
Mijal: Yeah. So we, we tend to finish our conversations with like asking “So, nu?” What now? Trying to tease out like, you know, big ideas, tangible implications. I’ll just say maybe one big one, Dara, that you are really raising over and over again is this assertion that we cannot teach about Holocaust without teaching about Jewish civilization, who Jews are, who we were. And also like, who we are like in recent years and what makes us who we are, what makes us a nonconformist element, why are we are threatening all of these things. It is so critical to approach it in this way. So I think this is a really important idea for all of us to keep in mind as we go into Yom Hashoah and as we continue to think what it means to advocate for like strong, good Holocaust education in this country.
Noam: Amazing, yeah, spot on.
Mijal: Amazing. And so good to have you here, Dara. I so, so grateful. Everybody buy Dara’s full seven books. They’re all really, really great.
Noam: Yes. One little goat, one little goat, a father in heaven with two luchot. Boom. There you go.
Mijal: Yeah, there we go. Wondering Jews with Mijal and Noam is a production of Unpacked, an OpenDor Media brand. Subscribe wherever you are listening to this podcast and follow Unpacked on all the regular social media channels. Just search for Unpacked Media. And if you enjoy wondering with us, please share this and other episodes with your friends and please be in touch by writing to us. This episode was hosted by me, Mijal and…Noam: Me! Noam Weissman.
Mijal: Honan Dodge is our researcher, Rob Pera is our audio editor, and we are produced by Michael Weber and Rivky . Dara, thank you again.
Noam: Thanks, Dara. Bye.
Dara Horn: Thank you so much for having me.