Dara Horn delivers galvanizing message to packed MJCC ballroom

PHOTO: JFGP Chief Community Relations and Public Affairs Officer Bob Horenstein hosts the fireside chat with Spotlight speaker Dara Horn Monday, OCt. 28 at the Mittleman Jewish Community Center. (Andie Petkus Photography for The Jewish Review)

By ROCKNE ROLL
The Jewish Review
“This is our Queen Esther moment.” 
Dara Horn, the award-winning author of “People Love Dead Jews,” carried this messaged to a sold-out ballroom at the Mittleman Jewish Community Center Monday, Oct. 28 at the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland’s Spotlight event. The intensification of antisemitism in American life has, she elaborated, left Jews with no choice but to emulate the heroine of the Purim story and speak up on behalf of our people. 
“We no longer have the luxury of not rising to the occasion. Our enemies have already discovered that it only takes a few loud voices to pass a resolution at a school board meeting or shout someone down in a city council or slander somebody online,” Horn said. “Many of you are in positions of leadership. All of you have the power of your own voices. Now is the time to spend your social capital.”
After publishing five novels and teaching Jewish literature at several prominent universities, Horn released “People Love Dead Jews” in 2021 and became what her sister once labeled to her as “the Antisemitism Lorax” – even serving on a panel on antisemitism convened by her alma mater and former employer, Harvard University. 
“I actually think that the focus that so many of us have had on college campuses for this past year is actually a psychologically protective measure that we are using to tell ourselves that this problem is localized. Unfortunately, it’s not localized. It’s everywhere,” Horn said. “I also have a front row seat to that train wreck, because I now have total strangers contacting me every single day to tell me about the antisemitic harassment that they are personally facing.”
The problem is both widespread and old – and while it has taken many forms throughout history, Horn cited David Nirenberg’s book, “Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition,” in explaining the common thread that antisemitism has had across history. 
“Societies have all defined themselves through their opposition to whatever they call ‘Judaism,’ and these air quotes are deliberate, because this idea of ‘Judaism’ has almost nothing to do with actual Judaism and everything to do with whatever evils these non-Jewish societies aspire to overcome.” Horn explained, “Jews become this blank screen onto which societies project whatever they consider evil.”
While some society’s responses to this have been outward violence, expulsions and mass murder – what Horn refers to as “Purim antisemitism” after Haman’s attempt at mass murder – others have responded by attempting to eliminate Jewish culture and society rather than Jewish lives, which Horn refers to as “Chanukah antisemitism” after the Greek attempts to replace Jewish culture with Greek culture in the run-up to the Maccabean revolt. A more modern example, Horn explains, is the insistence that their anti-Zionism was not antisemitic.
“This is in 1918, 30 years before the founding of the State of Israel. It’s probably not about Netanyahu,” Horn said. “By the way: they’re Marxist, so they’re also anti-religious. So, what they’re basically saying is, ’We love Jews! You just can’t practice Judaism or support Zionism or study Hebrew, but we love you!’”
This later evolved into mass imprisonment, torture and murder, but it was also an intellectual playbook that the Soviet Union leaned on throughout its existence and exported to its Cold War client states in Southwest Asia – the very countries that spent much of the second half of the 20th century at war with Israel and now serve as platforms for the terrorism that threatens Israel today. Through those countries, that ideology has made its way on to college campuses in the US. 
“All of that same material has been recycled by the various dictatorships supplying American universities with billions of dollars, so it’s not terribly surprising in 2024 when an antisemitic cartoon directly from KGB propaganda is posted on Instagram by faculty at Harvard,” Horn said. “Students and faculty can scream whatever racist things they want… but this avoids the deeper question: ‘Why is Harvard filled with screaming racists?’”
A valid question, considering the diversity efforts major universities have pursued. Horn went on to explain why these efforts have failed to address antisemitism: they’re designed to combat social prejudices, which she defines as the belief that a particular group is inferior. Antisemitism is rooted in a belief that a particular group, Jews, are superior. In this context, antisemitism isn’t a social prejudice, it’s a conspiracy theory. 
“If your worldview is that there is a hierarchy of power that really needs to be disrupted and that some people have too much power, too much privilege and are overrepresented,” she said, “you’re going to fall feet first into antisemitism, because the antisemitic conspiracy theory since ancient times is that Jews have too much power, Jews have too much privilege, and Jews are overrepresented. You know how old this idea is? It’s in the Torah.”
Like all conspiracy theories, antisemitism is built on lies, Horn explained; from the ancient blood libel to Holocaust denial to the modern ideas that Jews are settler colonialists and Zionism is a racist ideology.
“These lies are all part of the foundational big lie. The Big Lie is that antisemitism itself is a righteous act of resistance against evil, because Jews are collectively evil and have no right to exist,” she said.
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Following Horn’s remarks and a fireside chat with Federation Chief Community Relations and Public Affairs officer Bob Horenstein, Steve Netter took the stage to share his family’s story of those lies in action. His son, Ari, started sixth grade in 2022 and immediately became the target of antisemitic bullying in his public middle school. It began as references to the Jewish “South Park” character Kyle Broflovski, but quickly advanced to epithets and support for Nazi Germany. 
“We were continuously told, unless Ari could identify the kids who were saying this, there was essentially nothing that they would be able to do,” Netter said. “But how’s the kid who’s new to the school hearing comments and passing surrounded by hundreds of other kids he doesn’t know, supposed to identify the people who are tormenting him? Furthermore, why is it his responsibility? He’s the victim.”
The Netter family tried for months to address the subject with the school to no effect. By happenstance, they ended up speaking with Horenstein at San Francisco International Airport en route to the Federation’s 2023 mission to Israel. Horenstein heard their story and offered to help.
Shortly after their return from the trip, the harassment escalated to direct threats of physical violence. When that harassment drove the family to pull Ari out of school, the Federation’s contacts with the school board finally got the district to act both to address the issue and to ensure that Ari could continue his education at home through the rest of the year. Ari returned to the same school the next year, and while the initial weeks, including the aftermath of Oct. 7, was relatively calm, issues arose again when a teacher began labeling the war in Gaza as a genocide and compared Israel to Nazi Germany.
“We contacted the Federation again, which thankfully helped us at the district level as we worked with the school principal to open an investigation,” Netter said. “HR was involved, and the teacher was spoken to.”
The comments ceased. 
“I feel confident that the work that we did with the Federation, the pressure we put on the school, finally delivered some of the actual results that we’re looking for over the last year and a half,” Netter said.
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Part of why it’s easy for societies to cast Judaism as whatever they want to oppose, Horn explained, is that there’s limited understanding of what Judaism is. 
“When I speak on college campuses, I’m often asked, ‘Are Jews a religion? Are Jews a race? Are Jews a nationality?’ And the answer is that Jews predate all of those categories,” she said. “Every non-Jewish society has tried to fit Jews into whatever box they know best, but Jews always predate the box.”
The actual answer? 
“Jews are a joinable tribal group with a common history, homeland and culture,” Horn said. “What I just said was a paragraph in English; in Hebrew, it is one word that is two letters long: Am. We are Am Yisrael, the people of Israel.”
Jews are other things, too – things which confound efforts to include combatting antisemitism in traditional anti-bigotry education. 
“Usually the message goes something like, ‘you shouldn’t hate those people, because they’re just like you and me,’” Horn said. “The problem is that Jews have spent 3,000 years not being like everyone else. Uncoolness is Judaism brand. This goes back 3,000 years to the ancient Near East, when everybody else was worshiping a Marvel Cinematic Universe of sexy deities and the Jews are basically like the losers in the school cafeteria sitting in the corner with their bossy, unsexy, invisible God.”
One of the fundamental aspects of Judaism has been its opposition to idolatry. Horn elaborated that this is often understood as not praying to statues, but ancient Israel’s contemporaries often featured a panoply of deities with one being a dictator over the others – including Egypt’s pharaoh, considered a deity himself. 
“When the Jews said that they do not bow to idols, what they meant was that they do not bow to tyrants. People often have wondered how Jews have survived for so many thousands of years, and I feel that one answer is the refusal to bow to tyrants,” she said. 
The same relationship applies to the modern Jewish people and their current foes. 
“We are now facing a campaign that is explicitly orchestrated by tyrants,” Horn continued. “I think you can see evidence of that tyranny in how the language is identical in every boycott, every petition, every protest, every rally across this entire country and how that language is, in fact, taken directly from Hamas and Hezbollah.”
In the face of this threat, there is a responsibility – and a necessity – to speak out. 
“This moment is going to require us to stop bowing down before whatever is popular, and to tell the truth to ourselves and to everyone else about who we are and who we have always been,” Horn said. “We are going to have to educate our friends and neighbors instead of being trapped in the boxes that they have put us in.”
This is the most effective way to combat the fundamental lies of antisemitism, Horn said.
“Americans need to learn who Jews are, to learn the actual content of Jewish civilization instead of erasing Jewish life,” she said. “There is no way to fight antisemitism, with its denial of Jewish identity, without actually investing in teaching people the truth.”
It’s an investment that requires courage – the courage that Esther showed in the Megillah, appearing before King Ahasuerus at the risk of her own life.
“I have very good news for you from my travels around America, most people are not Haman,” Horn said. “Most people are Ahasuerus, the guy who says, ‘Oh, did I sign that decree? I must have been drunk.’ There is so much more ignorance than malice, and that is a huge opportunity.”
Horn shared the story of a college student who did not speak out in the face of antisemitic diatribes from professors and classmates but left college with deep regret over her silence and concluded with the classic Hebrew exhortation from the book of Joshua - Chazak v’ematz.
“Tonight, I want to offer you the words of the God of our ancestors, which all of us need as we meet this moment: Chazak v’ematz; be strong and courageous,” she said. “Be strong and courageous enough to know what is worth defending. Be strong and courageous when you enter that uncomfortable place, when you say what no one else has the guts to say, when you refuse to bow to tyrants. Be strong and courageous as you carry forth with you this ancient tradition that insists on the most uncomfortable truths and carries with it the antidote to tyranny.”

 

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