Is there a Final Solution to the Jewish question? - with Dara Horn

There's never been more coverage of Israel and the Jewish world and there's never been less of it worth trusting. That's why ARC Media exists and our subscribers are what make this possible. Join us at ARCMedia.org. And to our subscribers, thank you. You are listening to an ARC Media Podcast. This is the story of a tiny countercultural minority that refused to bow to tyrants, refused to assimilate into dominant empires. That is a story that goes on for thousands of years. So when the Jews say they don't bow to other gods, what they're really saying is they don't bow to tyrants. If you think about it that way, you realize that that is inseparable from the pattern of anti-Semitism for thousands of years. Because ultimately, when you have an antitronical movement, it pisses off time. And when you have a non-conformist movement, it pisses off dominant societies that need everyone to agree with them in order to validate their own ideas. The way I came to think about anti-Semitism is that anti-Semitism is essentially better understood, less as a bigotry or a bias than as a lie. It is a why that people use to gain or maintain power. It is 3.30 pm on Tuesday, August 11th here in New York City. It is 10.30 pm on Tuesday, August 11th in Israel. Before today's episode of Quick Housekeeping Note, on Thursday, October 22nd, just five days ahead of the Israeli elections, call me back, we'll hold a live taping at the Stryker Center in New York City. We're also down with Dan Shapiro, Dahlia Shindland, and Brett Stevens to discuss what's at stake in Israel's 2026 election and what its results will mean for the US-Israel relationship. Tickets have just gone on sale, so if you want to join us, please follow the link in the episode description. Now onto today's episode. In 2021, Dara Horn published the book People Love Dead Jews. The title alone was rattling, but it made a strong argument. America, Dara wrote, will canonize a murder Jew far more readily than it will engage with a living one. It became a best-seller, a won a National Jewish Book Award, and it turned into something close to a diagnostic term for how American culture actually relates to Jewish suffering. Five years later, after October 7th, after Bondi Beach, after several years in which nearly every assumption about Jewish identity in much of the English-speaking world has been tested, Dara Horn is back with a new book whose title does something even bolder. It's called The Final Solution to the Jewish Question, a love story for the living. It's out this September. Dara is deliberately taking the language, the Nazis use, to describe the extermination of European jury and repurposing it to ask, what would an actual solution, not a slogan or a hashtag look like? The book ranges wildly, the failures of Holocaust education, the long prehistory of the anti-Zionist movement, the quite compromises of what's been called the American Jewish Golden Age, and an investigation into an organized effort to poison artificial intelligence itself with anti-Jewish propaganda. Dara Horn has a doctorate in Hebrew in Yiddish literature from Harvard, she's taught at Yashiva University in Sarah Lawrence. Her last book named the disease, and this one claims to have found or at least argued toward a cure. My conversation with Dara Horn after this message. One of the things I've noticed over the last couple of years is how many people in my own circle have started learning Hebrew again, and a lot of them found their way to today's sponsor, Citizen Cafe. Here's the thing that nobody tells you about learning a language as an adult. It's not that you can't learn it, it's that most classes teach you the theory of the language instead of how to speak it. That's the part Citizen Cafe change, you're not memorizing conjugations for a test that never comes, you're in a conversation from day one, and the language starts to feel like something that belongs to you. Their teachers are Israeli, all their classes are online, and they work with students in over 25 countries, but what actually struck me is the community around it. Thousands of people learning together, showing up for each other, not just logging into an app on their own. In an industry that's all about automating everything, Citizen Cafe went the other way. This is the moment Hebrew stops being something you study and starts being something you're part of. To schedule your free intro session with Citizen Cafe, head now to the link in the show description or go to citizencafetlv.com. Dara, welcome to Call Me Back. Thank you so much for having me. I am really looking forward to this conversation on what is a very dark topic, but such are the books you write. Your book People of Dead Jews, I reference all the time, it had a huge impact on me and the way I think about the challenges and some of the opportunities we face. The title of your last book, People of Dead Jews, was very provocative. I didn't think anyone could come up with a more provocative title. This book, which is called The Final Solution to the Jewish Question, a love story for the living, borrows the most radioactive phrase in modern history to try to come up with a solution, which is The Final Solution. So why that title? This look actually came about because of what happened to me after I published People of Dead Jews, which as you mentioned was back in 2021. So well before October 7th. The premise of People of Dead Jews ultimately was that non-Jewish societies only find Jews acceptable if they have no power, whether that means they're politically impotent or dead. And in that book I explore sort of many situations in which this comes up and it's, you know, I go to Jewish heritage sites around the world, I talk about Holocaust commemoration and many other things. I really saw this book as just sort of an intellectual exploration of this problem. And then I was really surprised after the book came out that suddenly it was like a floodgate opened. Suddenly I had what felt like every Jew in America coming to me asking me for help, telling me their personal horror stories and experiences with anti-Semitism and asking me to fix this for them, which was shocking to me. I'm a novelist. I'm not a therapist. I feel like I made a mistake with writing People of Dead Jews because it was my first nonfiction book after writing five novels. And I did not realize that when you writing nonfiction book about a problem, people expect you to solve the problem at the end of the book. So people kept asking. And suddenly these asks became institutionalized after October 7th, I was recruited for this anti-Semitism advisory group at Harvard to the now former president of Harvard who as you may have heard did not take a whole lot of our advice. Right. In fact, it went so badly that I ended up as a witness in the congressional investigation. But now I have been thinking about this for three years. And I actually now have realized there's a lot we could be doing differently. And when I was writing in the post October 7th years, you speaking at events in the Jewish community and after every event, people would come up to you and unload their stories to you about what they have been seeing and experiencing since October 7th. And people are coming to you and describing what it was just astounding to me the amount of fear that people are coming to me with these stories. A lot of stories people came to me with that I didn't even put in the book because it's just too much like I'll give one example, a journalist came to me saying that the news organization that this person was working for was part of the union as this person told me this is a requirement, you know, part of my paycheck goes to this union. This union has just declared itself to be an anti Zionist union where Zionism will not be accepted in our union. And she's like no one will write a report about this because all of these various national news outlets are part of this union. Can you write about a please. Another example is, you know, this plot to poison artificial intelligence with anti-Semitic lies like a very rigorous plot. And it got to the point where I'm like, this wasn't what I set out to do, but obviously there's something about leadership where you know the way leadership happens is you look around and you see like someone ought to do fill in the blank and you look around and no one's doing it and then you're like, I guess it's me. Right. Okay. So if the problem that you diagnosed in your first book, which is the diasporic societies only know how to love Jews once their martyrs, you basically saying that these societies only accept Jews that don't have power or Jews who are dead. Are the only Jews that are celebrated or tolerated for that matter. Yes. So I mean, look in the last book, I begin with the story of something that happened at the Ant Frank Museum in Amsterdam, which was something happened way back in 2018 before the sort of thing was cool. It was a young Jewish man working at that museum. The museum would not allow him to wear his key pot of work. They had him hide it under a baseball hat. I sort of made this joke like why is the Ant Frank Museum forcing a Jew into hiding? Right. But of course the other element of that story was that they also had wiped the Israeli flag from their display of languages for their audio guide. And I mean, that was just an encapsulation of that. I mean, here at the Ant Frank Museum, like what is what the heck is the purpose of the Ant Frank Museum? So merging some of the ideas in that book with the book you have coming out now, if your critique or your diagnosis was that societies are all too happy to honor, celebrate, tolerate Jews who are powerless or dead, then what does it mean? to honor living Jews in a way that you would hope that societies would do it. There's a more work to be done in understanding how we got to this point and how to get out of it. This book explains how we got here by describing how it's impossible to understand this particular moment that we're in without really understanding this pattern, which has really been going on for 2200 years. And if you don't understand this pattern, you're going to fall for it. So let me explain what I mean by this. There's a positive story about Jewish civilization in life, and then there's a negative story about anti-Semitism and dead Jews. I used to think that I don't anymore. I now realize that those two stories are inseparable, inseparable. And when I realize there's a lot of the ways that Jews have tried to sort of fill in this blank, are themselves all still subject to anti-Semitic assumptions. So for example, often people say, "Oh, we should be celebrating Jewish contributions to society." Like, "Oh, we should be teaching kids about how Jews cured polio or something like this." Well, curing polio is not really the standard for earning public respect, right? That's kind of a high barred of clear. And so then I started thinking about, there's something weird about this. This is still in that box of Jews trying to prove that they're not evil. And that's what took me back to this ultimate question. So I started thinking about the actual very basic elements of Jewish civilization since ancient times. The groundbreaking ideas of this people, because ultimately this is the story of a tiny countercultural minority that refused to bow to tyrants, refused to assimilate into dominant empires. That is a story that goes on for thousands of years, right? Even the sort of core ideas of Jewish tradition like monotheism, the covenant between God and the people, Dittora. Ultimately, if you think about those ideas in the ancient world, those ideas are not only religious or spiritual ideas, they're political ideas. Because other societies in the ancient world have, you know, they have lots of gods. One of the gods might be the dictator, right? People are expected to think the Pharaoh is a god. They were expected to worship the Roman emperor. So if you think about it that way, if you think about Jewish civilization as this counter culture, this anti-turanical movement essentially since ancient times, you realize that that is inseparable from the pattern of anti-semitism for thousands of years. Because ultimately, when you have an anti-tronical movement, it pisses off time. So the way I came to think about anti-semitism is that anti-semitism is essentially better understood, less as a bigotry or a bias than as a lie. It is a lie that people use to gain or maintain power. And in the book, I call this the big lie. And to me, this also sort of cuts through all of the noise because today there's all this discussion in the Jewish community. Oh, there's right wing anti-semitism and left wing anti-semitism with anti-semitism versus anti-scientism. No, no, no, no, no. It is all exactly the same. It's all the big lie. The big lie is always the same in every era, every place. Jews are destroying what you value the most. Okay. This is a lie that is told by people who want to gain or maintain power. The only thing that's different in different eras and different settings is what you value the most. And ultimately, what I realized is that what we were lacking in the American Jewish community is this patterned recognition for this lie. Because once you recognize this lie, it's possible to inoculate people against it. Okay. So in the book, you talk about this idea, how to teach the Jewish story. And you say the opposite of hatred isn't love or empathy, it's curiosity, which really is a direct challenge to how Holocaust education has been designed or kind of has evolved for a couple generations as like an exercise in empathy and also an exercise in universalism. Yes. A version of this can happen to anybody or versions of it have happened to a lot of people not just Jews. And your book calls all of that a failure. Yes. So why is one question and what's wrong with love or empathy? Right. Here I am coming out against love and empathy. Right. I'm really a prophet of doom here. It's right. Yeah. I mean, come on. This is not I'm so much fun to hang out with our knife. Yeah. I spent about a year and I should say this is before October 7th, I spent about a year researching the way the Holocaust is taught in American schools. I went to museums around the country. I met with teachers. I went to teacher training conferences and institutes. I met with people who write curricula. And what was really striking to me was how essentially Jews had been erased from the story that was being taught about the Holocaust. And I know that sounds insane because people say like, oh, this is totally about Jews. Oh, no. The Jews don't have a speaking part in this story. The way it was being taught was as you mentioned, this model of empathy, right, where the idea is you're trying to find what it is that you have in common with others and that that's supposed to be how you overcome bigotry. That's sort of the pedagogical concept of teachers and educators were drawing on. And ultimately what that meant was they would find Holocaust victims who were most relatable, so to speak. So somebody like Anne Frank who grew up in a Western country, didn't speak a Jewish language, was protected by her non-Jewish neighbors. This is like the most atypical possible Holocaust story. The vast majority of I think 85 percent of Jews killed the Holocaust were Yiddish speakers probably over 99 percent of Jews who endured the Holocaust had no interaction with anyone we would call an upstander or righteous gentile. What I realized was there was a foundational flaw in that approach because the premise was that you shouldn't hate Jews because Jews are just like everyone else, right? That's the love and empathy piece. But the problem with this is that the Nazi project was not about killing six million people who were just like you and me is about erasing Jewish civilization. And when I went on this year-long tour of American Holocaust education, I saw that essentially American educators were participating in this erasure because there was no attempt to teach anything about who Jews are. I remember being in the Dallas Holocaust museum and this thing I talked about in the book and I was at a teacher conference there and I was talking to one of the docents and I said what the students usually ask when they come through the museum and he said you know what they ask are there still Jews alive today? Because if you went to this museum you kind of wouldn't know, right? I mean this and what I noticed was like there's no Jews after 1945 in Holocaust education. You describe in your new book that for most non-Jews what they know of Jews is they hear about like the Israelites when they study they're like Biblical yes maybe yeah maybe or they hear about an in church or something yes and it's interesting they say Israelites but they don't study Jews you know quote unquote yeah they don't tell you those are Jews right those are Jews so there's the Israelites and then the next time you hear anything about Jews is from 1933 to 1945 correct correct and then 1945 ends and the story of the Jews ends and that's it correct and I want to be clear I mean I'm not arguing against Holocaust education especially in this era when we're facing so much Holocaust denial it's mandated in 28 states or something like that it should be 50 but what that means is that the only thing students were warning in school about Jews if they weren't anything at all is that Jews for people who are murdered in Europe between 1933 and 1945 and their murders are supposed to teach us some nice lesson about humanity or empathy or something and what that means is that we've outsourced everything else that students are going to learn about Jews to TikTok and we are living with the results so when TikTok then tells those same students that you know Jews are white European colonizers who have no business in the Middle East and are like stealing land from righteous brown people or something like that students have no reason to disagree with that because you know that fits with what they heard so I mean this is like you're just leaving this wide open and what I've realized ultimately is this is a deliberate ignorance this is a deliberate ignorance which falls into this sort of like pattern of suppressing Jewish civilization for thousands of years I can say more about that okay I want I want to come back to that so there's something else though I mean it's not conscious by the people doing it but yes but there's something else going on here which I have experienced there's these stories now every week like every day of these acts of violence or harassment or intimidation against Jews the most recent one just because it's fresh my mind was this kosher restaurant in Montreal that was just burned down like oh like that's just another occurrence not an organ of the Israeli government not an organ of the idea of not that that would make it okay but I'm just saying just a clearly a Jewish owned restaurant in Montreal just gets burned down over Shabbat and that's just that doesn't even shock us anymore we're numb to this and yet we you and I and others feel like we're taking crazy pills because this is not normal this is what is happening is crazy and when we tell people this they think you're overreacting or you think you're manipulating that actually is not the most alarming reaction I get when I tell people these stories or flag these things for people they say oh yeah that's terrible it's awful but you're acting like there's a holocaust so they all know the holocaust and that's all they know so any pattern or trend or data or anecdote you point to that falls short of I mean this is going to be harsh I'm going to say but falls short of you know the Warsaw ghetto or Auschwitz they think you're like making something out of nothing and I think so that's been another effect of all this emphasis on the only thing people are taught about the Jews is the holocaust is they think that is the case study of when bad things happen to Jews and anything short of an attempted extermination is like you're trying to make a lot of noise out of not much but there's something much deeper than that which is that focusing on that eliminates pattern recognition anti-semitism is always eliminationist and what I mean by that doesn't necessarily mean just murdering everyone there are many forms of eliminating Jews from your society there's the entire Middle East and North Africa from which the entire Jewish population was completely emptied in the 20th century 25% of Tripoli was Jewish, you know, 30% of Baghdad was Jewish. I mean, these cities were more Jewish than New York City ever has been. How many Jews live in those cities today? Zero. Right. So I mean, you know, and we don't even talk about it. Like that doesn't even have a name that doesn't even have a name, right? The emptying of the, you know, every single Jewish community from the entire Middle Eastern world. But we are not teaching people ultimately is something deeper than this. When I talk about the big lie, which I mentioned earlier, anti-Semitism always follows the pattern of the big lie. The importance of that big lie is that it gives you a righteous reason to want to eliminate Jews, whether that means expelling people from your society, whether it means pushing them out of public life, whether it means pushing people out of professions, whether it means, you know, not letting these people perform at your music dance festival, whatever it is, right? Those eliminationist tactics are made to feel righteous because you think, oh, I'm standing up for my societies ideals, whatever they are. So that is the structure. And so to me, this has to be taught as a lie. And the way we have to teach this as a lie is demonstrating all the different times in which this has been used as a lie by people who need to gain or maintain power. And to me, the focus on the Holocaust has eliminated the kinds of patterns we could be talking about. For example, talking about the Nazi Holocaust is something that happened between 1933 and 1945 is dramatically inaccurate because Nazism didn't die with the Holocaust. And what I mean by Nazism not dying with the Holocaust isn't just, oh, there's now neo-Nazis today who are whatever weight nationalists harassing people in various places around the world. That's not even what I mean. I'm going to give a very concrete example that I give in the book. Yo, I'm Von Lares is somebody that, yes, no high school teacher who's teaching about the Holocaust is probably ever heard of this person. Yo, I'm Von Lares was a Nazi ideologue. He joined the Nazi party way before it was cool in 1929, even before that he had already written fan letters to Hodja Meeh al-Husayni, who I know your listeners know was the Mufti of Jerusalem. This was a Palestinian Arab leader who had already in the 1920s successfully incited mob violence and massacres of Jews in cities like Jerusalem and Havron and Jaffa. So Yo, I'm Von Lares was writing fan mail to Hodja Meeh al-Husayni in 1929, complimenting him on his work. Hodja Meeh al-Husayni then during World War II comes to Berlin, spends the entire war employed by the Third Reich to spread Nazi propaganda to the Arab world. Yo, I'm Von Lares is a Nazi ideologue. He was working for Gurbals and then for Himmler. He published, I think, 27 books in 10 years about Nazi ideology. And to him, what was so important about Nazi ideology is this point that other, that Holocaust scholars have made, which is that the Nazi regime was not anti-Semitic because it was racist. It was racist because it was anti-Semitic. And Yo, I'm Von Lares expresses this in his work because ultimately the argument he is making is that as he puts it, Jews have tried to convince the world of a great why, which is that all people are equal. Ultimately, this was the Nazi regime like all anti-Semitic regimes was against the content of Jewish civilization. Right. This is an objection to the content of Jewish civilization as an anti-Toramical movement. All of this would be interesting and kind of a fun footnote to the Third Reich, except for what happens to Von Lares after the fall of the Nazi regime in 1945. He escapes justice by going to Argentina. In Buenos Aires, he's super into dictators. He works for one Peron until Peron is deposed. He then starts working for the Egyptian embassy in Argentina, creating their bespoke campaign against Argentine Jews, which is an interesting use of Egyptian funds. He's then recruited by the Nasser regime. Gamal Abdel Nasser was a dictator of Egypt in starting in 1956. He recruits Von Lares to come to Cairo to create anti-Israel propaganda that is then used throughout the entire Arab League. Von Lares does that for the rest of his life. And my favorite coded to this story is that in 1956, he reunites in Cairo with his longtime friend, Hajimin al-Husayni, who then converts him to Islam. You know, oh, and then some of Von Lares material then gets translated into Russian and repurposed by the Soviets. Right. Right. Why are we pretending that this ended? So that's one example. Imagine if we had spent like maybe four minutes of the time we spent teaching people about Nazi anti-Semitism, teaching them about, say, Soviet anti-Zionism. Okay. So let's spend a minute on that because I would suspect even many of our listeners listened to this conversation today, don't know what you mean when you say what it would mean to study Soviet anti-Semitism. There was rabid anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, but that's not the point you're making. No, you're describing a very specific approach to anti-Semitism. Which has familiar echoes today. It could be interpreted as very tolerant of Jews, just not tolerant of a certain kind of Jew and a certain kind of Judaism. Yes. Soviet anti-Zionism. I want to be really clear. Sorry. Soviet anti-Zionism, but it is anti-Semitism. But go ahead. Of course it is. Right. I mean, then it's so blinding. We obviously. Okay. So explain. So for your listeners who might not be aware of this, the Bolsheviks in 1918 are reaching civil war to take over what's going to become the Soviet Union from what the former Russian Empire. They're at this point, two million Jews in the former Russian Empire. They obviously want these people on their side in the civil war. The Soviet Communist Party at this point creates what it calls the "Evseccy" a Jewish sections of the Communist Party whose purpose is to spread Marxist propaganda among the Jews of the former Russian Empire. This is led by Jews. And they're slogan in 1918 is we are not anti-Semitic. We are just anti-Zionist. This is in 1918. It's 30 years before the state of Israel. It's probably not about Netanyahu. And, you know, oh, of course, also their Marxists. So they're also anti-religious. So they love Jews. You just can't be a Zionist. You can't study Hebrew. You can't practice Judaism. But otherwise Jews are great and we love them. And of course, in the purp in the process of not being anti-Semitic and only being anti-Zionist, the Soviet Union ultimately manages to persecute and torture and execute and imprisonment. And discriminated against tens of thousands, ultimately millions of Soviet Jews suffer under this regime, which is officially not anti-Semitic and just anti-Zionist. And they ultimately spread this to their client states, their satellite states in Eastern Europe. You see this spoke anti-Zionist, so to speak, campaigns happens in Poland in 1968. I mean, how many Jews are left in Poland after the Holocaust? Not a whole lot. Right. But we managed to get rid of another, I think it's 30,000 of them in 1968 by saying, we are not anti-Semitic. We are just anti-Zionist and then they push all Jews out of their jobs in Poland. By the late 1960s, the Soviet Union creates this elaborate campaign of anti-Zionism. And this is where they start generating all the slogans that we still hear so often today. Zionism is racism. Zionism is colonialism. Zionism is apartheid. Zionism is genocide. These are all slogans that go back to the 1960s and 70s. They are directly from the KGB, from the Soviet secret police. Can you imagine if we had spent five minutes teaching students about this massive hate campaign that emptied societies of their Jews, right, pushed Jews out of public life, persecuted Jews in the Soviet Union and its client states? It's astonishing. And it's like, I remember showing a short film about this two teachers that I was training. It was literally a one minute film. And in this case, it was Jewish community teachers and they all just stared at me. They're like, why didn't I know about this? Okay. So explain how 19th or 20th century anti-Zionism relates or connects directly to what we were seeing. Rip apart college campuses and different all aspects really of diasporic life after October 7th. And these same slogans are preserved even after the fall of the Soviet Union in the Arab world. And certainly by the Iranian regime after 1979. Because the Iranian regime is sort of a malcomating Marxism and Islamism. And that's sort of where it's drawing its power, its rhetorical strength is from those two sources. This is an elaborate and extremely well financed campaign. So when we go to like what happened, let's say, and you said on college campuses, oh, man, Dan, I wish it was college campuses and not labor unions and cities. And health unions and hospitals and companies. And I mean, this is like we tell ourselves as college campuses so that we can compartmentalize it and it's not. What we are looking at is an organized international elimination as tape movement. And it's extremely well funded. And it is extremely well organized. And what we're seeing is this is this is an effort by tyrannical regimes to push Jews out of public life and to discredit Jews in every way. I feel like when people say that, it sounds like they're wearing a tinfoil hat. And what I want to be clear is what I bring in this book is the receipts. Okay. Say more. I'm going to give an example. I had an experience where I was I was asked to do and ask me anything event on Reddit. The person who was running this event was working in it was someone who was a volunteer moderator for a Jewish subreddit. This person happens to also be a data scientist. And what he noticed was that on October 7th itself October 7th 2023 there were these gigantic forums on Reddit that had nothing to do with the Middle East had nothing to do with Jews had nothing to do with Israel. These were like, you know, 20 million people are all in this, you know, subscribe to this forum about documentary film, something like that. Right. Those kinds of forums. On October 7th, they all suddenly became flooded with, you know, globalized the antifada. You know, all of the slogans we hear, you know, this is, you know, hummus is the resistance and, you know, pushing out Jewish users out of those forums. And this was just so bizarre that people couldn't help but notice it. And what this person and other people who were working with him started to do was. to track the people who were changing the character of these subreddits. And ultimately what they uncovered was a plot by a group of people to change the content of Reddit and Wikipedia on anything on a Jewish or Israeli topic. He was able to trace these people back to Hamas and he was able to determine why they were doing this, which is that those companies Wikipedia has a relationship with Google. So they are the top feeder for Gemini and for Google's emerging large language models. Reddit has a contract with OpenAI and ChatGPT to be a top feeder for their sources. So ultimately what these people realized was if you change the entry for Zionism on Wikipedia, then that will forever be the answer whenever somebody asks an LLM what is Zionism. And so if you look at what Zionism the entry in Wikipedia said in 2022, it said it defined it correctly as the National Liberation Movement of the Jewish people that seeks to reestablish a homeland in the ancestral homeland of the land of Israel. Today. I have it here from the chapter of your book. So it's you have here by early 2024, I'm quoting from your book, the world's most used reference source had redefined Zionism as quote, an ethno cultural nationalist movement that emerged in Europe in the late 19th century and aimed for the establishment of a Jewish state through the colonization of a land outside of Europe. And that was again early 2024. So the pivot point here is the post October 7th world. This was like a small group of extremely dedicated people who took this on as their responsibility to basically rewrite Jewish history, whitewash Hamas to make it look like a non terror group. I mean, it was extremely explicit. You actually chronicle how organized this like armies of editors working on this minute to minute, like there's basically like assigned shifts so that this is a very comprehensive effort. Oh, yes. What you see is, I mean, this is what you're data people work in this field will call a data poisoning plot. But what that I, what I then do is I wind back the clock 500 years to the invention of the printing press. And I show how what we think of as a medieval blood libel went viral because of the printing press and not just because Oh printing press made it easier to spread information. It was just one bishop in Trent who like basically literally hired what we today would call influencers to publish and draw cartoons and print all these things, chatbooks and things about this case. So what you see is like how much this relies on a lie, how much it relies on manipulation. And so you know, that's why I think what's most important for people to understand is that there's nothing organic about what Jews are experiencing today. This is not like an organic up swelling of, you know, popular sentiment or something. This is a very organized plot. And to me, that's why it is so important for people to understand and be taught about this as a lie that people used to gain or maintain power and ask who benefits from that lie. Okay. I want to get to that. But I do want to just stay on this point about what's happening with Reddit and how it serves as the content basis for the LLM's. I want to give you a receipt because this receipt comes from one of the ARC media team members that flagged this for us. It's a clip that landed on one of their feeds, social media feeds. I want to play it for you. And then I want you to react to it. What if Germany won World War II? Part two. The war is over. Germany has won. The true consequences of that victory are only beginning. The Holocaust continues. Year after year, millions more people disappear into concentration camps. Entire communities are erased. Families that would have shaped future generations. Vanish from history before they ever get the chance. Israel is never established. Instead, a Palestinian state emerges as the dominant power in the region, reshaping the Middle East for generations. As decades pass, the United States builds a close relationship with Palestine, turning it into one of America's most important allies. The political tensions that define the Middle East never develop. The war on terror never happens. Trillions of dollars spent fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are never spent. Thousands of American soldiers never deploy overseas. Entire generations grow up in a country focused more inward instead of fighting conflicts abroad. All because the beaches of Normandy were never taken. So, that was believe it or not. That is a revisionist history social media post that was on TikTok. There's a whole video component to this thing. Then you go through the comments. Basically, there are comments from people on the left, comments from the people on the right, which is pretty clear. They're all basically in agreement that the world would be a better place head Hitler had been able to finish the job. Now, this is jarring on so many levels. In part, the content for it, I think, is created through some of the methodologies that you are describing here. Yes. I mean, look, there's a lot we could talk about in terms of deep fakes and things like that. It's very easy to distort media. When I say that anti-semitism is a lie, that means the way to teach people, to inoculate people against anti-semitism, is for people to understand when they're being manipulated. Okay. And that means that they have to understand, first of all, something that psychologists call the "Aluzary Truth Effect." Aluzary Truth Effect is a pretty robustly studied concept in psychology, which is that when you hear a lie repeated enough times, you start to believe it. You think there must be something to it. Why do I keep hearing it over and over again? Zionism is genocide. Zionism is genocide. Zionism is genocide. Zionism is genocide. Zionism is like, after a while, you're like, well, do I have some weird association between Zionism and genocide? I wonder why. I mean, it's like, well, guess why. Right. So that's one piece of it. Another piece of it, though, is understanding, when I say understanding when you're being manipulated, you know, you don't pay for TikTok. You don't pay for Instagram. That means that you're the product. And if you are the product, who is benefiting from that product? This is something that a lot of people are not thinking about and need to be. And, you know, to me, this is sort of the story, one of the things that we teach about when we teach about this pattern of antisemitism about the big lie that repeats is how the lies always accelerate it through new media. Whether new media is the printing press, whether it's the radio, a book instead of a scroll, and you know, like, you can go back, you know, alphabets, new media is like the Wild West, because you don't yet know who's credible. You don't have a system yet. You don't have norms. You don't have guidelines. You don't have a sense of like how to determine who's credible and who isn't. And because you don't have that credibility is simply determined by consensus. This is how the LLM's do it. Oh, the consensus answer to this. Well, the consensus means popularity. And guess what? This is very popular because people like to blame others for their problems. I don't know those origins of that clip that you shared. But when you think about the amount of power that tyrannical regimes have over all of those videos that you're seeing every day, there's a question about who is benefiting. Like is there a reason why we keep talking about people murdered one conflict and not in another? The first thing the Iranians did when they were slaughtering 30,000 people in two weeks was to clear an internet blackout. Right. And you can do that when you're running a tyrannical regime. We don't have the power to do that in a democracy. But when you're running a tyrannical regime, you can do an internet blackout. So you can completely control the narrative. You control the flow of information. And to me, if you are teaching about anti-Semitism as a question of love and empathy rather than about manipulation, you've missed the entire story. We'll be right back. Over the past couple of years, Call Me Back has grown into something much bigger than we ever expected. A place for clarity, context, and honest conversations at a time when those things can seem hard to find. That's what Archimedia is all about. Building a truly independent voice, which means no one shaping what we say or how we say it. To help support our rapidly expanding operations, we created Inside Call Me Back. Our members only feed. If Call Me Back has been meaningful to you and you want to be part of what we're building, I hope you'll join us. You can subscribe at Archimedia.org or through the link in the show notes. And to our insiders, thank you. And we're back with Dara Horn. Okay. I want to talk about your criticism of this whole idea of the American Jewish Golden Age. Because there's a lot of lamenting about the end of or the loss of the Golden Age of American Jewish life. And you really take that apart in the book. And you take it apart in the sense that we, the American Jewish community made a series of compromises to get this golden age. And you all but say blew up in our face. Well, so this was a piece by Frank on four that was published in the Atlantic. Yeah, and the Atlantic in 2024 that said, oh, the Golden Age American Jews is ending that he was sort of talking about the sort of there was this prosperity and acceptance of American Jews after World War II. And that now this age is coming to an end. It's actually a very well supported and important article. I'm not dismissing this whole idea. The piece of it that I am dismissing is that in that article, he literally says that after the Holocaust non Jews felt bad about anti-Semitism. And therefore they stop hating Jews. This is a fantasy. It's not true. There are actual sociological studies from the late 1940s in the United States that demonstrate that the Holocaust had zero zero effect on non Jews attitudes towards the United States. If anything, it exacerbated anti-Semitism because people thought like, oh, well, if they're smoke, there's fire, you know, millions of people can't be wrong. You know, what do these people do to deserve this? And in fact, I would say that, you know, the late 1940s, if in fact were as I put it one of several high water marks for signs outside of businesses. saying things like no dogs and Jews allowed in the United States. What did change this situation? Was not non-Jews magically feeling bad and changing their attitudes? It was American Jewish activism. American Jewish activism is what changed the situation. And this took a few different forms. One is warfare, one is policy, you know, fighting for policy and civil rights legislation. These were, you know, national Jewish organizations that took the lead in changing policies, changing laws. This was at the same time, obviously, the black Americans were fighting a much broader multi-front fight against legal segregation in the South. The water of times these groups worked together. And so that was one piece of it. Another piece of it, though, was what you might call cultural activism, which you have. And this is my friend, Rachel Gordon, who's a historian at University of Florida, has, she has a great book that she wrote about this called Post-Worst Stories that's about sort of this active on efforts of American Jewish writers and thinkers to publish what she describes as anti-antisemitism novels and movies, you know, sort of, you know, making anti-semitism look anti-American. The most famous example of this is a book in a film called The Gentleman's Agreement, which is the chapter of the tar chapter of the book. Yes, chapter of the book is called Yes, Gentleman's Agreement. In the movie, this is sort of saying like, oh, there's this gentleman's agreement that we don't let Jews move into our fancy suburb or something like that. But what I point out and what she points out as well is that there was a compromise built into these efforts. One is that American Jewish leaders at that time made essentially a conscious decision to rebrand Jewish civilization as a religion. This was a tactical decision that made sense in post-World War II America when you had sort of a one of America's periodic religious revivals is happening. We're fighting the Godless Soviets in the Cold War, right? I mean, this was sort of like a savvy way to rebrand Jews as opposed to the way the Nazis had branded them as a race. So you start seeing all these articles in, you know, rabbis publishing in Life magazine and things like that from mass audiences about, you know, Judaism as a living face and this kind of thing. So this was a vast attempt to rebrand Judaism as a religion. It succeeded and I would call that a compromise because Judaism is in a religion. Right. Jews have a religion. I mean, to say Judaism is religion, but Jewish civilization is not a religion. There's millions of secular Jews. Personally, I've never met a secular Mormon. And as you point out in the book, a secular Jew is as Jewish as a black hat Hasidic Jew. Correct. And that's even according to the lights of the black hat Hasidic Jew, right? I mean, this is, we are not a tradition that relies on, you know, you have to believe X, Y and Z or otherwise you're out of the club. Okay, but, Tara, how do you describe what Jews are? It's actually not complicated. It's just old. A lot of the categories that we think of is, you know, identity categories in modern life, right? Choose predate the category of race. Just predate the category of nationality, Jews predate, Jews predate the category of religion when Hebrew was being revived as a spoken language, Hebrew linguists had to root through the Hebrew Bible to find a word to me in religion because Hebrew didn't have one. Jews are a type of social group that was common in the ancient world, very uncommon today. A joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture. And that was a sentence in English and in Hebrew, it's one word that's two letters long. Um, Jews are on Israel, the people of Israel, and that's who Jews have always been. And the reason it's not familiar to people in modern societies is because guess what? Empires destroyed most ancient groups that were like this. Most ancient groups succumbed to empires and assimilated into empires. And the Jews are one of the few from ancient times that didn't. And so that's what makes it so, oh, it's so hard to understand. Well, it's only hard to understand because everybody's thinking in this imperial fashion. So ultimately to go back to sort of the compromise that this meant American Jews took on. First of all, it meant that Jews put a lot of energy into redefining themselves as a religion. But what this has done is it has made American Jews unable to understand what is happening to them right now, which is an attack on the concept of Jewish peoplehood. Because if you don't even know what Jewish peoplehood is, you don't understand what you're dealing with. Right. But the golden age of American Judaism was in part about erasing the idea of peoplehood. That was the compromise. That was the deal that you write about. And Dan, there's even more than that actually because there's also another piece of this gentleman's agreement is not only this redefinition of Judaism of Jewish civilization as or Jews as a religion. When you look at the actual policy recommendations and legislation that national Jewish organizations were pushing for at the time, they were pushing for what at the time was thought of as a color blind model against discrimination. So one example of this and the historian Christopher Meglet goes into this in her book, she's a great book called a Rosenberg by any other name, which is about Jewish name changing in America. And in that book she talks about how many Jews went to court to change their names to avoid anti-Semitic discrimination. In the 1940s and the United States, it wasn't about incidents. It was about you couldn't get a job. You couldn't rent an apartment. You can stay in a hotel. Right. I mean, these are life limiting things. So for example, one of the ways that employers would discriminate against Jews was eliminating any application to a job that had a Jewish sounding name on it. So Jews then went to court and changed their names to something less Jewish sounding to avoid this life limiting discrimination. Employers then started publishing application forms that asked for your parents names for your grandparents names. Right. It would say, you know, who what's your pastor's name? You know, you know, I would literally say, you know, have you or your father ever legally changed your name, explain fully. And so the tactic that the American Jewish organized groups did at that time was to go to court and make those kinds of questions illegal, which we all are beneficiaries of that. Right. I mean, nothing to complain about that. But think about what that tactic meant. It basically what they considered victory over anti-Semitic discrimination. The big win was that Jews could now pass. That was the win. Jews don't have to be Jewish in public. Compare that with something like the gay rights movement. The gay rights movement pointed out that, you know, it was about 15 years ago in the American military. There was this idea, don't ask, don't tell where it was like, you could be gay in the military, but nobody was going to make you disclose that, right? And ultimately the gay rights movement identified that this is in fact a homophobic legislation because it's accommodating homophobia. You don't want to offend people who are homophobic. Right. And ultimately, you know, that's why the gay rights movement ultimately landed on this idea of pride. Like the goal was not to like be able to go through your life in the closet. The goal was to be fully accepted in American life. And so what to me is so interesting is that, you know, we are this quote, golden age of American Jews essentially was based on this idea that you were supposed to be able to pass. And if there's a long history to that goes back to the names of patient in Europe, this is a failed movement. And to me, the ultimate failure of it is that at no point is anyone trying to disrupt the idea that Jews are innately disgusting. Right. No one's trying to disrupt that at all. And, you know, to me, that means that you have allowed that concept to just sit there and you're not addressing it. And it's, it's made it impossible to fight against Jewish peoplehood, to understand when you're being attacked on the concept of Jewish peoplehood. And it also shows this sort of internalization of antisemitism. The people don't even, we're aren't even aware that they have. There are, you know, there's a big debate. And I'm sure you heard this all the time that we're losing a whole generation of Jews. There's this whole generation of Jews that feel disconnected from Israel, you know, the number of Jews that voted for Mamdani. And obviously this is now an issue that's rearing its head again right now because of what's happening in Michigan with the Senate race. So, first of all, it seems to me based on your book, you are not that alarmed by this data out there about the number of Jews that have quote unquote turned on Israel in the diaspora. Yes, wouldn't it be nice if this hate movement had something to do with Israel? Anything to do with anything real happening in Israel? It doesn't. It doesn't. And I mean, that was brought home to me when I was serving on this committee at Harvard. I'm going to give just one example of this. I remember it was in November of 2023 and the students were staging this whole national walkout of class. It wasn't just at Harvard. It was at schools and universities around the country. And at Harvard, the students came, you know, these anti-Israel protesters came into the classes with megaphone, you know, long live the intifada walk out to show your support for a ceasefire in Gaza. To me, what was most revealing about this particular moment was that it happened during a ceasefire in Gaza. I mean, like you're facing, you know, this is an Islamist movement whose purpose is to conquer the Middle East and the West. So there's really nothing that Israel can be doing that would change that ideological movement. And what we are seeing here is as I key talking about this elimination is hate movement. The amount of pressure that this movement exerts on people, especially young people who don't even understand what that pressure is or don't even understand how to identify it as pressure is just so relentless. It is an effort to just harass anyone who doesn't agree. And that's how you know that this is a hate movement because, you know, there's whole discussion of, oh, is it is a criticism of Israel? What does it spill into anti-Semitism? No, no, no, no, no. There's two things. There's one that's actual conversations about Israeli policies, which we can talk about until the cows going home. And that's what you do on this podcast with people far more informed than I am about everything in the Middle East. So there's that. And then there's a movement whose purpose is to push out a public life, anyone who disagrees. That's how you know that this is sponsored by tyrannical regimes because the insistence that you have to recite the party line. That's the insistence. And that that has to be done through pressure campaigns. It has to be done through harassment. It has to be done through vandalism. It has to be done through personal attacks. It has to be done through death threats. It has to be done by going to your employer smearing you online. Right. The amount of pressure that this takes. I mean, this is harassment and intimidation. And that's what people are facing. But to go to your question about the younger generation. You know, I often will hear that, oh, the younger generation is turning away from Israel because of, you know, whatever, fill in the blank things that have happened in Israel. And I wish that young people were so informed and the reason that they cared about this is because you know They're closely following Israeli politics that you know They've been like tracking what's going on with the Palestinian authority and I'm like no There's one reason one reason only Those people get all of their information from their phone and their phones have been colonized by Teranical regimes that are paying billions and billions of dollars to push whatever they want into these people's eyeballs all day long So you know to me that is like a much larger problem about how people get their information and the lack of skepticism Which is why in this in the Tel Institute? You know, I have this new nonprofit. Yeah, which will link to in the show notes This is a program for you know public schools. It's public schools private schools There's also a version of it for within the Jewish community for you know Benamit's for students and things like that which is teaching this what I call one story Which is the story of Jewish civilization and the dynamics of anti-Semitism and how they're intertwined And the choices that people have made to allow a civilization to adapt and be resilient for thousands of years But a lot of what we're teaching is how to understand when you might be being manipulated That's why I think it's so important to define anti-Semitism as a why rather than simply as a bigotry because so much of it is about People who want to gain or maintain power The other way that Jews tend to respond to it is by stepping into the defendant's dock and trying to robot every why Right like you know, here's 10 reasons why Israel's not committing genocide Here's 10 reasons why Israel's not a colonial estate and what's you do that? You've already lost because then you've accepted the terms of the argument Instead of saying who is making this accusation and why and what I've noticed is that you know I speak at a lot of college campuses and it often will happen that some student in a cafe will get up and ask Costal questions and I just answer these questions and I always expect those students to sort of come back at me, you know heckle be more be like well What about this and what about this and they never never do they never do and this used to puzzle me and then I realized I'm like Oh, they don't know anything they got up to the microphone They said Zionism is genocide that was the beginning in the end of what they knew and what I noticed is that often after these events Jewish students would come up to me and say like oh, you know that girl's been harassing us all semester And you know you just destroyed her and I'm like you could do this too and then we're like oh We don't know as much as you do and I'm like you really don't need a PhD to answer to respond to an argument that's three words long And what I realized is the real difference between me and these students is that they have to live with this harasser And I don't but what that means is what these young Jewish people need it's not just knowledge what they really need is courage What they really need is courage and this goes back to thousands of years of the Jewish people's heritage of standing up to the tyrants this is like I've called this before the queen Esther moment like you get to that moment where you're like well If I stand up in this moment, I could be killed or maybe doxed right or or harassed online There's this moment where like when you stand up and finally say the thing that you've been waiting to say you suddenly discover How many people actually agree with you and everybody's just been sitting around waiting for somebody to say it and that somebody could be you To me at the most important thing we have to teach our students is actually this idea of courage But you know, I'm not sure I agree with you fully for the following reason I think part of the problem is courage and courage is hard. It's not it's not an easy thing to teach It's not an easy thing to model. I mean, it would be wonderful, but I just it's not sadly It's not shocking to me that it's not happening But the other problem is so many Jews in the diaspora They were raised with a Judaism that didn't require too much of an investment by them So their entire lives have been about a Judaism that didn't require them to be literate about Judaism Jewish ideas Jewish rituals Jewish history to not have lived them to not have enjoyed them You know, I have two categories of peers who have kids around my age one category are the kids who go to campus and they are the Courageous ones that you're hoping they will be right and then there's the other category which are basically You know what like what do I need this service for? I don't want to be socially isolated. I don't want to be ostracized like I don't need it So I'll just play that like I'm not looking for a fight I won't embrace or advocate for my Judaism because it's just a hassle So this is why I built the Tel Institute was exactly this problem that you're talking about but also to sort of enable people to have these skills to Recognize whether being manipulated also to understand like the essential question of why the Jews and that question does go back to To the value proposition of being Jewish. It's like a lifelong course master class in resilience and courage That's a huge piece of what it means to me Jewish what happened was I developed this for public schools And I've gotten amazing results from public schools where I've taught it I have to say there's so much more ignorance and then Alice out there and that is such an opportunity That's why I feel like this is absolutely in the American public a solvable problem This really truly is a solvable problem There's a way to change the way that we're teaching about this There's a way to change this conversation. There is a way to prepare people for this I started getting so many requests from within the Jewish community for this That ultimately my team and I developed a benign midst of a version of this This is based on a lot of research that's been done about radicalization and things like that And when you know and manipulation online and what you realize is that there's a concept researchers called pre-bunking Which is far more successful than debunking In other words, you prepare someone for the kind of manipulation they're likely to encounter Rather than trying to debunk a lie after it's already been absorbed which is much much harder And so that's why we developed this program for bar and butt midst of students Because we felt like this is an age where people have the maturity to be able to understand these ideas But also have not yet been satcher and didn't necessarily by the kind of lies that they're going to encounter as they get older And as they have to make more and more decisions about social groups and those kinds of things So this is what we developed because yes, I think that we need to inoculate people against the lie And we need to find more and more ways for people to understand as you say the value proposition of living a Jewish life And can I tell you where I see it the most is in the anti-Israel movement They're usually like white non-Jewish American students who come to my event They're wearing a kaffir and they get up and they you know ask their hostile questions and whatever And I used to feel intimidated by these people but I'm a mother of 14-agers And at some point I just realized like wow, I'm not scared of teenagers And at that point I stopped feeling intimidated by them and I started feeling really sorry for them Because I would look at these people and I'd be like wow, this is sad like Unlike my children. Do you don't have anything from your own culture to wear? You don't have a way to like gather with other people in an intergenerational community and sit in a circle once a week and chant meaningful words that make you feel like you're part of a bigger story Like my kids do that every week on a shop is dinner But like you know, you don't have that you know, you have to go sit in a circle and be like chanting slogans And there's like this emptiness that I think a lot of people are looking to fill And I think that they're looking for a way to be part of a bigger story And that is the value proposition of Jewish life is that you know, there's this understanding that like You're part of this larger historical consciousness You're part of this like vast intergenerational chain of meaning and that you get to bring your own meaning to it So Darry, do you think there is a final solution? I think that when you are part of a non-conformist movement, it's always going to require courage And yeah, that's not going to be fun for people Do I think there's an opportunity to completely change the way we are telling the story? Absolutely We are so fortunate in the United States there is so much more ignorance than Nellis That is such an opportunity Most Americans are not fans of the hate movement Most Americans are not interested in you know, harassing their neighbors, vandalizing property, pushing people out of public life Most Americans are not aware that that's even what's happening to the Jewish community And also, most Americans are inspired by this story that Jews first brought to the world Which is this idea that you don't have to bow the tyrants That is an inspiring idea to Americans and people around the world And I think that there's a lot that we can share with our neighbors and with our children about who we are I think that that there's absolutely a possibility of changing our future All right, Darryl, we'll leave it there. I really encourage everyone listening to this to order this book The final solution to the Jewish question, a love story for the living I really think there are this is going to be one of the, regarded as one of the most important books that really chronicles what so much of so many of us have been experiencing these last few years And it's very level setting because it reminds you it's new but it's not new So thank you for the book, thank you for this conversation And look forward to having back on Thank you, thank you so much for having me and for everything you're doing to Happy's conversations every day Thank you I'm Deborah Pardays, the host of ARK News Daily What's happening in Israel and the Jewish world right now matters But it can be hard to keep up, let alone make sense of it all That's why we started ARK News Daily Every weekday morning, I walk you through the most important news, give you the context you need and let you know what to look out for next I don't try to convince you of anything and I don't waste your time On most days, I'll be in your ears for about 10 minutes or less Then you can move on with your day, hopefully a little bit smarter than before Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or follow the link in the show notes I hope to see you tomorrow [BLANK_AUDIO]