Being Jewish with Jonah Platt

BJJP_28_Dara Horn Part 1_V3
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Jonah Platt: [00:00:00] If I had to name one person whose voice I have found to be the most impactful in challenging my assumptions and revealing deep truths about contemporary anti ju bigotry, it is undoubtedly my guest today, I. Her literary contributions to the Jewish world are twofold as she celebrates our rich history through her unique brand of time, traveling Jewish fiction and enlightens us through her clarion nonfiction dissections of the anti Jew biases embedded throughout our society.

I. She's a mom. She's obsessed with Yiddish, and she's a quiz bowl phenom. Ladies and gentlemen, the perspicacious Dara Horn.

Dara Horn: Thank you so much for having me.

Jonah Platt: Thank you for being here. I, I'm really excited to have you here today. Quiz

Dara Horn: bowl. That was a deep cut,

Jonah Platt: right? I have great research. Very impressed. Very impressed.

Shout out to Samantha, the research associate. She finds it all so. I have so many questions for you, Dara. I really am so excited to have you here because I'm such a fan and student of so much of your writing. You've been so [00:01:00] instructive about how I think about the work that I do in this space, so I, I'm pumped to get into it.

You're an academic lover of language, you historian. I've pushed back against the term antisemitism on the show before because I have found it to be too opaque, too academic, um, too easily. Fought against by somebody saying, well, a, a semi is, can be all these different people, or this is what it meant at this time.

And, and I, so I've preferred to use terms like anti J bigotry or anti Jew hatred or anti Jew racism. What's your take on that?

Dara Horn: Well, I mean, you're correct because the term anti-Semitism was deliberately created to. Do exactly what you described is to legitimize and, you know, turn this into a scholastic enterprise And academic enterprise is a term from the 1870s and it was replacing previous term, which was Jew hatred, which, you know, that was like, you know, that looked too low brow.

And so then this was a, a German journalist named Wilhelm Maher who popularized this [00:02:00] term as antisemitism was basically exactly for what you say, to make it sound scholarly and scientific 'cause of like, you know, the new science of. Race. Right, right. In the 19th century, this was like, we're shifting away from, you know, the lowbrow, you know, religious bigotry to the like, super high-minded science-based race bigotry.

Right, right. And that's what I'm, yeah, this is, this is very old. So what, I mean, why

Jonah Platt: are we doing his job for

Dara Horn: Exactly, well, I mean, this is. Part of, you know, living in a non-Jewish society, you're trapped with the language that that society is using, which is, you know, not always true in Jewish communities, but certainly true in the community in the United States.

Jonah Platt: So it sounds like Dehorn is supporting my, uh, replacement terms.

Dara Horn: Oh, yes, absolutely.

Jonah Platt: Another term that I've pushed back against is the word Zionist, and not because it's been co-opted and distorted, which it totally has, but because I reject the framing of. Needing us to define ourselves as wanting Israel to exist when it does exist and has existed for [00:03:00] 77 years.

What do you make of that?

Dara Horn: Yeah. I mean, this is a successful movement, right? Right. Did I mean there's no, yeah, there's, and there's no other, you know, movement that's against the existence of a particular country, right? I mean, there's no, like, I don't want Jordan to exist, right?

Jonah Platt: Okay.

Dara Horn: Even though Jordan's formed in pretty much the same way, you know, there's all these countries that are formed through the partitions of empires af you know, in the 20th century, right?

I mean, there's no, I don't want, you know, I'm an anti Pakistan, you know, I don't want Pakistan to exist. Right. So, I mean, what's really interesting about, you know, the term, you know, Zionist and anti Zionist is Jewish life in. Israel is, I mean, this is just, you know, this origins of Jewish civilization, right?

Um, it's the roots of Jewish civil civilization. You have a continuous presence in the land of Israel, of Jewish communities since ancient times. All those things. I mean, it's sort of almo. There's very little in Jewish life that isn't tied back to the land of Israel. Mm-hmm. I mean, if you think about even the.

You know, the holidays were all pilgrimage holidays, right? Even the ones that were in pilgrimage holidays, like R [00:04:00] Hashanah and Yom Kippur, these are penitential holidays. And the reason that we have this penitential season in the fall is because ancient Israel's one of the only ancient near Eastern civilizations that doesn't have a river, okay?

And so, you know, I mean, they, they rely on water from the sky for their survival, and the rain only comes in the autumn. That penitential season immediately precedes. The first rain of the year.

Jonah Platt: Mm-hmm.

Dara Horn: Right. So it's like this big rain dance. I mean, that's why there's this obsessive like, oh, we're repenting for our sins, and you know, it's like we're, we're reevaluate.

It's because it's like we're begging God for water to survive. Right. I mean, that's sort of the roots of this sort of spirituality. In that season. It's all based on this microclimate of the land of Israel.

Jonah Platt: That's so interesting. I've never heard that. You know,

Dara Horn: there's also explicit prayers for rain at the end of that season, right at the end of Sukkot on er, which is, you know, the end of that was, you know, October 7th massacre was on that day.

Um, you know, that, that is the day, at the end of that holiday season. So it's like, you know, there's so many practices in Judaism and not just Jewish religion, but I mean the language. I mean, there's so [00:05:00] many things that are, it's kind of, it's inseparable. You know, Zionism is a modern political movement. It emerges at the same time as all of the other national movements around the world.

Right. In the 19th, early 20th century. They sort inspire one another. Yeah. I mean this is like, you know, it's a period when empires are crumbling and there's this opportunity for these national movements to emerge and so, you know, that is very typical. The interesting thing about, you know, what we think of as anti-Zionism is.

I'm gonna give you a very early origin point for that.

Jonah Platt: Okay.

Dara Horn: I speak a lot of college campuses and often someone will ask this question, can't I be anti-Zionist without being anti-Semitic? And my response to that is, I'm not sure if you're, if you are aware of the origins of the slogan you just shared with all of us.

It's from the Bolsheviks in 1918.

Jonah Platt: Interesting.

Dara Horn: Yeah, because in the, in 1918, you know, the Bolsheviks are, you know, they. Depose the Czar. They're, you know, waging Civil War to gain control of what's gonna become the Soviet Union. Mm-hmm. They create what are called the Yia Jewish sections of the Communist Party to [00:06:00] spread Marxist propaganda among the 2 million Jews of the former Russian Empire.

They want them on their side. Their slogan in 1918 is, we are not anti-Semitic. We are just

Jonah Platt: anti-Zionists.

Dara Horn: anti-Zionists. And you know, this is 30 years before the creation of the state of Israel. Is probably not about Netanyahu.

Jonah Platt: Right?

Dara Horn: Right. I mean, and then what's really, I mean, and of course in the process of you know, not being anti-Semitic and only being anti-Zionist, the Soviet Union manages to, you know, persecute an imprison and torture and murder tens of thousands of Jews.

And then later they export this slogan through the KGB to their client states in the developing world to the progressive. Circles in the United States. I mean, I could go on about this, right? Like all the slogans that we hear today. You know, Zionism is genocide, Zionism is imperialism. Zionism is colonialism.

Zionism is racism. Zionism apartheid. All of this is directly from the KGB. Wow. There's such a thick paper trail for all of these slogans. They're all from the KGB specifically in the 1960s. So [00:07:00] your sort of hesitation about like, oh, I don't like this term, Zionist. It's been co-opted. Also, it's kind of pointless because like, you know, we don't need a term anymore.

Like the state of Israel has existed for, you know, 70 plus years. It's more than that because yeah, clearly the reason that you have this issue is because this is part of this like broader movement by tyrannical societies to eliminate Jewish collective existence.

Jonah Platt: Wow. You made it even worse. Yes, I did.

Okay, so I'm a

Dara Horn: prophet of doom. That's what I did. Yeah, that's speaking of super

Jonah Platt: fun. Let's get into your book. People love dead Jews. Yeah. I'm so fun. Right. Speaking of doom. I have spoken about this book on this show many times. Uh, so many important concepts. We're gonna get into a bunch of them. Basically, the thesis is everyone is fascinated about how Jews die, but nobody seems to care much about how we live.

How much does that concept alone drive your work? Not just in this book, but in general?

Dara Horn: In my career, not that long ago. Just in 2018. Okay. Because. [00:08:00] Prior to that, you know, I, I, my first book came out in 2002. I mean, I've been publishing books for a long time. Mm-hmm. And all my books are about Jewish life, Jewish culture.

Yeah. We're gonna get into a bunch of those later. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, I, I always avoided this topic of, you know, writing about antisemitism and, you know, also really avoided. I mean, I never was writing about the Holocaust. I just, you know, and, and this, that's actually quite a lot to avoid when you're a person like me who, I mean, I have a PhD in Hebrew and Yiddish literature, right?

Right. And so it came from this sort of frustration I had as a Yiddish scholar, sort of seeing how there was this huge emphasis on. Holocaust fiction and Holocaust stories. It's like, you know, if you type into Netflix, you know, I'm looking, you know, for something Jewish like you're gonna get, it's all Holocaust movies.

Yeah. And it was sort of like, I noticed this and my response to this was to avoid it. 'cause I was so annoyed by it. Mm-hmm. Right. And I was, you know, spent my whole career trying to build. Jewish culture and [00:09:00] civilization. Yeah. I cared about this so much that, you know, when I, with my previous books, when I would do a book event, you know, at a bookstore or something, I would often ask the people at the bookstore, you know, how many people here can name for concentration camps.

And that's, you know, something, something a lot of people in Barnes and Noble can do. I would then ask those same people, how many people here can name four Yiddish writers? Right. Yeah. Well, I mean, which is remarkable because 85% of the people murdered in the Holocaust are Yiddish speakers. Mm-hmm. It was a famously literary civilization.

So I'm basically asking that question, you know, why do we care so much how these people died if we don't care at all how they lived? There's something deeper than that though. And I started thinking about this in 2018. An editor at Smithsonian Magazine approached me and asked me to do a long piece for them about Anne Frank.

Jonah Platt: Okay.

Dara Horn: And I got this request and I was just overwhelmed with dread. 'cause I was just thinking like, wow, I really don't feel like writing some like long pious essay about Anne Frank that's gonna be distributed in doctor's offices across America. 'cause you know, that's what happens to Smithsonian Magazine.

Right. Um, I was thinking about [00:10:00] this and I was like. This is interesting. Why don't I want to write about this?

Jonah Platt: Mm-hmm.

Dara Horn: And that was when I remembered a news story I had read. This again in 2018 about something that had happened at the Anne Frank Museum Yeah. In Amsterdam. And you, you, I know you've read the book and so you sort of already know this story.

Yeah. So that's,

Jonah Platt: I was gonna ask you about it anyway. Yeah. So let's get, let's get to it.

Dara Horn: Yeah. So, you know, the, um, this is a news story again in 2018. It was about a young Jewish man who was working at the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam. And the museum would not allow him to wear his yamaka to work. They made him hide it under a baseball hat.

He appealed this decision to the board of the museum. The board of the museum then deliberated for six months and then finally relented and let this guy wear his yamaka to work. And I had just, you know, I had read this news story and I thought, you know, six months is a really long time,

Jonah Platt: really long time for the

Dara Horn: and Frank Museum to wonder about, you know, whether or not it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding.

Jonah Platt: Right.

Dara Horn: And that's what I just started thinking like. There's something going on here. Yeah. Right. [00:11:00] Because, and you know, then I remember thinking about that news story and thinking like, you know, did this really happen? Did I dream it? You know? Yeah. Because it's so nuts, right? It's too unbelievable. And then, you know, I went and looked it up online and, you know, yeah.

I didn't dream it. But also something equally stupid had happened in the same museum,

Jonah Platt: right.

Dara Horn: Six months earlier, 2017. They had. Visitors had noticed something weird about the audio guide in that museum. You know, that's a big international museum. They've got, I don't know, 10 languages for their audio guide, and it says English, and there's a British flag.

Fran French Flag Espanol. Spanish flag Hebrew. No flag. And I'm just thinking, you know, these are, these are PR mishaps, but they're not mistakes. Right. And that's when I started thinking, you know, I've been avoiding this topic for so long, I'm just gonna dive into this and see where it takes me. And Oh wow.

It's took me, took me around the world. Yeah. And uh, yeah, ended up in a very different place from where I thought I would be.

Jonah Platt: Speaking of Anne Frank, like why aren't Jews in control? Of Jewish history.

Dara Horn: This story is told very differently in [00:12:00] Jewish languages.

Jonah Platt: Which story?

Dara Horn: The story of Jewish history in Jewish life and Jewish history.

I'm gonna give one simple example of this. So in English, we call the extermination of 6 million Jews in Europe during World War ii.

Jonah Platt: The

Dara Horn: Holocaust. The

Jonah Platt: Holocaust.

Dara Horn: Mm-hmm. That's like the Latin term for the Hebrew term Ola, which was a, a burnt offering that was offered up in the temple. While the term is from this temple ritual, it's from this Christian interpretation of there's this sacrifice of the innocent for our sins.

Hmm. Right. I mean, this is a very Christian idea, right? That there's like, you know, a, a Jew is tortured and killed for your sins, right? So that's the term. Mm-hmm. The, or origins of the term. It's like really very disturbing if you think about it. Yeah. Do you know the Yiddish word for the Holocaust?

Jonah Platt: No, I don't.

I mean, I know Shoah. Yeah. So

Dara Horn: Shoah a Hebrew, which means, you know, in, in atrocity the Yiddish word, and again, 85% of the people murder in the Holocaust are Yiddish speakers. Right? The Yiddish word [00:13:00] for the Holocaust is bin. Which comes from the Hebrew word hoban, which means destruction. It's a word that's used to refer to the destruction of the temple, first and second temples in Jerusalem.

So to me, this is interesting because it means that for Jews who experience the Holocaust and are using the language of the people who die in the Holocaust. This is a continuous experience. Mm. Right. This is a continuity from ancient Jewish history to the present. It's not seen as this sort of like isolated moment, right?

It's like a case study in morality. It's seen as a continuity. That is not the way it's presented to a non-Jewish audience at all. Right.

Jonah Platt: Who are not aware of these other points on that line of Jewish, you know, destruction and persecution all throughout history and And

Dara Horn: resilience also. And resilience. Yes.

Right. I mean, and before and after. Right. I mean, it's sort of taught as by itself and that it eliminates the possibility of pattern recognition.

Jonah Platt: Wow. One concept from your book that I've spoken about on the show is that. Uh, the American Golden Age for Jews post World War II [00:14:00] was actually not a normal to get back to, but it's actually the abnormal and that we're sort of living in the normal now, which is where Anti Jew society is, is prevalent and out in the open.

Do you still feel that way?

Dara Horn: There's this. Very deep belief in America as an exception to Jewish history,

Jonah Platt: that this is the one place where everything's gonna be different and gonna be safe. Mm. This totally different from

Dara Horn: everything else. And, you know, there's, you know, we could talk about the merits of that idea.

Mm-hmm. But the way that America Jews think about that idea, it's, it's more like a, a belief than, you know, a sort of right's, a little bit of

Jonah Platt: idealism in that. Yeah.

Dara Horn: I mean, and so, you know, and what's interesting to me about it is that. Because it's treated like that kind of a belief because, and it is true that, you know, American, Jewish life is, you know, I mean, dramatically better than Jewish life and, you know, 99.9% of other points in Jewish history.

Yeah. And I mean, on the other hand, the bar's on the floor. Right? Right. So, I mean, I just remember, you know, I, I produced a podcast a [00:15:00] couple years ago called Adventures with Dead Jews, and there was one episode that I had that was about the movie Gentleman's agreement, which is this movie from the 1940s about.

Uh, discrimination against Jews in American society.

Jonah Platt: Interesting. You know,

Dara Horn: and it's, it was only after I. Put out that podcast. And in that episode of the podcast where I talk about sort of, you know, today we talk about anti-Semitic incidents, but in the 1940s it wasn't about incidents, right? I mean, it was about you can't get a job, right?

You can't stay in a hotel. It was part of the culture. You can't stay in a hotel, you can't rent a, you can't rent an apartment. Um, you know, like that. I dunno if, you know, remember that movie, the Green Book? That was about, you know, um, this like travel guide for African Americans. Mm-hmm. You know, telling like

Jonah Platt: where they could go safely.

Dara Horn: So the Green Book was actually based on the Jewish travel guide for Jewish travelers, knowing where they were able to stay in a hotel. And it was only after I put out that episode that my parents told me these stories from when they were children about, you know, I remember my mother telling me she went to some kind of, some kind of summer program in the Hamptons and they had a visiting day for parents and.[00:16:00]

Her parents couldn't, couldn't come because there was nowhere for them to stay. Whoa. Like there was no hotel right where they could stay that would allow them, like the closest place that would take them was like an hour away. And. It was like, I've lived with my parents my, my whole life. Right? I mean, it's like this, just, they, it was like you didn't even talk about it.

Jonah Platt: It's not just your parents who don't talk about it. I mean, no one talks about it, right? No one talks about it. No one talks

Dara Horn: about it. I mean, and now, you know, this is an older generation that you know, very, you know, there aren't a lot of people who have those memories. Yeah. But you know, that's, that's not that long ago.

Jonah Platt: No. Yeah. Has the Trump administration's recent, very strong stance against antisemitism in the last couple weeks? Does that. Do you think move the needle for you at all in terms of feeling your feelings about American Jewry and safety

Dara Horn: the past year and a half? I think that both parties have used this issue for their own purposes.

Jonah Platt: Mm-hmm.

Dara Horn: I've noticed that there's this sort of trend in the, certainly in within the American Jewish community of only [00:17:00] talking about antisemitism when it comes from people who. Don't vote like you. Um, and I've noticed that same pattern is also, I mean, you know, we, we have, we live in a very polarized, toxic political climate.

Certainly, I've sort of actually been a little bit more deeply involved in this, these things because, um, I was a witness in one of those congressional investigations. Wow. Um, so I, I was, uh, you know, had a little bit of a front row seat for some of the ways that the, uh, federal government is interacting with this issue.

Jonah Platt: Were you speaking as having been at Harvard?

Dara Horn: I, I was part of this antisemitism advisory group to the right now, former president of Harvard who, uh,

Jonah Platt: like our former guest, rabbi David Wpe, who spoke about it on the show. Yeah. There were

Dara Horn: like about six of us mm-hmm. Who were in that group. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it was, I'm sure he, you know, told you just how fun it was.

Yeah. Yeah. It was super fun. Um, yeah, they, we were their antisemitism advisory group. I, I, I would not say that they. Took a whole lot of our advice. Yeah. In fact, it went so badly that, yeah, I got hauled and into Congress to testify about it.

Jonah Platt: What else can you [00:18:00] tell us about that experience?

Dara Horn: I feel like the process started with there, there was a sincere desire to address this issue.

Like I don't think, you know, that we were being played or something like that. Okay. What I did see was that they went into this with a lot of goodwill. But that's because they thought that this was a problem that they could address without pissing anyone off.

Jonah Platt: Interesting.

Dara Horn: And once they realized that that was not possible, they were no longer interested,

Jonah Platt: they basically kind of picked a side then, right?

Dara Horn: Short answer. Yeah.

Jonah Platt: Yeah.

Dara Horn: They thought they were, there was some way that they could kind of went, skirted, went their way through this or something, and. It just became blindingly obvious that that was not possible, and it also became blindingly obvious that they were not treating this the way they treated other forms of bigotry on campus.

Yeah. You know, it was just an incredibly frustrating experience because, you know, we went into this committee thinking we're going to have sort of like a process and we're gonna have, you know, recommendations that we give them. We did give them recommendations. Right. But what happened was, was just this fire [00:19:00] hose of.

Situations that were coming at us all day long. As soon as my name became public that I was on this committee, I was just, it, it was an avalanche of Jewish students asking for help. Mm. And what to me was the most telling about it was that, you know, I think the media depicted this as like, it's all about, you know, these protests, right?

And it's this question about, you know, free speech and you know, what are the limits of free speech? Not a single Jewish student came to me saying that they wanted to shut down. Free speech. Not a single student came to me saying, you know, oh, I don't like what their, the slogan they're using at this protest.

The students who were coming to us, you know, what they were saying was, I don't like people vandalizing my dorm room. Right, right. You know, I don't like people spitting on my face while I'm walking across campus. I don't like being chased through the law school. I don't like being followed around campus by someone yelling at me with a megaphone.

I don't like being thrown out of class [00:20:00] by my professor for being Israeli.

Jonah Platt: Yeah.

Dara Horn: There are students who like are like, I don't eat in the dining halls anymore because there are people waiting for me in the dining hall. They wait outside my dorm room, they're waiting for me in the dining hall. And then it's like, haven't you reported this?

And they're like. The person that I would've reported it to was the person who's waiting for me in the dining hall. I mean, this is harassment. I mean, this is not like criminal harassment in a lot of cases. Title six violations. Like it was very obvious and they were, you know, very content to treat this.

Like it was, you know, oh, is this like a big media bruhaha? And it's like interesting questions about the, look, it's a free speech. I'm like, no one is talking like not a single Jewish student care about free speech. It was sonu wasn't

Jonah Platt: framed by by the media and everyone it feels like. Under the focus was so much put on these demonstrations and not on the.

Day-to-day experience of these students. That's

Dara Horn: exactly what it was. And, and what it became really clear was, you know, I also was involved with this Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance that formed very quickly after October 7th. And there was a group of people in that, [00:21:00] uh, in that alumni group that did an audit of everything Harvard has been teaching about Jews in Israel in recent years, and.

When you look at that audit, it's like there's a much deeper problem here. This, this is not about like, you know, there's some students who are, you know, having fun with their activism or whatever it, like they're teaching this stuff. Yeah, yeah. They're teaching it. That's not a problem that I think you can solve through legislation.

I think that that's a, a deeper cultural challenge.

Jonah Platt: Okay. So. Getting back into your book to people of dead Jews. Another concept I wanna talk about, uh, I love your distinction of Hanukkah antisemitism versus Purim antisemitism. Can you just give us the, the quick recap of that idea?

Dara Horn: Sure. So I named these two types of antisemitism after Jewish holidays that celebrate triumphs over them.

Yeah. And Hanukkah. And Purim is, you know, the, like, the story in the Purim McGill, it's about this attempted genocide of the Jews and the Persian Empire. It's this very straightforward story of anti-Semitism where there's, there's a big bad guy [00:22:00] who wants to kill all the Jews. Right. And, you know, that is more similar to, you know, the Nazi project.

Right. I mean, that's where it sounds, feels familiar to us. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Um, from Holocaust education, um, is frankly also maybe similar to, you know, like. Something like Hamas, like this. Right. Kind of, you know, just, you know, we're, our goal, stated goal is to kill all the Jews. That is a, a far less common form of antisemitism.

Mm-hmm. In Jewish history. More common form is what I'm calling Hanukah antisemitism. In the Hanukkah story, no one ever says, let's kill all the Jews. Doesn't come up.

Jonah Platt: Mm-hmm. The

Dara Horn: goal is still to destroy Jewish civilization, but the way to do that is to make Jews stop being Jewish. Right. Right. And so, you know, I talk about this in the book at the beginning, you know, the Jew, the Hanukkah story is about this.

Uh, Hellenistic, a Greek cultural empire that takes over ancient Judea. And at first it's like this soft persuasion where, you know, they're like, you know, we have this awesome Greek culture, which obviously is superior to your sad, pathetic Jewish culture. Right. And at first the Jews of Judea kind of go along with this, or at [00:23:00] least some of them do.

They're like, you know, we could be a good vassal state. And one of the things they do is they build a gymnasium in Jerusalem for the Greek games.

Jonah Platt: Mm-hmm.

Dara Horn: You know, if you've ever been to an art museum, you may be recalled it. Greek athletics played in the nude,

Jonah Platt: right?

Dara Horn: They then had to recruit teenage Jewish boys to participate in these Greek games.

These teenage Jewish boys had their circumcisions reversed. Oh yeah. So they could participate in these Greek games. I don't wanna know how that's possible. Oh yeah. I don't know what that means. Yeah. I don't know. And nor do I want to. Okay. But what's interesting is no one's making them do that.

Jonah Platt: At that time.

That was

Dara Horn: what you needed to do to be a person who mattered in that society. And then it's five years later that this regime, outlawed circumcision. Mm-hmm. So, and then they start outlying other, you know, they outlawed. Sabbath observance, the outlaw Torah study. Right. I mean, it sort of becomes this, and, and that is just a much more common form of antisemitism in Jewish history, right?

Yeah. I mean that's more similar to like the Spanish Inquisition, you know, it's like, you know, you convert to, you know, Christianity and then you're fine, right? And other, you know, it's like you just have to denounce Whatever's not cool about being Jewish this [00:24:00] week. Right? I mean, in the Soviet anti-Zionism example that we talked about, right?

It's like, you know, we celebrate Jews, you just can't. Be a Zionist. Sounds familiar. Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Jonah Platt: Yeah. So you, you mentioned the word cool. Here. Here I wanna read you a quote from the book. Uncool Ness is pretty much Judaism's brand, which is why cool people find it so threatening and why Jews who are willing to become cool are so necessary to Hanukkah antisemitism success.

What makes Judaism uncool and why is that? Threatening

Dara Horn: Judaism from the beginning is an anti tyrannical movement. Today we think of Judaism as the first monotheism of course. And, and today we think of that as this, like a spiritual or religious idea.

Jonah Platt: Mm-hmm.

Dara Horn: In the ancient Near East, that's a political idea because in the ancient Near East, there's societies have lots of gods and usually one of the gods is the dictator.

Jonah Platt: Mm.

Dara Horn: Right. I mean, you think about like ancient Egypt Right. Derive their

Jonah Platt: power directly from the God. Yes, exactly.

Dara Horn: And so, you know, when the Jews in the ancient Near East are saying, we don't bow to idols, what they're actually saying is that we don't bow [00:25:00] to tyrants.

Jonah Platt: Hmm.

Dara Horn: I mean. You see how this pisses off tyrants and.

You know, so I mean, I sort of joke about it in the book. I said, I'm like, uncool ness is Judaism's brand. It's like, you know, this goes back 3000 years where the rest of the ancient world is worshiping this Marvel cinematic universe of sexy deities. Right. This Jews are like the losers in the school cafeteria.

We're like, here are the corner with the bossy, unsexy, invisible God. Mm-hmm. Right? Like Jews have never been cool, but it's also the juice have never. Try to conform.

Jonah Platt: Right?

Dara Horn: Right. It's a non-conformist, anti tyrannical tradition doesn't always live up to those standards. Of course. You know, there's these giant empires that are constantly, you know, that conquer, you know, certainly conquer, uh, ancient Israel, ancient Judea, you know, that happens over and over again in the ancient time period.

Um, and then, you know. Today, we don't think of it as empires, but you know, we're always living in these dominant cultures or surrounding cultures, and Jews are not conforming to those cultures and that people find [00:26:00] that threatening.

Jonah Platt: Mm.

Dara Horn: You know, I remember when I was in college and, um, someone who lived in my dorm, uh, one of my hallmates was this, uh, uh, boyfriend Montana, who had never met a Jew before.

Sure. Probably before he met me. And I remember him asking me at one point, he says, Dara, you know, do you think Judaism is. The truth, and I'm like, that's a weird question, but I'm like. I guess I'm like, I don't even, I, I mean, I was 18. I didn't even know how to understand how, what he was asking. Then he says, well, you know, so if you think it's true that like why don't you want everybody to be Jewish?

And at 18 I was so baffled by this question. I was like, if I have a favorite band, like why do, why do you have to have the same favorite band as me? Hmm. Like, I didn't even understand what he was talking about. Right. But the reality is that most dominant cultures. Are trying to make you have the same favorite band as them.

Right. Right. And then they feel if you say no thanks, they feel threatened by that.

Jonah Platt: Right,

Dara Horn: right. And like, you know, for someone who's coming from a culture where, you know, we're not really interested in doing that, like that's like, it's just a weird [00:27:00] idea. Mm-hmm. But that is like, you know, and there's benign version versions of that.

You know, the benign version is, you know, the missionary's knocking on your door and you say, no thanks Uhhuh. And then they go to the next house. Okay. But like. I mean, I'm not going on people's doors knocking on their door. Right. You know, even the habad guys who are, you know, stopping you on the street, they're asking if you're Jewish.

Right. If you're not Jewish, they're not, you know, telling you to wear, to fill in. Right. And even if you're, you know, even if they tell you to wear, to fill in, you know, you say No thanks, you walk away like fine. Yeah. Right. Like this whole idea that you're gonna, you know, make somebody else. Conform to your ideals.

It's like, it's just so alien to the Jewish idea, right? Mm-hmm. Like, we're not interested in that. We're not proselytizing. Right? Right. But that, that is very threatening to people who wanna be in a dominant position.

Jonah Platt: Yeah. How do we overcome, I. As a, as a Jewish community, I mean, it's really, it's a human question, but in terms of the Jewish community, how do we overcome that desire for acceptance that, that, that willingness to give up a piece of yourself, to get in with the cool crowd.

Dara Horn: I think young people struggle with this, especially because [00:28:00] they're not thinking long term enough. And I'm gonna give you an example of this. Yeah. What do you mean by that? Yeah. So I speak a lot of colleges. Yeah. Um, and I remember one college where I spoke and I was talking to a Jewish student there, and she told me that, you know, she was one of her classes.

You know, there's a student in the class who's making anti-Semitic comments in class, and the professor's not pushing back at all. He's like, oh, it's an interesting perspective. And she told me, she says, I could have said something, but I didn't because I thought, and this is, this is a step beyond, like I don't wanna be, um, about being cool.

This is also about. Not just not being cool, but not wanting to be attacked. Right. Safety.

Jonah Platt: Right

Dara Horn: Safety. So this is like a few steps past not wanting to be cool, right? She's like, I could have said something, but I knew that if I said something it like few steps beyond uncool. She's like, you know, I was gonna be attacked.

I was gonna be, you know, maybe target on my back. Yeah. Targeted, right? I was gonna be docs, I was gonna be ostracized on campus. I was gonna be pilled online. And then she said to me, but I wish I had said something. I wish I had said something. And you know, I felt this. [00:29:00] Compassion for a young person whose timeline is too short because you know, I said to her, I'm like, you know you're absolutely right.

If you had sex like you ab, all those things would've happened. Yeah, you would've been pilloried online. You would've been docs. You would've been targeted. I said, but you know, the people who are gonna do that to you, those people are gonna be in your life for the next few months of the next few years.

But you know who you're gonna spend the rest of your life with

Jonah Platt: yourself.

Dara Horn: Yes. First of all, like you've, you've sacrificed your integrity. Yeah. You know, I think about those teenage Jewish boys in ancient Judea who had their circumcisions reversed so they could be in the Greek games, they didn't win.

Jonah Platt: Right.

Dara Horn: And what's really funny is like they didn't win the game in their lifetime because there was this massive persecution of Jews, which included them. And I mean, this is, this is a war, right? I mean, this was a revolt and a war and it was a genocide and all of those things and, and we celebrated today because, you know, the Jews were able to be successful in that revolt.

Jonah Platt: Yeah. [00:30:00]

Dara Horn: But they did not win. Right? That was not the winning choice in their lifetime. It wasn't the winning choice historically. Because today we're celebrating Hanukkah and nobody's having Greek games. You know, maybe you can talk about the Olympics, but you know, nobody's, uh, performing nude and sacrificing to Zeus in the Olympics today.

So yeah, that culture's gone

Jonah Platt: and it, it applies I feel like to all of the eras where Jews has sort of had a choice to make, am I gonna stick to who I am or am I gonna try to hide? And. Sacrificed part of my Judaism and those people are never, you know, thought of fondly throughout history yet people keep doing it,

Dara Horn: but it's also like you've also lost your an opportunity to find out who is actually on your side because.

When you do speak out about these things, yeah. You'll lose some of your so-called friends. Mm-hmm. But you'll also discover a whole lot of new friends. Yeah. Who are all the people who are like sitting around waiting for somebody to say something? Yeah. Like it turns out that like she's not the only person in [00:31:00] that room.

Jonah Platt: Who, who had that thought? Who

Dara Horn: had that thought? Exactly. And like what I've discovered also, I mean we are very fortunate in this country. Like there is so much more ignorance than malice. Yeah. People just dunno. There's yes. People dunno anything. And there's just like, and there are a lot of people with a lot of goodwill who, you know, wanna be good allies so to speak, and really don't know how, you know, this is an opportunity and.

You know, you can't live your life without integrity. Right. I mean, it would be like, you know, for people in the L-G-B-T-Q community, it's like, you know, are you going to live your life in the closet?

Jonah Platt: Yeah.

Dara Horn: Right. I mean that's, you're really make, it's a similar choice in a lot. Yes. We talk about all

Jonah Platt: these ideas on this show a lot.

Yes. This are, it's, this is very important stuff to me, so. We touched on it earlier, but we didn't dive in. Now I do wanna dive in, uh, talking about Holocaust education. You wrote an, an amazing article for the Atlantic about how it's failing us. Um, a quote from that is, Holocaust education is incapable of addressing contemporary antisemitism.

In fact, in the total absence of any education about Jews alive [00:32:00] today, teaching about the Holocaust might even be making antisemitism worse. So what is it that Holocaust education is failing to address and how is that making things worse?

Dara Horn: Yeah. So of course this, this article made a lot of people hate me.

Did did it? Well, I mean, in publishing

Jonah Platt: everybody who works in Holocaust museums, right? Well, yeah. In publishing

Dara Horn: we call that starting a conversation. It started a conversation. Well, you know, it's funny actually. It did make a lot of people hate me initially. Um, you know, there was a lot, you know, pushback from organizations and you know, even, you know, 'cause there's a lot of sunk costs in this.

Yeah. But what's been interesting actually, 'cause that came out about two years ago at this point, and. I now actually have a lot of Holocaust educators approaching me. Because I think, especially since October 7th, they, you know, there's a lot of, you know, people go into Holocaust education, have a lot of goodwill Of course.

Um, you know, and they see that what they're doing is not adequate to the moment. And it's, I've had a lot of people coming to me now. It's, it's so, yeah. It's

Jonah Platt: so important that you. Have helped challenge these assumptions?

Dara Horn: Yes. I actually, I've now started a new [00:33:00] nonprofit that's, uh, based on addressing this much more directly.

Oh, cool. So I've spent about a year, um, researching that article. Oh wow. I mean, a child around the country, you know, and a lot of stuff didn't make it into the article, but I. You know, interviewing people, a lot of whom didn't even make it in. Um, you know, and not just like, you know, I wasn't just like walking around museums like, you know, attending, you know, tra teacher trainings and, you know, talking to people, create curricula for schools and mm-hmm.

Um, you know, talking to people who design the museums and this sort of thing. And was just so clear to me was how this was being, uh, Holocaust was being extracted from any kind of historical, um. Wine.

Jonah Platt: Right.

Dara Horn: And being used as a morality play. Mm-hmm. And the moral of the story is like, you should be nice.

Right. And there's nothing before. Nothing since. And what was amazing, like the, the point that hammers this home is I was at a. Teacher conference at the Dallas Holocaust Museum, and it was in July. So I didn't get to meet students in that context. And so I asked the docents there, what do the students typically ask when they come through [00:34:00] this museum?

And they said, you know what? They'll ask, are there still Jews alive today?

Jonah Platt: Wow.

Dara Horn: Because if you went to this museum, you wouldn't know they fought

Jonah Platt: all the dude, the Jews got killed and the spur brother. Well, there's

Dara Horn: never, you know, to Holocaust education, there's never Jews after 1945 except for Holocaust survivors who are talking about what happened between 1933 and 1945.

Right. You know, and that's it. There are otherwise, there are no Jews after 1945. And you know what's amazing? It's like. There's this concept in education philosophy called the null curriculum, like NULL, like zero. Okay. It's what's not taught in school, and the idea is that what's not taught in school is also part of the curriculum because you're not telling students don't learn this.

You're saying Don't learn it from me. So for example, like sex education a few generations ago, right? They didn't teach it in school. They weren't saying, don't worry about sex. They were saying, worry about it from your older brother. Right? Right? Mm-hmm. Don't talk to me about it. And you know, I just realized like, you know, there's, you know, all these places around the country where it's required to learn about the Holocaust in school, and I wanna be [00:35:00] queer.

I'm not against that like it should be in all 50 states. Like, I'm not saying that it shouldn't be taught school, but there's not a single place in this country where anyone is required to learn who Jews are.

Jonah Platt: Right.

Dara Horn: And so what that means is that we've outsourced the job of teaching people who Jews are.

To TikTok,

Jonah Platt: right?

Dara Horn: Literally when the only thing people know about Jews is that the Jews are people who died in Europe between 1933 and 1945. What the heck do they know about who Jews are? How can they process it all? What's happening now? Right? If you don't even know who Jews are, if you the,

Jonah Platt: you have no context.

You have no framework for understanding anything, nothing.

Dara Horn: Like you think Jews are a religion,

Jonah Platt: right?

Dara Horn: Right. Like if you think Jews are a religion. And then you're like, you know, why does the religion need its own country? It's like, I think

Jonah Platt: that's the number one misunderstanding about Jews. Right? It's ridiculous.

Dara Horn: I mean, and, and first of all, I mean, there are many, many Muslim countries in many Christian countries, right? But leaving that aside, like Jews aren't a religion,

Jonah Platt: right?

Dara Horn: I mean, you know, like there's millions of Jews who are secular Jews. Have you ever met a secular Mormon? Right? Right. And like there's an [00:36:00] answer to who Jews are, and it's quite simple.

Like we don't have to sit here and be like, oh, are Jews a race of religion and nationality? It's like, no. Jews are a type of social group that was common in the ancient Near East, right? Very uncommon. In the West. Today it's a Joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland and culture. What I just said was a paragraph in English and in Hebrew it's one word that's two letters long, um, right?

Jews are omni and unless you understand what that means. Like nothing else makes sense.

Jonah Platt: Right,

Dara Horn: right. Nothing else makes sense.

Jonah Platt: Yeah. That's why it's that it's that chief misunderstanding it. So it's sort of at the root of everything

Dara Horn: and it'ss not that hard to teach. And so this is actually my, so I have a new nonprofit that I just started.

What's it called? It's called Mosaic Persuasion. Okay. It is a bit of an inside joke. Um, what's the joke? Oh, so there's. After the emancipation of Jews in Europe. So when Jews were starting to be given civil rights at the, you know, you know, late 17 hundreds, early 18 hundreds, there was this idea that the only way that Jews would be entitled to civil rights would be if they renounced their collective identity.

So, in other words, you can't can't be [00:37:00] part of the Jewish nation. You have to be like Frenchmen of the mosaic. Persuasion.

Jonah Platt: Of the mosaic persuasion, yes. Germans of the mosaic

Dara Horn: persuasion. Yes. I've never

Jonah Platt: heard that phrase before. Yeah. Well, I

Dara Horn: mean, because it. You know, this concept failed. Thank God. Totally failed.

Right? I mean, because you know that, that, yeah, it did not work. So that's, um, so it's a little bit of an inside joke. I love that. 'cause it's also, you know, um, the purpose of this organization is to educate the broader American public about who Jews are.

Jonah Platt: How you gonna approach that?

Dara Horn: So starting in K to 12 education, because part of my experience with this, um.

Panel at Harvard was really like, wow. College. Too late.

Jonah Platt: Yeah, way too late. Those, those conceptions have already been formed. Yes.

Dara Horn: And then also, you know, after I'd written that piece about Holocaust education, having all these Holocaust educators approach me and being like. You know, how can we, how can we improve, how can we change what we're doing?

And also speaking around the country about my work and finding like just people constantly coming up to me and being like, you know, can I get some follow on? Like, you know, can you come and speak to my school or something like that. There was just this [00:38:00] demand and so sure. Um, so we've just started, like as of our conversation right now, we don't even have a website yet.

Hopefully we will very soon. Like that's how new this is. Like literally, you know, just got off the ground. Just got our first grant.

Jonah Platt: Amazing. Um,

Dara Horn: yeah. But we are doing, like right now we've run some pilot projects with, um, a couple of different school districts where we're doing, you know, teacher training workshops, which are about, you know, it's foundations of Jewish civilization.

Can you tell me where

Jonah Platt: those are in the country? Um, so

Dara Horn: we did one in Palm Beach County Public Schools for principals in that group, um, in that public school district. I didn't know this. Palm Beach County Public Schools to me sounds like Mar Wago, ritzy Florida suburb. Right. It's actually the 10th largest school district in America.

Wow. Yeah. And it's like actually, you know, very diverse in way Yeah. That way I would imagine. Yeah. You know, uh, ethnically, you know, racially, economically diverse. So, um, we ran one of those workshops for them. Um, we're doing, uh. Similar, uh, teacher training workshop for Miami-Dade Public Schools that's coming up.

If you're a listener and you're an educator and are interested in this, please let me know because There you go. Yep.

Jonah Platt: We, there's definitely [00:39:00] a lot of educators who listen to this show, so, so right

Dara Horn: now, the way to reach me is just through my website@darrowhorn.com because we do not yet have a website for Mosaic Persuasion, but hopefully we'll, but maybe by the

Jonah Platt: time this airs, so possibly, possibly check out Mosaic Persuasion.

Yes. What I feel like is missing from Holocaust education. I feel like we're sort of. Emphasizing the wrong thing. I feel like all the emphasis is on the camps. It's like a car wreck you can't look away from. They're, they're fascinating in a very, you know, perverse way and we're not emphasizing enough the buildup, I.

To the camps where, you know, you had segregation like the American South for Jews, where you had, you know, race defilement. Jews can't go to public swimming pools, can't have relationships with Germans, uh, where police stand by as Jews get beaten, where the, there's complicity in participation by the whole community.

I, I feel like that is what people need to engage with. Those are like. Everyday human things, things that other people can have a connection [00:40:00] to in a very, you know, thought provoking, painful way. Where is all that? And, and what do you think of that take?

Dara Horn: I think the problem is much bigger than that. I think that there's, again, this is sort of seen as this, like this is like a thing that sort of like came down from the sky in 1933.

And then went away in 1945. You know, all the things that you described about, you know, these social segregation and you know, this like, you know, legalized discrimination. All of that was true in Europe for like centuries, right? For Jews, centuries. It was true in the Islamic world for centuries. That Jews have this, you know, segregate.

It was like, you know, like a Jim Crow kind of status in the Islamic world. It was certainly, you know, even, you know, it was even more true in the, in the Christian world. I mean, this was a very, very old phenomenon. There had been a very brief shift away from that in only in Western Europe [00:41:00] and only for a couple of generations.

I mean, what people don't realize is like. This is not the first genocide of Jews even to have taken place in Europe,

Jonah Platt: right? I mean, not by a long shot.

Dara Horn: 20 years earlier in the 1920s, there are 150,000 Jews murdered in what's now Ukraine. In an explicit attempted genocide, and it's not unrelated to the Holocaust because then the survivors of that genocide flee to Western European capitals and there're, you know, these are, Penn was refugees and so they, there's a refugee crisis, which you know, helps.

It makes, makes it more possible to amp up popular sentiment against Jews because you have all these like homeless Jews on the streets, right? In, you know, cities, all aff cities like Vienna. But the reason there are all these homeless Jews on the streets is because they're survive. You know, it's like, you know, when, when I say like a genocide in, in what's now Ukraine, this is during the Russian civil War.

Like between 19, 18, 19 21, 150,000 Jews are. Brutally murdered and you know, the whole towns are burned to the ground. I mean, this is [00:42:00] like October 7th type,

Jonah Platt: right. Type,

Dara Horn: you know, type violence. And sometimes even more organized than that where people are being shot into mass graves. I mean, that already happened.

Mm-hmm. So that's a bigger problem. But to me there's this like larger issue, which is even when you sort of stop the story in 1945 and nothing moves forward, right. It's like. You know, if you go to the African American History and Culture Museum in Washington

Jonah Platt: mm-hmm.

Dara Horn: You know, you don't come out of this exhibit about American slavery and then, you know, enslavement around the world.

Right. Which is right. And then, you know, it's like, you know, there's an interactive, you know, panel about, you know, human trafficking today, it still exists. What are you doing to be an upstander to fight human trafficking? It's like, no. It's like that museum doesn't stop in 1865. It doesn't even stop in 1965.

Jonah Platt: Right. I think it'd be different if it was like, this is the slavery museum. Right? Like I would maybe expect that it would end at the end of slavery. What? You know, when you're going to a Holocaust museum, it's not necessarily a Jewish history museum, right? It's focused on a specific moment,

Dara Horn: which would be okay if there were Jewish history museums.

So

Jonah Platt: there's one in [00:43:00] Philadelphia? Yes,

Dara Horn: there is. Yes. The Weitzman. So I'm stepping away from it for a moment while I'm working on this nonprofit, but I was a creative advisor to the Weitzman Museum in Philadelphia. We've had

Jonah Platt: Stuart Weitzman on this show. Yeah,

Dara Horn: yeah. So, yeah. So they, they're, that's a great example of a museum that's really trying to tell a different kind of story, uh, museum of American Jewish History.

But even, you know, the mus, the story of American Jewish History, it's like. Frankly, it's kind of small, right? Compared to the sort of like broad scope of Jewish. Right. Haven't been here that long history. Yeah. Well, I mean, and also like, you know, this is, you know, we're talking about thousands of years here.

Mm-hmm. And, you know, this is a global people, like, there's a lot to tell and you're dealing with a, a broader American audience that like really knows, you know, very, very little about, about any of this.

Jonah Platt: Correct me if I'm wrong, but what it sort of sounds like I'm hearing you say is. That you're sort of rejecting the hyper-focus on the Holocaust at all and feel like it should be looked at only sort of within a broader context of Jewish history and not, let's have 50 museums focused just on this one moment in time.

Would that be accurate to say?

Dara Horn: I [00:44:00] think that focusing on that moment makes. Pattern recognition of antisemitism Impossible.

Jonah Platt: Mm.

Dara Horn: Because what it does is it defines antisemitism as, as

Jonah Platt: this one event

Dara Horn: genocide of 6 million Jews in Europe between 1933 and 1945. And anything that isn't that.

Jonah Platt: It's not anti-Semitism, it's,

Dara Horn: it's totally fine.

Jonah Platt: Right.

Dara Horn: There's a problem with defining anti-Semitism with the Holocaust, which is that, first of all, then you're just talking about, you're talking about genocide. Right, right. And that's, you know, that is, that's the bar, right? That's the bar, exactly. But also like when I say that you, there's no pattern recognition.

There's a very specific DI dynamic to antisemitism, which doesn't necessarily correlate with other forms of prejudice. Some of it might and some of it doesn't, but it certainly, you know, we have a much longer span of history to be able to look at it. Yeah, and the way I think of antisemitism is that antisemitism is essentially.

It's not so much a social prejudice, it's a lie. You know, when you think of any form of antisemitism, it's based on a lie. Right? Right. Those lies are either, you know, it could [00:45:00] be like a conspiracy theory, it could be, you know, blood liable. Yes. Or like, you know, denial of Jewish facts of Jewish history.

Right. You know, Holocaust denial, you know, Jews are all

Jonah Platt: white

Dara Horn: Jews are, are magically not, you know, have nothing to do with the land of Israel. Like, I mean, like, you know, their civilizations not native to the land of Israel. Like things like that, you know, these are just lies, but they all go back to. What I consider the big lie.

The big lie is that Jews are the obstacle to your society's ideals.

Jonah Platt: Mm.

Dara Horn: And therefore, opposing them is an act of righteousness.

Jonah Platt: Right.

Dara Horn: And that is the key to this because there's an origin point to that in Jewish history, which goes back to what I was saying earlier about Judaism as this like kind of anti tyrannical movement.

Yeah. It comes from Jews refusing to conform and to assimilate into these larger. Cultures. Mm-hmm. And, and how threatening that is to, you know, to a culture that wants to dominate.

Jonah Platt: Yeah.

Dara Horn: And so the way that you're able to sort of convince your [00:46:00] populace to go along with this hatred is by saying, we have this universal ideal.

Jews are the obstacle to it.

Jonah Platt: Right.

Dara Horn: And it doesn't matter. And that there's a shift in what that Right. Whatever the ideal is. What personal ideal is, is one thing,

Jonah Platt: whatever evil, it meets the opposite of that ideal. Exactly. And whatever society we're. Exactly.

Dara Horn: And you need to be able to see how that shifts in order for this to make any sense.

Right. What Wes up to the Holocaust is this ideal, where the ideal is science. Mm-hmm. Right. Which, you know, was should, is something worthwhile? I mean, this is not a, you know, the ideal itself is not the issue. But then the, the presenting Jews as the obstacle to the ideal is you have this like, you know, bogus pseudoscience about, you know, there's this racial thing and Jews are an inferior race, right?

Mm-hmm. And obviously this is something that impacts a lot of other groups, this idea. But like, then it's like, if you're against this idea, it's like, you know, you're a fool who's going against this universal ideal of science. Right. And then like there's an earlier version of antisemitism, which is based on the [00:47:00] universal ideal of, you know, a dominant religion.

Say like Christianity or Islam, right? And it's like this is a universal ideal. You know, anybody who's a, you know, a righteous right thinking person is gonna agree with this ideal. And, you know, Jews are the obstacle to this ideal, right? I mean, it feels

Jonah Platt: like there's some of that in the Germany, 1930s Germany too, right?

Yes,

Dara Horn: yes. But it was supposed to be like a step past that, right? It was supposed to, you know, that was like the shift to antisemitism, the way that, you know, that scholarly scientific term is part of that transition. And I feel there are transitions. Past World War ii, at least two past World War after World War II, and into our time where you have a universal ideal that, again, has been.

Perverted such that Jews are presented as the obstacle to that ideal.

Jonah Platt: What was the first shift after World War ii?

Dara Horn: You have a shift after World War II to, I mean, there's sort of, you know, when you have a Cold War, you have on one side communism. Mm-hmm. Right? Is the universal ideal. Right. Which, you know, that.

Doesn't have a lot to recommend at other, other, you know, unlike [00:48:00] science or so, um, you know, communism, um, and then, you know, international institutions. 'cause you have the emergence of these, all these international institutions after World War ii, like the un right. You know, nato, the Arab League. Mm-hmm. Um, these all emerge after World War ii.

And so then you have this idea of which again was, uh, really pushed by the Soviet Union. This idea of. We're not anti-Semitic. We're anti-Zionist. Right. Because you know this racist thing of, you know, hating Jews 'cause they're an inferior race. You know, that was this, we're above that. We're above that.

Right. You know, we are enlightened. And you know, what we really believe is that, you know, Jews are a source of evil because they're Zionists. Right. And this idea that the creation of the state of Israel is this, you know, horror to the world. Mm-hmm. Objectively makes no sense at all because it's literally, this is how like you know, hundreds of countries were created after World War II was through these partitions.

Jonah Platt: Alright, we're gonna pause it there for now if you want to hear the rest of this amazing conversation. Tune in next [00:49:00] week for the thrilling conclusion to my amazing talk with Dara Horn on the next episode of being Jewish with me, Jonah Platt.