Weekend Extra: Why ‘People Love Dead Jews’
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Patrol at the front door, we got to evacuate some of these hostages. Received request for patrol at the front door evacuating hostages. We have a spent magazine, looks like to a high-powered AK, middle hallway off the one-fourth corner. I have a description. Go ahead, send it. Tall, white male, short hair, light blue shirt, jeans.

Last week marked three years since the most lethal attack on Jews in U.S. history. The massacre at Tree of Life Synagogue affected me very deeply.

And not just because I grew up in Squirrel Hill, not just because I became a bat mitzvah in the place where a neo-Nazi was now shouting, kill all the Jews, and not just because I had to wait, panicked, to find out whether or not my own father was in the building that morning, but also because it was for me,

as I think it was for so many others, a watershed event. For years, incidents of anti-Semitism were on the decline in America. Before, everyone was just saying how they felt stronger and they felt braver, and I don't feel brave. I just feel scared. Now there is reason to fear. Eleven people were just slaughtered in a synagogue in America. The country I was born into, the country I lived in,

It was changing before my eyes. In video circulating online, you see a man exit a van and start shooting into a kosher grocery store on Martin Luther King Drive. There was the Jersey City kosher supermarket shooting. Now to that brutal attack on a rabbi's home outside New York City where dozens were celebrating Hanukkah. An intruder bursting in, slashing people with a large machete before...

and the Muncie Machete attack on a group of Jews lighting Hanukkah candles. Investigations are underway tonight in New York and Los Angeles after anti-Semitic attacks in those cities. There has been a troubling rise in such incidents ever since the fighting broke out in the Middle East. This past spring, we saw anti-Semitic attacks skyrocket.

Morgan says he hadn't even made it to a pro-Israel protest in Times Square before he was brutally beaten by a group of pro-Palestine protesters. And even in a year in which George Floyd's killing and attacks against Asians rightly captured our national attention, the number one minority group that was the victim of hate crimes in America?

or Jews. You're seeing a level of anti-Semitism that is beyond quantifiable. Just this week, attackers vandalized a Jewish fraternity at George Washington University, ripping the fraternity's Torah and dousing it with bleach. Or maybe you saw hours earlier and miles away, a synagogue in Austin burned. Or maybe you didn't see it.

Maybe what's more shocking than these incidents is the reaction to them, or rather, the almost total lack of reaction to them. What's shocking for many of us, what's most shocking, is that in an era in which we worry rightly so much about hatred and bigotry and exclusion, the Jews don't seem to count. As I was considering what to say now, three years since that terrorist showed up in my hometown, I was thinking,

my mind immediately went to a new book by my friend Dara Horn with a really catchy and very provocative title. It's called People Love Dead Jews. First of all, you've gotten the most insane reviews for this book. What's weird, though, is it's like, I kind of wish people liked this book a little less. It's kind of disturbing how much people appreciate this book. Dara is a novelist, a Yiddishist, an essayist, scholar, and a

And her book and her work in general helped me see that the fate of Jews and the fate of liberty are intertwined. She helped me understand that an assault on Jews isn't just an assault on Jews. It's an assault on the very notion of difference. I talked to Dara last week for a live subscriber-only event, and we edited that conversation down for you today. Our conversation is not just relevant to anyone who cares about the future of American Jews.

It's deeply relevant to anyone who cares about the future of America. Stay with us.

There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Dara, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me. It's really a pleasure to be here with you.

So, you know, we're not talking on just any evening. We're talking on the third year anniversary of the massacre at Tree of Life. And there's a lot that I remember from that time as if it were yesterday.

One of the things that I really remember was a piece that you wrote in the New York Times that's republished in this book. And it was called American Jews Know How This Story Goes. And I want to read the beginning of that column back to you and to share it with everyone. It opens like this.

There are no words. That was what I heard most often last weekend from those who were stunned by the news. Eleven people were murdered at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, believed to be the largest massacre of Jews on American soil. But there are words for this, entire books full of words.

The books the murdered people were reading at the hour of their deaths. News reports describe these victims as praying, but Jewish prayer is not primarily personal or spontaneous. It is a communal reading. Public recitations of ancient words, scripts compiled centuries ago and nearly identical in every synagogue in the world. A lot of those words are about exactly this.

And your children had words and you go on to say this. When I told my children what had happened, they didn't ask why they knew because some people hate Jews, they said.

How did these American children know that? They shrugged. It's like the Passover story my nine-year-old told me and the Hanukkah story and the Purim story and the Babylonians and the Romans. "My children are descendants of Holocaust survivors," you wrote, "but they didn't need to go that far forward in history. The words were already there." But the piece turns when you say the following. My children were right.

This story is old, with far too many words. Yet they were wrong about one thing. In the old stories, those outside the community rarely helped or cared. Our ancestors' consolation came only from one another and from God. But in this horrific week you wrote three years ago, perhaps our old words might mean something new. I wonder if you can explain, Dara, what you meant by that, what your children were wrong about and in what ways

Something that looked on its face like a pogrom was not a pogrom. And then I want you to answer three years later how you may have changed your assessment of that. Sure. So, you know, as I said in the piece, what was different about this from these past events is that

You saw this outpouring of love and support for the Pittsburgh Jewish community, right? I mean, there was instantly these like mass vigils and prayer services, some of which were really just spontaneous. And it happened within 48 hours. And, you know, like every congressperson known to man showed up and gave a speech. And yeah, you know, like there was just this like outpouring

pouring of support for the community, right? I mean, and that is like, that is not the norm in Jewish history, right? I mean, and that's what I wrote about in the piece. And I gave this allusion to this, you know, the expression that we say to mourners, which means like, God will comfort you, but it literally means the place will comfort you. And I draw this into this idea about America that like, you know, you can draw inspiration from this place where your neighbors are

with you, right? And to me, that was sort of like the one beautiful thing that came out of that was sort of seeing that outpouring of support for the Jewish community.

In terms of what has changed in the past few years, you know, six months later, there was another shooting in a synagogue in California. And the New York Times again called me to write yet another op-ed about this. And I just remember thinking like, oh God, I have to do this again. I'm running out of inspiration here. And I became like the go-to person for the emerging literary genre of synagogue shooting op-eds. Like this isn't a job I applied for.

Right. You know, and I was like afraid to say no to this job because I think if I say no, then who are they going to ask instead? But like, why do I have to keep doing this? Wow. And it's like that was what I thought the second time. And I remember not telling my children about that attack.

because I was like, you know, it's like, remember that thing that happened that was like this weird anomaly that never ever happens and was one crazy person. Sorry, apparently this anomaly happened again. And I sort of like just didn't, I wasn't willing to have that conversation with them. But the place where it really sort of changed for me, and this is at the end of the book, was the attacks on the Hasidic community that happened just before the pandemic. I mean, those attacks, like, first of all, New York Times not calling me for the quick op-ed,

on those. And I bet you can explain to everyone here why that is. Yes, I can explain exactly why, because what I did at that point was I went and first of all, I was like relieved that no one's asked me to write about this because I'm starting to realize that the things I have to say about this are not what people want to hear. And then what I did was I went and looked at all of the news coverage of those attacks and I could not find anything

news story, not even a column, news story about those attacks that didn't say something derogatory about the community being attacked in the process of reporting the attack. Like that they were gentrifiers or they were closed minded or OK. Yes. Like the one in Jersey City, you know, oh, well, these people were gentrifying a minority neighborhood, which is interesting for many reasons. Number one, these people were fleeing gentrification. They got priced out of Brooklyn. That's why they're in Jersey City.

Number two, these are highly visible members of the world's most historically persecuted minority. You know, these are not like white hipsters here. And number three, like, you know, is there this like murderous rage against gentrification where people are like walking into a blue bottle of coffee and, you know, blowing away white hipsters? Because I haven't seen that happening. I don't

I think gentrification is the issue here. And then the same thing, like with the Muncie attack, which for people who aren't familiar with this, this was an attack in Muncie, New York, in upstate New York, a town with a large Hasidic community. And somebody walked into this crowded Hanukkah party with a four foot machete and just started like slashing people. And,

And, you know, I'm reading the news articles covering that attack. And they're like, well, you know, just for context, there was this zoning battle between the Hasidic and non-Hasidic residents of this town. And first of all, again, factually irrelevant since it turned out the perpetrator, and it was in the same article, the perpetrator from a town 45 minutes away. So probably not someone who was really upset about the zoning. But second of all, like, you know, do we normally resolve municipal disputes with a machete?

Because silly me, I left mine at home at the last, for the last school board meeting, right? I was sort of like, you know, like these articles and then I'm like, these articles are sending a signal. And the signal is that these people deserve it. It's victim blaming. I mean, and it's that simple. And what I think is also really telling about that is people who are attacking Hasidim are not doing it because they disagree with Hasidic practice and belief, right? I mean, they're doing it because these people are visible. That's all. And

And it's just shocking was like for me to like read this in the press and sort of just see it just laid out so clearly. The other thing that shocked me and going going back to sort of like the silver lining, right, the thing we were all able to cling to after Pittsburgh was the fact that in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the words in Aramaic and Hebrew script of Yit Kadal, Yit Kadash, Shemera, the mourner's Kaddish are printed on the cover of the newspaper. And it's kind of embarrassing.

impossible to think of any other time or place in Jewish history where that would have happened. And so there was a comfort that like, yes, on the surface, this looks like every other attack that's ever happened to Jews, albeit with a different kind of weapon. But the response from the community was so different. And I remember going to Jersey City. I went there the day after the attack because I was thinking, maybe I'm going to write a column about this.

And what I saw there shattered me in a way that I was not able to fully articulate and weirdly in a way almost more deep and unsettling than Pittsburgh. The reason that it shattered me was that I went to the kosher supermarket expecting exactly what I had seen in Pittsburgh, expecting neighbors to be there, expecting there to be some kind of candlelight vigil, expecting flowers, expecting cards, expecting neighbors to be showing up. And I saw nothing.

And it was just the people, you know, in this community. And there was kind of like a little synagogue next door to it with a little school on top, cleaning up the glass, showing me a broom handle shot through with bullet holes. And I went store to store to store down the main strip of that Boulevard, asking people if they wanted to offer comment for a New York times column about what had happened. And almost no one had anything at all to say sympathetic to the community. And I,

That moment for me was like another sort of like turning point of, oh, you know, when the victims don't look like the kind of people we want to be victims and when the perpetrators don't look like the kind of people we're comfortable being perpetrators, how quickly do people sort of like turn their gaze away from reality?

Well, and I think it also sort of speaks to a fatal flaw in the way we think about diversity in this country and the way we sort of try to teach people, you know, not to be bigoted. And it's that, you know, the way we teach people not to be bigoted is to say like, oh, fill in the blank group over here that you are discriminating.

don't feel comfortable with or afraid of or, you know, or prejudiced against, you shouldn't be mean to those people because those people are just like us. They're just like you and me. Jews are just like us. And the problem with that concept is that Jews spent 3,000 years not being like everybody else. Right?

Right. That was sort of like, you know, in a lot of ways, the whole premise of Judaism, like going back to 3000 years ago when Jews were like the first people who were like, you know, worshiping a bossy and unsexy invisible God. Right. And I mean, that was like Jews are never cool. Right. There was never this attempt to be. It was always Judaism and Jewish culture is like a counterculture that runs through the whole history of the West and in a lot of ways challenges the whole history of the West. And we could talk more about that.

But there has been this sort of strategy that Jews in a lot of non-Jewish societies have felt the need to use where it's like you have to erase yourself in order to

gain some kind of public respect. And you see this even with the way we talk about antisemitism in some ways, because, you know, we often will make this argument like, oh, Jews are, and I've made this argument even myself to some extent, oh, Jews are the canary in the coal mine, right? Once Jews are attacked, it's like sign that, you know, there's this decline in the society or something.

Think about what an affront that is to one's dignity to have to make that argument. Because you're basically saying is we should all care when Jews are murdered or maimed because it might be an ominous sign that real people might later get attacked, right? Yeah.

that's really what you're saying. It's like you're erasing yourself in order to gain this public respect. And, you know, in retrospect, when you think about the response to the attack in Pittsburgh, this was a more liberal synagogue. The victims of this attack were people who don't have weird hairstyles and weird clothes. Yeah, they're not weird. Right. They're just like you and me. They don't wear weird. They don't have weird hairstyles. Right. And it's sort of like, well,

that's a fatal flaw in the way we think about living in a pluralistic society. You know, if we're only going to have empathy for people who are just exactly like us, right? I mean, if the idea of diversity is you have a bunch of people from lots of different backgrounds, but who all think the same way,

and who all live the same kind of lives. This is a real challenge to the American idea of what it means to respect differences. I want to get later to the idea of self-erasure, which is something that you've illuminated for me, and also to the idea of difference being the test of a liberal society.

Before we do, I want to get a little bit more deep into the book. You really resisted, as you said before, becoming the go-to person for synagogue shooting op-eds. You were angry about it. You write, "I was too angry. My children were growing up in an America very different from the one I'd grown up in. One where battling strangers' idiocies consumed large chunks of brain space and where the harassment and gaslighting of others were not the exception but the rule.

It seems, and you state this very clearly in the introduction, that you really didn't want to do this book that you just wrote. So why did you end up doing it? Let's start there. And it's not just that I didn't want to write this book. I spent 20 years not writing this book. I've published five novels before this. All five of my novels are very deeply entwined with Jewish history, Jewish culture, religion, beliefs, practices. Like this is like, you know, deeply involved in this. I have a PhD in Yiddish and Hebrew literature.

And I was always, in all of my work, pushing very hard back against this idea that Jewish life was defined from the outside by what people did to the Jews. To me, it was always extremely important for this to be a story that was told from within this culture. I used to ask people at my public talks about my books, I would often ask the audience, you know, how many people here can name three concentration camps? That's often something readers can do.

I'd ask those same readers, how many people here can name three Yiddish writers? 80% of the people murdered in the Holocaust were Yiddish speakers. This is a famously literary culture. Why would we care so much about how these people died if we're not going to care at all about how these people lived? And looking back at that, I sort of think I was kind of naive because I did not at that time appreciate this idea

enormous role that dead Jews play in the wider world's imagination. And that's where I think we get to the beginning of how I sort of fell into writing this book. Yes. And let's get to the, I mean, I, first of all, I think the title is incredible. I cannot believe your publisher allowed you to go with it. Obviously like the argument is,

in a way that runs through your essays is encoded in this title, People Love Dead Jews. I mean, most people see that and say, they do? Like, I don't. Explain to us what you mean by People Love Dead Jews. Sure. So the origin of this title is actually from a piece I wrote for Smithsonian Magazine in 2018. And what happened was Smithsonian Magazine approached me and asked me to write a piece for them about Anne Frank. And

I remember getting this proposal from them and just feeling this overwhelming dread because I was like, wow, I really don't want to write about Anne Frank. So I was like, why am I so uncomfortable with this? And I

And I then remembered a news item that I had read about something that happened at the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam. So this is, of course, the museum where Anne Frank, this teenage diarist who was murdered in the Holocaust, had been hiding with her family and other persecuted Jews in these like hidden rooms in this office building. This office building with these hidden rooms is now this blockbuster museum in Amsterdam. They get two million visitors a year.

And the news item I had seen was about a young Jewish employee at this museum, a young Jewish man who worked there. And his employer would not allow him to wear his yarmulke to work. So this, you know, this small little skullcap that Jewish religious men wear, they wouldn't allow him to wear it to work. They made him hide it under a baseball hat. When I read this, my jaw was on the floor. What was the reasoning they gave? Oh, you know, the museum has a wants to take a position of neutrality.

It was absurd, right? I mean, it was like, you know, we want to be neutral and welcoming to all people. I mean, all people except religious Jews, apparently. And so then he appealed this decision to the board of the museum, and the board of the museum deliberated about this for four months, and then relented and let him wear his yarmulke to work. And

I had read this story and I just thought, you know, four months is a really long time for the Anne Frank Museum to ponder whether or not it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding. And, you know, I, and I was just looking this up to sort of like remind myself, like what happened in this news story that I remember from a few months ago. And then I found an equally

equally ridiculous story from the same museum of something that had happened a few months earlier in 2017, where visitors had noticed something strange about the audio guide in this museum, where, you know, they have 15 languages and, you know, there's that audio guide display where it says English and there's a little British flag and it says Francais and there's a little French flag. Until you get to Hebrew, Hebrew, no flag.

No flag. And I'm like, you know, these are perhaps PR mishaps, but they're not mistakes.

And, you know, it's like the museum doesn't want to disrupt the experience of visitors who, you know, are coming to learn about the Jews' humanity. And what's the Jews' humanity? It's like, you know, the nice dead Jews, right? Not the yucky ones who are doing gross things like, I don't know, practicing Judaism or living in Israel. Like, that's not cool, right? We like the nice dead Jews. And so I did write this piece for Smithsonian Magazine, and the opening line of my piece is people.

People love dead Jews, living Jews, not so much. Yes. And so that's the opening line of this piece. And, you know, it's one of these things that once you see it, this dynamic of the way that people, as I put it,

are telling stories about dead Jews that make them feel better about themselves. Okay, so Anne Frank's actually a perfect illustration of that. And you contrast her in this amazing essay with a writer that I'm embarrassed that I had never heard of, who was sort of, I guess you could say, a contemporary of hers, a writer by the name of Zalman Gradovsky. Explain to me why it is

what it is about the story of Anne Frank or the worldview, at least the worldview we think is contained in the pages of that diary, that so flatter our sensibilities, why we know her name and why we don't know the name of Zolman Gradovsky.

Yes. So Anne Frank is a person who was writing in a non-Jewish language, was not particularly religious, right? Is living a Western life. And so I think that accounts for a lot of the appeal, right? She's just like us.

You know, she like, you know, has piano lessons or whatever, just like us. And that's part of it. But then there are other pieces, you know, you have this, the line that people are always plastering on the museum wall on the book jacket from Anne Frank's diary is this line where she says, you know, I still believe in spite of everything that people are truly good at heart.

And this line is inspiring, by which we mean it flatters us. It makes us feel forgiven for these, you know, I don't know, lapses in our civilization that lead to piles of murdered girls. And this is like, you know, this is also like this sort of very fundamental thing to Western civilization where, you know, you have this murdered Jew who's offered us grace, right? We have absolution from our sins because, you know, this murdered girl has told us so. Well, the problem with that is that

There's a much simpler explanation for why Anne Frank wrote this line, which is that Anne Frank wrote that line about people being truly good at heart three weeks before she met people who weren't.

Right now, three weeks later, she's arrested, deported to Auschwitz. And, you know, when she was there, she met people who weren't truly good at heart. So you just have to like dump that whole reality in order for this to work. So Zalman Grudovsky, you know, you say is contemporary. Of course, it's completely a contemporary of Anne Frank, very similar story in that this is a young Jewish person who is keeping a diary that was discovered after his death. The difference is Zalman Grudovsky was writing his diary in Auschwitz.

He was the one of the what the Nazis called the Sonderkommando, which were these Jewish prisoners who were forced to escort other Jewish prisoners into the gas chambers and then remove their bodies and burn them. And he was keeping this diary and buried it. And it was discovered after his death. He was he was murdered in a revolt that he had organized that basically lasted one day.

But in his diary, like he doesn't talk about how people are really good at heart. That's not something that comes up in his description of what's going on in these gas chambers. I mean, he talks about how people were singing Hatikvah in the gas chambers.

You know, he doesn't like stare into this inferno and wonder why this is happening. He knows. And he specifically says these fires were lit by the barbarians of the world. Yes, I was just pulling that up. Who hope to drive brutality from their own dark lives with its light.

This fire was ignited long ago by the barbarians and murderers of the world who had hoped to drive darkness from their brutal lives with its light. I had to put down the book when I read that. I mean, it's not a secret, right? Like why this is happening, right? I mean, and so there's a reason this isn't popular. You know, we'd rather hear about how people are really good at heart. It's not an optimistic view of human nature or of history.

I mean, it's not just that it's not an optimistic view of human nature or history. It also calls everybody into account for it because, you know, he's not saying that this is like some theological problem, right? He's saying like, you know, there's people in the world who have made choices that are, and this is their choice. You know, you're sort of in the dark for this, right? He's asking for accountability.

that's what people are not willing to do because that's not the story that makes them feel good about themselves. So we're talking here a little bit about the theme of like the way that we whitewash history or maybe the way that we look almost with one eye and

Jews are part of that too. And you write probably better than anyone else and have illuminated the subject for me of the phenomenon of Jewish self-erasure, essentially of us being complicit in our own self-abnegation. And you wrote an essay for Tablet a few years ago that I sent to everyone I know. It was for Tablet. It was called The Cool Jews. Can you just broadly talk to us about

There's the kind of anti-Semitism that you've described as Purim anti-Semitism that's about someone coming and saying, "I'm going to kill you." It's explicit. Then there's a kind of anti-Semitism that basically asks the Jews to make war against themselves. It asks the Jews essentially to erase themselves.

And this is a phenomenon that goes back thousands of years. And I'd love if you could explain this to people, because I think it helps people understand a lot of what they're witnessing right now.

Yes. So, you know, as you said, in the book, I identify it by these two forms of anti-Semitism, by the two holidays that in the Jewish calendar celebrate triumphs over them, right? So Purim anti-Semitism, based on the biblical book of Esther, which is about this attempted genocide, you know, and that's sort of the story that is probably most familiar to American Jews who are mostly descended from either Holocaust survivors or survivors of the

pogroms and persecutions of the Russian Empire in Eastern Europe. So that's sort of the like, you know, big bad guy comes and is like, we're going to kill all the Jews. Like, you know, like, let's go have a pogrom. Like, there's no ambiguity here. But then there's another strain that runs through this kind of history of what I call Hanukkah antisemitism based on this historic story of Hanukkah.

ancient Judea is taken over by this Hellenistic regime that at first is really just like, it's like a soft persuasion where it's like they're just imposing their religion on the country. Like we're going to have Greek games, we're going to have Greek temples, we're going to worship Greek gods. This is our culture and now it's your culture too because now you're our colony. And at first it sort of just looks like that.

But what then happens is you start seeing the sort of requirement that Jews comply with it.

And at first it starts as like, you don't have to comply with it, but it's the only way to sort of participate in this society. So the example I give is the example of these teenage Jewish boys who were recruited to play in the Greek games in Jerusalem, right? They built a stadium in Jerusalem and the Jews built this stadium sort of to prove to their Greek overwords, like, you know, we're on board with this. We're fine with this. Like we can be a good vassal state.

and they recruited teenage athletes to play in the Greek games. And you have to understand that this isn't just like being in the NBA, right? I mean, this is like, you know, in ancient Greek Hellenized culture, this was like

athletics were like the only way to like be a person who mattered. Like this was, it was tied up with the religion. I mean, it was like really pervasive in the culture. It was almost like, it would be like saying, if you don't participate in this game, it would be like not having a social media account or something. Like you really, you know, it's almost impossible. Right. Yes. It's a way to be cool. Right. It's a way to matter. And these teenage boys had their circumcisions reversed. Right.

in order to participate in these games. And that is at an early enough stage in this history where they're not being forced to do this. It's just that that's the only way to matter in this society. So, Dara, fast forward to another context, very different, much more recent in living memory, and explain to us who are the Yivseksia and how do they fit in to this theme of Jewish self-erasure?

Sure. So the Yiv Seksia is, these are the Jewish sections of the Communist Party after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. So the idea was that the Bolsheviks, they want to get all the masses of the former Russian empire now starting to be the Soviet Union on their side. And so, again, it's this kind of like soft persuasion at first, where they recruited Jews to sort of spread revolutionary message among other Jews.

And the form this takes, though, is that there's this editing that happens. And I should have added with the end of the Hanukkah story that it starts with this sort of what appears to be voluntary participation in Jews erasing some aspect, whatever aspect of their culture is currently considered uncool.

And the Hanukkah version, it then escalates, of course, to finally they make legislation forbidding various Jewish religious practices and they put people to death who don't comply. Okay. In the Soviet example, very similar. So it starts off as sort of voluntary and not violent, but it becomes violent, obviously. Yes. In these two cases, it does. Yes. So, and what it is, is when I say it's this editing, it's like this society is, what it's telling you, it's not saying we're going to kill all the Jews. It's very much not saying that. It's saying,

we love Jews. We just want you to not do the following X, Y, Z things, which we think are gross. Right. And so what those things are, you know, in the Hellenist society is going to be different from what it is in the Soviet Union. What I think is really interesting is in the Soviet Union and with the Bolsheviks, this took the form of, wait for it. We're not anti-Semitic. We're just anti-Zionist.

So they're like, Jews are awesome as long as they're not supporting Zionism, studying Hebrew, using Hebrew. Oh, by the way, also we're not anti-Semitic, we're just also anti-religious. So also you can't practice Judaism. So like Jews are great as long as you take like

As long as they're denatured and like stripped of everything that makes them Jews. Basically, yes. And then, you know, in the process of not being anti-Semitic and only being anti-Zionist, of course, then they managed to, you know, persecute, imprison, torture and murder thousands of Jews. Right. I mean, that's that's where this goes. So and of course, then it eats itself. Right. Because then what happens is these Jews who are on these committees, these Jewish sections of the Communist Party, this only lasts like, I don't know, I think it's 10 or 15 years and then they get purged.

Right. Because guess what? It turns out they're all Zionist spies who are trying to bring down the Soviet state. Right. I mean, it's very absurd. So and then you have sort of these various purges that happen going up through the 1950s until they're sort of able to repress any kind of expression of Jewish culture completely, all while being like, oh, we're not anti-Semitic.

Well, obviously, we're not living in Jerusalem under the Hellenists. We're not living in the Soviet Union. But this theme that runs through Jewish history of Jewish self-erasure, I think is very potent right now. I could choose dozens of examples, but I was reading a story this week about how in LA there's this new $500 million museum called the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures dedicated to the history of Hollywood.

And basically the only Jew referenced in the museum is the theater donated by David Geffen. And I think there's like one section about Louis B. Mayer. Explain this for me. Is it fair to see this as sort of a link in a long chain that you've been describing? - I mean, you're not imagining it, right? I mean, it takes a lot to tell the story of the history of Hollywood without talking about Jews.

I mean, I think that for Jews, there has been a strategy through history.

that has been sort of a negotiation with living within a non-Jewish society. And it's, there's like a new, numerous types of strategies that different Jewish communities have engaged over the millennia, really. And I mean, when you say Jewish self-erasure, I mean, Queen Esther pretended she wasn't Jewish, right? I mean, this is like, this goes back to the Hebrew Bible, right? This is not really like a new thing. In my book, I have a chapter about Ellis Island. This

myth of Ellis Island, right? Which is the myth that many Americans have heard in their families that, you know, are named for the force to be changed. Yes. That like, you know, this bumbling Ellis Island clerk, you know, change your name from something that sounds super Jewish to something that sounds super not Jewish.

in case anyone out there is wondering. No, your family's name was not changed at Ellis Island. No one's names were changed at Ellis Island. No one at Ellis Island wrote down people's names. They got the names from ships manifest. This is not my amazing research. This is like something they announced on public tours of Ellis Island National Park. So why was it that that idea, that myth took such hold? I remember the first time I heard you give a lecture about this, I was shocked. I mean, I was raised on the myth that our names were sort of like forcibly changed by the clerk.

Yeah. Why did that take hold there? Well, because it's easier. So what the reality behind that myth is that, and there are court records and this is not, this is not my research. This is a woman named Kirsten Vermegla, who's a fantastic historian. She has a book with another great title, A Rosenberg by Any Other Name. I love that. Great title where she tracks these court filings. And it's like tens of thousands of records in New York City civil court of

American Jews voluntarily changing their names. And a lot of these people weren't even immigrants, they were the children of immigrants. I mean, this were going through the 1940s and '50s, I mean, a generation after Ellis Island closed.

And what's remarkable about that is you see that these people were changing their names, not because they were like wanting to leave the Jewish community behind, but because they were staring down this reality of American antisemitism, like where, and you know, it's funny today we talk about antisemitic incidents, right? I mean, but in the 1940s, like it

it wasn't about incidents, right? It was about people not being able to get a job. Yeah. Right. Not being able to get an apartment. Right. I mean, that was like, you know, really a different world. And these were just people who were staring down a reality that was like, you know, destroying their family's prospects. And, you know, and so when I think about like, why does that myth have such staying power? That's what's interesting to me because I have written and spoken about this before. And every time I write and speak about it, people get really mad at me. Right. I have like

many, many people swarming me at public talks or in the comments section if I write about it. And they're all like, "Oh, you know, my great-grandfather must be the exception to this story because he wouldn't lie or whatever." And what's amazing is these are like, a lot of these people are highly educated American Jews who would never accept this Looney Tunes story about anything else. This story is doing emotional work for people.

Because this story, which was invented by American Jews ancestors, it was invented to protect their descendants from the psychological damage

of American antisemitism, right? It's a much better story to say like, oh this place has always been welcoming to American Jews, right? And this was just like a happy accident by this welcoming wonderful bumbling clerk at the counter who was like welcoming us into this wonderful country. Like that's a much better story to tell your children. And I think that that story people still cling to it because it gives them something that they can feel

more comfortable with. And I think that story, you see the effectiveness of it because now it's like every time you do see any kind of evidence of anti-Semitism in American life, like it always comes as a surprise. It's a perfect segue to a new report out this past week from the American Jewish Committee. And

And the numbers for many American Jews will seem shocking. 90% of American Jews view antisemitism as a problem. Nearly one in four Jews in America say they've been the subject of antisemitism over the past year. Over 80% of Jews say that antisemitism has increased over the past five years. Dara, before we got on here and we were talking, you were like...

Those numbers look pretty good to me. Tell us what you mean by that. What is it about your perspective and your worldview that allows you to not be shocked by numbers that I think for the vast majority of American Jews that I know would be shocking to them? What are you seeing or what is your frame that perhaps we can learn from? - Well, a few things, right? I mean, I think that part of it is like something really depressing, which is like the bar is kind of high

for what we consider disturbing in Jewish history, right? I mean, that's actually, you know, I talked about how people tell stories about dead Jews that make them feel better about themselves. One of those stories is Holocaust memorialization, frankly, because we all look great compared to the Nazis, right? Like...

Anybody can go to a Holocaust museum and they might be sad about what happened, but it makes them feel great about themselves because they're like, "I would never do this." Well, yeah, okay, you probably wouldn't. But you have this history in your mind and it's built into Jewish tradition. It's something that's always there.

you don't want to believe in it. You know, and I think, you know, it is true that like America is extraordinary for the Jewish community and remains so. So, I mean, I don't, I'm not troubled by those numbers. What I think it tells you though, is that American Jews have this deep awareness of this history. So, because if you think about attacks, like the one we're commemorating today in Pittsburgh, you know, these attacks, like they're very minimal compared to

what was the norm in a lot of periods in Jewish history, right? I mean, not even the Holocaust. I mean, there are whole sort of periods of Jewish history that people don't like. Did you know that there were these Petoria pogroms from 1919 to 1921, in which the lowest credible estimate of the number of Jews who were murdered in Ukraine during that period is 50,000? And

Probably you haven't even heard of it, right? Or even like anywhere in the Islamic world. I mean, you know, the Tripoli and Libya used to have, you know, had an ancient Jewish community that predated Islam. Tripoli in 1940 was 25% Jewish. How many Jews live in Libya today?

Zero. Zero. So I mean, you know, yeah, when that's your standard, these numbers, we're going to be thrilled with those numbers. This is excellent. So I mean, you know, so that's sort of like, you know, what I find troubling, though, is I'm 44 years old, and I feel like I grew up with antisemitism playing exactly zero role in my life, like zero.

And I don't think that's exactly true for my children. That's what I find disturbing. That's what I find troubling. So at this point in the conversation, Dara and I open it up to Q&A, which is something that you also can participate in if you become a subscriber to my Substack by going to barryweiss.substack.com.

We're not going to play the full Q&A on the podcast, but I do want you to hear Dara's answer to one particular question, which led to a wider talk about how Jews represent freedom in any given society, because that is one of the things that Dara has illuminated for me better than anyone else, and I just don't want you to miss it.

The question came from a mom. Her daughter's a freshman in college, and without getting too into the details, the daughter was assigned an essay in her anthropology class. It was called, How Did Jews Become White Folks? And the mom basically wanted to know, how could her daughter take this on? How could she get her class, her professor, to tell the Jewish story more accurately and responsibly?

Here's Dara's answer. That's the sort of erasure that I think we've been talking about in this whole conversation. I think that it comes as a product of a lack of education about Jewish history in general. And here's what I mean by that. Back up from college, where all kinds of insane things happen, to like high school, middle school, elementary school. If you have like a social studies textbook in a public school,

What does it say about Jews in that social studies textbook? If it has ancient history in it, there's maybe a page about the Israelites who doesn't mention that those are Jews. Those are like dead people from a long time ago. They might as well be Phoenicians. They're really dead. And then like if it's a book that has modern history, there's probably a chapter near the end about the Holocaust. So again, we have Jews who are dead people who are, their murders are here to teach us something, some kind of nice redemptive lesson about humanity.

There's nothing in between. But imagine how you completely flip over the meaning of Western history. And this goes to your listener's question. If you were to include Jewish history in Western history, there are so many things that we learn that if you included Jewish history in your discussion of world history, turn out to be lies. And an example of this, I'll give a very simple, small example, is literacy.

Right. Think about the way you learn about literacy, mass literacy in school. You learn that like before the printing press, nobody knew how to read except for like the nobles and the wealthy people and clergy and royalty. But then finally we have the printing press and then later we have industrial production and suddenly like gay mass literacy is finally possible.

Well, that's a nice story, but it's a lie because the Jewish community had universal male literacy for at least a thousand years before the printing press. Jewish kids in 12th century rural Yemen knew how to read. Jews always knew how to read. And so, you know, and if you were to teach that in a textbook,

It would make you tell a story that doesn't make you feel good about yourself because it would reveal that actually, no, you don't need advanced technology to have mass literacy. You just have to think that reading is important, right? So think about what I would encourage this person in this class to think about is what is the way we're telling this story that requires us to erase these people? Don't you think it's also just the idea that

everything right now is just coded in terms of racial discrimination and that we sort of defy that category. And, you know, I'm just looking at the title here, like how Jews became white folks. It's like, well, is that really the right frame here is to sort of like, first of all, think of us as a racial group at all. And then also if we are white people in, in

the framework of American life, American society, that makes it impossible for people to understand how we can be white people, therefore the oppressor group, and yet also the victims, according to the FBI, of the largest number of hate crimes year on year.

Isn't it that flattening framework that's the problem? Well, I mean, it's a couple of things. Also, the idea of like the Jews are these like oppressors who are like financially powerful and suck your blood. I mean, this is a very old anti-Semitic trope. Right. I mean, that's what we're doing here. But it's also like your thing about like, oh, Jews don't fit into this framework. Like now we're in the United States where like a lot of the history is seen through this racial lens. Right.

Jews never fit into the history. And that's always been a problem. Yeah. So, and this, I give the example of Napoleon dealing with this problem where in 1806, Napoleon convened a Sanhedrin, which was the ancient rabbinic court, which hadn't met in 2000 years. And he's like, we need to do something about the Jews because the Jews prior to the French revolution in Europe were treated as like a

a corporate entity. In other words, they weren't treated as individuals. They were taxed as a group. They were seen as like outside the feudal system. And, you know, they were like had placed these exorbitant taxes on them. And but they were not treated as individuals. They were treated as a group. And so then you have this problem with the French Revolution where they're trying to dissolve all these kind of corporate entities and make them all loyal to the nation state.

And so then suddenly you've got to dump Jews into a nation state and they don't really fit there. Right. So, and he literally does this ridiculous thing where he convenes this like court of rabbis from all over the French empire to come and meet and like promise their loyalty to the French state. It's this like absurd comedy. And you see that same absurd comedy going on in the United States now where it's like, you know, the Jews have never fit into these, you know, these sort of structures that are set up by these outside cultures. Right.

This is the place where throughout history, Jews in a sense represent the possibility of freedom. We don't conform.

And that again goes back to 3000 years ago when we're praying to the bossy, unsexy, invisible God. - I think it's one of the most, one of the insights of yours that I've clung to the most because the negative way to say it is as if you, which is what you referred to before is the idea of the Jews as the canary in the coal mine, which is the cliche. But the thing that you've written in this book and you know, it was originally printed in an op-ed is you say since ancient times in every place they've ever existed,

Jews have represented the frightening prospect of freedom. As long as Jews existed in any society, there was evidence that it, in fact, wasn't necessary to believe what everyone else believed, that those who disagreed with their neighbors could survive and even flourish against all odds.

The Jews continued distinctiveness despite overwhelming pressure to become just like everybody else, demonstrated their enormous effort to cultivate that freedom, devotion to law and story, deep literacy, and an absolute obsessiveness about transmitting those values between generations. The existence of Jews in any society is a reminder that freedom is possible.

but only with responsibility and that freedom without responsibility is no freedom at all. I wanted you to sort of expand on that last idea. What is that responsibility that you're referring to? What do you mean by that? That, you know, civil society doesn't magically happen. It has to be cultivated by all of the people who are committed to it. You know, that's something that, you know, we think of in the United States in the context of this is a nation that's based on this document that's a set of laws that

That's also the basis of Judaism. It's this covenant with God that's based on, it's like a text, which is like, here's a set of laws for how we're going to have a society.

And everybody has to buy into this set of laws. And it's not just buy into the set of laws, like follow these laws. It's actually hard work to follow these laws, right? It takes a lot of effort and it requires educating children. And it also requires sort of solving differences because there are going to be differences within that society. The end of the book, I talk about embarking on this dafiyomi, right? The study of the Talmud. And one of the things that's amazing about the Talmud is like this process

pluralism of opinion, right? I mean, the reason the Talmud is like 3000 pages long is because they include everyone's opinions.

Right. Not just the people who won the argument. Right. I mean, all of those people are in there and that's sort of what's really fascinating. So, you know, I think we're living in a society now where every the word on every right thinking person's lips is diversity and inclusion. And what you're suggesting is that actually those words are untrue and that we're moving away from those things and the way that we see that we're moving away from those things.

is the increasing levels of antisemitism. They're actually moving away from respect toward genuine difference. Would you agree with that?

I mean, I think that you see it, right? Because I think that you see that it's that same dynamic of that you saw, that you see in these other settings where it's like, Jews are great so long as they're not violating whatever it is, you know, these three things that our society thinks are universal standards, but they're not universal. They're just particular to us. That's why there's this like carve out for Hasidim, right? Where it's like,

People who would never want to be bigoted about anybody would like, you know, write this whole article about how like, you know, these people were attacked with machetes because, you know, they were they were taking over the town council. I mean, this is old.

Like, oh, they were manipulating power behind the scenes. I'm like, really? We're going there? Right? I mean, or then, like, you know, I mean, like, we haven't even spoken about, like, the public conversation about Israel and the absurdities of it, right? It's like, you know, oh, they're killing innocent children because they want to kill innocent children. It's like, this is old. Right?

Right? Like, this is like, you know, straight up blood libel here. So, I mean, these are very, very old things. So, you know, I mean, people really... But why are people so blind to it? I mean, you're saying that like it's so natural, like it's so obvious, like saying the sky is blue. I mean, it's obvious to me, but why is it so hard for people to see the connection between, you know, the traditional blood libel and the kind of newfangled one that's dressed up in, you know, sort of a disguise? Yes.

Well, I mean, I'm sure that people who, you know, during the medieval blood libels were very convinced that they were, you know, looking out for the welfare of these, you know, whatever toddler drowned in the river that week. You know, they really believed that, right? I mean, that was what they thought. I mean, and also, I mean, the blood libel example is something I do write about in the book because I talk about that in the context of The Merchant of Venice. I have a chapter about that. And, you know,

the story of Simon of Trent, who was this child who was, you know, the subject of one of these blood libels in 15th century Italy. And this story, you know, this sort of new story broke right when there was this new media to publicize it, the new media being printing presses. Yes. Right. I mean, that was the most shocking thing that I learned in researching that history was that like,

like I think it was the majority of the books that were published in the first 15 years of the printing press in Italy were about this like Jews butchering and eating this. News or news. We know this. Yeah. Like new media, new media is like, yeah, this, this nonsense can really spread.

Dara, thank you so much and hope to do this with you again soon. Thank you. Thank you, Barry. And thank you to all of these wonderful listeners. And I hope that we can continue this conversation in some other way in the future and among yourselves as well. Me too. Thanks so much.

Thank you to Dara Horn and to all of our subscribers who joined us for that conversation. Honestly, listeners, if you liked what you heard, if you're provoked, if you want to be able to attend events like this one in the future and ask my guest questions yourself, head over to barryweiss.substack.com and hit subscribe. See you next week.