Since Peo­ple Love Dead Jews was pub­lished in 2022, read­ers have con­sis­tent­ly asked Dara Horn for the solu­tion to ris­ing anti­semitism. Her lat­est book, with the provoca­tive title, The Final Solu­tion to the Jew­ish Ques­tion: A Love Sto­ry for the Liv­ing is her attempt to answer that ques­tion. In it, she expos­es the hypocrisy of the cur­rent moment, unpack­ing anti­semitism on the col­lege cam­pus, at the UN, and in the pub­lic dis­course with sting­ing wit, eru­di­tion, and a keen his­tor­i­cal lens.

Horn begins by call­ing her­self the Anti­semitism Lorax. Like the small crea­ture in Seuss’s book who calls out the evil around him but is pow­er­less to fix it, Horn has often felt that peo­ple were look­ing for her to stem the tide of ris­ing hatred when all she had the pow­er to do was call it out. Thank­ful­ly, what dis­tin­guish­es this book from her pre­vi­ous mas­ter­piece is that it gives us some direc­tion in terms of what we can do today. 

Before get­ting into her answers, Horn spends the bulk of the book ana­lyz­ing and cri­tiquing con­tem­po­rary post-Octo­ber 7th anti­semitism. Like Peo­ple Love Dead Jews, this book is a series of short essays, con­nect­ed by the com­mon theme of Jew-hatred, but each read­able on its own. In one, she care­ful­ly unpacks what went wrong at Har­vard and why Jews were not count­ed in their broad­er DEI work. In anoth­er, she care­ful­ly decon­structs the claim of Israel’s geno­cide of Pales­tini­ans, explos­ing the hypocrisy of the IJC and retrans­lat­ing state­ments by Israeli offi­cials that are often mis­used and held up as proof of geno­ci­dal intent. 

Per­haps Horn’s best chap­ter unpacks the his­to­ry of anti-Zion­ism begin­ning at the 2001 Dur­ban con­fer­ence and mov­ing back­ward to show how anti-Zion­ism was weaponized in Sovi­et Rus­sia and Nazi Ger­many, and dur­ing the Farhud pogrom to dis­cred­it Jews and make Jew-hatred into a ​“safer” polit­i­cal posi­tion. Horn then con­nects the dots to show how these his­tor­i­cal moments, all of which we would con­demn today, show up in con­tem­po­rary anti-Zion­ist dis­course on the left today. 

After diag­nos­ing the prob­lem, Horn then turns to her solu­tion. Horn is care­ful not to claim to be an expert. Instead she mod­els one fix, a project she calls The Tell. Not­ing that efforts to fight anti­semitism fail when they only address the his­to­ry of Jew-hatred like the Holo­caust, she empha­sizes the impor­tance of lift­ing up the expe­ri­ence of liv­ing Jews and the beau­ty of Judaism’s three-thou­sand-year-old faith along­side the sto­ry of anti­semitism. In addi­tion, she asserts that the goal of edu­ca­tion is to teach stu­dents to rec­og­nize pat­terns and become good at ques­tion­ing false assump­tions and media bias. As she argues, when stu­dents cul­ti­vate these skills, the plat­form for anti­se­mit­ic dis­course disappears.

Dara Horn is a phe­nom­e­nal writer. Despite deal­ing with hard mate­r­i­al, the book is also pro­found­ly fun­ny. Horn is a mas­ter at the turn of phrase and the per­fect­ly placed par­en­thet­i­cal that, in a few words, can show the absur­di­ty of the antisemite’s posi­tion. Although the book is a series of essays, the work shows a strong edi­to­r­i­al sense in con­nect­ing them. Not only do the essays build on one anoth­er, but also they fre­quent­ly ref­er­ence one anoth­er. In addi­tion, the book man­ages to be deeply per­son­al, his­tor­i­cal­ly infor­ma­tive, and jour­nal­is­ti­cal­ly obser­vant — all at the same time. The Final Solu­tion to the Jew­ish Ques­tion make­sit clear that Horn is at the top of her game.