Tough Love

Although Johann von Leers was a historian at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, his only significant achievements were in the Nazi war against the Jews. “Our task is to preach merciless hate,” he said. He wrote dozens of books and pamphlets with titles like Jews Behind Stalin, Blood and Race, and Jews Out! (Juden Raus!), along withNazi school curricula. By the time the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, arrived in Nazi Berlin, the two men had been corresponding for a decade. Von Leers, whose languages included Arabic, helped produce the radio broadcasts that spread the Nazi party line on Jews and Zionism throughout the Middle East.

Unlike most other Nazi propagandists, however, von Leers accomplished some of his most effective anti-Jewish work after the war. In the early 1950s, dictator Juan Perón hired him to create a public smear campaign against Argentinean Jews. Impressed with his recent work and aware of his record, the Egyptian government soon brought him to Cairo and put him to work heading an information ministry office devoted to antizionist propaganda. For the next decade, von Leers oversaw the Nasser regime’s effort to saturate the Arab world with articles, lectures, books, and broadcasts about the villainy of Jews and evils of Zionism.

Von Leers wasn’t the only Nazi to have a career trajectory like this, and the story doesn’t end there. As Dara Horn remarks in her new book, with characteristic bitter sarcasm, “His material was apparently too good to limit to Arab audiences, so it wound up at its natural destination: the Soviet Union.” There, she writes:

It became source material for Soviet antizionist propaganda. Books produced by von Leers’s Cairo propaganda factory, like one typical work titled America: A Zionist Colony, were plagiarized by Soviet “Zionologists” and republished as their own. I wish I could say there is a special irony in the Soviet Union, proud vanquishers of Nazis, knowingly regurgitating texts produced by a top-brass propaganda officer from the Nazi regime. But there isn’t. The ideas were the same.

Horn draws here on the archival research of the German historian Ulrike Becker and other scholars, but it is exceedingly unlikely that Americans students at an elite university would ever be taught such material, even though some of them might well proclaim that America is a colony of Israel, or vice versa. At one point in this devastating collection of essays, Horn notes:

[The Harvard] School of Public Health’s Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights proudly announced that it “utilizes a decolonial framework in program development, leadership, and engagement”—meaning, one might reasonably assume, the “decolonizing” of Israel through the removal of its seven million Jews.

Horn’s new book is many things, not least of which is an indictment of an American educational system. She recognizes that most student anti-Israel activists in elite schools were “well-meaning, intending only to voice their objection to a very real humanitarian disaster” in Gaza, but, she notes, “they were also remarkably incurious”:

The righteous romanticizing of students dressing up as Hezbollah recruits was extraordinary, as were the faculty members cheerleading for totalitarian regimes. Both of these phenomena—the enthusiastic support for costumed, privileged teenagers, and the enthusiastic support for some of the best-funded and most tyrannical regimes on earth—required not merely a deep ignorance, but a commitment to ignorance.

The idea that many students and professors at our best universities are committed to ignorance is a grievous charge but not an empty or unconsidered one on Horn’s part. In addition to being a distinguished novelist and critic, Horn holds a doctorate in comparative literature from Harvard; has taught and lectured widely; and served on the ill-fated Harvard task force on antisemitism, before giving up on it in frustration.

As Horn and other critics have noted, antisemitism was percolating through American culture and campuses before October 7, and expressions of solidarity with Hamas and condemnation of Israel started at universities like Harvard on October 8, before Israel had even responded. Of the popular chant, “There is only one solution: intifada revolution!” Horn dryly remarks, “If there is only one solution, perhaps one could call it the Final Solution.” This is one of the dark jokes that provided Horn with a title even more provocative than her previous collection, People Love Dead Jews, though it should be noted that The Final Solution to the Jewish Question comes withthe hopeful subtitle A Love Story for the Living, to which we shall return.

It is one of Dara Horn’s signal virtues as a writer and public thinker that she does not mince words. Take, for instance, her guest lecture at an elite prep school, which she describes as an attempt to refute a “multilayered archaeological accumulation of bullshit.”

In a school newspaper article after my visit, some students indeed complained that they’d been “triggered.” Of course they were, because people do not like it when others point out that they are bigots. On the other hand, several non-Jewish students approached me afterward to thank me. . . . “I thought that ‘Zionism’ meant ‘genocide,’” one student told me. . . . I knew where her “thought” had come from, and why someone educated at one of the best schools in America was likely to think it.

Before we turn to some of Horn’s archaeological excavations into the origins of such thoughts, it’s worth pausing for a moment to think about just what kind of bullshit she finds the anti-Israel orthodoxy at elite American institutions to be. When “costumed, privileged teenagers” chant, “There is only one solution: intifada revolution!” do they mean it?

The alternative is that they’re just bullshitting, in philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s sense of the word. As Frankfurt put it, the bullshitter’s “fault is not that she fails to get things right, but that she is not even trying.” If the protesters are bullshitting in Frankfurt’s sense, then they have certainly earned Horn’s contempt. The fate of Israelis and Palestinians, and of Jews around the world who have been brutalized by these calls to “globalize the intifada,” is a serious matter, if anything is, and it can only be addressed with a commitment to getting things right. Also too serious a matter for bullshitters is the enterprise of higher education. Yet precisely in those institutions whose missions demand a primary commitment to truth (or, as it says on the Harvard seal and sweatshirts, Veritas), enthusiasm for sloganeering has not just been tolerated; it has been cultivated.

But, as Horn knows, antisemitism can be both the bullshit that campus activists chant and deliberate lies propagated by demagogues, from Hasan Piker to Tucker Carlson, and dictatorships, from Qatar to China (not coincidentally, key funders of America’s leading institutions of higher education). In this respect, she defines “the Big Lie of antisemitism” as “Jews are destroying whatever you value most.” Like every other attempt to define a social phenomenon with a two-thousand-year history, this doesn’t capture everything, but it does underline the way in which a set of deliberate outright lies have been combined with a disregard for the truth and a spurious idealism. By rallying hundreds of thousands of college students to shout threats of violence in unison that they do not mean (assuming that they do not mean them), organizers have debased language in precisely the place where it should matter most. If in a university, language can be rendered meaningless and words judged for their political efficacy rather than their truth value, so much becomes possible (see under: “genocide”).

This is all true and important to say, but let’s return to those sincere but incurious students, some of whom become sincere but incurious teachers. As much as the lies and the bullshit, that incurious sincerity is how anti-Jewish politics advance in the twenty-first century: First, they come for the humanities.

The overarching argument of the various essays collected in People Love Dead Jews was, roughly, that society prefers to think of Jews as symbolic victims than as living complex human beings, which is not the same thing as antisemitism but isn’t very far from it either. On her book tour in 2021, Horn tells us, audience members confided their stories of experiencing anti-Jewish harassment. They also downplayed their experiences, but mostly “they were bewildered.” They approached her apologetically, telling her that “these were minor things . . . nothing things . . . certainly not worth reporting. . . . It was probably their fault.”

This was several years before October 7, and the incidents of everyday antisemitic aggression, micro and macro, that Horn relates are disturbing. For instance, a man wearing a kippa in the supermarket had his cart rammed by another shopper, which could have been an accident, “except the shopper shouted, ‘The kosher bagels are in the next aisle!’”; Jewish kids in public schools had pennies thrown at them in the halls; and the security guard at a Jewish private school joked online about shooting kids on the playground and parents in the carpool line.

Horn’s answer to her readers’ bewilderment at such incidents is both complex and uncompromising. To put it briefly: These aren’t minor incidents, and the seemingly successful American Jewish project of assimilation makes it impossible to address them. Horn calls this project “the gentleman’s agreement” after Laura Z. Hobson’s best-selling novel and the 1947 Gregory Peck movie of that name. It is the story of a Christian journalist who investigates antisemitism by posing as a Jew, the moral being that people shouldn’t hate Jews because Jews are just like everyone else. Or, as someone on set supposedly told screenwriter Moss Hart, “You should never be mean to a Jew because he may turn out to be a Gentile.”

The gentleman’s agreement of the book and film is unreasoning country club exclusionism, but the gentleman’s agreement Horn points to is the American Jewish acceptance of its basic premise, that Jews must assimilate to be included. Horn writes:

The gentleman’s agreement has made American Jews incapable of understanding what is currently happening to them, which is not an attack on Jews as individuals, but an attack on the idea of Jewish peoplehood. Most American Jews today have lived inside the gentleman’s agreement all their lives, many for generations. Living inside it, they cannot see it. They do not understand that their identity has been edited and subjected to someone else’s approval.

The price of this identity editing has been accepting “the lie that has defined antisemitism since ancient times,” which is that Jews are always on the dock, guilty until proven innocent.

Horn needn’t be taken as saying that antisemitism has everywhere and at all times been the same phenomenon, an eternal hatred. All she insists on, following the historian David Nirenberg and others, is that there are historical continuities: “Stories were always built on older stories that were built on even older stories.” And like an archaeologist digging through a tell, or mound, she shows the way in which one lie was built on and transformed the one beneath it. Sometimes, however, the historical continuities are more like direct links in a causal chain: Johann von Leers, an unrepentant Goebbels crony, adapted Nazi propaganda for Arab and Soviet purposes to disseminate at home and abroad, especially in the Third World and among Western radicals. Some of those same tropes, claims, and conspiracy theories are now repeated by today’s anti-Israel activists.

Whatever the specific historical source of this or that antisemitic calumny or attack, the American Jewish idée fixe that such antisemitism is a simple prejudice and that reminding menacing protesters or sneering colleagues of Jews’ essential sameness will dispel that prejudice is, Horn argues, pointless. That approach informed the massive investments in Holocaust education of the past decades, which Horn criticizes at length in a chapter that first appeared in The Atlantic. In avoiding both the particular history of antisemitism and the particularities of the Jews and Jewish culture that was destroyed, Holocaust education has been, she argues, counterproductive. Now it turns out that some of the very students who passed through these Holocaust studies curricula joined the stampede to purify their clubs, forums, professional associations, and social circles of Israelis and Israel-connected Jews.

There are, of course, other ways of teaching the Holocaust. A version less beholden to the gentleman’s agreement would help people realize that antisemitism is not mere prejudice; it is hostile politics. The Nazis organized as a political party, wrote a platform, and ran for election, after all. But American Jews themselves barely understand that. Their insistence on thinking of antisemitism as hate-in-a-misguided-heart has given them no capacity to adapt to a political environment in which the various bad actors trying to break US support for Israel have determined that targeting American Jews can help achieve that end. They have made Jews pay real personal costs at school, work, and on the street for their community’s relationship with Israel. It’s working, and many Jews are deciding that they don’t care enough to pay the personal price.

As for non-Jewish students in the US, they are more likely to learn whatever they know of Jews, Jewish history, and Israel from social media, ChatGPT, and subreddits than from well-meaning school assemblies or visits to the local Holocaust museum. In a key chapter, Horn shows why this is not only even worse than one might have thought but, more surprisingly, in keeping with the long history of antisemitism.

It begins with a conversation with a worried young data scientist she calls Nigel (a pseudonym), who teaches her about data poisoning. He had been following antisemitic discourse on Reddit and trying to get the company to do something about it before October 7, but “their VP of safety told us that they’d be a much smaller platform” if they did. Then it got worse:

On the very day of October 7, 2023, several of the largest subreddits on the platform were immediately overwhelmed with content justifying and even celebrating the attack. . . . These subreddits—groups with millions of subscribers—were on topics completely unrelated to the Middle East. One . . . focused on blooper videos and funny memes. The instantaneous transformation of these enormous anodyne forums into spaces where moderators announced that Zionists must be eliminated, and where Jewish users who objected were immediately attacked, harassed, and banned, was especially striking for happening . . . within twenty-four hours of the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Something had “completely changed the character of those subreddits,” Nigel said.

It turned out that some of the volunteer moderators of these groups were also moderators on the “Palestine” subreddit as well as on a similar Discord server, where, among other things, activists were being actively recruited to “join a network of Wikipedia editors manipulating that platform on a large scale.” The most dangerous thing about this is not the online propagandizing and bullying or even the slanted pseudo-objectivity of Wikipedia entries about Jews, Israel, and the Middle East—it’s the fact that Reddit and Wikipedia are among the largest sources of the training data for the large language models that power AI platforms like ChatGPT.

Perhaps surprisingly, new media antisemitism is not so new. In Horn’s first level of excavation, she discusses Father Coughlin, who defended Nazi actions throughout the 1930s on his popular radio program, broadcast from Detroit. She describes Coughlin’s defense of Kristallnacht with a startling analogy:

Rather than being a highly planned massacre sponsored by a well-financed authoritarian regime whose ideology demanded the elimination of every Jew on the planet, Kristallnacht, like October 7, was simply an organic, grassroots, democratic outburst from a justifiably frustrated populace, an understandable day of revenge.

As it happens, the name of Coughlin’s newspaper was Social Justice.

Of course, the largest newspaper coming out of Detroit was Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent, which he used to relentlessly promote antisemitic conspiracy theories including The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (itself a media creation). Horn notes this (wittily comparing Ford to Elon Musk) but then proceeds to dig “much deeper into the layered simulacrum of reality and illusion of authority that gives new media its power over a population.” Here, she brings the reader back to 1493, when “the new media of print reached an early apotheosis with the Nuremberg Chronicle,” a popular history of the world, illustrated with hundreds of woodcuts. It was, Horn writes, “the Wikipedia of its time.” It also spread the blood libel that the Jews of Trent had kidnapped, ritually tortured, and murdered a Christian toddler named Simon.

Following the recent work of the historian Magda Teter, Horn shows how the legend of Simon of Trent’s ritual murder was built with a relentless public relations campaign organized by the local bishop, Johannes Hinderbach, with the help of poets, artists, and other fifteenth-century culture-industry creatives. By the time the Nuremberg Chronicle was published, placing Simon’s murder as a key event in the Sixth Age of the World, Hinderbach and his colleagues had published dozens of works promoting the blood libel. Despite the Vatican’s opposition at the time, within a century, Simon was officially beatified and declared a saint by the church.

“It turns out,” Horn writes, “that if you control the flow of information, and if you use that control to blast images of Jews drinking children’s blood . . . everyone will eventually believe it.” As she notes, the blood libel reached the Middle East with the Damascus blood libel of 1840, and still circulates there.

There may be an important gap, a missing stratum, in Horn’s archaeological analysis, not in her discussion of the antisemites and their fellow travelers but in her discussion of American Jews. It is true that Gentleman’s Agreement codified midcentury Jewish strategies of erasing difference, but by the 1960s and 70s, American Jewish culture had decisively changed in ways that sociologists and historians of American Jewry have discussed and documented extensively. The world in which Dara Horn (and I and perhaps most of the readers of this magazine) grew up in was one in which Jews were seen asserting their differences throughout the culture.

If we were excavating this archaeological layer of American Jewish life (or our parents’ basement), we might find an old copy of The Jewish Catalog next to an ArtScroll Chumash; a blue-and-orange New York Mets kippa with a hot dog receipt from the old Shea Stadium’s kosher vendor; a college sweatshirt bearing the Hebrew letters heh-resh-vav-vav-alef-resh-dalet; a Rugrats Passover video cassette; a completed Jewish day school financial aid form (now unreadable due to water damage from a leaky Birthright Israel water bottle); a surplus box of metal bracelets engraved “Anatoly Shcharansky 3-15-77”; and a Judaic studies senior thesis along with a memento from the campus Chabad.

All this detritus of American Jewry’s post-1960s embrace of ethnic pride and religious revival tells a different story from that of cowering self-erasure. It speaks to ways that the advent of a US-aligned Israel and the rise of American multiculturalism combined to give American Jews the confidence to pursue a new, less gentlemanly agreement that asserted the dignity of difference. So, what happened? Why hasn’t that more self confident Jewish culture given rise to a more vigorous and effective response to the present crises?

One perhaps too-easyanswer is that it has. Passionate, articulate advocates like Horn are the products of this culture (her mother, she mentions, holds a doctorate in Jewish studies, and she went off to Harvard as a proud and unapologetic Jew). A more sober answer might be that although The Jewish Catalog, the day school paperwork, the Harvard Hebrew sweatshirt, and so on were all very real expressions of a confident American Jewish renaissance, it must be remembered that it is one in which the majority of American Jews took no part.

The subtitle of Horn’s book, A Love Story for the Living, inverts the title of her previous bombshell. It is exceedingly tough love, but there is a logic to Horn’s uncensored detailing of the abuses being hurled at Jews today and to her revelatory archaeologies of the pasts from which the twenty-first century’s Jewish Question is constructed. She wants American Jews to see their own experience clearly, in context, and without illusions. Add enough dots, draw enough lines, and readers will see the patterns and, like Horn or the data scientist Nigel, set aside their genteel instincts and fight back.

But Horn really does propose, if not quite a “solution” to the present-day Jewish Question, at least a constructive plan, not only for her fellow Jews but for her fellow Americans who are not Jewish. Inspired by the work of teachers and volunteers, especially two Minnesotans named Sally Abrams and Holly Brod-Farber who have spent the last two decades volunteering to give students in public and non-Jewish private schools a crash course in Jewish civilization, Horn proposes to do the same thing systematically and at scale. In her final chapters, she imagines a curriculum that would present Jews as neither victims or victimizers but as heirs to an extraordinary history and culture, with a historic and inalienable connection to the Land of Israel.

Horn’s educational plans (which have now evolved into a nonprofit foundation called The Tell) are ambitious and certainly welcome. And yet, what remains with me after reading her angry, incisive, endlessly eloquent book is her unapologetic Jewish outrage. I was reminded of a famous essay by the great cultural Zionist Asher Ginsberg, who went by the pen name Ahad Ha’am (one of the people):

Surrounded by armed bandits, I cry out, “Help! Help!” Is not every man bound to hasten to my help? Is it not a fearful, and indelible disgrace, that I am forced to prove first of all that my danger affects other people, affects the whole human race? As though my blood were not good enough, unless it be mingled with the blood of others!