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

**Dan Senor** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (0:21)
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**Dara Horn** (0:26)
This is the story of a tiny, counter-cultural minority that refused to bow to tyrants, refused to assimilate into dominant empires.
That is a story that goes on for thousands of years. So when the Jews say they don't bow to other gods, what they're really saying is they don't bow to tyrants. If you think about it that way, you realize that that is inseparable from the pattern of antisemitism for thousands of years. Because ultimately, when you have an antitronical movement, it pisses off tyrants. And when you have a non-conformist movement, it pisses off dominant societies that need everyone to agree with them in order to validate their own ideas. The way I came to think about antisemitism is that antisemitism is essentially better understood less as a bigotry or a bias than as a lie. It is a lie that people use to gain or maintain power.

**Dan Senor** (1:27)
It's 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, August 11th here in New York City. It's 10:30 p.m. on Tuesday, August 11th in Israel. Before today's episode, a quick housekeeping note. On Thursday, October 22nd, just five days ahead of the Israeli elections, Call Me Back will hold a live taping at the Streicker Center in New York City, where I'll sit down with Dan Shapiro, Dahlia Scheinlin and Brett Stevens to discuss what's at stake in Israel's 2026 election and what its results will mean for the U.S.-Israel relationship. Tickets have just gone on sale, so if you want to join us, please follow the link in the episode description. Now on to today's episode. In 2021, Dara Horn published the book, People Love Dead Jews.
The title alone was rattling, but it made a strong argument. America, Dara wrote, will canonize a murdered Jew far more readily than it will engage with a living one. It became a bestseller, it won a National Jewish Book Award, and it turned into something close to a diagnostic term for how American culture actually relates to Jewish suffering. Five years later, after October 7th, after Bondi Beach, after several years in which nearly every assumption about Jewish identity in much of the English-speaking world has been tested, Dara Horn is back with a new book whose title does something even bolder. It's called The Final Solution to the Jewish Question, A Love Story for the Living. It's out this September. Dara is deliberately taking the language the Nazis used to describe the extermination of European Jewry and repurposing it to ask, What would an actual solution, not a slogan or a hashtag, look like? The book ranges wildly, the failures of Holocaust education, the long prehistory of the anti-Zionist movement, the quiet compromises of what's been called the American Jewish Golden Age, and an investigation into an organized effort to poison artificial intelligence itself with anti-Jewish propaganda.
Dara Horn has a doctorate in Hebrew and Yiddish literature from Harvard. She's taught at Yeshiva University in Sarah Lawrence. Her last book named The Disease, and this one claims to have found or at least argued toward a cure. My conversation with Dara Horn after this message.
One of the things I've noticed over the last couple of years is how many people in my own circle have started learning Hebrew again, and a lot of them found their way to today's sponsor, Citizen Cafe. Here's the thing that nobody tells you about learning a language as an adult. It's not that you can't learn it. It's that most classes teach you the theory of the language instead of how to speak it. That's the part Citizen Cafe change. You're not memorizing conjugations for a test that never comes. You're in a conversation from day one, and the language starts to feel like something that belongs to you. Their teachers are Israeli, all their classes are online, and they work with students in over 25 countries. But what actually struck me is the community around it. Thousands of people learning together, showing up for each other, not just logging into an app on their own. In an industry that's all about automating everything, Citizen Cafe went the other way. This is the moment Hebrew stops being something you study and starts being something you're part of. To schedule your free intro session with Citizen Cafe, head now to the link in the show description or go to citizencafetlv.com.
Dara, welcome to Call Me Back.