By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
Author Dara Horn (at left) interviewed by Melanie Pell at Congregation Adath Jeshurun on Aug. 10, 2026 during the Year of Civil Discourse’s first public event (Photo by Amy Joseph Landon)
Editor’s note: While Dara Horn’s talk touched on a broad range of topics and issues, this article focuses on the subject of YOCD’s first public presentation: antisemitism. For more background about the Year of Civil Discourse, reaction to the event and information on upcoming presentations, see the companion “Letter to the Community” printed on page 19 of this issue, or visit yocdlouisville.org.
Dara Horn likes to tell of the time, eight or so years ago, when Smithsonian Magazine asked her to write a commemorative essay on Anne Frank. The request didn’t exactly send the celebrated Jewish author and scholar into paroxysms of unbridled joy.
“I was overwhelmed with dread,” Horn told a large audience at Congregation Adath Jeshurun, where on Aug. 10 she was the featured speaker for the Year of Civil Discourse’s first public event. The evening’s topic was fraught and familiar: antisemitism, which YOCD had been exploring the previous week via three Dialogue Circles, small group discussions comprising more than 70 community participants of varying backgrounds and perspectives.
“Our goal is to promote civil discourse on the important Jewish issues of our time,” Bill Altman, chair of Louisville’s Jewish Community Relations Council and one of several community YOCD organizers, explained during his introductory remarks. As Altman explains: ““YOCD’s goal is to promote civil discourse on the important issues of our time, give voice to the range of views on these issues and to remain connected as a community, even and especially in the face of disagreement.”
Referring to the teaching of Pirkei Avot (typically translated as “Ethics of the Fathers”), he stressed the need to “remain connected as a community, even when we disagree. Do not enter into argument with anger, because anger inhibits the ability to listen, and that clouds understanding and judgement.”
Tellingly, “I avoided writing about antisemitism for 20 years of my career as a Jewish writer,” said Horn, a New Jersey native, Harvard Ph.D and five-time novelist best known for her 2021 collection of essays titled People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present.
Such deflection “is a hard thing to avoid for a Jewish writer,” she acknowledged to the AJ audience and to her interviewer for the evening, Melanie Pell. Yet by year 2018, “I started noticing that there was a certain pattern of what my non-Jewish or my editors at non-Jewish publications wanted me to write about.”
Enter the resonant ghost of Anne Frank, and the aforementioned dread of conventional expectations.
“I just thought, ‘I really don’t want to write this long, pious essay about Anne Frank that’s going to be in doctors’ offices across America – which is what happens to Smithsonian Magazine. The normal thing would be to turn this assignment down. But I’m a writer, so I’mnot a normal person.”
The tipping point arrived when Horn came across a news story about a 2018 incident at Amsterdam’s Anne Frank Museum, where administrators had forbidden an observant Jewish male staffer to wear his kippah to work. The museum’s board spent about six months hashing out the matter before deciding that, yes, the man could indeed wear his kippah while on the job.
“I remember thinking, six months is a very long time for the Anne Frank Museum to wonder whether or not it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding.” It proved sufficient incentive for Horn to accept Smithsonian Magazine’s proposed assignment – though what she turned in, titled Becoming Anne Frank, “was not the piece they expected” – not with an opening that began: “People love dead Jews. Living Jews, not so much.”
Days later came the horrific mass shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue. “Within 24 hours of that attack, The New York Times called me and said, ‘Would you like to write about dead Jews?’ They didn’t say it like that, but that’s what they meant.” Her initialreaction: ‘Short answer – no.’”
But then Horn reconsidered, thinking if not her, then who? “Somebody has to say ‘Yes’ to this in the next 24 hours. What if the next person they ask is Bozo?’ Then it happens six months later – a shooting in San Diego (a Chabad synagogue in the suburb of Poway), and The New York Times calls me again. And I’m like, ‘Wow, this has become my job.’ Something’s been going on here,” making her realize “I’ve been avoiding this topic for 20 years. I’m going to dive into this and see where it takes me.” The result was her book.
“You’ve also described yourself as being ‘the Lorax of antisemitism,’ Pell remarked, invoking the Dr. Seuss character who famously declares, I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.
Pell is a JCL Board Member and JCRC member who serves as Chief Field Operations Officer at the American Jewish Committee. “I want to share a few of the questions that we received in advance that came out of our dialogue circles related to antisemitism,” she told Horn, “so you can have a sense of the ways some of our community members are thinking.
“One person asked about the idea that two separate approaches to antisemitism seem to be discussed. There’s the traditional approach of not addressing it directly and building coalitions in an effort to counter it; and then there’s the approach that calls for outward shaming and condemning of antisemitic speech and acts. Are these diametrically opposed to each other, or is one more beneficial than the other?”
Pell continued: “Another questioner asked, ‘Is arguing with antisemites or calling out antisemitism online worthwhile?’ So, my question to you: There was substance in those questions, but are we framing the questions in the right way? Are we asking the right questions?”
Horn – reminding the audience that People Love Dead Jews was published in 2021, well before the post-October 7, 2023 surge in antisemitism – said that “the conclusion I came to in that book was that Jews are only acceptable in most non-Jewish societies if they have no power – whether that means they’re politically impotent, or dead.”
The post-publication response, Horn recalled, was staggering in its swiftness and amplitude.
“I was inundated with Jewish readers coming to me with their own horror stories. It didn’t stop. It was like every person…was asking me if I could help. And I was like, ‘I’m not a therapist and I’m not a politician.’ I was so at a loss.”
Horn began to appreciate a vital, if frustrating truth.
“The questions you just raised from your community – ‘How do you address this?’ – are like what everyone’s asking me,” she told Pell.
“It was my first non-fiction book, and I did not realize that when you write a non-fiction book about a problem, people expect you to solve the problem at the end of the book,” Horn said.
“At that point, every person who’d read the book was like, ‘So what’s your solution to this problem?’ And my totally tasteless response was, ‘Do you want me to give you the final solution to the Jewish question?’ That’s the title of my next book, coming out Sept. 1.”
“Should we be building coalitions? Should we be calling out, naming, and shaming? I don’t see how those things are against each other,” Horn emphasized.
Meanwhile, “I think we have let a lot of things slide,” she said. “Unless somebody comes after you with a gun, you’re like, ‘It’s no big deal,’ the idea that anything that happens that isn’t the Holocaust is fine, right? I think there’s this reluctance for people to raise their voices, and that’s a misunderstanding of our role in the United States.”
Then there’s the issue of vocabulary, of semantics.
“I imagine that in this room it would be true that the Jewish community has never actually agreed on what antisemitism is,” Pell said. “So, do you define ‘antisemitism’ in any certain way? Do you think it’s just in our nature that we do not have a consensus on a definition?”
“I actually have created a new way of understanding this problem,” Horn answered. “We have often tried to understand antisemitism by thinking about it as a problem of a lack of empathy. There’s this idea – and you see this often in Holocaust education, where the idea is we’re trying to convince people that they shouldn’t hate Jews, because Jews are just like everyone else, right?”
“That’s always the message: ‘Oh, look at Anne Frank, she’s a girl just like you and me; she has piano lessons or whatever – she’s so relatable.’ We’re trying to build that commonality and empathy.”
Not so fast, Horn countered. “Here’s the problem with this model: Jews spent 3,000 years not being like everyone else. Uncoolness is Judaism’s brand. Why should someone have to be just like you and me to gain public respect? That is the fatal flaw in this understanding.”
Instead, “I have a different way of understanding antisemitism,” one that “is intimately related to the foundational ideas of Jewish civilization. “I see Jewish civilization as a 3,000-year-old anti-tyrannical movement, going back to its beginnings as the world’s first monotheism.
In other words, “when Jews say they don’t bow to other gods, what they actually mean is that they don’t bow to tyrants. This is a non-conformist movement for thousands of years that does not assimilate into dominant societies and empires.”
So, “ultimately, to me, these ideas are the root of antisemitism, and that brings me to the way I define antisemitism. I don’t see it primarily as a bigotry. I don’t see it primarily as a bias, although it has all those elements. I define antisemitism as a lie that is used by people who want to gain or maintain power, and the lie is always the same: ‘Jews are destroying what you value the most.’ That’s it. The only thing that varies in different eras, different settings, different social settings, is what you value the most.”
Indeed, “the reason that’s so successful is that it makes antisemitism feel righteous. You don’t feel like you’re hating people for no reason, that you’re standing up for your ideals. The question I think we need to be asking in these situations is, who is benefitting from that?”
Which brought the discussion back to a critical juncture. “You made the observation as well that many people can name concentration camps more easily than they can name Jewish writers, or thinkers, or artists,” Pell said to Horn. “What does that reveal about how Jews are understood in broader society?”
“We have accepted, and I think internalized, this idea that Jews need to be erased from public life,” Horn replied. “The example I’m going to give is Holocaust education. If you think about the example you gave, that many people can name three concentration camps – how many of those same people can name three Yiddish writers? Eighty-five percent of the people murdered in the Holocaust were Yiddish speakers. This was a famously literary culture.”
Or as Horn puts it: “Why do we care how these people died if we completely don’t care how these people lived?”
“I remember being in the Dallas Holocaust Museum and talking to the docents there,” she told her AJ listeners. “They said one of the questions students ask when they come through that museum is, ‘Are there still Jews alive today?’ Because you went to this museum, how would you know? To me, that is like the erasure we are, in a sense, participating in, trying to win empathy or something like this.
“I read this as incredibly misguided – this erasure of Jewish civilization, of Jewish life, because we have an amazing story to tell.” That story, Horn says, is bound up in Jewish history, tradition, and sheer tenacity. It summons up “the commitments that Jewish communities made in ancient times through to today, that contributed to this community still thriving. To me, that is a story that has a lot to inspire our neighbors as well.”
And if nothing else: “Be a leader,” Horn urged.
“When you look around at a situation – this is honestly what happened to me – and you’re like, ‘No one is doing what someone really should be doing’ – that’s the universe telling you that the person who should be doing it is you.”
As Jews, perhaps the most enduring imperative is our collective refusal to be erased – literally and figuratively, through infinite time and space.
“So much of what we talk about is yes, we have suffered, yes, we have endured so much, but we are resilient, and we have, we continue to exist.,” Pell said. “I love the way you frame that, she told Horn. Ultimately, Pell added, “our story is a story of resilience, of survival, of thriving in spite of all of the efforts to eliminate us.”
