Dara Horn says American Jews need a new activism
For 80 years, American Jewish activism had a reliable formula: build institutions, tell the story and trust that education would do the rest. It worked well enough for long enough that most American Jews never had to ask whether it still worked.
Oct. 7 answered the unasked question: It doesn’t work, not on its own, and not fast enough for a fight that has moved from the op-ed page to TikTok algorithms.
This week, Dara Horn published a new book, “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” a deliberately provocative title. It argues that American Jews have been fighting with the wrong era’s weapons.
Her core claim is that antisemitism is not bias or ignorance to be corrected with better facts. It’s a lie and always the same lie: Jews are destroying whatever a given society claims to value most. You don’t out-argue a lie like that with a pamphlet. You must disrupt it.
That reframing matters because it changes the target. If antisemitism were simply ignorance, the old model — educate, publish, litigate — would eventually win.
But most people spreading or absorbing these lies aren’t Haman. They’re Ahasuerus; not malicious, just credulous, going along with whoever has their ear. That’s good news. Ignorance is fixable and doesn’t want to stay duped once it realizes it’s been played.
Part of the old failure was definitional. For decades, Jews have attempted to fit into a framework that was never entirely accurate — a mere religion, a community, just one group among many in a pluralistic society — that made us easier to dismiss.
In reality, Jews are a people and allowed to define ourselves as such, even if we are a non-conforming people that doesn’t dissolve into someone else’s identity categories. We shouldn’t be negotiating that down to something smaller and safer just to be accepted.
Horn notes that Jewish survival itself is a result of refusing to assimilate into invisibility. This was a choice, repeated across 3,000 years.
• • •
A battle is taking place today on platforms where the loudest voices — left and right alike — get amplified because outrage is the business model. When Jews respond only by defending ourselves over and over, we concede the premise that a defense is owed in the first place.
Feeding that campaign is an education gap Horn has named directly: In most American schools, the only thing students are reliably taught about Jews is that they were murdered in Europe between 1933 and 1945, period. Everything else has been outsourced to TikTok.
Teaching a 12-year that snapshot of history, without any context or explanation of the events that preceded (with genocidal antisemitism going back millennia) or followed, leaves students with a deep understanding of the horror but complete ignorance of the history that explains it.
So, what would a new Jewish activism look like? Like pattern recognition rather than incident-by-incident amnesia. And being loud in the rooms where the extreme fringe dominates by default because no one else shows up. Visibility is both leverage and leadership.
I’ll admit something my generation might not like to hear: Some of this is on us. We had the platforms and some of the most brilliant, creative Jewish minds of any generation in entertainment, media, law and technology. But we often squandered this advantage by not actively engaging in the fight on social media, where the real action was taking place.
• • •
We fell asleep at the wheel. That complacency is how a DSA-aligned candidate like Zohran Mamdani could rise from a backbench state assembly seat to the mayoralty of New York City in barely a year. It’s how he never faced a serious challenge from the communities who should have seen it coming. Mamdani wasn’t a surprise attack. It came in plain sight, while we looked away.
Education and rebuttal will always be necessary, but both are reactive, a response that comes only after the lie has become universal. Our new strategy must alter the landscape itself, beginning with controlling the content pipeline rather than merely policing it afterward (with a correction reaching only a fraction of the audience the original lie has already reached).
What competes is original, engaging Jewish content — history, humor, daily life, culture — that shows up in the feed before the lie does.
A new form of activism involves coalition-building beyond the community, not just within it. Much Jewish activism focuses on Jews talking to Jews, but if the majority of people being misled are more like Ahasuerus than Haman, then the most effective audience often lies outside the community; among other groups targeted by the same disinformation networks, originating from the same sources and receiving the same funding.
Finally, a new activism means investing in culture, not just advocacy. The Jewish creative talent already present in film, comedy, music and gaming has never been effectively mobilized to formulate a coordinated counternarrative. But culture moves faster than curricula. It always has.
Visibility, culture, coalition and leverage all come down to the same underlying choice.
• • •
Horn frames this as a Queen Esther moment, and the analogy is more apt than it should be. King Ahasuerus ruled an empire comprising 127 provinces, stretching from India to Ethiopia. He issued a decree to annihilate his own Jewish subjects within those provinces without ever asking who they were. A ruler, and by extension a public, was willing to endorse such annihilation so long as no one confronted them directly with the reality of their target.
Esther’s true obstacle was not the decree itself. It was her own fear of being discovered and losing the safety of hiding within the palace walls. The pivotal moment in the story occurs when she ceases to conceal herself and identifies herself as one of the individuals marked for destruction.
Today, we find ourselves at a similar crossroads. We all must choose whether to continue to quietly assimilate or finally declare our true selves.
We didn’t disappear when it would have been easier to disappear. That was not an accident. It was a choice, and the time has come to choose again.
We are a people that has already outlasted every empire that tried to erase us against odds that should have ended us many times over. We are still here. We intend to remain here.
Karen Lehmann, based in Washington, is a photographer, journalist and political activist.
Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
