On February 5th, 2024, the Zahava and Moshael Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought, in conjunction with the S. Daniel Abraham Honors Program, hosted acclaimed author Dr. Dara Horn for the annual Hillel Rogoff Memorial Lecture. Dr. Horn, a renowned novelist and author of the recent bestseller People Love Dead Jews, delivered her address to a packed audience of more than 150 people at the Koch Auditorium on YU’s Beren campus.
Dr. Horn’s lecture was titled “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: Becoming Prosemitic in a Haunted World.” As a graduate of Harvard University, from which she received her bachelor’s degree as well as her Ph.D. in comparative literature, Dr. Horn began by reflecting on her experiences serving on Harvard’s antisemitism advisory committee following Hamas’ massacre on October 7th.
Interestingly, Dr. Horn was the only member of the committee who was not working for Harvard, and she was inundated with stories of antisemtic encounters experiences by Jewish students on campus. Dr. Horn also revealed that the president of Harvard did not consult with the committee before the infamous congressional hearing. At the hearing, university presidents repeated platitudes about how hatred comes from ignorance. If so, asked Dr. Horn, “why are all these universities full of this very specific ignorance?” (In a recent article for The Atlantic, Dr. Horn elaborated her discussion of the widespread falsehoods in higher education.)
Dr. Horn drew upon the work of historian David Nirenberg to diagnose why antisemitism has been pervasive in Western culture. “Antisemitism is the twilight of thought,” she remarked. “And I think the stakes for understanding this and how to address it are really nothing less than the future of intellectual life in America.” She wrote People Love Dead Jews to address the dark, often unspoken side of how Jews are perceived by non-Jews. “The uncomfortable moments are almost always where the story is… Facing that uncomfortable reality actually has the ability to empower us.”
Dr. Horn concluded her lecture by emphasizing the need not only for Jewish education but for reintegrating Judaism into mainstream history textbooks. “You can’t understand Western civilization…without understanding Judaism.” After all, she pointed out, “The Jews invented the weekend,” an idea that was revolutionary in antiquity.
In a question-and-answer section, Straus Scholar Tziporah Pinczower asked how we should emphasize accomplishments of the Jewish people without letting it backfire into antisemitic stereotypes about Jewish power. Dr. Horn responded by pointing out, for instance, that it is generally not considered triumphalist to claim that the Greeks invented democracy or that Arabs invented algebra. If Judaism is part of the story of the West, then “omitting that information is the opposite of education” and constitutes an erasure of Jewish civilization. Dr. Horn urged the importance of telling the Jewish story, a task that is central to the mission of the Straus Center.
