We cannot memorialize our way to the Jewish future.

We have mastered the art of remembering dead Jews while neglecting the journeys that strengthen living ones.

A Jewish cemetery in Europe (photo: Tomasz Brengos/Unsplash)

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

---

This is a guest essay by Steven Abraham, the rabbi at Beth El Synagogue in Omaha, Nebraska.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

---

Dara Horn is entirely aware of what she has done.

She has joked that her book titles make excellent beach reading because nobody will sit near you.

Five years ago, she gave us “People Love Dead Jews,” which was awkward enough. This new title — “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question” — is a provocation set in 40-point type on the cover of a mainstream trade hardcover.

The provocation is not merely a marketing stunt. It is a piece of theology. And the fact that the book will arrive in the middle of Elul (the final month of the Jewish civil year), days before we stand together for Selichot¹, is a coincidence worth treating as something more than coincidence.

Start with the title. Horn has taken the bureaucratic euphemism the Nazis used for the murder of European Jewry and repurposed it as a lure. As she explained in an interview, the title is intended to catch the eye while also announcing, without irony, that she intends to propose an actual solution — not a 10-point public-policy program, but a different story about who Jews are and what antisemitism is.

This is not new to us. This is Purim.

It is the logic of a holiday in which we take the name of the man who wanted us dead and place it in the mouths of children holding noisemakers. Jewish survival has always involved seizing the vocabulary of the enemy and refusing to let it mean what he meant by it.

What Horn proposes, at least from what she has said publicly about the book, is a reframing. Antisemitism, she argues, is not most usefully understood as bias, bigotry, prejudice, or even conspiracy theory. Those categories flatter us into believing that antisemitism sits neatly on a shelf beside other hatreds and can therefore be addressed with the same tools: diversity seminars, museum visits, carefully worded statements and commemorative events.

Horn says antisemitism is a lie, and the lie never truly changes. Her formulation is worth quoting: “Jews are destroying what you value the most.” In other words, antisemites accuse Jews of destroying what antisemites value the most.

Whatever the surrounding civilization treasures, the Jews are accused of dissolving it. In a Christian world, we were killers of God. In a nationalist world, we were rootless cosmopolitans. In a capitalist society, Jews were accused of communist subversion; under communism, Jews were condemned as capitalist parasites. In a world that has decided colonialism is the master sin, Jews have become the ultimate colonizers.

The accusation is a mirror. It tells us almost nothing about Jews and almost everything about what the accuser worships.

Then Horn does something more daring than diagnosis: She insists that most people are not the enemy. Her framing is drawn from the Megillah (the traditional Jewish scroll read during holidays like Purim), and it may be the most rabbinically interesting move in the entire project.

Most people, she says, are not Haman (the villainous, Amalekite-descended prime minister in Megillat Esther who plotted the total annihilation of the Jewish People). Most people are Achashverosh, the volatile and easily manipulated Persian king whose decree to destroy the Jews was thwarted by Queen Esther and Mordechai, a miraculous turnaround celebrated every year on Purim.

They are not plotting genocide in a back room. They are distracted, credulous, comfortable, and easily influenced by whoever last had their ear. Haman is rare. Achashverosh is everywhere.

But Achashverosh is persuadable.

That is why Esther speaks. It is why Mordechai refuses to allow her the fantasy that silence will keep her safe. And it is why Dara Horn has written this book at all: not only for the convinced antisemite, who may be beyond persuasion, but for the friend who does not understand, the school principal who has never learned to recognize the lie, and the well-meaning neighbor who cannot comprehend why Jews refuse to disavow Israel as the price of social acceptance.

Anyone familiar with the archives of Jewish self-understanding will feel the ground shift here. We have spent generations describing antisemitism through the language of Amalek: an eternal, metaphysical enmity that cannot be reasoned with, only survived. There is a certain comfort in that framing. If hatred is eternal, we are relieved of the exhausting work of persuasion. We are also relieved of asking whether we have told our own story badly.

Horn takes that comfort away. She has watched a fatalism settle over Jewish communities — especially since October 7th — a quiet conviction that hatred is simply our lot. Her answer is essentially Mordechai’s answer to Esther: Do not imagine that your silence will save you.

The Megillah is famously the one book of Hebrew Bible in which God’s name does not appear. That absence is not a theological defect. It is the point. Deliverance in the story comes through human beings deciding to act.

The argument of Horn’s book “People Love Dead Jews” was that the world prefers its Jews murdered and memorialized. Dead Jews can be honored without making demands. They can be placed behind glass, engraved in stone and incorporated into speeches about tolerance. Living Jews are less convenient. They have loyalties, children, fears, political claims, and opinions of their own.

What I have come to believe, standing in a synagogue in Omaha, Nebraska, is that this preference is not exclusively a gentile problem. We have absorbed some of it ourselves. We have become extraordinarily good at commemoration and strangely reluctant to fund vitality.

photo: Dara Horn/Facebook

Look honestly at where American Jewish money goes: Holocaust education centers, memorial plaques, security infrastructure (which we genuinely need and which I would never begrudge), and cemetery associations with endowments that may outlast the congregations that own them.

Then look at what we starve. The preschool that operates at a loss and is therefore always one board meeting away from closing. The Tuesday afternoon religious school whose teacher is paid something between a stipend and an insult. The camp scholarship fund that ran dry in March. The youth program without enough money for a professional advisor. The young family that would join the synagogue if dues and tuition were survivable.

We know how to bury Jews beautifully. We are less certain how to make being Jewish on a Tuesday afternoon in Nebraska feel like something other than an obligation to be endured.

Our tradition is not ambiguous about the dignity owed to the dead. Kevod ha-met is a sacred obligation, so serious that caring for a met mitzvah (an abandoned corpse with no one to arrange burial) overrides nearly every other communal responsibility. Cemeteries should be beautiful. The grass should be cut, the stones should stand straight, and the names should remain legible. We should perform that work with reverence because forgotten graves represent forgotten lives.

But a manicured cemetery is not Jewish continuity. Without the living, it is an archive.

The architecture of Jewish law bends toward life. Nearly every commandment yields to pikuach nefesh, the preservation of human life. The dead, the Talmud says with characteristic lack of sentimentality, are free from the commandments. They have finished their work.

We have not. A community that invests more imagination in those who have finished than in those who have not has quietly decided how its own story will end.

The future of Judaism has never been built in cemeteries. It has been built in classrooms, around campfires, at Shabbat tables, and during chaotic preschool drop-offs. It has been built by underpaid teachers, exhausted parents, patient tutors, and rabbis trying to convince a 13-year-old that the Torah portion in front of them belongs to them too.

Every cemetery exists because previous generations invested in the living. Every gravestone marks someone who was once a child learning Aleph-Bet. This is why Horn’s subtitle matters even more than her title. Her answer to the Jewish question is not death, revenge, or retreat. It is a love story for the living.

She wants Judaism understood as a 3,000-year-old anti-tyrannical movement, a civilization organized around the conviction that no human being is a god and no empire is permanent. That is a story worth telling the Achashverosh’s among our neighbors.

It is also a story that requires actual Jews who know it.

We cannot hand a child a heritage of moral defiance if the totality of her Jewish education consists of a Holocaust unit and a bar mitzvah tutor hired in the spring. We cannot complain that young Jews do not defend Judaism when we have not taught them what Judaism is. We cannot speak endlessly of continuity while treating preschool, religious school, camp and youth engagement as budgetary luxuries.

The greatest memorial we can build to previous generations is another generation.

Horn’s new book arrives during Elul, the season of cheshbon ha-nefesh, honest moral accounting. She has, in effect, handed the American Jewish community an examination of conscience in hardcover.

Read it. Argue with it. Then look at your Jewish community’s budget, which may be the most honest theological document any Jewish institution produces. Ask whether it was written by people who expect Jews to be here in 50 years.

Let the cemeteries be beautiful, but fund the preschool. Pay the Wednesday school teacher. Send the child to camp. Help the young family walk through the door.

The monument remembers who we were. The classroom determines whether anyone will remain to remember.

---

1. Selichot means “forgiveness” or “pardon” in Hebrew. It refers to a collection of Jewish penitential prayers and poetic hymns (piyyutim) recited to seek divine mercy, reflection, and a clean slate ahead of the High Holidays.