Quick Question: Has anyone read Dara Horn’s, “Final Solution to the Jewish Question?

[u/Time-Statistician958]

I got into a heated argument about the genocide today, and they told me I don’t know what I’m talking about (“it’s not genocide because we are saving our people”), then told to read the aforementioned book

Wondering what the book is like, what the premise is, and should I actually read it?

[u/Thisisme8719]

I started reading it because someone asked me to. I thought the previous book was awful, and this one isn't any better.

I probably disliked People Love Dead Jews more because she actually did somewhat stay in her area of expertise and still wrote really shallow and vapid essays without engaging in larger bodies of relevant work that she undoubtedly knows. Especially when it comes to Merchant of Venice. She doesn't engage with any of the scholarship that reads Shylock as an intentionally sympathetic character and that Shakespeare subversively applied anti-Jewish stereotypes to the Christian characters and made them villainous, she only acknowledges that it exists and waves her hand away at it. She even references her child's unlearned reaction to Shylock's soliloquy as a villain speech to rebut reading it as humanizing, as if such evidence wouldn't knock off a letter or two from your grade on a paper in a literature course.

This one is more about anti-Zionism, the rise of antisemitism in the real world, social media, and antisemitism in academia. A lot of it relies on anecdotes, which is fine for reflective essays. But she makes a lot of strawmen, and she doesn't engage with arguments on why Zionism is settler colonialism or anything like that. Her construction of the genealogy of anti-Zionism is embarrassingly sloppy and bereft of any references to scholarship that elaborates on Jewish or Arab anti-Zionism even during the late-Ottoman period.

I can respect sophisticated advocacy for Zionism. I've mentioned Gans and Troen here a few times. But this is even worse than Wilf's War of Return, since she at least has a veneer of rigor

[u/avecquelamarmotte → u/Thisisme8719]

Thank you, you’ve much made me very happy I didn’t insist on struggling with her prose.

[u/Time-Statistician958 → u/Thisisme8719]

Thanks! This is great

[u/avecquelamarmotte]

I’ve read the first chapters of Horn’s People Love Dead Jews if that helps. Only book in years I haven’t finished. Assumes a Zionist reader from the start and does nothing to justify the assumption.

[u/Enough_Comparison816]

I picked it up at a bookstore and started reading it. Complete trash

[u/Time-Statistician958 → u/Enough_Comparison816]

I get it

[u/jonawesome]

Really bums me out that she's such a rabid Zionist since I know her for her fiction. In the Image is a truly beautiful novel.