Combating Antisemitism Through Cultural and Historical Understanding
Posted on 03/07/2025 @ 05:00 AM
Dr. Miriam Klein Kassenoff, Rabbi Efrat Zarren-Zoher, Carly Orshan and Dara Horn, L-R
Read Part Two HERE
The above was the title of the interactive workshop offered this week by Dara Horn at the Holocaust Teacher’s Institute of the University of Miami School of Education and Human Development.
Carly Orshan, CAJE’s Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives and Teen Education, and I were invited by Dr. Kassenoff to attend from CAJE.
We were thrilled to see colleagues Nikki Freeman, Director of Education for the Holocaust Memorial, along with Julie Paresky and Stephanie Rosen of the organization 3G Miami, as well as Rabbi Judith Siegal of Temple Judea.
Most of the attendees were public school teachers from all across Miami-Dade.
This was a full-day workshop, so I’m dividing my description of what we learned into two parts.
Part one will explore how Dara Horn laid out the seminal foundations of Jewish civilization and what made its ideas so radical.
First, Dara defined the words “Am Yisrael” and then proceeded to use it throughout the day instead of saying “Jews,” a word that is so fraught with associations.
Am Yisrael is a type of social group that was common in the ancient Near East but is uncommon in the West today: a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture, of which a non-universalizing religion is but one feature.
This helps educators (and Jews too, of course) understand that Judaism is neither solely a religion nor solely a nationality.
Characterizing Jews as one or the other, according to Horn, betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of Jewish identity, because Jews predate the concepts of both religion and nationality.
This explains how millions of Jews can identify as secular, which would be illogical if Judaism were merely a religion.
Yet, she astutely points out in her article mentioned above, that “every non-Jewish society has tried to force Jews into whatever identity boxes it knows best— which is itself a quiet act of domination.”
Am Yisrael is how we characterized ourselves from ancient times, even before the word Jews came to be.
And I love that she began by reclaiming our naming in our own language.
Horn also noted that we have always been a tiny people and in contrast to other great civilizations, we originally lived in a tiny land with few natural resources.
Then she proceeded to reflect on the radical ideas that Am Yisrael brought to the world.
First, monotheism.
In her article on Holocaust education, Horn recounts the following by a Holocaust educator with students:
“’The Jews worship one God, and that’s their moral structure. Egyptian society has multiple gods whose authority goes to the pharaoh. When things go wrong, you can see how Jews as outsiders were perceived by the pharaoh as the threat.’
This unexpected understanding of Jewish belief revealed a profound insight about Judaism: Its rejection of idolatry is identical to its rejection of tyranny.”
And that alone will make anyone seeking power and authority— like a Pharoah— to feel very uncomfortable and quite possibly threatened.
Second, Torah and the Hebrew Bible as a whole.
Having a sacred text that testified to G!D as the King of Kings would naturally also be threatening to regular kings.
We know that allowing a king over the Israelite nation in Biblical times was a concession to the people’s need to be like other nations but was not the original ideal. (See 1 Samuel 8)
Having laws that did not come from kings but rather from a Higher Authority would also be a radical and frightening idea to the powerful.
Also, by the Rabbinic Period (165 BCE- 600 CE), Jews were required to educate all boys to be literate in Hebrew, making them the first example of a literate society (vs. a small group of literate elites) in the world. And literacy means it’s harder to tell people what to believe.
Furthermore, in the Rabbinic Period, Am Yisrael was encouraged to debate and disagree in the pursuit of truth. This is what animated the learning in batei midrash and later yeshivot as they “argued for the sake of Heaven” and were able to hold multiple perspectives at the same time.
Such open-mindedness and learner-centered education (interpreting/ thinking vs. purely memorizing/ repeating) would have also been seen as radical in the context of the times.
Third, the central narrative of the Torah and Jewish prayer is a liberation narrative— the Exodus from Egypt.
The Exodus testifies to all enslaved (literally and metaphorically) that their situation can be overturned. Just because it is like this today, does not mean that it will always be this way.
G!d wants people to be free. And that’s a very scary idea for those who do not want people to be free.
To conclude, Dara Horn noted that what is unique about Am Yisrael in comparison to most, if not all, other ancient peoples, is that when they were conquered or exiled or slaughtered, they did not disappear through assimilation into the surrounding majority culture.
Over and over throughout history, they refused to give up their distinct identity.
As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks so eloquently put it, the Jews represent “the dignity of difference.”
Being different alone would make being part of Am Yisrael a difficult and dangerous endeavor, one that might certainly lead to persecution in cultures that prized homogeneity and obedience to other norms.
And yet, that doesn’t entirely explain the persistence of Jew hatred even in times and places (like ours today) that claim to value diversity.
Part Two of her workshop where she describes and defines “The Big Lie” will sadly explain the rest (to be presented in an upcoming article).
Looking forward to your feedback as always...
