Dara Horn’s audience can expect to have their minds stretched at her Loyola University Maryland lecture on contemporary antisemitism. What else would one expect from someone who titles her book “People Love Dead Jews”?
Horn is the speaker at the Jerome S. Cardin Memorial Lecture series on Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2025. The series explores relations between the Jewish and Christian communities and is hosted by the Center for the Humanities at Loyola University Maryland.
An award-winning author of seven books and countless articles in prestigious publications, Horn has a doctorate in comparative literature from Harvard University with studies in Hebrew and Yiddish. She has won three National Jewish Book Awards and was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, the Wingate Prize, and more. Her books have been selected as New York Times Notable Books, Booklist’s 25 Best Books of the Decade, and her nonfiction work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, Tablet, and many other publications.
“People Love Dead Jews” came out in 2021 about the misuses of Jewish history and contemporary antisemitism. There are slurs and stereotypes with which the Jewish community contends. In researching America’s K-12 Holocaust education, however, Horn was astonished to find that not only is it severely lacking, in many places the Holocaust is the only thing people know about Jews.
“What really was striking was how there are a lot of people who, the only thing that they knew about Jews was that Jews are people who died in Europe between 1933 and1945,” Horn told Baltimore Fishbowl. “I was at one Holocaust Museum; I was interviewing the docents. One of them told me that when students come to the museum, they ask, ‘Are there still Jews alive today?’”
One of the problems contributing to this ignorance is the ability to opt out of Holocaust education. Horn has run into this in her reporting for the Atlantic on Holocaust education around the country. She recalled one administrator who said every year there were parents who opted out of their students reading Eli Weisel’s “Night” because those parents do not believe the Holocaust happened.
Compared to denial of evolution or that the earth is round, Holocaust denial is a “hate-driven belief,” Horn said. Denial of evolution and shape of the earth are rejections of science and mathematical theories that have been proven, but conflict with a person’s religious views. The premise of Holocaust denial rests on the assumption that entire generations of Jewish people are lying about something that happened to them. It is conspiracy-driven, she explained.
What does one tackle first? The ignorance or the hate?
Horn’s new venture attempts to do both. The TELL Institute is an education project meant to help reframe what students and the broader public know about Jewish civilization, 2,500 years of antisemitism, and the ideas that form the basis of a pluralistic society. It is a genuine attempt to forge a shared future.
“Our approach to teaching about this is quite different,” Horn said. “It’s based on this idea of teaching people about living Jewish civilization and having that be the grounding starting point. That’s sort of shocking to me, that people really know absolutely nothing about Jewish civilization…. You really can’t understand a lot of world history without understanding anything about Judaism.”
When people ask her if Jews are a religion or a race or a nationality, Horn says there is no answer to that because Jews predate all those categories. Yet in the rush to categorize Jews as a group, what gets lost is “these sort of really dramatic and groundbreaking ideas that come from this tiny group.” Ideas like monotheism, resistance to idolatry, the idea that laws are not tied to one individual ruler all come from Judaism.
The TELL Institute’s curriculum for antisemitism is also radically different from the way it is normally taught.
“[Antisemitism is] usually taught as a social prejudice, right?” Horn said. “Or it’s conspiracy theory, and actually I think it’s something different. The way we teach antisemitism is actually it’s a lie that people use to gain or maintain power, and the lie is that Jews are the obstacle to what you value most.”
What people value most changes depending on the historical setting and period, but what stays the same is that antisemitism holds Jews up as the obstacle.
“So, if it’s a communist society, Jews are capitalists. If it’s a capitalist society, Jews are communists,” Horn explained. “If it’s a society where nationalism is glorified, then Jews are ruleless cosmopolitans. If it’s a cosmopolitan society, then Jews are chauvinistic nationalists, right? If it’s a racist society, Jews are an inferior race, and if it’s an anti-racist society, the Jews are racist.”
Horn views this moment in time as a test case for a pluralistic society, given the steep increase in antisemitism since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and the resulting war.
“I’m very happy to share these kinds of ideas in this setting that’s devoted to Jewish-Christian relations and understanding, because I feel like this is sort of really foundational to that,” Horn said. “It really is this idea of what it means to participate in a pluralistic society where not everyone is going to agree.”
The lecture takes place at 7 p.m. in McGuire Hall. The event is free and open to the public, but advance registration is required.
