The Oldest Lie: Understanding Antisemitism as a Weapon of Power

Dara Horn's book People Love Dead Jews and her more recent work examine a paradox at the heart of Jewish existence: Jews are a tiny, ancient people who have survived successive empires by refusing to assimilate into any of them, and this very refusal has made them a perpetual target. The lie that powers antisemitism, she argues, is always the same in every era: "Jews are destroying what you value the most." What changes is what a given society values most—religious orthodoxy, national loyalty, racial purity, anti-colonialism, or social justice.

What Jews Actually Are

The confusion about Jewish identity stems from the fact that Jews predate the modern categories used to describe them—religion, race, nationality, ethnicity. When Hebrew linguists revived Hebrew as a spoken language, they had to dig through the Bible to find a word for "religion" because the concept didn't exist in the original framework. In Hebrew, the word for the Jewish people is two letters long: am—a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture.