Dara Horn’s new book named something I’ve watched two Jewish friends live out all year: a refusal to bow.

This past summer, two friends and I sat outside at HaBasta, a small restaurant tucked on a side street just off Tel Aviv’s Carmel Market, where the kitchen sources everything fresh from the market each morning and the menu changes daily to match.

Over small plates and wine from a list built around lesser-known, remarkable bottles, we talked long into the night about what Jews were facing back home, the hatred coming from antizionist students and faculty, and what the year ahead might hold. Both are Jewish faculty, each at different universities in the states.

A few days ago I finished reading Dara Horn’s new book, The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, 2026). Horn’s book isn’t just another accounting of what was lost during the Holocaust. It’s an invitation for readers to ask what it means to be a Jew in the 21st century, and to consider how their own lives might help dismantle the “big lie” of antisemitism, the lie that Jews are destroying what a society values most.

To me, the book is about courage, not just Horn’s to write it, but the courage it calls for in all of us, Jews and allies alike: standing against the big lie, and proclaiming instead the long history of a resilient, courageous people who shaped Western civilization in profound ways. Chief among them, a world-changing........

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