The last few years have been strange ones for writer Dara Horn. Used to creating imaginative Jewish worlds as a fiction writer, she published her first nonfiction book in 2021, expecting it to be a “detour.” Instead, the publication of People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present, about the very real and often very depressing world that Jews inhabit, changed the course of her career.

“I became this receptacle for all of these horror stories from Jewish readers,” Horn said. “I was immersed in this dumpster fire that now all of us are living in.” 

The book was a series of essays examining the ways in which different societies engage with Jewish history and culture — usually, she found, by venerating Jewish suffering in traumatic historical events such as the Holocaust or the Spanish Inquisition, without teaching people to reckon with Jews as they currently are. The argument was explosive even before the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks. Since then, the book’s title has become a ghoulishly ironic tagline for many Jews.

“The premise of the book is really that Jews are only acceptable in a non-Jewish society when they have no power, whether that means politically impotent or dead,” Horn told Jewish Insider in an interview this week. “That is just roaring back at us now. That is the only way that it’s acceptable to be Jewish, if you have no agency.”

Now, Horn has published her first new book in more than three years, a departure from both the award-winning literary fiction she is known for and the nonfiction essays about antisemitism she has written for major publications including The Atlantic and The New York Times since Oct. 7. 

One Little Goat: A Passover Catastrophe is a graphic novel, geared toward middle school readers, about a family that gets stuck at their Seder for six months because their house is so messy that the children are unable to find the afikomen. In order to retrieve it, the protagonist must go on a time-travel journey through thousands of years of Jewish history, visiting Seders throughout time — guided by a talking goat from the song “Chad Gadya” — until he retrieves the afikomen, finally saving his family from the longest Seder ever. 

“If you’ve ever been to a Passover Seder, you know that they feel like they last forever,” the book begins. In the pane below, the text reads: “It’s a holiday celebrating freedom, but you are stuck at that table for a very long time.” Horn read this passage with a laugh, and a word of praise for the illustration skills of her collaborator Theo Ellsworth, a cartoonist in Montana who she cold-emailed after she found her kids reading one of his books.

“The way he illustrated this is he has this kid sitting in the chair in the top frame, and then the bottom frame is a bearded skeleton covered in cobwebs, seated in the same chair, which is how I feel like a lot of kids feel, and even some adults,” Horn said. 

The book is meant to be consumed by young readers, but some of the material operates on two planes — like when the boy finds himself at Sigmund Freud’s Seder, but they only meet his mother.

“She’s like, ‘He never calls, he never writes, what did I do to deserve such a son?’” Horn said of the oedipal Seder. 

“Even my kids who didn’t necessarily understand were like, ‘Ugh, parents are always whining about their kids,’” she said. “An adult reading that thinks, OK, that’s really funny.”

Working on her first young-adult book and journeying through Jewish history gave Horn some context to what was happening in her own life following Oct. 7. 

“It absolutely was this bright spot in my life, especially over the past year and a half. It’s been pretty grim,” she said. 

Horn served for several weeks on an antisemitism advisory committee at Harvard University created by former Harvard President Claudine Gay. She was called as a witness in the congressional investigation of antisemitism on U.S. college campuses.

“I was in this absolutely dark place. And it’s funny, because I could sort of say, like, ‘Oh, this was a distraction from that.’ It’s not. It’s the same story,” Horn said. “It’s a kid’s book. But this, to me, is what’s so interesting about it. Passover is actually really scary.”

The original Seder was the night before the Exodus, as the Israelites waited in their homes in ancient Egypt for the Angel of Death to pass them by. She drew a parallel to modern Israel and the shelters where Israelis have waited out thousands of Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthi rocket and missile attacks.

“You’re sitting in the safe room. And this is a very terrifying thing that just keeps happening,” Horn said. “The Passover story is about this terrifying thing, but the message is about hope and resilience, and it’s giving you these tools for understanding and living through these times.”

Despite the dark tone of her musings on post-Oct. 7 America and her inbox full of Jews sharing their horror stories, Horn is optimistic. 

“There is so much more ignorance than malice,” she noted. “Even when I speak on college campuses, I have these people who get up and they’re wearing their keffiyeh and they’re asking me hostile questions, and I answer their questions, and then they say, ‘Wow, I never thought about it that way before.’ I expect them to keep heckling me, and they never do.”

Horn argued in a 2023 magazine article published six months before Oct. 7 that Holocaust education is not actually addressing the problem of modern antisemitism: “If the only thing you know about Jews is that they died in Europe between 1933 and 1945, there’s no pattern recognition of antisemitism,” she told JI.

Now, she is in the process of building out a nonprofit to teach people about Jews and Jewish civilization — not the Holocaust, and not Israel advocacy. 

“I’m not doing this thing that I think a lot of people do, where you go in and you’re using what’s ultimately an antisemitic frame, where you say, ‘Here’s 10 reasons why Israel is not an apartheid, genocidal state,’ or something like that. I’m not doing that,” Horn said. “We don’t even realize that we’re living in this antisemitic playbook. It’s like the fish swimming in water, being like, ‘What’s water?’ You don’t even realize how the basic assumptions of a non-Jewish society are that Jews are evil.”

There’s good news, she promises. “This is winnable,” Horn argued. 

“Most Americans are not fans of federally designated terrorist organizations,” she continued. “Most Americans are not fans of right-wing racist crap, either. This is not a popular cause with normies.”