The book you must read before Rosh Hashanah

(RNS) — Leave it to author Dara Horn to come up with book titles that are a little scandalous.

Her last nonfiction book, “ People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present, ” explored why non-Jews and Jews alike prefer stories of Jewish victimization to those of Jewish heroism. And her new book, “ The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living,” runs the real risk of people mistaking it for Nazi agitprop.

But that is how Dara rolls, always pushing the envelope and making it into an art form. Through her many novels and other writings, as well as public appearances, she has become one of the most thoughtful and incisive observers of the Jewish condition in the world today, and she does it with humor and irony. It all works.

You need to read this book now, because it is its own shofar blast. Get a few friends to do the same, eat Rosh Hashanah lunch together and discuss.

Here are a few stinging points, to go with the apples and honey (which comes, after all, from bees).

The first sting: Dara claims that Jews are uncool and that this is a feature rather than a bug. For several generations, Jewish institutional life has run on the theory that the…