‘His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’

When we return to the Balfour Declaration today, we rightly criticize the first clauses. While the declaration promised imperial support for a ‘national home’ in Palestine for Jews, it promised only to protect the ‘civil and religious rights’ of native Palestinians. The foundational inequality was baked in from the start; and of course the latter promise, paltry as it was, was quickly discarded in the century of Palestinian dispossession which followed.

But the fight over Hasan Piker’s words today reminds me that less attention is often paid to the final clause of the Balfour Declaration, which promises to protect “the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” This was included to address the concerns of Jewish critics of Zionism, who worried that Jewish nationalism would help inflame antisemitism by calling into question Jewish belonging in the countries where they lived, opening Jews worldwide to charges of dual loyalty and implicating them in whatever happened in Palestine.

Their fear soon proved prescient across the Middle East and North Africa, where hundreds of thousands of Jews were uprooted in the decades following Israel’s establishment. But in the West, it proved premature. Israel became a key Western ally, and Zionism became not only fully compatible with ‘Western values’ but in the eyes of many, their quintessential expression. Many American Jews gained some measure of race and class privilege, the trinity of ‘Protestant-Catholic-Jew’ defined the postwar American religious and social order, and Jewishness (in some articulations at least) found cultural visibility, acceptance and cache. ‘Judeo-Christian’ became the West’s watchword, and the causes of Israel and anti-antisemitism became treasured objects in Western culture, chief markers of liberalism and its promise of inclusion, moral progress and perfectibility on one side of the aisle, or of nationalism and the traditionalist moral order on the other.

Especially after the Six Day War, a commonsense consensus formed that the interests of America and Israel were one and the same. As long as this persisted, the fears of anti-Zionist Jews seemed antiquated and quaint. Far from a danger, it benefited American Jews to proudly identify with Israel, even to perform a kind of dual loyalty, with American and Israeli flags flanking the bima. Israelism paradoxically became a marker of Jewish belonging in America. Hence in an ironic inversion, Trump regularly accuses American Jews of being ‘disloyal’ not to America, but to Israel; and when Joe Biden said “Were there no Israel, there wouldn’t be a Jew in the world that is safe”, it ironically functioned as an affective commitment to Jewish safety in America. Of course, this brand of ‘dual loyalty’ is quite fashionable for non-Jews as well– hence the bizarre spectacle of Representative Brian Mast wearing an IDF uniform on Capitol Hill after October 7, to name one of countless morbid examples. The point is that this philosemitism and philo-Israelism was always overdetermined in the American imagination. Jews were put on a pedestal– but it may prove to be a shaky pedestal indeed.

When the US-Israeli ‘special relationship’ shows signs of strain, and the specter of divorce looms on the horizon, this passionate American Jewish identification with Israel becomes jarringly out of step, and emerges as a convenient scapegoat for the decadent disasters of a crumbling empire. The logic that ‘the Jews’ are at the center of the ‘special relationship’ can seem self-evident; after all, the weapons manufacturers, Christian Zionists, interventionists, and others who benefit have always claimed it was for the Jews’ sake anyway. Moreover, some Jews have amassed real power in the American system, used that power to promote Israel, and proudly proclaimed their Jewishness as they did so; many other Jews amassed much less power, but proudly proclaimed the same identification nonetheless. Antisemitism is a conspiracy theory that presents itself as a power analysis; and so it stands ready-made, fashioned by the conjuncture itself as an intuitive meta-explanation for what’s going on, who to blame, and why.

When an old status quo begins to crumble, those who benefit from it tend to cling tighter to the position they have enjoyed, and this reflex tends to heighten the very contradictions driving their insecurity. Since October 7, these dynamics around Israel/Palestine and antisemitism have intensified to steadily slot American Jews into an ultimately more precarious position. It is a paradoxical precarity because it announces itself as privilege and protection. Like the feudal princes of old, the Trump regime fashions ‘the Jews’ into a monolithic pro-Israel mold and singles out this mass as a special caste in the royal court, in need of special laws and protections, special rituals of piety and sensitivity. All of this benefits the Christian nationalist agenda, of course, but it also benefits those Jewish leaders who gain the ear of the king, and the benefits trickle down, in some form, to the many other Jews who applaud those at the court.

But just as in the feudal world, this exceptionalist carve-out corrodes the foundations of belonging, and isolates the Jewish community writ large. It renders us hyper-visible and exposed at the discursive center of political transformations in which we are deeply implicated, but which of course ultimately lie beyond our control. When domestic state repression is carried out in our name, it lends credence to the canard that we are pulling the strings. When those carrying out the repression make breathless appeals to our special victimhood, it breeds enmity and resentment all around. When a solid mass of our community stands behind some of the worst human rights atrocities of a still-young 21st century– and claims victim status as they do so– it erodes goodwill. When you yoke the fortunes of a small, hyper-visible global minority to the actions of a belligerent pariah state, it can cause dangerous blowback.

At a more basic level, when we are homogenized as a monolith, and marked as homesick natives of a foreign land, it normalizes the idea that we are transient guests in a ‘host’ country, a separate bloc granted conditional belonging at best. This is exactly what yesterday’s critics of Balfour were afraid of. Amidst other important factors– including the mainstreaming of white Christian nationalism, the deregulation of social media, the culture of conspiracy and all the economic, social and other structural forces fueling its rise– the stage is set for a resurgence of antisemitism in contemporary American life.

The US-Israel relationship was a product of the postwar liberal order. That order has now ended, and in this interregnum, many morbid symptoms appear. In a sense then, I am an ‘October 8th Jew’; I agree with Zionists that October 7 may have ushered in a new chapter in Western antisemitism, one that will take some time to write itself out, one whose conclusion is not foreordained (let’s not get too lachrymose). I differ with them of course on nearly everything else, and arrive at a diametrically opposite conclusion– our task is to double down not on Zionism but on its overcoming.

Those who dismiss Piker’s warning as victim-blaming are thinking moralistically, not politically. Of course, when a person decides to pick up a brick and throw it through the window of a synagogue, the person to blame is the antisemite, who must be held accountable and responsible for their actions, in the court of law as well as the heavenly court. In tracing Zionism’s role in our current conjuncture, the point is not to assign blame for antisemitism but to understand the conditions of its emergence.

But once we understand these conditions, the question of Jewish world-historical responsibility does come to the fore. At its philosophical core, the early Zionist movement claimed to re-orient the Jewish people as political actors charged with agency, tasked with overcoming antisemitism through collective action (in their case, national self-determination). Ironically today, many Jews claim their Zionism as a kind of tender, precious retreat from historical and political responsibility in the face of antisemitism. They are shocked, simply outraged that Piker could even suggest that Jewish support for Israel is one factor in today’s rise of antisemitism. Doesn’t he understand the emotional core of Jewish attachment to Israel??

It is time to put away childish things. When I was an undergrad at Bard College, I spent many afternoons by the graveside of Hannah Arendt. As a philosophy major, I was more likely than not smoking a spliff and discussing topics like Being, Time and the Other, not politics. Now I have put away childish things (philosophy, not the spliff). When I visited Arendt’s grave recently, I recalled her prophetic predictions in her 1944 essay ‘Zionism Reconsidered’.

[T]he Zionists, if they continue to ignore the Mediterranean people and watch out only for the big faraway powers, will appear only as their tools, the agents of foreign and hostile interests. Jews who know their own history should be aware that such a state of affairs will inevitably lead to a new wave of Jew-hatred; the antisemitism of tomorrow will assert that Jews not only profiteered from the presence of foreign big powers in that region but had actually plotted it and hence are guilty of the consequences…

If a Jewish commonwealth is obtained in the near future—with or without partition—it will be due to the political influence of American Jews…. But if the Jewish commonwealth is proclaimed against the will of the Arabs and without the support of the Mediterranean peoples, not only financial help but political support will be necessary for a long time to come. And that may turn out to be very troublesome indeed for Jews in this country [the U.S.], who after all have no power to direct the political destinies of the Near East. It may eventually be far more of a responsibility than today they imagine or tomorrow can make good.

Today it is not Zionism but the movements we call Jewish anti-Zionism, diasporism, etc that must assume the mantle of Jewish world-historical responsibility. The political project of opposing Zionism, and of opposing antisemitism, are one and the same, and mobilizing Jewish collective action in service of these goals must be seen as a kind of ‘self-determination’, a coming-to-grips with a new world and our precarious place in it. We owe it to ourselves and to our children’s children to get a grip, and soon.

This week’s Parsha opens with the following verse: “G-d spoke to Moses after the death of Aaron’s two sons, when, having drawn near to G-d, they died. G-d said to Moses: “Speak to your brother Aaron, and tell him that he must not come whenever he wishes into the Sanctuary beyond the partition Curtain, in front of the Cover that rests upon the Ark—in order that he not die, for I appear in a cloud over the Ark Cover.”

Aaron, the high priest, probably didn’t need this reminder. Just before this, at the end of last week’s parsha, his two sons, Nadav and Avihu, were consumed by divine fire because they strode into the inner sanctum of the Holy of Holies and tried to present their own offering to G-d.

According to many rabbinic commentators, they met their fiery fate because they were too headstrong in thinking they could access the inner essence of G-d’s presence. They weren’t satisfied with worshipping at a distance; they wanted the full experience of the real thing.

So the parsha opens by recalling their deaths. And from there G-d outlines a sweeping series of commandments. This is a double Torah portion, one of the longest, and it’s chock full of laws, laws, laws- everything from how to bring a correct offering into the temple, to who not to sleep with, to ‘love thy neighbor as yourself’. It’s all here- some mitzvot that we would embrace as fundamental to our vision of justice; some we would reject as oppressive; some that on the face of it don’t seem to be about ethics at all.

So the parsha is telling us two things off the bat- G-d is inaccessible to us; and, here is the Law. This seems to fly in the face of a lot of our sensibilities as radicals, and as moderns. But in my opinion it’s actually the most radical proposition out there.

Our society is addicted to revelation and presence. We want everything to be accessible and illuminated for us, we want to merge with the innermost essence of things, to grasp and consume and experience it all.

We come to spirituality looking for cosmic truth, for direct unmediated access to the oneness of the universe, or to the deepest nature of our inner world. For our souls we want refuah shlema- full and complete healing, as if that were even possible. If the food comes out lukewarm we send it back.

But what I like most about Judaism is the hiddenness of G-d. G-d is when we climb to the mountaintop and laugh because we are dust in the cosmos. G-d is a label we slap onto the mystical experience of our smallness, of running into a hard edge and being completely in awe that whatever lies beyond is totally beyond.

Many speak of this as connecting to a presence. I prefer getting in touch with an absence— yearning, praying, clinging, wrestling with a holy absence. Even Moses cannot see G-d’s face. Only Aaron the high priest could enter the innermost chamber of the holy of holies, and only once a year, and even then, G-d appears in a cloud.

Judaism promises a cloud of unknowing, to borrow a phrase from Christian mysticism. G-d is radically Other. That comes to us as a prohibition- not to make a graven image of G-d, not to define G-ds essence in overly concrete terms, not to pronounce G-ds name out loud or even to string its letters together, since nothing— not our thinking, not our artistry, not our silly little mouth sounds— could pretend to describe this presence of absence.

This is a posture of humility— but not one of passivity. To bear witness to a ‘king who reigns over all kings’- to follow ‘one G-d, no masters’ means to oppose any system that boasts that it alone holds the key to absolute truth. This is why Abraham smashed all the idols in his fathers idol shop.

G-d is One, and that Oneness is radically Other. This was the central insight of the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. In the shadow of the Shoah, he warned against any philosophy which promised to contain the essence of Being in its totality. This was the fundamental conceit at the core of fascism, which he diagnosed in his former mentor, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, whose philosophy was all about uncovering the innermost truth of Being and who turned out to be a total fucking Nazi.

G-d is One, but if you think you can really grasp the essence, the inner sanctum of that oneness, you might just be a fascist. Instead of a oneness of totality, Levinas offered a oneness of infinity. G-d is a radical beyond that haunts us, a trace of difference that cannot be fully digested or assimilated, a G-d of exile, upsetting our paradigms, opening our closed systems, undoing us again and again. And that Otherness announces itself in the face of the Other, the face of another human being who we cannot fully possess or know, and who in that sense is always a stranger. For Levinas, the experience of looking into another person’s face unsettles us, shatters our complacency, pulls us out of ourselves. The face of the Other screams to us the fundamental commandment— thou shall not kill.

We cannot reach G-d in the holy of holies, and we cannot possess the Other, and in the space of that distance we are commanded to carve out ways to live ethically together, all of us refugees, all of us prophets, grasping at traces of the holy in reaching for a more just world. And that will always be a work in progress, messy, fractured, imperfect. It’s a horizon we will always be working to approach, and that’s the point. In the shadow of the hidden and unknowable One we are commanded to try our best to set up social systems and practices that bear witness to its trace, which is to say, we are commanded to try to be decent to each Other.

And so that is why we start off this weeks parsha with the twin injunctions- G-d is inaccessible; and here is the law.

Shabbat shalom!

The genocide in Gaza and the war on Iran and Lebanon have reshaped the political order in the Middle East and around the world. Christian Zionism is a core driver of the US-Israeli war machine. But its influence remains little understood.

For over a century, Christian Zionists have set the stage, fanned the flames and kept the fires burning in the Middle East, convinced that God is on their side. Today they work at the highest levers of power to keep the arms and blood flowing, driven by a toxic stew of End Times fantasies, Islamophobia and antisemitism, and Christian supremacy.

Christian Zionism is older than today’s Christian Right; older than the state of Israel; and older even than the Jewish Zionist movement itself. When the first Puritan colonists sailed to conquer the Americas in the 1630s, they saw themselves as a ‘new Israel’— a special nation singled out by God to build a new Promised Land. And they insisted that the Jewish people would soon usher in the End Times by returning en masse to Palestine, converting to Christianity and waging an apocalyptic war against the enemies of God.

That vision was cherished and refined by generations of Western Protestants. In the mid-1800s— half a century before European Jews like Theodore Herzl launched the Zionist movement— English evangelicals and statesmen lobbied tirelessly for the British Empire to establish Jewish colonies in Palestine. In America, too, Protestant elites clamored for the White House to advance the Zionist vision years before Herzl put pen to paper.

For Christian Zionists, the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 was part of God’s plan. So too, apparently, was the mass expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians at the hands of Zionist militias— which Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe— creating a refugee crisis which remains at the heart of present-day injustices. Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, beginning in 1967, was another step forward in their prophetic timeline.

With the rise of the Christian Right in the 1980s, Christian Zionism helped solidify a new consensus of unquestioned US support for the Israeli Right and its supremacist agenda. Today, tens of millions of MAGA evangelicals remain a rock-solid constituency backing the unending carnage in Gaza, Iran and beyond. And beyond American shores, the rapid growth of non-denominational, Neo-Pentecostal Christianity is conscripting hundreds of millions of Christian Zionist foot soldiers across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Christian Zionism is part and parcel of the rise of Christian nationalism, helping to corrode the foundations of democratic pluralism in the US and around the world. Its adherents demonize Palestinians, Muslims and anyone who opposes their dystopian vision as instruments of the devil, enemies of the ‘Judeo-Christian West’, to be swept aside in a 21st-century Crusade. And their fervent proclamations of love for Jews are laced with antisemitism, conscripting our communities as cannon fodder in their ‘clash of civilizations’.

Today, the movement isn’t just about the Rapture— there are new theologies underwriting Christian support for Israeli domination in Palestine. It isn’t just MAGA evangelicals— Christian Zionism shows up in ‘liberal’ mainline churches, and other denominations as well. And it isn’t going unchallenged. Palestinian Christians are voicing theologies of liberation, grounded in a vision of justice and collective thriving for all who live on the Land. Progressive Christians are answering their call, organizing to move their communities, and introducing new ways of reading the Bible and living their faith. Many Christian nationalists, too, are backing away from supporting Israel, and helping ignite a ‘civil war’ in the MAGA camp. Christian Zionism is in crisis, and the need to understand where it came from and where it’s going is greater than ever.

KINGDOM NOW will provide a 400-year narrative history of a movement that has crisscrossed the Middle East and both sides of the Atlantic, leapt from the pews to the heights of power, and offered a Biblical script for Empire. Drawing on my work as an analyst of the authoritarian Right, I will introduce readers to the key politicians, prayer-warriors and movement leaders at the front lines of Christian Zionism today.

As an American Jewish anti-Zionist, I will share my own experiences wrestling at the crossroads of identity, community and faith. And I will profile some of the courageous Christians, in Palestine and around the world, who are standing shoulder-to-shoulder and building movements for justice and freedom in the Land.

I’m honored to get to work on this with Broadleaf Books, an imprint of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, at a time when these issues are more important than ever. Stay tuned!

For years, Purim has been one of my favorite holidays. I’ve tried hard to see it as a story of “vulnerability and resilience, diasporism, and fighting white supremacy”, as I wrote in 2019.

This year I find myself frightened by Mordecai. The Book of Esther narrates a Jewish diaspora anti-antisemitism strategy that seeks safety through proximity to state power. And today we see where that has led.

After the defeat of Haman, Esther pleaded with Achashverosh to save the Jews, and the king responded– “Then King Ahasuerus said to Queen Esther and Mordecai the Jew, ‘I have given Haman’s property to Esther, and he has been impaled on the stake for scheming against the Jews. And you may further write with regard to the Jews as you see fit. [Write it] in the king’s name and seal it with the king’s signet, for an edict that has been written in the king’s name and sealed with the king’s signet may not be revoked.’” (Esther 8:7-8).

In the common interpretation of the last line, the king is telling Esther and Mordecai that he regrettably cannot withdraw Haman’s edict to kill the Jews. This interpretation provides moral cover for Esther and Mordecai’s next move, lending the slaughter of tens of thousands of Persians a kind of air of inevitability. But the line is ambiguous. Achashverosh could also be warning Esther and Mordecai, as they prepare to issue their own new decree, that the state holds sovereign power to ‘decide the state of exception’, as Carl Schmitt would put it, and that power is absolute and unsparing.

State power appears in the Book of Esther as a blunt instrument to be fought over in a two-way struggle between the Jews, and those who would harm the Jews. Each side seeks to enact its agenda through proximity to the king, using savvy calculation and at times deception. The narrative pivots around lush descriptions of the palace and royal court of the king, his governors and satraps, his roads and provinces, couriers and royal steeds, decrees and signet ring. We find Mordecai sitting ‘at the king’s gate’, as a lower-level judge in the legal bureaucracy, and his ultimate triumph, by the book’s end, is to rise in power second only to the king himself.

Mordecai famously refused to bow to Haman, and one reversal, in the book’s unsettling final chapters, is that now state officials in essence felt obliged to bow to the Jews. “All the officials of the provinces—the satraps, the governors, and the king’s stewards—showed deference to the Jews, because the fear of Mordecai had fallen upon them. For Mordecai was now powerful in the royal palace, and his fame was spreading through all the provinces; this man Mordecai was growing ever more powerful. So the Jews struck at their enemies with the sword, slaying and destroying; they wreaked their will upon their enemies.” (Esther 9:3-5). While the slaying of tens of thousands of Persians is sometimes presented as communal self-defense, there’s a clear undertone of retribution, a celebration of power on the day in which the Jews of Persia get to “avenge themselves on their enemies” (8:13).

The final passages of the book make it clear that the telos is proximity to state power as a good in itself. “King Ahasuerus imposed tribute on the mainland and the islands. All his mighty and powerful acts, and a full account of the greatness to which the king advanced Mordecai, are recorded in the Annals of the Kings of Media and Persia. For Mordecai the Jew ranked next to King Ahasuerus…” (Esther 10:1-3).

Reading the Book of Esther today I can’t help but think of the leaders of the Federations, the ADL and the like, who have made a clear calculation that the best safety strategy for Jews, as a diaspora minority group, is to seek proximity to state power and to turn that power against named communal enemies. It would be nice if there was a hint of a broader liberatory vision in there– if, as I wrote in 2019, the obligation to destroy Amalek could be re-interpreted as “an obligation to eradicate systems and forces of white supremacy, Empire, greed-driven capitalism, and right-wing Christian fundamentalism plaguing our planet.” But it seems like the lesson of the Book of Esther is not to dismantle Edom, but to become it. This year I gave the grogger a few half-hearted shakes, but soon I had to put it down.

Not too long ago, the slightest hint of association with the groypers could sink a campaign. Last month the 31-year-old Fishback proudly donned their blue AF hat at a rally and said it's about 'unapologetic love for Americans'. Facing pushback, he remained defiant, telling followers 'I apologize for absolutely nothing'. Last week, Carlson rewarded him with the largest MAGA platform.

Some of his policy proposals on Israel sound lifted from the progressive playbook. He has pledged to reinvest Florida’s $385 million in Israel bonds into a fund to help married couples afford a downpayment on their new home. And he opposes the IHRA definition of antisemitism on free speech grounds. But there the similarities end. He mocks his black pro-Israel opponent as “AIPAC Shakur” and calls for a moratorium on all immigration, legal & undocumented, in order to stop “white genocide”.

Fishback is a bellwether of a MAGA populist realignment in the wake of rising Gen-Z Israel-skepticism, economic woes and white Christian revanchism. He remains a long-shot candidate. But he stands to turn the Florida governor race into the latest proxy war over the future of MAGA.

He also proves that the groyper’s mainstreaming strategy appears to be working. Fuentes always sought to position his America First movement as a tugboat at the rightward edge of the GOP, casting edgy ideas out into the discourse for mainstream leaders to steadily adopt. Now candidates like Fishback feel increasingly emboldened to step into the space he has created— with the help, of course, of normalizers like Tucker Carlson.

Read my piece at The Nation to learn more about Fishback’s blend of white Christian grievance, Israel-skepticism and faux-populism— and why Tucker Carlson may be right that “pretty soon, all winning Republican politicians will talk like this.”

I must confess that even I have felt burnt out, for quite some time now, reporting on the steady march of white nationalist ideology into the mainstream of the conservative movement. When I began in 2019 (seven years ago, wow), I often felt like analysts of this trend, including myself, were grasping at the slimmest innuendos to make the argument that MAGA leaders were mirroring the rhetoric of their alt-right fringe. Every time Tucker Carlson or a GOP politician said that Democrats are trying to “import” immigrant voters to guarantee an electoral majority, it sparked a major political controversy. Many insisted that the word choice was a dog-whistle for the ‘great replacement’— the idea, at the core of white nationalism, than an elite (usually Jewish) cabal is engineering the demographic extinction of the white race through promoting non-white immigration. While I agreed the racist impulse was essentially the same, I confess that at times I thought that calling this the ‘great replacement’ was a bit of a stretch. As a researcher of the radical Right, I opened my computer screen every morning to look at unvarnished white nationalism— the kind that unambiguously proclaimed that white people, as white people, were being replaced in America at the hands of the Jews. While we were right to highlight the similarities, I also felt it was my role to remind folks of the analytical distinctions, if only to sharpen our understanding of the different sectors of the Right— or in other words, to remind people it could get worse.

And then of course, over time, the difference collapsed. A critique of Democrat electoral strategy shaded into a polemic against cultural decay. ‘American voters’ became ‘heritage Americans’, the ‘founding stock’. ‘Democratic Party elites’ became ‘globalists’ and ‘cultural Marxists’, and pundits like Charlie Kirk gradually felt safe mentioning to his viewers, in passing, that alot of those elites are Jews. As I’ve covered extensively, white nationalist movements like the groypers played no small role in goading this transformation along. The mainstreaming of white nationalism is a complex process— not so much a simple ‘mask off’ as a dynamic and evolving interplay between the MAGA base, social movements, punditry and leadership class, a self-reinforcing radicalization buoyed by neoliberal immiseration, social alienation, male grievance, social media algorithms and more.

Regardless what brought us here, we’ve arrived. What Elon Musk retweeted yesterday is unambiguously what I saw on 4chan every day in 2019. Observers pointed out that the account he retweeted, unsurprisingly, had little use for dogwhistles in naming the ‘elites’ responsible.

Perhaps the Anti-Defamation League will realize there are more important priorities right now than the ‘Mamdani Monitor’. I’m not holding my breath.

Check out my piece at Religion Dispatches for more.

Last week, Jewish Studies scholar Zachary Braiterman published a lengthy critique of Jewish anti-Zionism, ‘Unhinged on the Jewish Anti-Zionist Left’, that included a close and critical reading of my 2024 book Safety through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism. While I strongly disagree with Braiterman’s analysis, I appreciated his substantive engagement with my text and his attempt to critique the Jewish Left at least somewhat on its own terms. I found it useful to think with and against Braiterman, and I encourage you to read his piece first.

Braiterman’s polemic rests on the assumption that there exists a singular, stable Zionist American Jewish consensus, and that dissenting expressions of Jewishness are pathologically deviant. He accepts this consensus as a social fact rather than a site of contestation.

With the passage of time, Diaspora solidarity with Israel sedimented into a base Jewish communal norm: ahavat Yisrael, fidelity to the klal, etc. Hedged in by taboo and symbolism, the “essence of Judaism” would be the bare social bond or “moral community,” i.e. the compelling power of shared collective existence. Against the grain, contemporary Jewish Anti-Zionism in the Diaspora takes shape in opposition to this social mass.

In Braiterman’s telling, the Jewish Left is ‘weird’ because its pro-Palestine ritual, politics and affect is aberrant, subversive, offensive to the ‘moral norms’ of the ‘pro-Israel, pro-peace’ American Jewish communal consensus. ‘Weird’ here means a fringe, isolated subculture. But the Israeli Right, in his telling, is also ‘weird’. Against both, he seeks to recover a smothered liberal center, a quiet majority. The parallel is a revealing one though because the Israeli Right is hardly fringe; it has fast become the dominant consensus in Israel. He claims the Jewish Left is by contrast a ‘weak force’. But beneath his parallel I sense more than a bit of anxiety that the Jewish Left is not as sociologically fringe as he insists it is. While recognizing that all sides to this makhlokhet can find a poll to back them up, it’s undeniable that characterizations of Israel’s Gaza war as genocide, or support for ending US military aid are fast becoming normalized, especially among younger American Jews. In the same breath he acknowledges that over a century ago, Zionism itself was ‘weird’ in the Jewish world— until, of course, it wasn’t! His argument reads as an overwrought attempt to shore up the ‘normie’ consensus in an era when it is crumbling, an era when many would argue its inherent weirdness is increasingly apparent.

His parallel also reveals a fault at the heart of his analysis. The problem in Israel is Bibi and the religious Right; we need a return to the politics of Rabin and before that, to the ostensible liberal-pluralism of the early state. His analysis of the US far-right suffers the same shortcoming. The problem in both countries, he summarizes in another piece, is ‘religion’ understood as a fanatical excess plaguing an otherwise rational body politic. He’s wrong; the problem, as Shaul Magid also pointed out, is ethnonationalism. In America it’s rooted in white supremacy. In Israel, the foundational inequality is 1948, not 1967. The religious Right is in both a symptom and driver of deeper structures of injustice. Speaking from the ‘socialist tradition’ he castigates the Jewish Left as deviant for building a politics around this uncomfortable but necessary truth.

The twists and turns of his polemic rely on caricatured strawmen. To pick only one, he faults the Gaza solidarity sukkot on college campuses in 2024 for ‘decentering Jewish social norms’ by, for example, featuring ‘Palestinian insignia’ prominently on the sukkah.

Leaving a strange visual impression, the performance of Jewish ritual inside the intimate circle of the encampment was intended to create new community by sacralizing Palestinian suffering and the struggle against Zionism…If religion and ritual work by way of magnification, the distortion of Jewish percepts and affects is by way of intensification. Contributing to the overall defamiliarization were the masked participants, the expressions of exaggeration, distortion, and emotional ambiguity intended to impact on the transformation of identity and social roles. The visual impact central to the genre of agitprop is unusual and unsettling, intended to draw the group deeper into the imaginary world of play staged by the ritual actors.

Sounding somewhat like a 19th-century anthropologist in sub-Saharan Africa, the thrust of his critique is that anti-Zionist Jews are aggressively assaulting the Jewish ‘social bond’ by sculpting ritual around the demand for Palestinian freedom. One doubts he would delegitimize freedom Seders for Soviet Jewry in the 1980s, or Arthur Waskow’s original Freedom Seder as mere ‘agitprop’— to say nothing of the socialist Haggadot or festive Yom Kippur balls that characterized the old Jewish Left which he nostalgically valorizes. We can debate the relative merits and potential excesses of the politicization of ritual, but that’s not the point. What is revolting about the Gaza sukkah for Braiterman is precisely that it breaks the communal ‘taboo’ of Israelism by putting a Palestinian flag on the wall. Never mind that for many of us, the sight of an Israeli flag is just as ‘weird’; or that a more traditional way to measure Jewish commitment on campus is, after all, whether one puts up a sukkah or even cares that it’s Sukkot in the first place.

Other aspects of his critique boil down to the observation that at this historical moment, the Jewish Left primarily defines itself by what it stands against, and is still developing independent, positive vision. The Jewish Left is a young, emergent movement taking its early steps to break an entrenched communal consensus and prefigure something different. As Gramsci put it, in the interregnum, where one consensus is crumbling and another has not yet taken its place, morbid symptoms appear. If at times the Jewish Left appears strenuously defined by what it opposes, this is another way of saying that it comes stamped with the conditions and contradictions of the world from which it emerges. Would we expect anything different? Braiterman faults the movement for being excessively defined by the non-Jewish Other, driven by an external compulsion to ‘decenter Jewishness’. This binary opposition should be problematized but even if we accept it, it hardly signifies some deficiency of Jewish authenticity quantum, much less diminished influence. From Moses onward, some of the best ideas and most dynamic forces that reshape the Jewish world come from what Isaac Deutscher called ‘non-Jewish Jews’, figures who have one foot outside the Jewish tent.

Towards the end of his piece, he settles on a strategic argument. Braiterman critiques the Jewish Left for essentially choosing the affective thrill of Palestine solidarity and anti-Zionism over the less gratifying, but more necessary work of transforming ‘normie’ Jewish communities from within. It’s a familiar critique, and one I’ve made, in hopefully less caustic form, in the past. There’s a lively and long debate on the Jewish Left, which he entirely passes over, regarding the relative merits of an inside vs. outside strategy for communal transformation. Many, including myself, have found ourselves zig-zagging between different lanes depending on the moment, and trying to straddle the in-between.

Many would argue there are many lanes for many to play, and that you need JVP, INN and J Street all in the mix. Since October 7, there’s a stronger case to be made that nurturing a countercultural hegemonic bloc is a better use of time than hand-holding within a crumbling establishment consensus. Polarization can be effective and necessary. The conditions of 21st-century Zionism have brought us to crisis, and there is no way out but through. The agitational posture of the Jewish Left is responding to this real crisis and is largely motivated by genuine, abiding concern for the “shared collective existence” of Jewish life. The assertion that far-left and far-right are working hand-in-hand to assail the liberal consensus from both sides only makes sense if you assume that liberal consensus is stable. It isn’t. In the American Jewish community, it’s rotting from within.

Most disappointing, Braiterman’s caustic caricature portrays Jewish anti-Zionist agitation as lacking love and care for our fellow Jews, a bitter formulation that willfully resists acknowledging the actual feeling that animates the range of political action undertaken by many thousands of us in ways large and small in families, in shul and on the street, within and beyond communal institutions, and yes, within broader political formations as well. Under a constrictive and stale definition of ahavat Yisrael, this canard suffers from a regrettable poverty of imagination concerning the many forms that Jewish fealty, commitment and love can take in public. As the prophets show us, or Abraham in his own father’s idol shop, smashing taboos can be an act of love.

Braiterman’s critique of the theory and practice behind ‘safety through solidarity’ hinges on the assertion that solidarity is a dead letter because ‘antisemitism on the Left’ is unhinged and out of control.

We disagree on a lot of what constitutes ‘antisemitism on the Left’. I do not see calls for full democracy and equality in Israel/Palestine as an inherent assault on Jewish ‘auto-emancipation’. I don’t see ‘red hot hostility to Israel and Zionism’ as in itself antisemitic. I share his critique of tendencies on portions of the Left, for example, to uncritically valorize groups like Hamas or Hezbollah as emancipatory, or to slot Israeli society into a homogenous oppressor category. But I see this as primarily a problem of political analysis— ‘campism’, an oversimplistic binary thinking, etc— that is hardly unique to Israel/Palestine. Calling it specifically antisemitic requires a lot of unpacking. The assertion that there is an undercurrent of simmering resentment against Jews is often an unfalsifiable subjective vibe. It’s context-specific and in many cases I think, speculative and overblown. ‘Impact, not intent’ is the fallback we often hear on this front, and it’s similarly undercooked.

That being said, I broadly agree with Braiterman that the Left is “ambivalent” about Jews. He frames this observation as “the very opposite to the one drawn by Burley and Lorber”, but we in fact say on page 208–

An unwillingness to take Jewish Zionism seriously does not mean that the Left is a simmering hotbed of antisemitism-in-waiting, with fanatical conspiracy theories of Jewish world domination and demonizing views of Jews as Satanic baby killers brewing just below the surface. The truth, as we see it, is both more nuanced and banal than that. The Left is often just ambivalent about Jewish issues. Warmth, curiosity, and openness mix in with patches of resentment and microaggressions in a broader stew of ignorance. This is a far cry from the threats Jews face on the Right, but it nonetheless remains an obstacle.

In a world still riven with the structures and thought-forms of antisemitism, there’s a lot of ambivalence about Jews out there, and that remains true to varying degrees across the agglomeration of groups, tendencies and personalities that for better and worse constitutes today’s Left. I think there’s a soft ambivalence on the Left about Indian and Hindu Americans, too— another minority that, socio-economically speaking, isn’t so ‘oppressed’ in the Left’s standard metrics, that counts no shortage of reactionaries in positions of public prominence, and for whom politicized claims of victimization (Hinduphobia) are also often wielded for reactionary ends in the public square.

But the salience of Israel and by extension ‘Jewish issues’ is comparatively much more intense on the Left. I don’t think that’s because of some protean Judeophobia lurking beneath the surface. Jews are wedged in the crosshairs of an empire that keeps loudly declaring ‘never again’, again and again, as it drops bombs abroad and locks up dissenters at home. Some of the leading voices keeping that wedge in place are Jews, and the others point ceaselessly to them. An unending moral panic welds a caricature of Jewish victimhood as a heavy object to the hard center of American political discourse, used mostly to clobber the Left. All while the destruction of Gaza, and US support for it has quite appropriately solidified for the Left as a signifier for all that is inhuman about Empire and its power structures in our world.

As the US-Israel war machine takes ever more ghoulish form since October 7, it becomes among other things an enormous factory for Jewish ambivalence. At best it steadily corrodes goodwill towards Jews, and at worst it actively encourages antisemitic narratives of Jews as the embodiment of a brutal, ruthless and predatory elite. As long as it keeps slapping a ‘Shalom, Mahmoud’ sticker on the ruins of Gaza and of Columbia; as long as a phantasmic script of Jewish victimhood plays such an overdetermined, hypervisible role in legitimizing Empire— many people are going to have messy, contradictory feelings and responses to questions of antisemitism. There will be unavoidable tensions and contradictions in the relationship between pro-Israel American Jews and broader movements for social justice that aren’t reducible to simple identity-based bigotry. It’s gonna be really hard to stop that noisy corner from calling your AIPAC-friendly bubbe a war criminal or protesting the IDF bake sale at the synagogue down the street.

Put differently, if Israel, Jews and Jewish objects assume “phantasmagorical” dimension in parts of the far-left imaginary as Braiterman claims, we shouldn’t think of this as the simple mirror of the far-right and reject both in favor of a stable center, as he suggests. Instead we should see both as distinct, if sometimes parallel responses to the philosemitic phantasmagoria of the status quo— the overdetermined, spectral role held by Israel and ‘the Jews’ in normative Western political, social and imaginative structures. And we should tailor our priorities accordingly.

Even for the larger parts of the Left who find more strategic targets than bubbe or the bake sale, standing with Jews in an unmediated way will often be fraught and complicated. We saw this after the Bondi Beach massacre. Aside from a small, ghoulish corner which rushed to dehumanize the victims by highlighting their Zionist politics, most Leftists condemned the massacre in the strongest terms and simultaneously condemned the Islamophobic, anti-Palestinian response they feared would follow. The Zionist camp saw this dual posture as more evidence of bad solidarity from non-Jews, and as ‘good Jew’ apologism when it came from Jews. Much of Braiterman’s critique pivots around this familiar affective distaste for a left-wing anti-antisemitic politics that is excessively ‘relational’, as he puts it, that always puts Jews alongside the Other, ceaselessly foregrounding the intersections of oppression. What he and others read as an inauthentic response to antisemitism, whether from Jews or ‘allies’, is quite often a rational and care-full attempt to break a wedge, to size up and confront the impossible contradictions of our conjuncture, to loosen a knot that Braiterman’s grievance can only tighten.

Braiterman pessimistically offered that the Left’s solidarity with Jews peaked after the Tree of Life shooting, and today a more bitter paucity is laid bare. Public displays of ‘allyship’ towards identity groups are often performative and episodic. They tend to spike in crisis moments— like the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, the Muslim ban, the George Floyd uprising, attacks on Drag Queen Story Hour— and fade in intensity with time. This is especially true for mass shootings, the most dramatic manifestation of antisemitism or indeed any bigotry. The sentiment Braiterman evokes, that ‘the Left doesn’t show up for Jews’, is a common one, and it’s as much a mediated spectacle, a digital vibe fed by social media outrage loops, as any of the tendencies on the Jewish Left that he claims assume “a place between the virtual world and real life”. The vast majority of Leftists have a baseline understanding of antisemitism and a commitment to opposing it. Looking for ‘solidarity’ in public proclamations of identity-based ‘allyship’ is understandable, and such displays have their place and are not insignificant. But this kind of politics has a limited horizon, and many aptly critique the liberal underpinnings of that horizon. We don’t choose the politics of solidarity because we’re satisfied that enough comrades have made room for our tribe on their ‘in this house we believe’ yard signs. We choose it because we look at the world and see that antisemitism is reproduced by the same conditions of inequality, alienation and exploitation that produce other forms of oppression, and acting collectively to transform those conditions is the only hope for a possible better world.

I understand the impulse to put the Jewish Left on the couch because one holds it responsible, or at least as the most proximate scapegoat for a progressive political landscape which feels increasingly unrecognizable; to yearn for a lost liberal Zionist consensus, and blame our noisiness for its vanishing. The contemporary fragmentation is painful for all of us, I’m afraid, but there is no way out but through.

It is disorienting to watch MAGA figures like Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene suddenly drape themselves in the language of human rights, speaking with apparent moral clarity about Israel’s genocide in Gaza and Palestinian suffering. The same leaders who revel in cruelty toward immigrants, trans people, Black Lives Matter protesters, and almost every marginalized group now sound, for a moment, like Amnesty International.

Amidst our vertigo, some progressives think there is tactical value in partnering with the Israel-critical Right around narrow, shared goals of ending the carnage in Gaza, opposing new U.S. weapons transfers, or reining in the national security state. Progressive members of Congress have co-sponsored or voted with MTG or Thomas Massie on specific measures, while CodePink even recently posed for a photo with Greene in Congress, thanking her for her stance. I often think these alliances are ill-advised beyond a few specific contexts, where they should be approached with caution and careful deliberation, but the deeper strategic questions this opens up are beyond the scope of this piece.

Here I want to make the point that confusion about motives can scramble our political coordinates. Israel-critical MAGA elites like Carlson are wielding selective empathy for Palestine as a political weapon in an inter-elite struggle over the future of the Right. Their public sympathy for Palestinians helps score rhetorical points against the pro-Israel neoconservative old guard and lends moral legitimacy to their emergent “America First” nationalist bloc, which rejects Middle East intervention while doubling down on white Christian nationalism at home.

The point is not what is in Tucker’s heart, but what his tears are doing in the broader strategic landscape.

Western elites have long weaponized selective empathy for oppressed groups in their internecine squabbles. In the build-up to the Iraq War, neoconservatives—including Tucker himself, at the time—invoked the suffering of Iraqi women and children under Saddam Hussein to justify invasion and occupation. Today, those same pro-Israel forces highlight the persecution of Christians in the Middle East to cast Israel as a beleaguered outpost of “Judeo-Christian civilization.” Carlson broke ranks with his old friends but kept their tactics: he regularly highlights the real struggles of Palestinian Christians under Israeli occupation and genocide in order to fracture the ‘Judeo-Christian’ consensus on the Right, often implicitly mobilizing centuries-old Christian polemics against Judaism in the process.

There is nothing new about these tactics. When Britain ruled over Palestine in the early 20th century, colonial officers and senior officials sympathetic to Zionist aspirations invoked Arab ‘fanaticism’ and Jewish victimhood, while those who favored Arab nationalism (and sometimes, even British withdrawal) condemned Zionist aggression and expressed outrage at Palestinian dispossession. No matter which direction they aimed their public grief, they remained hard-nosed imperialists, maneuvering to secure the most favorable conditions for the domination of their Empire, and their humanitarian sympathy rarely extended across its myriad other frontiers.

Ironically, if we’re looking for contemporary examples of selective empathy wielded for political ends, we need look no further than the pro-Israel anti-antisemitism Carlson so effectively critiques. The nonstop performative October 7 memorialization, and self-serving concern for Jewish vulnerability on college campuses expressed by those seeking endless war in the Middle East or the authoritarian dismantling of American higher education— all show the dangers of useful victim narratives. (Nor are selective empathy and performative allyship the exclusive province of the Right, of course— indeed these tendencies may be constitutive of our political discourse across the spectrum.)

In a media ecosystem saturated with wall-to-wall dehumanization of Palestinians, we may welcome any platform which manages to break through the noise. We should just recognize that Tucker Carlson is deploying a rival affective regime, rather than applauding him as a voice of conscience. We don’t know what’s in Tucker’s heart, and it doesn’t matter. Political actors frequently come to believe their own selective empathy; sincerity and instrumentalization are not mutually exclusive. The question is not “is this emotion real?” but “what work is it doing, and for whom?” We may well decide that even the most selective, self-serving empathy should be encouraged as a wedge that can open fissures in reactionary coalitions. But we shouldn’t be fooled, even for a moment, that these people are our friends.

Attendees were ‘commissioned’ as ‘ambassadors’ in the fight against antisemitism and Israel-criticism in the MAGA movement. As criticism of Israel deepens across the MAGA base— including what US ambassador Mike Huckabee called a “growing cancer within the evangelical movement”— Israel’s supporters see pro-Israel evangelicals as a vital bulwark. “The pulpit has become quiet,” one pastor warned. “We’ve allowed cultural voices to speak louder than pastors.” As polling shows falling support for Israel among young conservatives, including evangelicals, they hope that a louder evangelical chorus can drown out the bullhorn of Israel-critics like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes.

Airfare and lodging for last week’s trip was reportedly covered by the Israeli government, and once on the ground, attendees were immersed in the worldview of the Zionist radical Right. “Mr. Vice President, we love you and we love America. But there’s something you have to understand,” Evans proclaimed during a visit to the West Bank settlement of Shiloh, addressing JD Vance’s recent comments opposing Israeli annexation of the West Bank. “The policy of the God who birthed America, and the policy of the God who gave these people this land, is in fact that Judea and Samaria is Bible land!” Attendees stood and cheered, some with palms open in praise. “Speak to young people,” Netanyahu urged attendees in a recorded address. “Stand up and be counted. I’m counting on you, and I know you’ll do what has to be done. That’s what our destiny calls for.”

Israel and its allies are scrambling to defend their ‘Judeo-Christian’ partnership in a time of crisis. But its most loyal partners in ‘fighting antisemitism’ have their own agenda.

Last week’s delegation was organized by evangelical leader Mike Evans, head of the Jerusalem-based Friends of Zion Museum, which highlights Christian Zionist support for the Jewish state. Evans claimed that MAGA Israel-critics are “coming out and saying worse things presently than the Nazi Party said at their platform in 2020.”

I have written extensively on the Israel-critical antisemitism espoused by MAGA figures like Carlson and Fuentes, and its troubling rise in shaping the culture and discourse of MAGA, especially its youth. Even still, Evans’ comparison was over the top, given that the 25-point Nazi Party platform adopted in February 1920 defined Jews as a separate, non‑German race, excluded them from citizenship and called for their removal from German public life.

It was also more than a bit ironic given that in the 1970s Evans led Bnai Yeshua, a Messianic organization that sought, as he put it at the time, to “see every Jewish person in the world come to a greater relationship with the God of Israel through the acceptance of Jesus as the Messiah.” Evans was born Jewish and reportedly found faith in Jesus at age 11. By the mid-70s, he had built Bnai Yeshua into one of the US’s leading Messianic organizations, at the forefront of a wave of intense proselytizing efforts that alarmed American Jewish leadership.

In 1976 Evans, then 29, moved Bnai Yeshua from Texas to a 12-acre campus in Long Island, where they drew as many as 200 people to their Friday night services serving up bagels and cream cheese and lively hora dances alongside shouts of praise for Jesus. Reaction was swift and fierce from the local Jewish community. At Bnai Yeshua’s first annual conference, activists from the far-right Jewish Defense League reportedly leapt to their feet, released twenty live mice on the floor and seized the stage chanting “never again” and “not one Jewish soul.” The local Jewish Community Relations Council organized an emergency counter-missionary task force to counter Evans and other missionaries, compiling data and mobilizing psychologists and educators to counter their entreaties.

At one point Evans, dubbed by opponents the “soul snatcher of Long Island”, suggested his missionaries would wear yellow stars to protest their persecution at the hands of the Jewish community. (I wrote about this in 2022, when Evans bizarrely proclaimed, without basis, that he would be leading that year’s March of the Living at Yad Vashem. He has a long history, it seems, of playing fast and loose with Holocaust memory for his own ends.)

As late as 1985, Evans’ name appeared on warning lists of messianic organizations published by American Jewish defense groups. But by then Evans had moved into his current line of work, parlaying relationships with Israeli right-wing leaders like Menachem Begin and Benjamin Netanyahu into a lucrative Christian Zionist career.

According to Evans’ website, Netanyahu has called him a “cherished friend…a fighter for freedom in a world of darkening and narrowing horizons” with “the moral clarity that is necessary to defend Israel against the lies and distortions of its enemies.” In 2017, Evans and other evangelical leaders presented Trump with a ‘Friends of Zion’ award in the Oval Office, thanking him for his decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem.

Today Evans runs the Friends of Zion Museum in Jerusalem, a collection of high-tech multimedia exhibits showcasing Christian Zionist support for the Jewish state. In 2017, one Israeli anti-missionary activist reported on the disturbing evidence of missionizing she encountered at the museum.

In one room, you can hear testimonies of Jewish people who have been helped or saved by Christians in one way or another. One of the most disturbing was the description of Christians who come to volunteer at nursing homes. They specifically seek out Holocaust survivors, those who don’t have family or friends visiting them. They serve food, bring clothing, gifts, and Hebrew/Yiddish translations of the New Testament Christian Bible. For people who don’t know, this is called “Deathbed Evangelism,” and seeks to take advantage of the elderly who are vulnerable, fearful of death, and feelings of loneliness in order to convert them to Christianity in their dying days or even last moments.

The website for another of Evans’ organizations, Jerusalem Prayer Team, once stated plainly that “The return of our Lord and Savior is directly related to Jerusalem. Most all prophecy points to Jerusalem and the end times; the new Temple being built, the Antichrist, the Battle of Armageddon and the 144,000 Evangelists.” The last number is a reference to the fraction of the world’s Jews that will remain alive to preach the gospel, according to popular Christian Zionist teaching, after the battle of Armageddon condemns the rest to hellfire. Evans’ many novels traffic in End Times themes, including an unpublished novel from 2018, recently leaked by Responsible Statecraft, that envisions an apocalyptic war between Israel and Iran.

During last week’s trip, the settlers of Shiloh presented Evans with an ‘honorary citizenship’ in their settlement. “Mike, the new citizen of Judea and Samaria— but an old friend of Israel and the Jewish people,” exclaimed Yacov Livne, Israeli career diplomat. “We all fell in love with you- thank you so much.”

Today Evans claims he no longer proselytizes to Jews, and frames his missionary career as an early experiment in a lifelong journey to protect Jews, a journey that began when, as a child, he could not protect his Jewish mother from his abusive non-Jewish father. The tidy narrative pulls on all the right heart-strings (and piques the interest of armchair psychoanalysts like myself), but it whitewashes the thread that binds the ‘soul-snatcher of Long Island’ and the ‘friend of Israel’ into a cohesive Christian Zionist project.

Over four centuries ago, Puritan restorationists on both sides of the Atlantic preached that a Jewish awakening to Jesus and a Jewish regathering to Palestine were both right around the corner, and must occur together to trigger the return of Jesus and inaugurate the era of universal redemption. Today, neo-charismatic movements like the New Apostolic Reformation are driving Christian Zionism and Christian nationalism around the world, and they focus heavily on proselytizing to Jews in Israel as part of their End Times vision. As I wrote last week, Mike Evans is far from the only Christian Zionist leader in the close orbit of missionizing.

Perusing the social media footprint of last week’s Ambassador Summit, it wasn’t hard to find groups who share this theology. Blessors for Israel, based in Hillsboro, Oregon, professes on its website a commitment to “equipping Christians to stand with Israel as the events of the latter days unfold,” “building a Messianic school in Israel to reveal Jesus to His people from the Scriptures”, and “uniting to defend” Israel from antisemitism.

“Nations that stand with Israel are the blessed nations,” Matthew Dodd, executive director of Blessors for Israel, stated matter-of-factly on a livestream at the site of the Nova massacre, with long rows of upright placards and posts displaying the faces of victims on an open field behind him. “And those that don’t, well…they will be cursed.”

It’s hard to take seriously any ambassador against antisemitism whose pitch includes a rallying cry for Jews to join the global community of Jesus-believers. We have a pretty long memory of being burnt at the stake for refusing that kind of cry. Christian Zionist proselytizers know this about us, and claim sympathy for our historical trauma. Maybe now, they tell themselves, once we show the Jews our love for Israel, they’ll be more receptive to our message.

Martin Luther, the founder of the Protestant Reformation, once held that same logic. In 1523 he published his treatise That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew, chastising the corrupt Catholic church establishment for its centuries-long mistreatment of Jews. “They have dealt with the Jews as if they were dogs rather than human beings..if the apostles, who also were Jews, had dealt with us Gentiles as we deal with the Jews, none of us would have become Christians.”

Luther anticipated that, once his Reformation returned Christian worship to its more pure and authentic form, the Jews would finally recognize their error, and flock to convert in droves. “I hope that if one deals in a kindly way with the Jews and does not address them with arrogance, many of them will become genuine Christians and turn to us.”

When the Jews did not convert as he hoped, Luther’s later texts, like the 1543 On the Jews and Their Lies, bristled with rage. “Set fire to their synagogues or schools,” he told his Christian readers. “I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed…all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing, and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them…[and they should] be expelled from the country and be told to return to their land and their possessions in Jerusalem.” This strand of vitriolic antisemitism in Luther was cited approvingly by the Nazis centuries later.

Evans, too, has responded with rage when his favored Jews did not do as he pleased. In 2021 he penned a vitriolic open letter calling out politicians like Naftali Bennett who formed a coalition government without Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister. “These would-be pretend striptease actors, with their obese bellies delusionally thinking they’re seductive, are screaming at the top of their lungs, ‘Crucify Him, crucify him!’ It is sick and shameful to see such a group running like rabid dogs possessed with power and revenge.” The diatribe, which he later apologized for, packaged centuries of antisemitic tropes in a single missive.

On the same day that Evans’ evangelical delegation kicked off in Jerusalem, the far-right Israeli outlet Israel Hayom, funded by GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson, held its first ever conference in New York, where the fight against antisemitism took center stage. “More than two hundred organizations have been founded in the past two years to fight antisemitism” in the American Jewish community, bemoaned Malcolm Hoenlein, head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, “and they have received massive funding, but the truth is that we win a few battles yet we are losing the war.”

Over forty years ago Hoenlein headed New York’s Jewish Community Relations Council, where he formed and led the task force to counter Evans’ missionary work. But that was a different era. In 2016 he led a Conference of Presidents delegation to visit Evans’ museum in 2016, where he accepted an award from Evans’ son. The two leaders now share overlapping circles in pro-Israel networks, which cause them to occasionally rub shoulders in the halls of power— in a White House discussion on Trump’s Mideast peace plan in January 2020, for example, or at the Israeli embassy in DC in July 2025.

In recent years Hoenlein has defended the utility of partnerships with Christian Zionists, while warning against missionizing. But the dance between the two men over the decades epitomizes the shifting priorities of mainstream Jewish communal defense partnerships in the 21st century. With friends like these it’s no wonder, as Hoenlein put it, that they are losing their war.

The prayer space in Succat Hallel is lined with spacious floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Temple Mount— prime real estate to watch the final battles of the End Times unfold. Huckabee stood in the front row lightly swaying, head bowed in focus, as pastor Rick Ridings prayed that Jerusalem would be “full of Jewish believers” in Jesus and affirmed that “the only perfect government [in Israel] will be established when you [Jesus] come, and you reign from your holy hill.” Huckabee’s speech matched Ridings’ fervent tone and included a frank admission of dual loyalty— his job, he told the crowd, was to serve not only as “an ambassador for my country” but also as “an ambassador for the kingdom.”

Succat Hallel is a ministry dedicated to bringing Israeli Jews to faith in Jesus. (I’m not writing ‘convert Jews to Christianity’ because, the way they see it, they’re helping Jews discover their authentic, ‘completed’ Jewish identity. But commitment to analytical precision aside, the overwhelming majority of Jews see no difference.) They pray for an awakening of Jewish faith in Jesus, especially in Israel, to catalyze the End Times process. Ridings has put it clearly: Jesus “will not return to earth and restore all things until there are enough Jewish people in Jerusalem who will welcome him back,” as he put it in 2024.

It’s not just Mike Huckabee. Many prominent Christian Zionists are allying with efforts to bring Jews to faith in Jesus— breaking a longstanding movement taboo.

Here in the US, many leaders of prominent Christian Zionist organizations dedicated to ‘fighting antisemitism’ support proselytizing to Jews, or are willing to ally with those who do. I’m talking specifically here about the Project Esther crowd, the same people who helped lead the cynical crackdown on the pro-Palestine Left, & are now fighting antisemitic Israel-critics on the Right like Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson (or trying to, at least. Since they split with the Heritage Foundation last month they’re twisting in the wind, as I covered last month over at Jewish Currents.)

It might make your head spin that a movement that incessantly proclaims its commitment to Jewish survival and flourishing would simultaneously thirst for Jews to find Jesus, given that for 2,000 years Jews have considered the latter a full-frontal assault on our survival and flourishing. But this draws from deep currents in Christian Zionism. In the early 1600s, Puritan restorationists on both sides of the Atlantic (including men like John Cotton and Increase Mather who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony) preached that in the End Times, Jews would convert to faith in Jesus and flock to Palestine to set up a messianic kingdom. Since then, restorationists have debated which would take priority— the spiritual awakening or the political kingdom— but few disputed both were ultimately inseparable.

Since the 1970s, when Christian Zionism emerged as a major force in American conservatism, its leaders largely respected the taboo on outright proselytizing in order to maintain good coalition relationships with Jewish partners. But 21st-century Christian Zionism is increasingly shaped by neo-charismatic movements like the New Apostolic Reformation, which put Jewish faith in Jesus front and center, alongside political support for Israel, in the unfolding End Times process. They watch closely and pray avidly for a ‘spiritual awakening’ among Israeli Jews, in the here and now, as a sign that their dominionist political project is accelerating towards its final culmination, in the Christianization of the world.

Today’s Jewish Right, in the US and Israel, is teaming up with these players as they seek to battle not only the anti-Zionist Left, but a growing trend of Israel-criticism on the Right. I would say they deserve better allies, but after 2 years of genocide in Gaza I’m not sure they do.

Check out my piece at Religion Dispatches for the receipts and more.

So said James Fishback, a 30 year old investor, as he announced his Republican candidacy for Florida governor this morning, hoping to succeed Ron DeSantis, who is stepping down due to term limits. He’s running on a populist, anti-establishment platform that blends boilerplate hard-right culture war issues with opposition to legal (not just illegal) immigration, and pledges to protect housing stock, electricity bills and affordability by going after AI data centers and large corporate homebuyers like AirBnb and Blackstone. He’s won praise from Elon Musk and conservative influencers for his idea of a “DOGE dividend” and other psuedo-populist economic branding.

He also distinguishes himself from the GOP mainstream with sharp criticism of Israel. “I’m sorry, but it is *not* antisemitic to criticize Israel,” he said in September. “Why is it that when we’re critical of Israel, it feels like a fourth branch comes out to almost criminalize our speech?” He’s slammed AIPAC as a foreign lobby and called on Israel to release Mohammed Ibrahim, a 16-year old Palestinian American and Florida resident who Israel has detained without trial for over 6 months. He regularly attacks Randy Fine, Florida’s rabidly Zionist and Islamophobic representative, who called him a “weirdo groyper” in response.

Fishback isn’t the only 2026 GOP midterm candidate running on an Israel-critical platform. Aaron Baker is running against Randy Fine in Florida’s 6th Congressional District. He has called Israel’s genocide in Gaza a genocide, called Fine “diabolically genocidal” and supported Marjorie Taylor Greene’s July 2025 attempt to withhold $500 million in military support to Israel. He even called himself an anti-Zionist, though he seems not terribly up to date on the terminology, claiming in the same tweet to support a two state solution. Mike Wilnau, running in the 11th district, rails against AIPAC, insisting that “the American people should have more representation than a foreign government in our Capitol” and agreeing with hardline antisemitic Christian nationalist Lauren Witzke that “serving a foreign government is treason.”

All three candidates, along with 9th district candidate Marcus Carter (another national-populist who has criticized Israel in passing) are speaking at a ‘Florida First Town Hall’ organized by University of Florida College Republicans (UFCR) on December 4. The event promises to highlight a “new era of right wing politics and America First ideals.” Earlier this month, UFCR made a splash on the online Right by claiming that UF’s Turning Point USA chapter expelled many of its members from their group chat for “hate speech”, after they supported Tucker Carlson when the MAGA star hosted Nick Fuentes on his show.

UFCR is a chapter of College Republicans of America, a campus organization which claims over 200 chapters nationwide and launched in 2023 as a hard-right alternative to establishment campus conservatism. That year I exposed the groyper connections of many of its national leaders. These days its founder and chairman, William Branson Donahue, has come out swinging in defense of Carlson. “I’m no longer MAGA,” he tweeted on November 16. “MAGA is dead. MAGA was supposed to put Americans First. Maybe we should turn it into MAFA—Make Americans First Again.” Nick Fuentes had announced the death of MAGA four days earlier.

Nick Fuentes on his November 15 show, proclaiming the death of MAGA and the rise of America First

The GOP schism on display here isn’t only about Israel. Earlier this month I wrote that it “has become the opening salvo in the battle for Trumpism after Trump… touching not only on foreign intervention but also issues of immigration, trade policy, culture wars, and more.” These candidates are unafraid to openly challenge Trump’s economic policies from the Right. Carter criticized Trump’s proposal for a 50-year mortgage, calling instead for a federally backed home loan program “so families don’t have to compete with banks for their slice of the American dream”. As Donahue put it, “MAGA has been co-opted by neocons that are more concerned with protecting Israel, Ukraine, Indian and Chinese H-1B visa workers, and foreign students than American workers, American taxpayers, and American students. Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Ben Shapiro, and Dinesh D’Souza are America Last…We are America First, America Only.”

Expect more of this. In July, Mike Johnson held a closed-door meeting with GOP leaders and Christian nationalists to strategize against the rise of Israel-critical GOP candidates in the 2026 midterms. Florida, a longtime MAGA bastion, looks to be ground zero for these fights. “Politics is downstream from culture,” as Andrew Breitbart famously put it, and the Tucker Carlson line on Israel isn’t going to stay in the online sphere of MAGA streamers. It already has trickled down into the electoral realm, and that stream will only broaden in 2026.

In 2022 & 2024 I went to Hazony’s NatCon conference, a who’s who of US & global far-right leaders. In 2022 the Jewish nationalists I spoke to insisted antisemitism wasn’t a big problem in their movement. By 2024 they started changing their tune.

In last week’s interview Hazony still wanted to deny that Gaza has anything to do with the rise in MAGA antisemitism. “I have not discovered that the openness to antisemitic messaging on the Right under the age of 45—I have not noticed that it is a reaction, almost at all, to supposed Israeli genocide or accusations of war crimes in Gaza,” he told Douthat.

But that’s ridiculous. Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson & others are rejecting the old-guard, neoconservative establishment consensus, and Israel is central to that fault line. As I write- “we still need to ask why some arguments gain more currency than others in specific historical moments. At this moment MAGA antisemitism has crystallized around nationalist rejection of the US-Israel relationship. Since October 7, meaningful blocs within MAGA have grown tired of US entanglement in another Middle East war, outraged by scenes of a livestreamed genocide, skeptical at a clear pattern of Israeli belligerence, and irritated by the heavy-handed accusations of antisemitism they face whenever they try to talk about it...This is the central contradiction Fuentes and Carlson are seeking to exploit—between an old-guard neoconservative establishment and an ascendant America First wing that has no patience for the ‘special relationship.’”

For years Hazony & the rest of the pro-Israel Right have been feeding the flames of MAGA antisemitism, scapegoating George Soros as a progressive puppetmaster & liberal Jews as illegitimate. Their gamble was that Christian nationalism would remain ‘Judeo-Christian’ and pro-Israel. They were very wrong. “Now that his house is on fire,” I write, “Hazony stands flailing amidst the conflagration...but his hands are covered in gasoline.”

Read more at Religion Dispatches.

He’s applauding the largest Christian Zionist organization, based in Jerusalem, for building relationships with Israelis & advocating for Israel because this makes it easier to ‘harvest’ Jewish souls.

That was in 2013. Here he is this summer.

“What if God wants to move among Jewish people” means, what if Jews find Jesus? He chuckles because he knows it’s controversial to say.

Another speaker at today’s conference is Tony Perkins, head of Family Research Council. Here he is last fall, at FRC’s DC conference, nodding affirmingly as another speaker outlines a grim End Times scenario where 2/3 of Jews will die, & calls on Jews to convert now.

Jewish Zionists have long expected their Christian partners to disavow this stuff. But here, Bramnick & Perkins are speaking only to Christians.

Maybe it’s just me, but I think Jews deserve better friends than folks like these who ultimately want most of us to burn in End Times hellfire & stop being Jewish.

Here’s a recent piece from Fred Clarkson & I on the End Times Christian Zionism of Mario Bramnick and the New Apostolic Reformation.

Listen here.

For The Nation, I wrote about Nick Fuentes’ half-decade march into the conservative mainstream, and how the right’s crisis over US support for Israel has provided the white nationalist with the opening he needs to be welcomed into the MAGA fold. Read it here.

“Of course, in many ways it’s surprising that Fuentes’s red-carpet welcome took this long. In fits and starts, with plenty of misses and plenty of luck along the way, he has been clawing his way toward the top for years. He has done this not primarily through building a mass base or taking over conservative institutions but through what the alt-right called “metapolitics”—seeding radical ideas in culture until a moment of crisis provides an opening for wider dissemination. Now the right’s crisis over US support for Israel, after two years of genocidal annihilation in Gaza, has provided him the opening he needs…

Liberals and progressives can still learn something from Carlson and Roberts, however: It doesn’t pay to shut out your radicals, and it won’t work. Millions of Americans, young and old, are fed up with bipartisan support for Israel, unprecedented inequality, and the other morbid symptoms of decaying empire. The establishment has no answer for this widespread and mounting alienation, because the establishment is the cause. Only fresh, outsider ideas can meet this moment, and they’re popular. But while left-wing insurgents still struggle to get past our side’s gatekeepers onto larger platforms of influence, radicals like Fuentes are finding less resistance on the right. If we don’t want their answers to win the day, we don’t have much time left.”

For The Hill, I wrote about rising antisemitism and support for Nick Fuentes within the conservative movement. With MAGA influencers like Tucker Carlson and groups like the Heritage Foundation ushering Fuentes and his ideas into the tent, pro-Israel groups on the Right are facing a brutal awakening.

“In hindsight, the obsessive focus on uncovering and rooting out a supposed crisis of antisemitism on the left will prove to have been a drastic and myopic miscalculation. Jewish Rightists, in fact, were bedfellows with a far more substantive threat, putting not only Jews but democracy itself in greater danger in the process. With their dreams increasingly discredited, we must work to awaken from the nightmare they have helped create.”

Read more here.

For Convergence Magazine, I wrote a 2-part series to help progressives understand and counter antisemitism and its weaponization.

Part 1

“Antisemitism has always been deeply interwoven with other types of social domination. It is both a form of bigotry and scapegoating against Jews, and a conspiracy theory that today is stitched into the fabric of white Christian nationalism and its authoritarian culture.”

Part 2

“To respond effectively to the weaponization of antisemitism, we need to sharpen our understanding, organize with shared safety in solidarity, and ground the fight against antisemitism in the struggle for collective liberation.”

For +972mag, I wrote on the growing criticism of Israel animating the MAGA movement, especially Gen Z, where it comes interlaced with America First antisemitism and ultra-nationalism.

“Generational shift, isolationism, and nationalist anger are breaking the GOP’s pro-Israel consensus. But the left must remain wary of their motives.”

Read more here.

My latest at Religion Dispatches.

GOP leader Mike Johnson visited the West Bank yesterday & proclaimed support for Israeli annexation. But few noticed the Christian Zionist operative who has quietly arranged trips like this for decades, driven by Biblical prophecy.

Heather Johnston runs the US Israel Education Association from her home in Arkansas. USIEA arranges ‘Biblical’ trips to the occupied West Bank for senior Congressional leaders. When AIPAC tours cross the Green line it draws controversy- USIEA benefits from avoiding the spotlight.

In 2011 Johnston’s West Bank tour helped convince Congressional leaders to secure major US funding for Israel’s Iron Dome system. She claims to work regularly with Netanyahu, Mike Johnson & other prominent US & Israeli leaders- but few know her name.

Johnston sees her “hidden role” in the West Bank as the “staging ground” for the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. And while many Christian Zionists disavow conversionary intent, Johnston seems to think bringing Jews to Jesus is part of the prophetic plan.

Yesterday’s Congressional visit was part of an international Christian Zionist strategy long in the making. It’s everywhere in the US pro-Israel movement, but its influence is easy to overlook.

Over at New Lines Magazine, I wrote about the antisemitic conspiracy theories that are central to the far right’s obsession with sex-trafficking billionaire Jeffrey Epstein and his links to the global elite.

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The MAGA world is abuzz with fresh demands that the Donald Trump administration declassify federal records regarding the case of Jeffrey Epstein, the serial pedophile and sex trafficker who was imprisoned in 2019 and died in prison under suspicious circumstances. Epstein’s monstrous crimes continue to draw intense fascination because they took place against a backdrop of sprawling, bipartisan networks of the global elite, with political leaders like Trump and Bill Clinton, Britain’s Prince Andrew, business tycoons, media moguls, prominent scientists and countless others in his orbit.

In the MAGA world, one particular charge has surfaced with intensity — that Epstein may have been an asset of Israeli intelligence.

How should we make sense of this emerging MAGA civil war, and the place of antisemitism within it? A disorienting vertigo can result when people on the right advance critiques of plutocrats and disastrous foreign policies that look from some angles, if one squints, like progressive ones.

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Read more at New Lines Magazine.