One of the political effects of the Gaza war has been to highlight how much the Israeli government in its rhetoric has made remembrance of the Holocaust synonymous with support for Israel, and antisemitism equivalent to criticism of Israel. The genocide expert Omer Bartov has noted that the field of Holocaust studies and genocide studies are in danger of becoming distinct fields due to Israel’s actions against the Palestinians and the reluctance of institutions dedicated to studying and commemorating the Holocaust to criticize Israel’s actions or to recognize what has happened as an act of genocide.
Natasha Soffer-Roth looks at how problematic it has become that Israel reflexively equate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Hardline rightwingers in Europe and the US have found a way to identify with the far-right Netanyahu government of Israel via Islamophobia according to the formula “We hate Muslims and Muslims hate Israel so we can’t possibly be antisemitic.”
Soffer-Roth recently analyzed how the Republican Party’s embrace of the real, old-fashioned kind of antisemitism has (inevitably) become problematic for the Trumpsters. At this point, the Republican Party is nearly identical with the Trump cult, as shown by the recent excommunication of Marjorie Taylor Greene – herself a nasty antisemite is the real sense. She uses an analogy to the Lousi Renault character in Casablanca who was “shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here,”
Last month, following a cozy, long-winded chat between the far-right commentator Tucker Carlson and the pro-Hitler influencer Nick Fuentes, a whole team of Louis Renaults fanned out across conservative media and gatherings to express outrage at the apparent sudden appearance of antisemitism within their ranks. Almost as soon as the interview aired, a number of conservatives began pressuring the Heritage Foundation — the Trump-aligned think tank behind the authoritarian blueprint Project 2025 and its anti-antisemitism spin-off, Project Esther — to cut its long-standing close association with Carlson.The old-fashioned kind of Jew-hating associated with the original American First movement (2) is very much still present in the kind of antisemitism espoused by creeps like Fuentes.
The critique was at least in part due to the fact that Carlson’s platforming of antisemitism was not accompanied by the usual pro-Israel sentiment that the American (and global) far right often relies on to deflect from its bigotry against Jews. In fact, a sizable portion of Carlson’s interview with Fuentes was dedicated to criticizing Israel, its reliance on U.S. support, and Christian Zionists. (1)
Rick Perlstein, the historian who is a genuine authority on the Republican Party and its relationship to the Radical Right over the decades, wrote in 2024 about the measures that police directed against anti-genocide protesters in the US since October of 2023:
Concerns for the “safety” of Jewish students has become a rhetorical commonplace in elite discussions of campus politics these days: “Jewish students of all political beliefs,” Theo Baker, son of New York Times superstar Peter Baker, tells us in The Atlantic in “The War at Stanford,” “have been given good reason to fear for their safety. They’ve been followed, harassed, and called derogatory racial epithets.”A big part of this weirdness is a product of the embrace by the Republican Party and the Israel lobby of American Christian Zionism. For people paying attention, this toxic mixture of Christian fundamentalists claiming to be philosemites and old-fashioned, hardcore Jew-hating and antisemitic conspiracy theories is not new. Michael Lind did an excellent analysis 30 years ago of the case of Pat Robertson, longtime Christian Right leader who promoted a crassly antisemitic theory of world politics of the type we now find in Mike Huckabee, current US Ambassador to Israel. (4)
It makes me feel like I’m losing my mind. You know who has good reason to fear for their safety? People, many of them Jews, getting pummeled by cops and fascists. People getting high-powered rifles aimed at them from rooftops by agents of the state who surely have been told by the people giving them orders to be ready to shoot because of all the “dangerous” things that are going on amid those protesters’ tents.
Sure, offensive things have happened to protesters. And that’s awful. But when I told some Chicago neighbors about all the Judaism going on down in Hyde Park, they were frankly shocked to hear it: They watch Morning Joe, from which they got the impression that Jew-hate was the overwhelming leitmotif of this whole protest thing. (3) [my emphasis]
Soffer-Roth’s description of the game being played inside the Trump/Republican Party is on the nose: “Republicans and their allies have mainstreamed far-right antisemitism while systematically downplaying it; at the same time, they have portrayed anti-Jewish prejudice as a uniquely left-wing problem to fuel a persecutory, authoritarian agenda [of the Republicans’ own].”
And she gives an excellent summary description of how this has been working:
Still, the far right — from the GOP to the dense constellation of Christian and Jewish lawfare, policy, and political advocacy groups — has spearheaded the acceleration of this push over the past decade. Making the fight against antisemitism predominantly about defending Israel has proven an incredibly effective way to advance various parts of the right-wing agenda: from attacking higher education, to targeting immigration and immigrants, to attempting to criminalize swaths of the left as terrorist sympathizers. [my emphasis]The hard-right turn of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) – which was never exactly a bastion of left-ideology, though they did take a more liberal stance in the past - is one aspect of this grim development, as Mari Cohen and Alex Kane described in 2023, “No matter how the specifics play out, it’s clear that the ADL’s efforts to appease Trump and MAGA have backfired - failing to pacify the right, while further alienating liberals.” (5) And they note:
Former ADL employees—some of whom requested anonymity to protect their professional standings—said the organization had distanced itself from liberal allies so much that few are eager to stick up for it, even against an administration they oppose. “The retreat from the broader civil rights work that the ADL has done for generations diluted coalitional strength and has seemingly isolated the organization,” said Robert Sills, the ADL’s former national director for state and local government affairs. …The ADL even sank to defending Elon Mush’s Hitler salute celebrating Trump’s re-election.
Indeed, six former ADL staffers told Jewish Currents that under CEO Jonathan Greenblatt’s ten years of leadership, the organization’s attention has shifted to focus primarily on the alleged threat that Palestinian solidarity activists pose to the Jewish community - an evolution that accelerated after the October 7th attacks.
Notes:
(1) Soffer-Roth, Natasha (205): The GOP fed the antisemitism monster. Now it’s turning on its masters. +972 Magazine 12/09/2025. <https://www.972mag.com/gop-antisemitism-israel-carlson-fuentes-heritage-trump-maga/> (Accessed: 2025-11-12).
(2) Lindbergh. Woody Guthrie-Toxic YouTube channel 05/19/2015. <https://youtu.be/BzLOTHciIKI?si=qPQalp8eO3mWbI6n> (Accessed: 2025-11-12).
(3) Perlstein, Rick (2024): The New Anti-Antisemitism. The American Prospect 05/08/2024. <https://prospect.org/2024/05/08/2024-05-08-new-anti-antisemitism-college-protests-gaza/> (Accessed: 2025-11-12).
(4) Lind, Michael (1995): Rev. Robertson’s Grand International Conspiracy Theory. New York Review of Books 02/02/2025. <https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/02/02/rev-robertsons-grand-international-conspiracy-theo/>
(5) Cohen, Mari & Kane, Alex (2025): The ADL Tried to Appease MAGA. The FBI Cut Ties with Them Anyway. Jewish Currents 12/10/2025. <https://jewishcurrents.org/the-adl-tried-to-appease-maga-the-fbi-cut-ties-with-them-anyway> (Accessed: 2025-11-12).
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