Why are conspiracy theories about Jews surging in the American mainstream — and why are so many young Americans embracing them?

In this episode of Identity/Crisis, Yehuda Kurtzer and Yair Rosenberg, staff writer at The Atlantic, unpack how Tucker Carlson’s platforming of Nick Fuentes reveals a broader ecosystem of digital extremism and populist politics that increasingly places Jews at the center of national discontent.

A transcript of this episode is available below.

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Carlson, Fuentes, and the New/Old Antisemitism Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi everyone. Welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Yehuda Institute, creating better conversations about the essential issues facing Jewish life. I’m Muta Kurtzer. We’re recording Thursday, November 13th, 2025. So one of the ironies of probing antisemitism online, especially of the white nationalist variety, is that the whole phenomenon, as you try to understand it, is full of twists and turns. You keep finding connections between this politician and that online influencer, and this media figure, and that organization. And inasmuch as antisemitism itself is a conspiracy theory about Jews, about how we are interlaced with each other as part of a global cabal, I find it striking to notice that what may not be true about Jews is actually true about these antisemites. I’m not sure whether this is the case because of the internet and the way that information travels and the ways that new relationships can be formed. But there’s no question that this kind of conspiratorial antisemitism is accelerated and enabled by our digital information systems. If once upon a time, white nationalists and white supremacists were obscure oddballs living in their grandmother’s basements around the country, some of them who could be classified as NEETs, N-E-E-T-S, “Not Employed, in Education, or Training,” which is an identity that the Antisemite white nationalist Nick Fuentes claims as a badge of honor about himself. Today, those oddballs are oddballs with podcasts and networks and followings, and sometimes those networks are powerful. Sometimes they include people in real positions of power, and I think that’s where we find ourselves today. Most recent public unspooling of this kind of network is all over the news these past few weeks based on an interview that Tucker Carlson did on one of his platforms with Fuentes himself. Carlson may be the most influential media figure in the country, spent over an hour with the 27-year-old Fuentes who has hundreds of thousands of followers, now giving fuel to his views to millions and millions of people, views that he has called about himself “white-identitarian,” “race-realist,” “Jewish-aware,” “counter-Zionist authoritarian,” and traditional Catholic views. We’ll come back to Carlson in a moment, but the magnitude of that kind of platforming is enormous, and the backlash has been fascinating. The head of the Conservative Heritage Foundation refused to distance himself from Carlson and now faces very significant opposition, both from within the organization and from without. Some Republican lawmakers, most notably Ted Cruz, spoke up about this growing scourge in his own party, but definitely not all Republican lawmakers. And when you consider the idea of the Overton window, how the framework for the acceptabilities of ideas within a society can change, it’s hard to deny that this happened and quite fast in the last few weeks in America. I think the struggle with this kind of antisemitism is that it is, for lack of a better word, outlandishly evil, almost cartoonish, and it makes it difficult to parse the question of whether it should be taken literally or seriously, or both. Those who would make light of it point to the ways that these extreme ideas can only be found holistically outside the halls of power. Some who take it seriously, like Bret Stephens in this week’s New York Times, note all of the ways that although Trumpism as an ideology itself is not, in his words, “epistemically anti-Semitic,” in the same ways that you see from Fuentes, Trumpism still possesses a set of ideas that Stephens calls anti-Semitic, adjacent and in particular positions of the Trump administration on immigration and the growing skepticism on the American right about international intervention and support for Israel. If you wanna go a step further in terms of noting the fears connected to these conspiratorial ideas, Conservative writer Rod Dreher wrote a piece this week in which he estimated that 40% of Republican congressional and administration staffers in Washington are fans of Fuentes. And if you listen to some of the scuttlebutt around DC you hear murmurings that if you are too pro-Israel, you cannot work in the Trump White House. Meanwhile, the rhetoricians behind this antisemitic extremism, they also tend to play tricks around what they talk about all the time, sometimes speaking, quote “in satire” or “in jest,” which enables them to advance inflammatory ideas and then walk them back as merely jokes. Other times it’s thought experiments. Sometimes extreme ideas get advanced as a means of making free speech arguments or the case for viewpoint diversity. What’s wrong with the free exchange of ideas? By the way, last week, less noticed than the Fuentes kerfuffle, Nerdeen Kiswani, the leader of an organization called Within Our Lifetime, which is a violent anti-Israel organization that defended the events of October 7th. By the way, Fuentes himself called October 7th, a false flag operation as well. Kiswani went on a rant on X saying: “Antisemitism is not a systemic structural issue in the United States. Everyone knows this except for professional victims. There is a Nazi problem in the United States, and sadly, many of these Nazis are Jewish people. In fact, many Jewish people proudly proclaim that 95% of Jews are Nazis (Zionists). If you wanna truly fight against the Nazi problem, I suggest you start with your own community.” And we are still out here arguing whether right-wing or left-wing antisemitism is worse. Do those adjectives matter? And you know that thing about the boiling water and the frog? Well, folks, the water is boiling, but Pepe the frog is not jumping out. I’m joined today to talk about mostly Carlson and Fuentes, but this larger antisemitism problem in America with Yair Rosenberg. Yair is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He writes about issues of religion and politics and culture. He edits the newsletter “Deep Shtetl.” Yair, you have a lot of interesting things to say about a lot of different interesting things, but I know you tend to get called in to talk about antisemitism, especially today, so I’m sorry about that, but I’m glad that you have the wisdom on these issues to be able to actually help us in this moment. I wanna start with Carlson himself. I wanna ask you what happened, and I wanna ask this because there’s now a clip going around. I actually saw it from Stephen Powell of Lion of Light Ministries posted this clip of Tucker Carlson from C-Span almost 20 years ago, describing Pat Buchanan as an anti-Semite. Buchanan is kinda the precursor to Carlson, and Carlson says very reasonably, and we’re gonna let our listeners listen to this clip. He says very reasonably, like it’s okay to be publicly critical of the US relationship with Israel. It’s okay to be critical of a lobby in Washington if you think it’s acting against American interests. But when you keep fixating and talking about Jews so much, you have to start coming to the conclusion that somebody might be an anti-Semite. Carlson: You reach a point when you say, well, gee, here’s a guy who has gone out of his way to defend Demjanjuk and other accused Nazi war criminals, who’s constantly attacked Israel, who attacked American Jews for supporting Israel unduly, who’s implied that American Jews push America into wars in which non-Jews die. There really is, and again, I’m not hysterical on the subject—I do believe that there is a pattern with Pat Buchanan of needling the Jews. Is that antisemitic? Yeah. I mean, after all, I conclude, it is in some sense, antisemitic. Yehuda: So it feels surreal to watch this nearly 20 years on and see that Carlson seems to have gone down exactly the same path. Can you give us some insight as to what happened to Tucker Carlson as a kind of a mainstream, Conservative pundit, to now trafficking in this antisemitic arena? Yair: It’s always a dangerous thing to try to explain what’s going on in somebody’s head. Is it ideological commitment? Is it personal resentment? Is it a mix of the two? Is it one that leads to the other? I’ve heard all sorts of stories from all sorts of people because Tucker Carlson has been around a really long time. And he’s had relationships with many, many different people across the media landscape. Obviously on the right, but also on the left. I mean, everyone’s got their own theories, and I don’t know if it’s really productive to try to figure it out. It’s more like what are the outcomes of those things? But that clip is very instructive because it is essentially an instruction manual for doing what Tucker Carlson is doing now. Which suggests that he knows what he’s doing now. Right now, for what reasons he’s choosing to talk about Jews in this way, right, and to fixate on Jews in this way and to make them the center of all conspiracies and things that are wrong in this way, and to promote people who have that worldview, and a lot of other adjacent narratives, which we might get into. He’s doing it consciously. It’s not a mistake, it’s not an error. It’s a worldview. It’s a choice. As to why that is… Yehuda: It’s hard to say. So instead of diagnosing what happened to Carlson, what changed, I guess the different way of asking that question would be, what changed in the incentive structure that this is now perceived as being something that is—cause ultimately he is a marketer, right? He’s speaking to 20, 30 million people a week—what changed in the incentive structure in the American population that is making it more ripe, creating a different appetite for, kind of, the conspiratorial thinking about Jews. And that’s a larger question about the rise of antisemitism, but in particular in the media landscape. Yair: That is the question. That is the question. It’s much, much bigger than Tucker Carlson, right? People like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and other people with millions of followers on social media platforms and podcasts that you’ve never even heard of, are all doing this. It is not just Tucker, they are not in fact creating the anti-Semitism as much as they are supply-rising to meet demand. And we know that the demand for anti-Semitic material exists because we now have pretty good survey data that shows in particular that young people are much more antisemitic than their elders. And this goes against certain stereotypes about how prejudices are the province of the old and they will die off when that generation passes on and are replaced with, you know, the flag waving progressives of the youth. In point of fact, in many cases, not just with antisemitism and in many countries prejudices are the province of the young. One example of this is David Shore, the top pollster for the Kamala Harris campaign who designed a lot of their messaging, was given a tremendous amount of resources and money during the 2024 election to poll the electorate. And not just on political questions, but generally to get a sense of the opinions and the thoughts and the ideas of the themes roiling the people voting in America. And he asked things like, do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of Jews? And unlike your typical poll where they get like 500 people and maybe a thousand if you’re lucky, and then you try to, you know, scale up and do all sorts of math with it. He polled 130,000 people because when you have the resources of a campaign, you can do that. And so this is pretty good data and he found that some one quarter of young people—with negligible difference between whether you voted for Trump or Harris—said straight out that they had unfavorable opinion of Jewish people. And then as you go up the age curve, that just disappears completely, right? And hardly anybody is willing to—the older you get—to say that kind of thing. So this suggests right that there is an audience, and enterprising people, and an unmediated landscape that social media allows are going to service that demand. And not only that, but as this younger generation ages into positions of more influence in politics and culture, you would expect politics and culture to begin to reflect their desires and impetus. And thus, you’re going to get that 25% being expressed in our politics and culture. Then the question becomes, why did that 25% become, right? This is your real question. That could be a whole book and perhaps I’ll write it. Let’s give the capsule version of a few things. One is really obvious, but I think misunderstood, which is the passing of Holocaust memory. Now, when we talk about that, many people think of it in terms of, Holocaust survivors have passed on, who’s going to tell their story? The Jewish experience of the Holocaust is passing. But actually what changed American attitudes towards Jews and what affected how they treated Jews was not the Jewish experience. It was the non-Jewish experience of the Holocaust, which is to say that if you look at polls before America intervened in World War II, while the Holocaust is going on in Europe, the Nuremberg Laws, Kristallnacht, Americans are not particularly sympathetic, right? They don’t really wanna get involved. And you get remarkable polls which show like Gallup found that, you know, over 60% of Americans thought that the persecution of Jews in Europe was either partly or entirely their own fault. They blamed the Jews for the Holocaust that was descending upon them. That was already after Nuremberg, around Kristallnacht. After Kristallnacht, there was like, you know, 70%, you know, don’t raise the Jewish refugee caps. There was a bill in Congress to let children, children, more children immigrate from Europe, after Kristallnacht, it never even got to a vote. FDR knew this. He could read a poll. This is one of the reasons why he didn’t raise the caps. It’s why he didn’t bomb the railway tracks to Auschwitz or Auschwitz itself. There wasn’t a desire, appetite. Then you have Pearl Harbor. America enters World War II for American national security, entirely American reasons. And then we send men drafted from across the country, diverse backgrounds, ’cause we have conscription back then and so does Canada, right? And all these places, they all go to Europe and they defeat the Nazis. And by the by they start liberating some of these concentration camps. And you have these letters from GIs and they’re saying, I was eager to go and liberate the camps because I wanted to see it for myself because I figured it was propaganda and this would set my heart at ease to see that it wasn’t as bad as I’d been told, and it turned out it was worse. This is what they wrote back to their families, right? Eisenhower famously brings in journalists and congresspeople to see the camps, and he goes himself to say, lest anyone ever say, right, that this wasn’t as bad as they said, I will have been there, and I’ve seen it and testified to it. This dramatically changes American attitudes towards Jews, their relationship to antisemitism, because to be American became to defeat the Nazis, to be against antisemitism. Antisemitism became, in some ways, anti-American, right. This becomes part of this myth of Americanism, post World War II. And that redounds to the great benefit of Jews trying to integrate into American society and succeed in American society in ways that they’d never had in any other non-Jewish country. Yehuda: Including the fact that American Jews were among those GIs who return. Yair: Exactly. Yehuda: And they come back as not just having liberated their own people, but actually having fought on behalf of America against the bad guys. Yair: Yeah. Although I think that what really, you know, you have non-Jews, go back, again, because they’re drafted from across America. They come back to Kentucky, to everywhere you can imagine in the United States. And they tell this story and we have records of people doing this, and they say it in churches and they write it in papers. It becomes firsthand knowledge and secondhand knowledge by the next generation. And that is what tethers the place of the Jews after World War II, and changes this dynamic. Now, you go to the current younger generation, very understandably, they don’t have that experience, right? There’s no connection. There’s not secondhand. It’s just not there. So we’re reverting to the people who could say, maybe it was their fault, right? It could be suspicious. Let’s keep out of all that stuff. It’s not something we wanna get involved in. Yehuda: Yeah, and there’s a deeper critique that we’ve covered on the show before also about antisemitism, and Holocaust education oftentimes universalizes a whole set of concerns that actually doesn’t put in any context that hatred of the Jews is actually a driver of the Holocaust. So as opposed to this kind of either story of American exceptionalism and intervention across the world, which is kind of what the US Holocaust Museum in Washington is about, it ends with the American GIs liberating the camps, or you know, universal Holocaust education, which talks about man’s inhumanity to man. Neither of those—and this has been demonstrated— Yair: Our story about antisemitism. Yehuda: Correct, of any measurable effect in helping people and understand the particular precarious position that Jews inhabit in the West. Yair: And of course, Dara Horn and others have written on this and I have sympathy for it. But I do think I wanna emphasize, we often look at these problems and say their problems of education. I think education is important. Both my parents are educators. In some sense what I do is education. So clearly I think it matters, but something that matters just as much or more is experience, and education can’t replace experience. And in the case of Holocaust, we should never want such another experience to educate people. But when you have a generation that, shelo yada’at Yosef, that didn’t know, never saw, understandably, they’re not impacted. That’s just not a frame of reference. So that’s one big difference. You can see, if you look at, now back to Tucker Carlson, and you know the people that he has on, he has had a parade of Hitler apologists on his podcast. People saying that actually Hitler was misunderstood; he wasn’t as bad as people said, and maybe Winston Churchill was actually the villain of World War II, all of this stuff. He just recently went off on a tangent about how Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who the Christian, you know, sort of Saint, who was part of a plot to try to kill Hitler and died for it and is, was, formally a great hero on the American right, as part of that story, suggesting that it was not Christian of him to try to do that. And you can make some sort of technical theological argument about that kind of thing because you’re trying to kill somebody, right, but that’s not what he’s doing. No, he’s saying that Hitler isn’t bad, that Churchill is bad, that Dietrich Bonhoeffer is actually maybe not a Christian. Right? Like you don’t have to, you know, it’s not even reading between the lines anymore. It is an inversion of this traditional narrative, which has a more receptive audience now, in service of a broader inversion of the American story in which Jews are suspect, right? And subversives and other people, also others, other kinds of prejudices are now in play again. And the sort of reorganizing of America’s understanding of itself after World War II is reversed. So that’s one big answer. Another answer, and this gets to some of the stuff you’re talking about, how this is not just a phenomenon on the right. This is something we’ve seen on both the left and the right. We have seen the rise of populist politics since 2016. I cover, you know, with one of my other hats, Latin American politics. I’ve been to the political, you know, the national political conventions since 2012 and interviewed candidates and you know, been on the trail and all that stuff. And in 2016 we saw a populous revolt against both parties. One of them succeeded. That was Donald Trump and the Republican Party, and a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. One of them was remarkably successful and shifted the direction of the party, but didn’t actually capture the nomination, that would’ve been Bernie Sanders’s revolt against Hillary Clinton. And these populous revolts against party elites, against American elites, right, were well founded in things that we now recognize as tremendous failures, right, of elite governance in American society and. Everyone can sort of point to different ones they want, right? Economic, stewardship, foreign entanglements, and wars that were disastrous, catastrophic. Some will point to academia and immigration and border control and all of these other things. Lots and lots of people—the media, my industry, right? People feeling that they can’t trust what the media is doing. The media fell down on this or that thing, or scandals and things like that. All of this comes together to show and create a lot of discontent with the people who have been running American society and seem to have not been doing a good job. And so that results in, as it often does in many countries and many places in a populous movement against those elites. And populism is not inherently an evil thing, right? Populism can be a great corrective to elite mismanagement. It can result in corrective reforms, right? And new leadership. But populism is also a narrative about how the innocent masses have been screwed over by masterful manipulators at the top of the food chain, a shadowy cabal of people who are responsible for all your society’s problems. And that rhymes with anti-Semitism, ’cause all you have to do is say that those people are the Jews, and then there are centuries of propaganda and Google searches backing you up, and it becomes very easy to graft antisemitism on this, and, in fact, divert what are originally populous movements with genuine grievances into chases against for Jewish culprits, right. Hunts for Jewish culprits. And so as our politics has gotten more populist, right, it is inevitably going to get more anti-Semitic. It’s very hard not to, to stop it. You need leaders who might gatekeep it out, and we can, that’s another point about social media and communication. It’s much harder to gatekeep anything out. And so these are just two examples of like, this sort of thing. And of course Tucker and his many, you know, extended universe people, they are riding that wave. But it’s also the case that we see it on the left. Right? And you know, that sort of stuff in, you know, populous left discourse where you see anti-Semitic ideas, it is often just grafting this narrative of the, you know, the, the sinister conspiratorial group on the top, right, these elites and saying that those elites are Jews or saying it’s Zionists, but literally there’s no difference. Yehuda: Right. You know, it’s interesting, even in your depiction of that narrative, which is very compelling, you even made a rhetorical move at some point where you said, you know, the global elites, the cabal is the Jews, but actually there’s a preliminary step, which isn’t “the Jews”—it’s just “Jews,” because that’s actually easy to prove. You can be like, oh look, there’s George Soros, if you’re on one side of the aisle, or there’s Sheldon Adelson on the other side of the aisle, and here’s, you know, we’ll throw Jeffrey Epstein into the mix. You do actually have Jews who are human beings, who happen to be Jewish, who are sometimes easy to depict as the caricature of that cabal. And then once you do “Jews,” it’s very easy to jump to “the Jews.” Right, because it’s not that many of us, and because it becomes easy to kind of re-aggregate the Jews under one umbrella. So it’s kind of one of these things where anytime you have a conspiracy theory, you have just enough data to be able to fuel something bigger, and that enables you to kind of transpose that from an observation—oh, there are actually rich Jews who have a lot of influence—and turn that into “the Jews are a controlled cabal that’s actually trying to, that’s always been orchestrating society.” Yair: That’s always the case with these kinds of things where you take individual members of a minority community and then you recast them as a mendacious monolith where everybody is all in cahoots with each other and they’re out to get you. And people will do that, with more and less success, with other groups too. You know, so like, all the Muslims are conspiring to impose Sharia law, right? That kind of conspiracy is not very distinct from this kind of thing, just not as prevalent throughout history. Right. But it has, we’ve seen it with some power in different times in the United States history. There were certain conspiracy theories about Mormons trying to take over America, which people think is crazy now. But that was absolutely something, and it got stirred up actually when Mitt Romney ran for president. There were times when people evoked this sort of thing, but there’s just been centuries upon centuries of versions of this, and certainly most recent, you know, in the last century or two of this kind of narrative, which animated the Soviet Union and animated Nazi Germany, which were opposed in every possible way in so many other respects. But the thing about a conspiracy theory that says that there’s a secret shadowy group that’s behind all of your problems, is that whatever your problems are, you can pin in on those people. So you might have totally different diagnoses of what the problems are, but you can agree on what the enemy is, and that makes antisemitism really potent and able to unite extremely unlikely allies. So for the Soviet Union, right, all of the, you know, the capitalist superstructure, the exploiters of workers, end up being Jews, right? For, you know, many, you know, people on the left, the socialist left, the sorts of people who ended up thronging into the Labor Party under Jeremy Corbin. There was a large group of those sorts of people. But then on the right, right, and, you know, in the, in Nazi Germany and the like, and, just the nationalist rights elsewhere, the Jews are the Bolsheviks, right? They’re the communists and the cosmopolitans, the people of no place, right, who are undermining society from within. And as you say, you can always point to Jews who are doing this, and you can even point to sometimes where they’re disproportionate, right. Nobody’s ever very interested in when Jews are disproportionately not somewhere like, I would like to know why we’re discriminated against in the NBA. It’s always in one direction. It’s very motivated reasoning. Right, the jump from “Jews” to “the Jews” is something that people just don’t do with… Let’s put it this way. The people who do that will never do that with white people, which I think is correct. Right? You should never say that. You know, this young white man shot up a shopping mall. What, what will white people do about this? Right? This is sort of a gag that some people on left started doing that some pines and social media in like the 2020s. It’s a very bad one. It’s a bad way to talk about people, but it’s not the general thing. It’s certainly the sorts of, you know, antisemitic rhetoric we hear where people essentialize Jews into a monolith, they’ll never do it to their own community, right. What we’re all just saying is treat everyone with the same sort of heuristic. And so that is the, you know, you have the jump from Jew to Jews. Right. And then you have this very selective definition of what is disproportionate, which only goes in one direction and only indicts one group Yehuda: Rather than hops. Bret Stephens in the piece I alluded to before adds another layer to this, which I found a kind of a provocative move where he says, one other piece that’s gone wrong has been what he calls like, the forced merger of conservatism and Christianity. And he argues that conservatism, at least in what he would consider the kind of the heyday of conservatism in the eighties and nineties, the period that he is formed in, actually had something more of an embedded respect for religious tolerance as a kind of constitutional principle of what it meant to be conservative. And he sees the merger of Christianity with conservatism, a kind of takeover as therefore importing some of Christianity’s historical antipathy for Jews and its incapacity to be tolerant as part of a kind of a conservative worldview and creating that kind of oppression. I wonder what you think about that theory as part of this. Yair: It’s hard for me to make such straight lines because I think in general, every partisan of every ideology that I ever covered always says that if people were truly conservative, if they were truly progressive. I saw this on Twitter recently. Yes. No true Scotsman. Right? Yair: If they were truly postliberal, I saw that this past week. Mmm, that’s good. Yair: Right? They would not be antisemitic. It’s definitionally impossible. And yet historically, in actuality, that is not what happens, cause the truth is every ideology is subject to hypocrisy. Every ideology is subject to creating carve outs and rules for disfavored communities. I’m sorry, but like Zionism does this in spades. Currently in Israel, if you pay attention to who is calling the shots and who is pressuring Netanyahu and making a lot of decisions, and everyone always says, but yeah, but true this, the true version. Right? And it’s totally fine to advocate for a better version of something that doesn’t have these things, but you’re not gonna make much of a dent in it until you recognize that there are these natural propensities. And I think the same is true of Christianity. There is a Christianity that is tremendously, you know, can be tremendously oppressive to Jews throughout history. And then there’s, you know, Christianity of different stripes that has been tremendously welcoming. Right? And that was also part of the American phylosemitic experiment, right, in post World War II and deserves credit. So it’s hard for me to draw this natural, like, alliance and say that these things won’t go together. I think it’s just about whether there are good versions of these ideologies or bad, and then what are the fundamental forces that lead them to go along certain tracks rather than others. Yehuda: Yeah. It is interesting though to me to consider the ways that evangelicals play into the story because one of the things that I’ve watched pro-Israel Jews say for about maybe 20 years now is “we’re gonna be fine because America is becoming Evangelical and Evangelicals have a special place in the hearts of the Jews because they support Zionism and the state of Israel,” and they tend to kind of make light of what the theological implications of why evangelicals might support the state of Israel. Make light of the fact that like some of that implies that evangelicals would like Jews to leave here and be in the state of Israel, and forget about the theological kind of apocalyptic vision of the future in which Jews are meant to play a role, which is its own type of antisemitism, like the Jews fit into a paradigm for the transformation of the world based on a Christian idea. But what’s so fascinating is that that has so visibly backfired in that next generation of Evangelicals are becoming isolationist around Israel and it almost feels, and you could tell me if I’m wrong on this analysis, it almost feels like you have one generation left of Republican leadership, which is embracing some of those isolationist ideas, but still has a kind of carved out exception for Israel and it’s gonna become gradually incoherent down the line. So maybe you could give us some insight into what you think is taking place on the Christian right as it relates to these issues. Yair: Yeah, so I don’t know if I’m an expert on the Christian right, but I can tell you what I have seen in my writing and reporting. I think that it’s like every younger cohort in America, again, the, their narrative about Jews and their narrative about Israel is very different. And this notion that American Evangelicals would be immune to any of that, right, was a folly, setting aside the moral considerations that Bibi sort of centering American support for Israel in what a certain group of non-Jews wanted, rather than perhaps listening to the American Jewish community anymore, which he didn’t have any real interest in doing. But I don’t think, for example, that there’s a huge groundswell of Evangelicals who wanna ditch Israel. I think that there is a significant number of younger people who want to have a more normalized dialogue and conversation about Israel, and which is to say this recent trend, which is really post George W. Bush, of the Republican party, not just being supportive of Israel, or a relationship with Israel, but basically just enabling the most right-wing version of Israel and the wishlist of whoever is the most right-wing person on Israel, both in the Evangelical community and in the Israeli community—that does not actually make sense. It is not something that George W. Bush felt compelled to do. It’s not something that any previous Republican president, despite they having Evangelicals in their base, felt compelled to do, you know, not Reagan, none of these people. It’s very unique. It happened under Trump, under their very unusual circumstances. And when you deal to one extreme, you often have a backlash, right, where you have people questioning that. And so that’s one of those things. I don’t think that all of these people are just immediately saying, let’s sever Israel. That being said, when people respond to their critiques by saying, that’s entirely out of bounds, that’s antisemitic, you can’t have that conversation, well, what do you think is going to happen? They’re not going to drop those questions. They’re going to say, why don’t you wanna have that conversation? Especially in a very sort of distrust authority, distrust the system, distrust the elites, kind of environment. And so you have a fair amount of batches going on, which is a very normal like foreign policy debate that some people are sort of seeing as something that’s beyond that. So different Republican politicians are trying to navigate that, snd trying to come up with ways to, you know, bridge these sorts of divides both generationally and in the base. Someone like Tucker Carlson is not interested in that. He’s not interested in trying to come with a rational way to discuss Israel, which is something I would support, right, as someone who’s much to the left of the American right on Israel. It’s kind of funny to see, like, the Steve Bannons and Tucker Carlsons pretending to be critical of Israel, but you know that they have no actual interest in Palestinians. They have no actual interest in good outcomes in Israel. They just don’t like people who are different. Right? And particularly they have an issue with Jews, and they see them as subversives in problems. They also seem to see, right, let me say, like, they seem to see these things, right? That’s how they act, right? And they also seem to see anti-Semitism as a useful tool, politically, for uniting people behind the movement. And that’s not a, not a bad short term bet. Historically, you can use antisemitism to glue anti-establishment populists together, like we discussed, and gain a certain level of political power that transcends normal political divides. That’s really handy. That’s really useful. You. It tends to blow up in your face. It tends to destroy the movements that embrace it because they can no longer rationally solve problems ’cause they’re chasing phantom Jewish culprits instead of rationally addressing their society’s issues. All that long term is disastrous for society and anyone who’s involved in it. Not to mention the Jews who are targeted by it. But in the short term, it can become some good rocket fuel for a movement and it does seem like some people are doing that. They’re pushing these people who have these sorts of questions into the most extreme versions of these questions. But I don’t think it’s inherently, like, these sorts of political debates are inherently dangerous. I think what’s sort of dangerous is what people are purposely pushing them, what direction, just like I don’t think populism inherently has to be dangerous, right. It’s how you use these things and where people decide to use it. Yehuda: Yeah. This is something I hear from a lot of our audiences, traveling around. Part of what’s taking place also is a kind of psychic overload by American Jews of how much of this antisemitism they’re seeing and hearing all the time, and the inability to kind of classify it, order it, and make sense of it. I think there tend to be kind of two responses. One is the overwhelm response. Which actually doesn’t help you. It doesn’t help you to think about how your politics should be different, doesn’t help you to think about how you should organize around it. But I think that actually characterizes much of the American Jewish institutional response to antisemitism. And one of the ways they respond to it is just by amplifying all of it. That’s antisemitism. That’s antisemitism. That’s like, okay, but what do we do about it? The second response seems to be like, oh, let me decide, this one is a kind of, okay, and I’ll respond to this. I’ll kind of put them in order. I’ll give you like my favorite example was, you know, for all of the conversation about antisemitism in the recent New York City mayoral election with respect to the Mayor elect Mamdani, you know, Cuomo has like a famous line for when he was governor during COVID, about Orthodox Jews trying to celebrate Sukkot. And I dunno if you know this one, this is a great line where he was like, has has said to have said to his staff, “these people in their fucking tree houses,” which is, funny, and also kind of anti-Semitic. So I saw people on the left kinda wheeling that out to be like, look, this isn’t a choice between an anti-Semite and a phylosemite. It’s a choice between these two anti-Semites, or, I think Cuomo is worse. And I, I find these, like neither of those strategies seem right. I wonder how you think about the kind of, this overload phenomena of all of this arrival of this data and what it’s doing to our capacity to actually talk intelligently about this and even strategize around it, both as a Jewish community but also as Americans. Yair: Yeah. There’s a tremendous lack of strategic thinking on this stuff. There’s a lot of reactivity that’s always characterized, I think, the Jewish response to antisemitism. I would say in the defense of all the Jewish organizations, so of which I have more sympathy for and their particular approaches, some less. Antisemitism, fundamentally, isn’t about what Jews say or do about it, and this is the real problem. The Jewish organizations could have the pitch perfect, perfectly designed, incredibly executed strategy for countering antisemitism, and unlike the antisemites, who believe that the 0.2% of the world population that is Jewish controls the fate of the other 99.8%, in reality, the 99.8% of the world that’s not Jewish is gonna determine the fate of the 0.2%. And it doesn’t matter if that 0.2% as the perfect strategy. Mean, say they managed to figure out how to punch a hundred times above their weight. Well then, they would be punching at 20%, right? Like it still wouldn’t work. And that’s not what’s happening and that can’t happen. And that’s not how the real world works. So it’s similar to when people say like, you know, people often say like, I am really mad about how this right-wing person is sort of running interference for right-wing antisemitism, or this left-wing person is running interference for what I perceive to be antisemitism disguised as anti-Zionism. And it’s true, you might, I might agree with you on this or that critique, but if they didn’t exist, if those people weren’t running cover, if the, all the self hating Jews, as they’re so-called, described, right, didn’t exist, you’d still have all the anti-Semitic power structure, all the anti-Semitism would still be there, because the concept of Jews sort of trying to fit into an anti-Semitic power structure or running interference for it, is an epiphenomenon of the power structure, right? It didn’t create it. Jews didn’t create the anti-Semitic superstructure, the double standards, right, the conspiracy theories, all of that kind of stuff, right? Jews are subject to it and then they act within it and they try to respond to it, and they do that unless— Yehuda: Yeah, they can, they can make it worse, right? Yair: They can make it worse and they can make it a little better. And this is all mostly at the margins, right? And this is, you know, not something that people really want to hear. It’s gonna be, it’s what they need to do. In the end it is a non-Jewish concern. It is something that non-Jews decide whether or not this is something that they want in their societies, and this is something they want to govern their societies. And you’re seeing that playing out right now very strongly, obviously on the American right, where there’s this pitched war now over what has a place in the conservation of it. And fundamentally it’s not gonna be decided by the Jews. And if Jews somehow tried to decide it, that would end up being construed as anti-Semitic. Right? Look at the Jews acting to try to control this debate. I think it’s a little scary. I think Jews look at that and they say like, wait, we don’t have the ability to influence this so much. That’s probably true and that’s not incredibly encouraging. But also the fact is, is that there are plenty of people out there in the world who do care about Jews, and America is a better place for Jews before the Holocaust, even as we just talked about how there was a lot of anti-Semitism that sort of fell away after World War II. There’s a reason so many thousands upon thousands of American Jews came here from Europe. It was so much better, right? And there’s lots and lots of good things and resources that America has and Americans have and all of those things. But in the end, it’s gonna come down a lot to Americans who are not Jewish. Yehuda: That’s such a strange powerlessness story in so many ways. Yair: I think people want to tell a really agentic, powerful story about the Jews rising above their circumstances and constantly changing fate and bending the arc of history. And I dunno, I don’t really see it, right. I think that’s a very powerful, both national and theological narrative. And I think that some people absolutely reasonably can believe those sorts of things about different moments in history, but like, if you were just looking at the distribution of power, you know, and who decides, you know, what terms, what groups are talked about in? Well, Jews are not the, we don’t get to set the terms of discourse about which we’re discussed. Yehuda: That’s true. Although I, here’s the counterpoint, which would be that one of the things that American Jews did in the first half of the 20th century is, American Jews helped architect not a special, “treat us well” strategy that they then imported to others, but they helped architect a better angel’s strategy, a narrative about America that would help Americans tell a better story of America, that ultimately we redound with goodness for Jews. That’s the Brandeis story. That’s the Cahan story. That’s the Lazarus story. Yair: That’s the American liberalism story. Yehuda: That’s the American liberalism story. Yair: For sure. Yehuda: So I understand that what you don’t wanna have is, and let’s use the Ted Cruz example, the recent one isn’t, is a good one. That’s your good story, right? A leading American conservative politician stands up to repudiate the antisemitism that’s taken place within his own party. To his credit, he wasn’t like, yeah, this is antisemitism, but what’s happening over there on the left is worse. Yair: The left is worse. He did not use that. Yehuda: He did not do that. He went after the Heritage Foundation, it’s a hard thing for conservatives to go after, just did it exactly right. And the way you’re describing it is in order for that to work, that just has to be a natural occurrence, as opposed to, it can’t be like he did that because AIPAC called him, because that will be like the worst expression of this, of like, oh, the Jews are leveraging this order to make this happen. Yair: I’m not saying Jews can’t be involved in these things. I think that there’s a very strong American Jewish liberal story that says we will create alliances with all sorts of groups for all of these— Yehuda: But not for our own interests. Yair: Right. But not just for us, for everyone. And I think that that’s the thing that’s totally correct, and I think on the moral sort of, again, and just in general, I think people should do those things if they think they’re right, I push back on the notion that we are the deciders. And I sometimes think Jews fall into that sort of, I think it’s a little solipsistic. And I think antisemites believe it all the time. They really believe that Jews are deciders of this story, but really everyone has agency. And then there’s a lot of people in this world. So like, I think Jews, in the end right, can be part of different stories that America tells about itself. And they should say, which of those stories I think is better for everyone, right? Not just better for Jews, right. But better for us too. Right. And then work on those. And there’s very strong disagreements about what kind of, what that story is. But, I just don’t think that Jews are, are typically, they’re not— Yehuda: Ultimately, they’re not gonna be the ones who decide on this question. Yair: I don’t think we’re—once in a while someone might be in the right place at the right time. Yehuda: Right, right. I mean, and I fear about that version of a story that it creates a kind of American Jewish fatalism about this, of like, well, well, I guess we’ll wait around to see whether America likes us or not. Which— Yair: Well, I think that there are other things you can do other than saying, we’re going to solve all this problem on ourselves. There’s also things that you do that are just protective. Right. That’s the sort of thing where you say like, we’re not going to be able to like, solve these giant societal wide issues on our own. Right. But we can do certain things that are just sort of protective of our community. Right. That can be involving just basic things like security. That can be involved with Jewish life and learning and like, you know, resilience and so many other things that you can do, right, without saying, we have to conquer this all ourselves because you’re talking about overwhelm. That’s how you started this conversation. It’s because people are correctly perceiving an overwhelming situation. And if that is the thing that you start trying to do, you’re going to accomplish almost nothing. And you might actually do a lot of counterproductive stuff. Right? And so to scale back a little bit and then to like, you know, take stock, right? I think it is valuable. Yehuda: So, but I would say for us, and I, I said this personally, but it’s also my hope institutionally, I would like to bring back that agenda of American Jews being part of together in coalitions, other Americans who are arguing for a narrative and a set of ideas and values about America that is ultimately to our collective benefit, and to reduce the amount of dissonance between how right-wing Americans might tell a narrative story about America and how left-wing Americans would tell that narrative story, not because I don’t ultimately vote on one side of the aisle and not because there’s some altar of centrism that I sacrifice on, but because ultimately that is a means of creating the best possible framework for the safety and security, not just of Jews, but other fellow Americans. And I, I’ll ask you a question that may just be a rhetorical question, but I actually think you may have opinions on it, also—why doesn’t the freaking American Jewish community do this—what happened to this agenda as the normative agenda of American Jewish life, which I genuinely think prevailed in the middle of the 20th century and led to a period of relative safety and security for Jews in America.? Yair: Yes. I’m actually the worst expert to ask about the American Jewish organizational landscape, because I report on, you know, American, US politics, Israeli politics, international stuff, these big picture trends, and I do not, I almost never write about any of these organizations. I have very little insight. Yehuda: That’s a good way to stay safe, right? Yair: I have very little, no, but I have just very little insight into them. I will go and speak on a panel here and there and things like that, but it’s just not the landscape that I cover. And I, I do think, frankly, the fact that I can do what I do and not do that suggests something of what you’re saying, which is that if they mattered more, right, on some of these issues, then I would be, right? It would force its way into what I do, but very often it doesn’t. So that, that’s what I would say. I wanna do, I do wanna circle back. Cause I, you said I want to push back against the, the fatalism thing, cause I do want to say that’s not what I’m trying to, to say, right. I am trying to give people realistic appraisal of what the problems are, and like, figure out, how can we smartly address them? I also think that there are a bunch of things that people can get together on matters of common concern that don’t seem like they’re specifically Jewish coded, but in fact matter for Jews, and that may be a much more healthy way into it than just talking about this antisemitism, that, like you said. So think in terms of these big picture trends that we’re talking about, that are leading people to be more open to, say, conspiratorial antisemitism than they were, you know, a generation ago. It’s the passing of the Holocaust generation. It’s the rise of populist politics in America. We didn’t discuss this, but it’s underneath everything and perhaps the most important, which is the change in how we communicate and understand each other through social media, which is a sort of mechanism that is designed to proliferate advantage conspiracy theories, and disadvantage minorities, to break that down really simply. If there’s a cacophony of people talking on social media to break through, you have to say something that other people are not saying. And it’s unique. You could be prettier than other people, your cat could be cuter, you could be funnier, or if you’re a news organization, maybe you have some information that other people don’t have. That takes a lot of work, but it doesn’t take that much work if you just make it up. And that is why you see so much conspiratorial theorizing and fabrication and scams on social media. It is the easiest form of vital content to produce. So we have advantages, conspiracy theories, and antisemitism is one of those. Social media decides what you see based on an algorithm which determines what people click on, pay attention to, and what gets, and that’s based on, shares and likes. When you have a globalized conversation, it’s gonna reflect the globalized pathologies. A tremendous number of people around the world, many, many more millions don’t like Jews. Maybe they never met one, but they don’t like Jews and they have negative notions about them. Then Jewish or like-Jews and are willing to step up and stand in the way of people who are saying no. Right? We hate Jews and we want them gone. And it’s one thing if your conversation is localized, right, in your community where people know each other and they know Jews and other people, and you can handle all these kinds of prejudices in that way, in theory. Once you globalize it, you can solve a local problem and then it becomes the, but then in your pocket, the conversation and the algorithm is deciding based on global trends and global votes, and you’ve let a tremendous number of people into that conversation, and who’s actually getting most of their information and having that conversation? It’s young people. And so social media, huge thing. Yehuda: Huge driver. Yair: So thinking about how social media acts in society and whether or not we want social media, which has so many other downstream negative consequences, like study after study in so many different ways. How much influence do we want it to have on our lives and the lives of our children and our families and our communities? That doesn’t sound like a Jewish issue, but it is a Jewish issue. Populist energy and grievances in American politics. How you address those. Maybe it’s that populism is too dangerous and it too easily turns into conspiracy, theorizing, and prejudice, and so you’re going to try to find someone who will be a consensus broker and come up with a new form of politics, right, that will address those grievances in a way that isn’t populous. Or you say, I need to find a responsible, populist politicians who will police their coalitions and they have the power and the charisma to do that. Sort of what certain people on the right, you know, sort of have given up on Trump ever being or doing, which is Trump would have to say like, this is not a good and I won’t do it. Of course he never does that. If you agree with him, right, he will accept you into his movement no matter what other views you have. And that’s part of how we got here. But in theory, somebody could exist who doesn’t have that. So I’m not telling people which direction to go, but once you see these big picture trends that are, don’t look like Jewish issues per se, but they in fact, are you then have agency and have the ability to work with other allies and all these other people on those issues in ways that if you address those concerns, you will address these things that are feeding into the antisemitism. Yehuda: Yes. And you know, closer to home for us, educational and pedagogic strategies, you wrote about this in Tablet in 2021, around why Marjorie Taylor Greene became a nationally known name., in part, for all of the reasons you described, populist use of social media, like, you know, you didn’t say this specifically, but like I know this just from a person with a modest social media platform among certain kinds of Jews, the more inflammatory I write something, the more boost that I get. And I regret it every time I do it. Yair: And we have lots of studies that show that negative material towards the out group goes much farther than saying nice things about your own group on social media. Yehuda: So you wrote in 2021, like, here’s the reasons and many things we covered around conspiracy theories that people are drawn to this kind of anti-Semitic rhetoric. And your argument ultimately, which was for politics, a weak argument, for education, a powerful argument, is we need to build societies that actually teach complexity, and that would make people resilient and capable of repudiating the ways that conspiracy theories take complicated things and try to produce simple answers. It’s very hard to do that at scale. Yair: Yeah. One way, well, well, one way I would say that one can do that in a more simple way is sort of. Recognizing that conspiracy theories are usually bad answers to good questions. Why did the stock market crash, is a great question. Very important question to ask. Who did 9/11? Right? Really important question to be able to answer. Now, if you’re Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and saying, well, Jews right are behind 9/11, specifically Israel had some sort of foreknowledge and let it all happen, or something like that. Right? Well, that’s not good, right? If you’re the anti-Semites who think, or the Jews crashed the stock market and the currencies, whatever that is. You will never stop the next calamity because you don’t actually understand what’s going on. But people are right to ask the question, and we would be right to validate the grievance and to validate the question and the concern, but then to say, this is a bad answer that will lead you into bad places. It will not solve your problems. And then what you have to do is give people better answers. And better answers have the value of actually playing out of the real world and solving those problems. And then people realize, well, this person has more predictive value. This person helped me more. Right. This person’s way of explaining the world empowered me rather than disempowered me. The sad tragedy of like conspiratorial actors in the world, like, say a Candace Owens or Tucker or whatever is they are fundamentally disempowering their followers. They’re taking people who feel often adrift and ensuring they stay that way, and it’s so incredibly cruel and irresponsible. We talk about this in this narrow context of what they’re doing to targets of like, people like Jews, but everyone who listens to them is a victim in this way. Yehuda: Until they make them feel powerful by activating them like on January 6th and such moments. Yair: And then some of those people will then victimize other people. Yehuda: Correct. Yair: Right. But you know, and the wake of January 6th, the people who were both the perpetrators, right, going into the capitol, but they were victims. Right? These are the people who are going to get thrown in jail. Their lives are going to be ruined. The people who actually incited them into this and lied to them, often knowing better, right, those people very rarely get held to account. And so like I think that, you know, in that way, some small way, what I’m doing in journalism is trying to say, these are good questions. Let me try to give you the real answer. And over time you can build people who like say, okay, yeah, that that was more trustworthy. That explains something to me that I couldn’t otherwise understand that the conspiracy theory didn’t do. And if we just say, oh, that’s conspiracy theory, we label and we lecture. Right? That’s not helpful. Similarly, if you just say, that’s antisemitic, that doesn’t solve anything. You have to, when I report on antisemitism, I try to explain in some detail why someone might come to this conclusion and then why it’s wrong and then, you know, pull out the word or the label if I choose to do that. Right? A lot of people think that reporting on, you know, we’re talking about antisemitism just means saying it and labeling it and that you did something there but you didn’t, right. You have to assume the average person needs more than that. And I understand that’s not for everybody. Right. In fact, it can be exhausting. But that is a much more effective thing and I think that, you know, our organizational responses often, sometimes, you know, fall short in that respect. But this is much bigger than Jews, right. This is generally about any sort of populistic, conspiratorial grievance, is figuring out the way to address that as best you can. And then there are some of these things that are just toxic or they’ve curdled it to something so toxic that you can’t do with it, and then it just needs to be quarantined. But you need to be able to distinguish between those two. If you just treat everything as the curdled version before, right, you will end up creating more of it. Yehuda: Let me ask you one last question, which is, as someone who likes to think about history and memory, there’s always an, I find, always an appeal to like, where have I seen this before? What’s an historical analogy to this? And kind of the most obvious one is Father Coughlin in the 1930s. You know, a parish priest who ultimately somebody is like, Hey, you’re pretty good at this, puts in front of a radio mic and becomes, in the 1930s, enormously influential in advancing antisemitic ideas, which, you could see a direct correlation to exactly what we were talking about before the rise of antisemitic ideas in America, the resistance to entering the second World War, certainly to intervening on behalf of Jews. That happens. And then afterwards people are like, well, that was bad. And he winds up returning to spend the rest of his life basically anonymously, living as a parish priest in some parish somewhere else. Does the Father Coughlin story help us in any ways, thinking about Tucker? Both about like, how these things come to pass and how they might ultimately turn out in the end? You know, is it a story of like, some version of a brief period of collective psychosis because of all these various economic and other reasons that drive people into these positions? And we can be optimistic that somebody will get out on the other end? Or is this a story of almost the inevitability of these media figures leading a country into such significant ruin that their ultimate ending doesn’t really matter? I wonder how that history actually helps us in a moment like this. Or if it doesn’t, maybe it doesn’t. Yair: Well, since we’re on a podcast, I want to bring readers attention to the fact that there is a podcast called Radioactive that a journalist Andrew Lapin did, which is excellent, which is a short series podcast that you can go listen to, a partnership, I think, between Tablet studios and public radio, and it does a great job of recapping the Father Coughlin thing, and then at the end, just interspersing the things he was saying were the things that someone like Tucker was saying, and this is made years ago, right? Which is an example of—all these trends, they’re not new, right? And all these things that are suddenly shocking people, you know? It is shocking. But it has been building for quite some time. And I can’t predict the future, right? Like, that’s really like something I steer clear from. You know, I, I have all my little cliches, you know, I, I report on the present, not the future, all that kind of stuff. I think you laid out two very plausible scenarios, which is that, you know, these sorts of things can burn themselves out. And you could even argue that in the internet age and social media, everything moves so fast that we go through these phases way quicker, right? And so something can really come to a boil and can, you know, seem like the wave of the future. And then it’s gone within a year or two. Then on the other hand, some things can be transformational and they can stick. It’s very hard to know. I do think though, what that story does tell us is that Father Coughlin is not a sort of one guy who drops out of the sky. He’s feeding off of major social unrest and trends, and as some of those get resolved, right, some of his appeal goes away. And so that brings us to some of these sorts of big picture questions about what is fundamentally driving American antisemitism and what you can do about it. And reacting not to like individual, like, symptoms, right? But saying what are these fundamental forces? And that to me is like not fatalistic, right? That is sort of an optimistic approach. It’s saying that once you actually recognize a problem for real and like the real sources of it, you have the ability to grapple with it and to try to ameliorate those trends and to challenge them. But yeah, but I, I don’t know. I think Father Cochlan is very instructive. I think people should, like, pay attention to that parallel and recognize that we are… Our history does recur and some comfort comes from that in the sense that we have faced these questions before and we have gotten through it. And so you know, my hope is that we will again. Yehuda: Thanks. This is great. Thanks for doing it. Yair: Thank you.