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How Jewish comedy found religion, from Philip Roth to ‘Broad City’
(JTA) — In the 2020 comedy “Shiva Baby,” a 20-something young woman shows up at a house of Jewish mourners and gently offers her condolences. When she finds her mother in the kitchen, they chat about the funeral and the rugelach before the daughter asks, “Mom, who died?”
While “Shiva Baby” explores themes of sexuality and gender, the comedy almost never comes at the expense of Jewish tradition, which is treated seriously by its millennial writer and director Emma Seligman (born in 1995) even as the shiva-goers collide. It’s far cry from the acerbic way an author raised during the Depression like Philip Roth lampooned a Jewish wedding or a baby boomer like Jerry Seinfeld mocked a bris.
These generational differences are explored in Jenny Caplan’s new book, “Funny, You Don’t Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials.” A religion scholar, Caplan writes about the way North American Jewish comedy has evolved since World War II, with a focus on how humorists treat Judaism as a religion. Her subjects range from writers and filmmakers who came of age shortly after the war (who viewed Judaism as “a joke at best and an actual danger at worst”) to Generation X and millennials, whose Jewish comedy often recognizes “the power of community, the value of family tradition, and the way that religion can serve as a port in an emotional storm.”
“I see great value in zeroing in on the ways in which Jewish humorists have engaged Jewish practices and their own Jewishness,” Caplan writes. “It tells us something (or perhaps it tells us many somethings) about the relationship between Jews and humor that goes deeper than the mere coincidence that a certain humorist was born into a certain family.”
Caplan is the chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Cincinnati. She has a master’s of theological studies degree from Harvard Divinity School and earned a Ph.D. in religion from Syracuse University.
In a conversation last week, we spoke about the Jewishness of Jerry Seinfeld, efforts by young women comics to reclaim the “Jewish American Princess” label, and why she no longer shows Woody Allen movies in her classrooms.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity
[Note: For the purpose of her book and our conversation, this is how Caplan isolates the generations: the Silent Generation (b. 1925-45), the baby boom (1946-65), Generation X (1966-79) and millennials (1980–95).]
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Let me ask how you got into this topic.
Jenny Caplan: I grew up in a family where I was just sort of surrounded by this kind of material. My dad is a comedic actor and director who went to [Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey’s] Clown College. My degrees were more broadly in American religion, not Jewish studies, but I was really interested in the combination of American religion and popular culture. When I got to Syracuse and it came time to start thinking about my larger project and what I wanted to do, I proposed a dissertation on Jewish humor.
The key to your book is how Jewish humor reflects the Jewish identity and compulsions of four sequential generations. Let’s start with the Silent Generation, which is sandwiched between the generation whose men were old enough to fight in World War II and the baby boomers who were born just after the war.
The hallmark of the Silent Generation is that they were old enough to be aware of the war, but they were mostly too young to serve. Every time I told people what I was writing about, they would say Woody Allen or Philip Roth, two people of roughly the same generation.
In “Funny, You Don’t Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials,” Jenny Caplan explores how comics treated religion from the end of World War II to the 21st century. (Courtesy)
The Roth story you focus on is “Eli, the Fanatic” from 1959, about an assimilated Jewish suburb that is embarrassed and sort of freaks out when an Orthodox yeshiva, led by a Holocaust survivor, sets up in town.
Roth spent the first 20 to 30 years of his career dodging the claim of being a self-loathing Jew and bad for the Jews. But the actual social critique of “Eli, the Fanatic” is so sharp. It is about how American Jewish comfort comes at the expense of displaced persons from World War II and at the expense of those for whom Judaism is a real thriving, living religious practice.
That’s an example you offer when you write that the Silent Generation “may have found organized religion to be a dangerous force, but they nevertheless wanted to protect and preserve the Jewish people.” I think that would surprise people in regards to Roth, and maybe to some degree Woody Allen.
Yeah, it surprised me. They really did, I think, share that postwar Jewish sense of insecurity about ongoing Jewish continuity, and that there’s still an existential threat to the ongoing existence of Jews.
I hear that and I think of Woody Allen’s characters, atheists who are often on the lookout for antisemitism. But you don’t focus on Allen as the intellectual nebbish of the movies. You look at his satire of Jewish texts, like his very funny “Hassidic Tales, With a Guide to Their Interpretation by the Noted Scholar” from 1970, which appeared in The New Yorker. It’s a parody of Martin Buber’s “Tales of the Hasidim” and sentimental depictions of the shtetl, perhaps like “Fiddler on the Roof.” A reader might think he’s just mocking the tradition, but you think there’s something else going on.
He’s not mocking the tradition as much as he’s mocking a sort of consumerist approach to the tradition. There was this sort of very superficial attachment to Buber’s “Tales of the Hasidim.” Allen’s satire is not a critique of the traditions of Judaism, it’s a critique of the way that people latch onto things like the Kabbalah and these new English translations of Hasidic stories without any real depth of thought or intellect. Intellectual hypocrisy seems to be a common theme in his movies and in his writing. It’s really a critique of organized religion, and it’s a critique of institutions, and it’s a critique of the power of institutions. But it’s not a critique of the concept of religion.
The idea of making fun of the wise men and their gullible followers reminds me of the folk tales of Chelm, which feature rabbis and other Jewish leaders who use Jewish logic to come to illogical conclusions.
Yes.
You write that the baby boomers are sort of a transition between the Silent Generation and a later generation: They were the teenagers of the counterculture, and warned about the dangers of empty religion, but also came to consider religion and tradition as valuable. But before you get there, you have a 1977 “Saturday Night Live” skit in which a bris is performed in the back seat of a luxury car, and the rabbi who performs it is portrayed as what you call an absolute sellout.
Exactly. You know: Institutional religion is empty and it’s hollow, it’s dangerous and it’s seductive.
Jerry Seinfeld, born in 1954, is seen as an icon of Jewish humor, but to me is an example of someone who never depicts religion as a positive thing. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
“Seinfeld” is more a show about New York than it is necessarily a show about anything Jewish. The New York of Seinfeld is very similar to the New York of Woody Allen, peopled almost entirely by white, middle-class, attractive folks. It’s a sort of Upper West Side myopia.
But there’s the bris episode, aired in 1993, and written by Larry Charles. Unless you are really interested in the medium, you may not know much about Larry Charles, because he stays behind the camera. But he also goes on to do things like direct Bill Maher’s anti-religion documentary “Religulous,” and there’s a real strong case for him as having very negative feelings about organized religion which feels like a holdover from the Silent Generation. And so in that episode you have Kramer as the Larry Charles stand-in, just opining about the barbaric nature of the circumcision and trying to save this poor baby from being mutilated.
The few references to actual Judaism in “Seinfeld” are squirmy. I am thinking of the 1995 episode in which a buffoon of a rabbi blurts out Elaine’s secrets on a TV show. That was written by Larry David, another boomer, whose follow-up series, “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” is similarly known for its irreverence toward Judaism. But you say David can also surprise you with a kind of empathy for religion.
For the most part, he’s classic, old school, anti-organized religion. There’s the Palestinian Chicken episode where the Jews are rabidly protesting the existence of a Palestinian-run chicken restaurant near a Jewish deli, and where his friend Funkhouser won’t play golf on Shabbos until Larry gets permission by bribing the rabbi with the Palestinian chicken. There, rabbis are ridiculous and can be bought and religion is hollow and this is all terrible.
But then there’s this bat mitzvah montage where for one moment in the entire run of this show, Larry seems happy and in a healthy relationship and fulfilled and enjoying life.
That’s where he falls in love with Loretta Black during a bat mitzvah and imagines a happy future with her.
It’s so startling: It is the most human we ever see Larry over the run of the show, and I believe that was the season finale for the 2007 season. It was much more in line with what we’ve been seeing from a lot of younger comedians at that point, which was religion as an anchor in a good way — not to pull you down but to keep you grounded.
So for Generation X, as you write, Judaism serves “real, emotional, or psychological purpose for the practitioners.”
I wouldn’t actually call it respect but religion is an idea that’s not just something to be mocked and relegated to the dustbin. I’m not saying that Generation X is necessarily more religious, but they see real power and value in tradition and in certain kinds of family experiences. So, a huge amount of the humor can still come at the expense of your Jewish mother or your Jewish grandmother, but the family can also be the thing that is keeping you grounded, and frequently through some sort of religious ritual.
Who exemplifies that?
My favorite example is the 2009 Jonathan Tropper novel, “This Is Where I Leave You.” I’m so disappointed that the film adaptation of that sucked a lot of the Jewish identity out of the story, so let’s stick with the novel. In that book, where a family gathers for their father’s shiva, the characters are horrible people in a dysfunctional family writ large. They lie to each other. They backstab each other. But in scene where the protagonist Judd describes standing up on the bimah [in synagogue] to say Kaddish [the Mourner’s Prayer] after the death of his father, and the way he talks about this emotional catharsis that comes from saying the words and hearing the congregation say the words — it’s a startling moment of clarity in a book where these characters are otherwise just truly reprehensible.
Adam Sandler was born in 1966, the first year of Generation X, and his “Chanukah Song” seems like such a touchstone for his generation and the ones that follow. It’s not about religious Judaism, but in listing Jewish celebrities, it’s a statement of ethnic pride that Roth or Woody Allen couldn’t imagine.
It’s the reclamation of Jewish identity as something great and cool and fun and hip and wonderful and absolutely not to be ashamed of.
From left, Ilana Glazer, Abbi Jacobson and Seth Green in an episode of “Broad City” parodying Birthright Israel. (Screenshot from Comedy Central)
Which brings us to “Broad City,” which aired between 2014 and 2019. It’s about two 20-something Jewish women in New York who, in the case of Ilana Glazer’s character, anyway, are almost giddy about being Jewish and embrace it just as they embrace their sexuality: as just liberating. Ilana even upends the Jewish mother cliche by loving her mother to death.
That’s the episode with Ilana at her grandmother’s shiva, which also has the B plot where Ilana and her mother are shopping for underground illegal handbags. They spend most of the episode snarking at each other and fighting with each other and her mother’s a nag and Ilana is a bumbling idiot. But at the moment that the cops show up, and try to nab them for having all of these illegal knockoff handbags, the two of them are a team. They are an absolute unit of destructive force against these hapless police officers.
I think all of your examples of younger comics are women, who have always had fraught relationships with Jewish humor, both as practitioners and as the target of jokes. You write about “The JAP Battle” rap from “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” which both leans into the stereotype of the Jewish-American Princess — spoiled, acquisitive, “hard as nails” — and tries to reclaim it without the misogyny.
Rachel Bloom’s character Rebecca in “Girlfriend” self-identifies as a JAP, but she doesn’t actually fit the category. It’s her mother, Naomi, who truly is the Philip Roth, “Marjorie Morningstar,” Herman Wouk model of a JAP. So Bloom is kind of using the term, but you can’t repurpose the term when the original is still there.
So as an alternative, I offer up a new term: the Modern Ashkenazi American Woman. It’s very New York, it’s very East Coast, it’s very particular to a type of upbringing and community that in the 1950s and ’60s would have been almost exclusively Conservative Jews, and then may have become a bit more Reform as we’ve gotten into the ’90s and 2000s. They went to the JCC. They probably went to Jewish summer camp.
But even that doesn’t even really speak to the American sense of what Jewish is anymore, because American Jews have become increasingly racially and culturally diverse.
There is also something that’s happening historically with Generation X, and that’s the distance from the two major Jewish events of the 20th century, which is the Holocaust and the creation of Israel.
The Silent Generation and baby boomers still had a lingering sense of existential dread — the sense that we’re not so far removed from an attempted total annihilation of Jews. Gen X and millennials are so far removed from the Holocaust that they don’t feel that same fear.
But the real battleground we’re seeing in contemporary American Judaism is about the relationship to Israel. For baby boomers and even for some older members of Gen X, there’s still a sense that you can criticize Israel, but at the end of the day, it’s your duty to ultimately support Israel’s right to exist. And I think millennials and Zoomers [Gen Z] are much more comfortable with the idea of Israel being illegitimate.
Have you seen that in comedy?
I certainly think you can see the leading edge of that in some millennial stuff. The “Jews on a Plane” episode of “Broad City” is an absolute excoriation of Birthright Israel, and does not seem particularly interested in softening its punches about the whole idea of Jews going to Israel. I think we can see a trend in that direction, where younger American Jewish comedians do not see that as punching down.
You’re teaching a class on Jewish humor. What do your undergraduates find funny? Now that Woody Allen is better known for having married his adoptive daughter and for the molestation allegations brought by another adoptive daughter, do they look at his classic films and ask, “Why are you teaching us this guy?”
For the first time I’m not including Woody Allen. I had shown “Crimes and Misdemeanors” for years because I think it’s his most theological film. I think it’s a great film. And then a couple years ago, I backed off, because some students were responding that it was hard to look at him with all the baggage. He’s still coming up in conversation because you can’t really talk about the people who came after him without talking about him, but for the first time I’m not having them actually watch or read any of his stuff.
They have found things funny that I didn’t expect them to, and they have not found things funny that I would have thought they would. They laughed their way through “Yidl mitn fidl,” the 1936 Yiddish musical starring Molly Picon. I also thought they’d enjoy the Marx Brothers’ “Duck Soup” and they did not laugh once. Some of that is the fact that Groucho’s delivery is just so fast.
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The post How Jewish comedy found religion, from Philip Roth to ‘Broad City’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Do European Nationalists Really Love Israel?
A police officer stands at the scene, after a man was arrested following a stabbing incident in the Golders Green area, which is home to a large Jewish population, in London, Britain, April 29, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Hannah McKay
For decades, major pollsters around the world have conducted surveys on attitudes toward Jews. For decades, these surveys have produced more heat than light.
“Thinking of Jews, is your attitude generally positive or negative?” — that is the typical formulation. Time after time, pollsters found that in the West in general, and in the Anglosphere in particular, negativity toward Jews was low. Perhaps 10–15% of the Western public would openly state that they see Jews negatively.
That number may still sound high to some. But what does it actually mean in terms of the potential for rapid political mobilization? Nobody really knows. Yet much of the academic research on antisemitism — conducted in major universities and sponsored by well-meaning donors — never seriously bothered to ask the crucial questions: what does this figure mean, and is it a lot or a little?
But there is another puzzle hiding in plain sight, equally gracefully ignored. The trend in negativity toward Jews is flat. If surveys are to be believed, not much has changed in the minds of Westerners over the past decade, and possibly longer. And yet, with reports constantly highlighting a global surge in antisemitic incidents reported by Jews to the police, one is tempted to ask: who is lying? Jews who report incidents to the police and Jewish communal bodies? The police? Or the surveys?
I have an answer: the surveys are. Or rather, the surveys are asking the wrong question.
What they should be asking, and some do, only less enthusiastically than they should, is whether the Western public is negative toward Israel.
And this is emphatically not because what people feel about Israel is an objectively true measure of Jews’ status, or even Israel’s status, in the Western imagination. It is because attitudes toward Israel function as a mirror: they reveal the respondent’s own identity, the way they see themselves, and their hopes for their society. In a way, Jews and Israel can almost be forgotten. They are only needed as instruments to tease out people’s real political selves.
Have you noticed a finding that some consider “strange,” others applaud, but nobody explains convincingly? When surveys ask about attitudes to Israel and also ask about political affiliation — and when the responses are cross-classified — it turns out that nationalist circles in the West are often quite pro-Israel.
In a recent YouGov survey in Britain, for example, 39% of Reform UK supporters (the most nationalistic large British party) identified as pro-Israel, and only 13% said they were anti-Israel.
Contrast this with the currently surging far-left force, the Green Party: only 4% of Green supporters were pro-Israel, while 60% were anti-Israel. The British political old-timers — the Conservatives and Labour — show similar dynamics in essentials. While the traditionally nationalistic Conservatives lean more pro-Israel than anti-Israel, Labour leans in the opposite direction.
These findings are not new. Nor are they limited to a single pollster.
It is true that the British political map has been redrawn in recent years. The old two-party dynamic — similar to what exists in the US — no longer holds, at least for now. The Conservatives and Labour are no longer the uncontested icons of Right and Left. Instead, both look like spent forces. British politics now has clearer, more sharply defined right-wing and left-wing agendas, represented by Reform UK and the Greens. But the basic pattern — the positivity of nationalists toward Israel and the hostility of socialist circles toward it — has existed for years. It is traceable back at least a decade.
The lack of serious commentary on this is astonishing, especially given that both radical left and right-wing forces are rising across Europe. So what is happening to the nationalists? Do they really care about Israel? And should this be celebrated by those who care about Israel?
My answer, from the crossroads of demographic and historical research, is simple: British nationalists care first and foremost about themselves. They are pro-Israel because Israel is useful to their self-understanding.
The way European nationalists see Israel is simply the way they want to see themselves. Israel, in their eyes, is a Western country — close in manners and sensibilities to their own. It is a muscular Western democracy, defending its citizenry and saying a decisive “yes” to prosperity and innovation, and a decisive “no” to attempts to valorize terrorism or relativize good and evil.
While such games could be played for a while in the West, Israel did not have the luxury of indulging in them for long. And so, not by design but by historical slippage, Israel became the version of the West that Western nationalists crave but can no longer see around them. At the same time, Israel’s neighbors and insurgents are associated with anti-Western sentiments and terrorism — and, more broadly, with what is not the West. The very West of which Britain is a formative part, and which nationalists believe deserves celebration.
In a recently published feature refreshingly titled “Zionism for Everyone,” Alana Newhouse proposes a simple test of national wellbeing. Can a country maintain its demographics? Can it defend itself? Are its people happy?
In Israel’s case, the answer to all three questions is a resounding yes. Israel’s population grows naturally. Israel fights wars — not without successes, to put it mildly. And Israelis report some of the highest levels of happiness in the Western world. Zionism, Newhouse argues, is a recipe for everyone.
Is this merely wish-casting — an expression of the author’s political preferences? Not so fast. It looks like large swathes of European nationalists feel similarly. Listening to their critiques of their own societies, it is procreative confidence, pride, muscularity, and optimism that they identify as both lacking and desirable.
And what of British Jews?
Their politics is also being redesigned. Like the rest of the UK, they are increasingly interested in the newly popular right-wing and left-wing forces — Reform UK and the Green Party. Like the rest of the UK, they are less interested in the old political brands, Conservatives and Labour. Recent surveys of British Jews make this clear.
Yet British Jews are not overwhelmingly aligned with Reform UK. The extent to which nationalist pro-Israel sentiment affects Jewish voting behavior remains unclear. At the risk of sounding dramatic, this resembles unreturned love.
Put more analytically: British Jews, and Diaspora Jews more broadly, do not share a single unified vision of their host societies — or of themselves. People often speak of “Jewish interests.” Perhaps the only idea that unites both antisemites and philosemites is the belief that Jews have some collective “interest” that they coordinate politically. The difference is that antisemites describe this alleged interest in sinister terms, while philosemites relate to it with sympathy. Both miss the point.
Jewish political instincts do not boil down to guarding some uniquely defined and unambiguous “Jewish interest.” Jews are as divided over what is good for them as their host societies are. And that is perhaps the best-kept secret about Jewish politics.
So what are these competing visions of society now being contested in Britain?
One vision, promoted by British nationalists, holds that nations are natural units of human existence. Their elites, however flawed, should take care of them. Borders should be guarded. National identity should be celebrated. In that broad family of nations, Britain, Israel, and the West more generally are benevolent forces — associated with lifestyles conducive to freedom and prosperity.
An opposing vision, promoted by the far left and expressed eloquently by the leader of the British Green Party, Zac Polanski, is one in which no country has a right to exist. Similar sentiments have been voiced before. In this worldview, individuals — not nations — are the natural units of humanity. Nations are retrograde, perhaps ridiculous. End of story. Full stop.
From this menu of national versus post-national dishes, the whole of the West — majorities and minorities alike, including Jews — is now choosing. These choices dictate voting behavior and political rhetoric.
If we adopt this framework, the nationalists’ love of Israel at this particular historical moment, as well as Jewish ambivalence toward nationalist parties, becomes simultaneously explainable. Until now, both the nationalist affection for Israel and Jewish lack of enthusiasm for nationalists have seemed puzzling. But a single explanation that solves several puzzles at once is usually the strongest explanation — assuming Occam’s razor still holds.
In today’s West, broadly speaking, whoever loves the West loves Israel. The two loves are connected because Israel is perceived as the West — condensed, sharpened, and made morally legible. By extension, whoever cannot tolerate the West cannot bear Israel.
And so, as long as the West remains capable of self-love at all, Israel will remain acceptable in its books.
Dr. Daniel Staetsky is an expert in Jewish demography and statistics. He is based in Cambridge, UK.
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Exposing The New York Times’ Tucker Carlson Interview
Tucker Carlson speaks on first day of AmericaFest 2025 at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona, Dec. 18, 2025. Photo: Charles-McClintock Wilson/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Like everyone who has sat down in recent months to interview Tucker Carlson, The New York Times’ Lulu Garcia‑Navarro too often allowed him to do what he does best: answer anything and everything with a mixture of sophistry, dishonesty, and vagueness.
Overall, she did a better job than most. Economist editor‑in‑chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, for example, all but avoided Carlson’s most insidious claims about Israel and Jews in her own interview, preferring to spar with him on safer, domestic territory.
Garcia‑Navarro, by contrast, doesn’t duck the subject at all.
Naming the Trope Without Truly Challenging It
She pointedly asked him about “rhetoric where everything is blamed on Israel, where Israel is seen as the core of all of these problems,” and notes how his rhetoric “has echoes of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” rhetoric that “opens the door to this idea that there is a very powerful sect of Jewish people who want global war and global conflict.”
She challenged his platforming of Nick Fuentes and tied it to Holocaust denial and to the way dehumanizing language paves the way for mass violence.
“The Holocaust didn’t start with the gassing of Jews. It started with the dehumanization of Jews, with the way that they were spoken about, with the language that was used,” she told him. It is a powerful line.
But she followed it with a curiously soft question: “Why do you think you get tagged so often with antisemitism?”
“Tagged” as antisemitic? Why ask Carlson how he feels about the label rather than confront him with his own words?
Why press him him on his claim that Dick Cheney’s office was “completely controlled … by people who were putting Israel’s interests above America’s interests,” or his description of Donald Trump as a “slave” to Benjamin Netanyahu and his “advocates in the United States,” and ask him directly how that is not trafficking in classic antisemitic narratives about Jews driving wars?
Why not force him to account for his line that “Israel pushed the United States president” into war with Iran and sought to keep the conflict going until Iran was “destroyed and chaotic, which is the Israeli goal”?
The Question Garcia-Navarro Never Really Asked
What Garcia‑Navarro too often failed to do is what so many interviewers before her have also failed to do: ask Carlson for evidence and stay on the claim until he either substantiates it or admits he cannot. When he portrayed Trump as a “hostage” and “slave” to Netanyahu and suggested Israeli leaders drove both the Iraq and Iran wars, she largely let those claims stand without demanding proof in the moment.
At his most evasive, Carlson falls back on one of his most familiar tactics: either feigning ignorance or retreating into an undefined “they.”
To her credit, Garcia‑Navarro did at one point press him on that famous “they” — asking him explicitly who “they” are when he talks about shadowy forces pushing Trump toward war. That, precisely, is what a good interviewer should do.
Carlson’s “They” and the Return of Old Conspiracies
But then, at other moments, she let him wriggle away. She raised the Protocols of the Elders of Zion herself, clearly aware of how central that forged text is to the idea of a Jewish cabal manipulating global events. Carlson responds by saying he has merely “heard references to it” and that it is “like a Tsarist forgery or something.”
This is one of the most prominent right‑wing media figures in America, a man who opines constantly about antisemitism, Jews, and Israel. How is it conceivable that he has not properly “heard of” one of the foundational antisemitic texts of the last century? Why not simply ask that? Why not point out that he is disavowing knowledge of the book while reproducing its very structure in his claims about shadowy pro‑Israel forces controlling presidents and forcing wars?
Letting Conspiracy Theories Stand Unchallenged
Carlson deserves to be challenged at the level of evidence, not just rhetoric.
On Iraq, he made the claim that former Vice President Cheney’s office was being controlled before concluding, “I would say the Iraq war was to a great extent a product of that.” On Iran, he similarly claimed that “Israel pushed the United States president” and that Israeli strikes on civilians in Lebanon were designed to sabotage diplomacy and “keep this going until Iran was destroyed and chaotic, which is the Israeli goal.”
On the latter point, Garcia‑Navarro mostly restated his claims and tacitly accepted the framing by asking why Trump has been uniquely susceptible compared with previous presidents. On both wars, she never put to Carlson the obvious counter‑facts: post‑9/11 doctrine, US intelligence assessments, the role of Gulf states, or Iran’s own conduct. She never tests whether “Israel did it” is anything more than a monocausal conspiracy theory.
Israel’s Legitimacy Treated as an Open Question
The same pattern holds for Israel’s basic legitimacy. Carlson was allowed, repeatedly, to pivot to his preferred talking points. He questioned whether Israel has any “unique right to exist” based on scripture and whether “people whose ancestors didn’t live here now occupy the land.”
Garcia‑Navarro did note that this rhetoric veers into delegitimizing Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people, but she did not test his reasoning. Israel is not a case of “Bible or bust.” There are non‑theological bases for its legitimacy — UN partition, international recognition, state practice — that never entered the conversation.
By keeping the debate locked inside Carlson’s chosen frame — is Israel’s biblical claim valid? — the interview ended up treating the very question of Israel’s right to exist as an open, almost abstract dilemma.
Would Garcia‑Navarro ever entertain, in the same way, the question of whether Algeria or Pakistan “really” have a right to exist, on the grounds that their borders are disputed and their populations include people “whose ancestors didn’t live there” a hundred years ago?
The New York Times Problem
In that sense, Garcia‑Navarro becomes a proxy for broader New York Times tendencies. She is very good at naming labels: antisemitism, “cabal” tropes, the Holocaust, genocide, “delegitimizing Israel.”
But when Carlson made concrete empirical claims — that Israel decides US wars, that it deliberately targets civilians in Lebanon to blow up peace talks, that “hundreds” of people in Britain have been arrested simply for “criticizing Israel,” that Israel practices “collective punishment” — she rarely forced him to supply proof or confront counter‑evidence.
The Times is comfortable talking about antisemitism as a feeling or fear. It is much less comfortable adjudicating factual narratives about Israel, even when those narratives echo some of the oldest antisemitic myths in circulation.
Antisemitism as Rhetoric, Not Fact-Checking
That asymmetry runs through the interview. Throughout, Garcia‑Navarro seems more at ease challenging Carlson on certain narratives than others. She pushed repeatedly on his theological musings about Trump as a possible “Antichrist” and on Christian morality in the age of Trump. Yet she took a comparatively light touch toward Carlson’s sweeping claims about Israel’s agency and Israel as the prime driver of Middle Eastern conflict.
That choice is particularly striking because Garcia‑Navarro is not a novice on these issues. She has previously hosted ADL chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt to discuss antisemitism, anti‑Zionism, and “double standards” toward Israel, and she has reported extensively on Israel and the Palestinians. She knows that “Israel controls US policy” narratives are a staple of modern antisemitism. Precisely because she knows this, the decision to let so many of those claims pass without forensic challenge is important.
When Caveats Replace Journalism
When a platform as powerful as The New York Times invites Tucker Carlson to explain why Israel supposedly drives American wars, the minimum journalistic standard cannot be to name the antisemitic tropes and then leave his assertions hanging in the air.
It has to be to interrogate them, to demand evidence, and to put his story about Israel alongside the facts about how US policy is actually made. Otherwise, even a well‑meaning interview risks laundering a familiar narrative — that a small, uniquely suspect Jewish state and “its advocates” pull the strings — into the mainstream with only the thinnest of caveats.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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EU sanctions Israeli settlers after Hungary, under new leadership, clears path
(JTA) — The European Union decided to sanction Israeli settlers over violence against Palestinians in the West Bank on Monday, moving forward a measure that had been blocked for months.
The EU’s 27 foreign ministers agreed on the sanctions at a meeting in Brussels after Hungary’s new government gave its approval.
The measure had been blocked by a close ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Viktor Orban, who was Hungary’s president for 16 years before being unseated in April.
The backing from Peter Magyar, who was sworn in as Orban’s replacement on Saturday, is seen as portending a new era in which the consensus-oriented European Union adopts a more united tone against Israeli policies.
Magyar has pledged to restore ties with the EU after Orban’s far-right politics isolated Hungary. He also said he would pursue a “pragmatic relationship” with Israel and vowed to recommit Hungary to the International Criminal Court, which Orban withdrew from after the court issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu over alleged war crimes.
“It was high time we move from deadlock to delivery. Extremisms and violence carry consequences,” Kaja Kallas, the EU’s top diplomat, said on X.
Kallas said ministers also agreed to impose “new sanctions on leading Hamas figures,” who were not specified.
Kallas did not name the Israelis that will now be sanctioned or specify whether they will be organizations, individuals, or both. Several groups play crucial roles in promoting, developing, financing and defending Israeli settlements, while multiple individuals have previously faced sanctions by individual governments over their alleged involvement in violence against Palestinians.
Settler violence in the West Bank surged after the Gaza war began in October 2023 and further intensified since the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran broke out in February. In March, thousands of Diaspora Jewish leaders called on Israeli President Isaac Herzog to take action to stop the violence.
Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Saar said Israel “firmly rejects” the EU’s decision and accused the bloc of imposing sanctions on Israeli citizens and groups “because of their political views and without any basis.”
“Equally outrageous is the unacceptable comparison the European Union has chosen to make between Israeli citizens and Hamas terrorists. This is a completely distorted moral equivalence,” Saar said on X. He added that Jewish people have a “moral and historical right” to “settle in the heart of our homeland.”
Peace Now, which advocates for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said the EU had sent “a grave warning sign” and “a call to the Israeli public to wake up to the reality we have created through decades of occupation.”
“The rampant violence of settlers in the West Bank, encouraged and supported by the government, is leading Israel into a moral abyss and casting an indelible stain on the state of Israel,” the group said in a statement.
Broader measures against Israel remain stalled by a lack of support. Spain, Ireland and Slovenia have pushed for the EU to suspend its trade agreement with Israel and sanction its far-right cabinet ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. France and Sweden have called for tariffs on imported products from settlements in the West Bank. Other member states, such as Germany and Italy, have refused to support those measures.
Under the Biden administration, the United States sanctioned multiple settler leaders, settler groups and West Bank outposts in 2024. Trump canceled the sanctions a day after reentering office in January 2025.
In March, Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said the administration had expressed concerns about settler violence to the Israeli government and anticipated that the government would take action.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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