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Conservative political activism has grown increasingly crusading. These Jews feel right at home.
NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland (JTA) — A little more than a week ago, 120 Jews gathered at the Residence Inn in National Harbor, Maryland, to spend Shabbat together.
The Shabbaton, or programmed Shabbat, had a structure familiar to many observant Jews: Sabbath meals and prayer service options along with opportunities for group discussions and lectures. The vibe was also characteristic of observant Jewish gatherings on Friday afternoon: Frantic calls to family stuck in the Washington, D.C., area’s notorious Friday afternoon traffic, excited reunions in the lobby and a reverting to Hebrew-inflected Jewish vernacular.
“I come here to meet politically like minded Jews on a more spiritual level and for more like religious Jews, they express their political views and in a way that aligns with [their beliefs],” Jeremy Pollock, 33, said. “So it makes it all cohesive.”
The political views that Pollock alluded to are what set this Shabbaton apart from many others. The participants were there to attend CPAC, the annual conservative activist conference. And at the Gaylord National Resort conference center across the street from the Residence Inn, where the conference was being held, the atmosphere was starkly different.
The older, darker, slightly musty Residence Inn was packed with blocky furniture and buzzing with older staffers who were eager to help and to explain that yes, they understood about helping the Shabbat observant get to their rooms. In the conference center, the massive light-filled corridors across the street with overpriced eateries and harried younger staffers who were few and far between.
“This is a place for open dialogue on all topics,” said Mark Young, a Baltimore physician, noting that he still maintains a few of the liberal beliefs he grew up with, and would not hesitate to air them in the Jewish enclave. “I think it’s very much an open tent.” Pollock, who wears a kippah, said he has never been made to feel uncomfortable in his years of attending CPAC.
The attitude toward Jews at CPAC also felt different at times. One speaker called for mandatory Christian prayer at schools. Multiple sessions opened with Christian prayer. And “evil” was a word used repeatedly to describe George Soros, the Holocaust survivor, billionaire and philanthropist who funds liberal causes, and who even made it into the title of one of the events.
Paintings and prints depicting former President Donald Trump and Jesus are seen for sale on the first day of the Conservative Political Action Conference CPAC held at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, March 02, 2023. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Soros wasn’t alone. “Evil” was also used frequently to describe liberals, Democrats, transgender activists and RINOs (Republicans in Name Only).
But some Jews at the event said they didn’t mind that kind of language. Instead of feeling alienated by calls for Christianity in the public square, or bristling at conspiratorial statements surrounding a leading Jewish progressive philanthropist, Jews at CPAC demonstrated that they felt welcome at an event — and within a larger right-wing political movement — whose rhetoric and aims have grown increasingly assertive.
“If you look at the archives, almost every year one of the opening prayers is delivered by a Jew,” said Yitzchok Tendler, an Atlanta-based rabbi who launched the Shabbat gatherings at CPAC and who has long been involved with the American Conservative Union, which runs CPAC. “Also any religious language would not be too different from what is heard in legislatures across the United States all the time.”
The conference also demonstrated a commitment to opposing virulent antisemitic rhetoric on the right. Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier who Donald Trump had as a dinner guest last year (and who Trump later disavowed) attempted to enter the conference and was ejected.
“His hateful racist rhetoric and actions are not consistent with mission of CPAC,” Schlapp said in a statement. ”We are pleased that our conference welcomes a wide array of conservative perspectives from people of different backgrounds. But we are concerned about the rise in antisemitic rhetoric (or Jew hatred) in our country and around the globe, whether it be in the corridors of power and academia or through the online rantings of bigots like Fuentes.”
As an example of Jewish inclusion at the conference, Tendler referred to a panel at this year’s conference titled “A Rabbi, a Christian and a Cardinal walk into a Bar.” (The “cardinal” in this case was Deal Hudson, who is Catholic, which also makes him Christian, but is not a cardinal.)
Jack Brewer, a panelist who is a former NFL star, said “It’s up to the believer to preach the gospel of Jesus Chris, unabashedly.” Seated near him was his fellow panelist Rabbi Shlomo Chayen, a religious Zionist rabbi based in Tel Aviv who focuses his outreach on encouraging young couples to have a Jewish wedding.
Whether or not the references to Jesus made Chayen uncomfortable, that panel also showed one reason Jews may have felt at home at the conference. The moderator, Elaine Beck, a Christian podcaster, introduced Chayen by noting CPAC’s growing commitment to Israel, where it held an event last year.
“I want to say thank you for having me all the way from Israel, I want to to bless everyone here,” Chayen said, prompting a round of applause and oohs and ahhs from the audience.
The session also hinted at the tensions Jews face in negotiating such an event. Brewer advocated that schools, both public and private, should be required to offer parents the option of teaching children the Christian gospel.
“We should be demanding every single public, private school give parents an option to give their kids the gospel of Jesus Christ,” he said.
He also pushed for corporal punishment. “Some kids need their butts whooped!” he said. “Amen!” said Beck, to applause.
Chayen skillfully navigated what united the four people on the stage, a commitment to family. His work, he said, focuses on weddings and procreation. “Look at our children and grandchildren and know that we’re leaving behind the set of values that they will continue,” he said.
Another panel may have felt less welcoming to Jews — or to two Jews in particular. The session was titled “The New Axis of Evil: Soros, Schwab, and Fink,” referring to Soros’ Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum, who is not Jewish); and Larry Fink, the CEO of the investment firm BlackRock, who is Jewish.
Much of the panel focused on ESG funding, an acronym for environmental, social and corporate governance funding, and the perils of using political criteria to determine investment. (That principle wasn’t universally upheld: A panel just two hours later promoted investment in businesses that embrace conservative and Christian causes.)
Despite the title of the program, Soros was the only name to come up during the conversation between former Trump White House spokesman Sean Spicer, Heritage Foundation think-tanker and former hamburger chain CEO Andrew Puzder and Oklahoma House Speaker Charles McCall. Spicer cast Soros as a sinister, all-pervasive presence.
“In the title of this [session] is Soros, and one of the things that I find fascinating is over the last several cycles. George Soros has created this web where he has gone into state government, whether it’s secretaries of state, local attorneys, and started to help fund the elections of a lot of these organizations, a lot of these individuals,” Spicer said.
The singular focus on Soros, among a batch of billionaires who fund the left, and the imagery and rhetoric attached to attacks on him — he is often depicted as maintaining secretive control, sometimes as an octopus — has led Jewish organizations to call out the obsession as at least borderline antisemitic.
There were two sessions devoted to Israel, one after the other, and because of delays, they came hard on the arrival of Shabbat. One featured David Milstein, an adviser to David Friedman, the Trump administration ambassador to Israel, and another featured Eugene Kontorovich, a George Mason University professor, and Josh Hammer, a conservative Newsweek editor whom the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled as “embracing the anti-democracy hard right,” who explained what they said were the stakes for conservatives in the current controversy over judiciary reforms in Israel.
Netanyahu’s proposed reforms, which would sap the Supreme Court of much of its power, have triggered a political crisis, sparking weeks of massive protests in the country as well as acts of civil disobedience.
Kontorovich and Hammer made the case that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faced the same nefarious elites that riled the conservatives at CPAC. “In Israel, there is a deep state,” Kontorovich said. “There’s a small group of elite lawyers and technocrats that have managed to control the country.”
Kontorovich told JTA it made sense to get into the weeds with the CPAC crowd.
“I believe the U.S. should stay out of its allies’ domestic governance, and it is particularly foolish to take sides in what are largely foreign domestic partisan disputes,” he said. “But as I said in my comments, now that the Biden Administration seems to be weighing in on the reform, it unfortunately becomes an issue for U.S. foreign policy, which those who care about Israel should have informed positions about.”
President Joe Biden has expressed his concern that Netanyahu’s proposed reforms would erode Israel’s democracy, as have almost half of Congressional Democrats and a majority of Jewish Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Support for Israel was one element that underscored the necessity of a Jewish presence at events like CPAC, said Rabbi Yaakov Menken, the managing director of the right-wing Orthodox rabbinical group the Coalition for Jewish Values.
“If you look at both the right and the left, there are voices that want to cut off aid to Israel,” Menken said in an interview. “And we know that Israel is a bastion of freedom and democracy in the Middle East and unlike most other countries where a US military presence is requested, Israel’s willing to do the work and have the boots on the ground all by themselves, they just need help to be that bastion of democracy.”
Another factor was making clear to conservatives that the Jewish community was not monolithically liberal, Menken said. “Jews need to make their presence known, especially in value spaces where there is a prevailing Jewish narrative that goes in the opposite direction,” he said. “They need to see, meaning the larger audience needs to see, that there are Jewish people who stand with them on those issues.”
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Two Men Spit, Say ‘Free Palestine’ as They Attempt to Gain Access to Jewish Center in Dallas
Two young men who attempted to gain entry to a Jewish life center in Dallas by claiming to be window cleaners. Photo: Screenshot
Jewish community leaders on Monday denounced an antisemitic incident in which two men trespassed the grounds of the Olami Dallas Center in Texas and demanded entry to the home of its rabbi by claiming to be window cleaners.
According to StandWithUs, the perpetrators rang the doorbell of Rabbi Yaakov Rubin, who refused to let them, in response to which one of the men spat on the property as the other said “Free Palestine.” StandWithUs added that they also said “fake Jews” during their attempt to gain access to the building.
However, after realizing they were caught on camera, one of the perpetrators then yelled: “I love the Jews.”
StandWithUs shared video footage of the incident.
“There’s much brazenness required to walk up to a house, in an attempt to intimidate a Jewish Life center, and its host family, ring the doorbell, and say, ‘Free Palestine,’” Rubin said in a statement included in a press release StandWithUs issued following the incident. “This requires us to be that much bolder and proud of our Jewishness and Israel, through open pride, a strong sense of identity and nurturing our mission from G-d. We don’t run, won’t hide, we will be a light to the world.”
The incident at the Olami center comes amid a period of anti-Jewish violence in the US that is unprecedented in the country’s history. Since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, Jews have been murdered on the streets of Washington D.C., firebombed in Colorado with Molotov cocktails, and gang assaulted. In a recent incident just last month, a young man apparently radicalized by the far right set the Beth Israel Congregation on fire over its “Jewish ties,” a catastrophic event which has shut down the Jewish house of worship for the foreseeable future. Another arsonist struck the San Francisco Hillel building in December.
In Monday’s press release, Jordan Cope, director for policy and education at StandWithUs, said this latest incident is a reminder of the degree to which antisemitism is coupled with anti-Zionism.
“The youth’s mention of ‘fake Jews’ before his subsequent ‘free Palestine’ assertion followed by his ‘I love the Jews’ comments, is a clear reminder of how bigots all too often disingenuously disguise their antisemitism as a matter of Middle Eastern politics,” Cope said. “Efforts to intimidate the Jewish people into abandoning their pride of their indigenous homeless ultimately seek to intimidate Jews into silence and submission at a time where antisemitism continues to run rife throughout the West.”
He added, “Antisemitism is an age-old hatred. Anti-Israel sentiment is its newest spear.”
For several consecutive years, antisemitism in the US has surged to break “all previous annual records,” according to a series of reports issued by the ADL since it began recording data on antisemitic incidents.
The FBI disclosed similar numbers, showing that even as hate crimes across the US decreased overall, those perpetrated against Jews increased by 5.8 percent in 2024 to 1,938, the largest total recorded in over 30 years of the FBI’s counting them. Jewish American groups have noted that this rise in antisemitic hate crimes, which included 178 assaults, is being experienced by a demographic group which constitutes just 2 percent of the US population.
The wave of hatred has changed how American Jews perceive their status in America.
According to the results of a new survey commissioned by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Jewish Federations of North America, a majority of American Jews now consider antisemitism to be a normal and endemic aspect of life in the US.
A striking 57 percent reported believing “that antisemitism is now a normal Jewish experience,” the organizations disclosed, while 55 percent said they have personally witnessed or been subjected to antisemitic hatred, including physical assaults, threats, and harassment, in the past year.
The survey results revealed other disturbing trends: Jewish victims are internalizing their experiences, as 74 percent did not report what happened to them to “any institution or organization”; Jewish youth are bearing the brunt of antisemitism, having faced communications which aim to exclude Jews or delegitimize their concerns about rising hate; roughly a third of survey respondents show symptoms of anxiety; and the cultural climate has fostered a sense in the Jewish community that the non-Jewish community would not act as a moral guardrail against violence and threats.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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In JFNA’s first ‘State of the Jewish Union’ address, security and antisemitism loom large
(JTA) — Speaking from Washington, D.C., on Thursday, the president and CEO of the Jewish Federations of North America, Eric Fingerhut, laid out his assessment of the state of Jewish life in America.
“The state of the Jewish union in America is strong, but it is being tested,” said Fingerhut. “We are united in our commitment to America and to Jewish life, even as we worry about the real threats of violence and the growing acceptance of antisemitic rhetoric.”
During his remarks, which was billed as JFNA’s inaugural “State of the Jewish Union” address ahead of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address next week, Fingerhut issued six recommendations to Congress which centered on increasing security for Jewish communities.
They included providing federal support for security personnel, expanding FBI capabilities to counter domestic terrorism, increasing support for local and state law enforcement, prosecuting hate crimes aggressively and holding social media companies accountable for amplifying antisemitic rhetoric.
“Jewish children and teens are facing growing risks online, including antisemitic harassment, bullying and extremist content,” said Fingerhut. “We recognize the difficulty of legislating in this field, but states are moving forward, and it’s time for Congress to move forward as well.”
Fingerhut also called on Congress to increase funding for the Nonprofit Security Grant Program to $1 billion annually, and “make the program more flexible and simpler to use.” (This year, the program is requiring recipients to support federal immigration enforcement and avoid programs advancing diversity, raising concern among many Jewish groups, including JFNA.)
At the beginning of his address, Fingerhut also emphasized the ties between the American Jewish community and Israel, which have come under scrutiny since JFNA published a survey earlier this month which found that only one-third of American Jews say they identify as Zionist.
“The focus of today’s talk will be about the state of Jews in America, but it is not possible to have that conversation without acknowledging and addressing the emotional, familial and religious connection between the American Jewish community and the people of Israel,” said Fingerhut.
Fingerhut’s remarks come shortly after Bret Stephens, the right-leaning Jewish New York Times columnist, argued during his 92NY’s annual “The State of World Jewry” speech that groups devoted to combating antisemitism, including the Anti-Defamation League, should abandon their strategy and instead focus on bolstering Jewish education and communal infrastructure.
During Fingerhut’s address, which largely centered on the security burdens placed on Jewish communities and concern for changes to social services funding, he also pivoted to a broader vision of Jewish life beyond the need for protection alone.
“It is important for the Congress to know that Jewish life is not only what we are protecting, but what we are building,” said Fingerhut. “It is Jewish education and Jewish experiences, but it is also human services, dignity and belonging.”
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Trump and Biden officials clash over campus antisemitism actions as federal investigation kicks off
The first hearing held as part of a federal investigation into how the Trump administration has sought to counter campus antisemitism turned into a showdown between Democratic and Republican officials over how civil rights laws are being enforced.
Craig Trainor, who ran civil rights investigations at the Education Department for most of last year, described his predecessors in the Biden administration as unable to stop what he called “coordinated harassment and violence against Jewish students” and said its approach had been “equivocal, craven and pathetic.”
Matt Nosanchuk, who worked in same department under former President Joe Biden, defended his team’s work and said the White House under Trump is no longer concerned with helping Jewish students: “In the name of combating antisemitism, the current administration has built a Trojan horse to unleash a frontal, ideological attack on higher education.”
And Mondaire Jones, a former Democratic congressman from New York and current member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which is conducting the federal probe, accused the Trump officials who testified of violating federal law by refusing to turn over documents the commission requested as part of its inquiry. “You have a statutory obligation to comply,” Jones said.
The all-day hearing, which also included dueling analyses of civil rights law from academics and testimony from Jewish college students, is part of the first independent federal investigation into how the government has responded to allegations of antisemitism on college campuses. The bipartisan commission, whose members are appointed by Congress and the president, currently has a narrow Democratic majority and chair.
“When we started this project I thought there was no chance this could be anything other than bipartisan and free from sniping and partisanship about who did a better job,” J. Christian Adams, a Republican member of the commission, said at one point. “Alas, like everything else around here, that dream has died.”
The civil rights commission said it expects to release its findings and potential recommendations in the fall, although by that point it may be deadlocked between Democratic and Republican appointees and unable to reach agreement. Trump has unsuccessfully sought to remove its Democratic chair, Rochelle Garza.
Dueling views of federal actions
Several of the witnesses at the hearing focused on the Trump administration’s diminishment of the federal government’s capacity to investigate claims of antisemitism through its mass layoffs, which took a heavy toll at the departments of education and justice. The Education Department has closed 7 of its 12 regional offices and laid off around half of the employees tasked with enforcing civil rights laws before bringing many of them back to work in January.
Alyssa Lareau, a 16-year veteran of the civil rights division at the Justice Department who left last March, told the commission that the Trump administration appeared to violate federal law by freezing billions of dollars in grants to universities accused of tolerating antisemitism without following the rigorous process required and that courts had ruled several of the freezes to be illegal.
“Title XI has a detailed process for terminating federal funding,” said Lareau, referring to the section of civil rights law that applies to most antisemitism claims. “DOJ appears to not have adhered to the procedures mandated by Title XI or its own Title XI regulations.”
But Trainor argued that the Biden administration had let bureaucracy serve as an excuse for not taking sufficient action against the “mobs” and “hateful hordes” he described as brutalizing Jewish students on campus following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack in Israel and subsequent Gaza war.
“The president, when he was campaigning to Make America Great Again in 2024, promised to put an end to this,” Trainor said. “And he did.”
The Trump administration has made countering what it has described as antisemitism on the political left, and especially on college campuses, a top priority. That has included creating a special task force of its own to address it and reaching unprecedented settlements with elite schools that include Columbia, Brown, Cornell and the University of California, Los Angeles.
Some Jewish students have credited the Trump administration for lighting a fire under university administrations they felt had been reluctant to crack down on campus activism they felt created an antisemitic environment on their campuses. Others have described feeling like political pawns.
Sarah Silverman, a Jewish sophomore at Harvard, told the commission that the Justice Department had used the story of a mezuzah being removed from her doorframe as evidence in its attempt to strip research funding from the university and make its students ineligible to receive federal financial aid.
“How does destroying and discrediting educational institutions fight antisemitism?” she asked.
Most American Jews have also expressed skepticism of the White House’s approach. None of its main tactics — including attempting to deport international students who spoke out against Israel during the Gaza war — have received majority approval in surveys of the Jewish community, even as Jews remain alarmed by the level of domestic antisemitism.
Early in the panel, several legal scholars and activists voiced opposite views on whether strident anti-Zionist activism could create the kind of hostile environment for Jewish students that schools are required by law to prevent.
Benjamin Eidelson, an expert in anti-discrimination at Harvard Law School, argued that anti-Zionism could not be treated as a de facto form of antisemitism because “no views about Zionism or Israel are inherent in anyone’s ancestry.”
Eidelson said he was sympathetic to Jewish students who felt alienated by campus protests but “not everything that’s bad is a violation of Title XI.”
Mark Goldfeder, director of the pro-Israel National Jewish Advocacy Center, took the opposite tack. He brought a rock from Mount Zion in Jerusalem to demonstrate that Zionism was linked to the ancestral Jewish connection to Israel.
“Excluding someone based on where their ancestors are from — or based on an identity rooted in where they’re from — is not only wrong, it’s national origin discrimination and civil rights law forbids it,” he said.
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