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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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On my first Shabbat in NYC, the sanctuary was attacked
I don’t often go to synagogue. Outside of the High Holidays, it is not somewhere I would ordinarily find myself on a Friday night.
In the last few years, I have made a point of spending Shabbat with my grandmother. We light candles, eat together and let the week recede for a few hours. I don’t see it as an obligation so much as the comfort of doing something that has been done before, by people I love, in a rhythm that existed long before I did.
And yet, synagogues have a strange way of finding me when I need them.
Last summer, while travelling through Europe to visit two of my closest friends, I found myself in London, exhausted from weeks of constant movement. I happened to walk past a synagogue and realized that Shabbat was the following day. I reached out and asked if I could join their services. I remember thinking that perhaps this was exactly what I needed: a few hours to sit still, focus, and breathe.
And I was right.
There is something uniquely grounding about entering a synagogue in an unfamiliar place and discovering that the ritual is familiar. You may be thousands of miles from home, surrounded by people you’ve never met, but you know when to stand. You recognize the melodies. You open the same prayers. You know that somewhere else in the world, other Jews are doing some version of the same thing.
So when, only a few days after moving to New York, I was connected with a member of Central Synagogue through a potential landlord and they invited me to join them for Shabbat services, I thought: Why not?
I had just arrived in a city where I was beginning a new job at the Forward, a new life, one that, for the first time, was entirely mine to shape. That is a daunting task. What better way to spend my first Friday night than doing something that has always made the unknown feel a little more manageable.
Moments after services began, I was sitting in the sanctuary, allowing myself to take in the week that had just passed — my first week in New York — when a man entered and began moving violently through the congregation.
He knocked down the Shabbat candles that had just been lit. He moved through the rows of congregants. I watched him strike another person.
People around me ran toward the sides of the sanctuary. My own body went into the same instinctive state of shock and survival: Where is the danger? Where can I go? What do I need to watch for?
The security response was swift. The intruder was stopped, we re-lit the candles, and services continued.
Those around me who knew I was new to the synagogue immediately went into protection mode. They checked on me, expressing disbelief that something like this could have happened there, especially given the level of security they pride themselves on maintaining. They told me that in the nearly three years since October 7, nothing like this had happened.
The clergy, too, seemed to understand what the moment required. They gave us strength and courage, using the same voices that had moments earlier been leading us in song and prayer to restore some sense of calm. Throughout the service and again afterward in their online response, they returned to the same idea: it was our duty to keep joy alive.
Joy, one of the rabbis said, is itself an act of resistance.
I understood the sentiment. But my body hadn’t quite caught up.
Shabbat is one of the rare times when I allow myself to become completely uninhibited. I sing. I look up from the prayer book. I watch the rabbis and the people around me. I let myself become absorbed in something larger than whatever has been occupying my mind that week. For a few hours, I am not thinking about work, or apartment hunting, or navigating a new city. I am simply there.
That is also why the disruption was so jarring. I had come to Shabbat to let my guard down, and suddenly I found myself unable to do so.
I kept my eyes toward the front of the room, watching for movement. When it came time to turn around during Lecha Dodi, I felt a jolt of anxiety at the thought of putting my back toward the congregation. I could no longer surrender myself completely to the moment and what it required of me. I knew, rationally, that the threat had passed. But my body had learned something different: that even here, even now, even in this room, I might need to be ready.
For a moment, I considered leaving. But the people around me seemed to embody a quiet confidence that everything was going to be okay. They had chosen to stay, and I followed their lead. There is a certain strength in knowing that you are not standing alone.
I had come to Central Synagogue because I wanted to feel at home in my new city. Instead, on my first Shabbat in New York, I was reminded how quickly the simple act of practicing Judaism can become an exercise in vigilance. And yet, looking around the room that evening, I also understood that vigilance does not have to mean retreat.
The post On my first Shabbat in NYC, the sanctuary was attacked appeared first on The Forward.
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Anti-Israel Republicans tests their strength in Florida primaries
Some insurgent Democrats have found success by making criticism of Israel central to their campaigns. Now a group of Republican candidates is trying to tap into a similar movement on the right, even if they are unlikely to win.
That divide is on display in Florida’s Republican primaries, set for Tuesday, where several long-shot candidates are challenging the party’s traditionally strong support for the Jewish state. Congressional candidates Dan Bilzerian and Jake Lang and gubernatorial hopeful James Fishback have made opposition to Israel and AIPAC part of their political identity. But they have also gone further than most progressive critics of Israel, using rhetoric that has been widely condemned as antisemitic.
Bilzerian is a professional poker player and a social media personality once known as the “King of Instagram” for flaunting a lifestyle of luxury, fast cars, women, and guns. He is challenging incumbent Rep. Randy Fine, one of four Jewish Republicans in Congress. Fine has made support for Israel central to his political identity, while also drawing condemnation for inflammatory rhetoric about Muslims and Palestinians.
Fine is a favorite to win reelection, has the endorsement of President Donald Trump and has a large fundraising advantage. He represents District 6, which is located just under the northeast part of the state and includes Daytona Beach, and is facing four primary challengers. Among them are Aaron Baker, an “America First” candidate who has criticized the “influence of foreign lobbies” and what he calls America’s “endless wars.” Baker also said he would oppose providing Israel with offensive weapons.
But Bilzerian’s attacks on Fine, who often wears a yarmulke in public, have gone well beyond criticism of Israel. He has repeatedly promoted conspiracy theories about Jews, including that Jews killed President John F. Kennedy. On social media, where Bilzerian has more than 30 million followers, he has asked if Adolf Hitler was a “good person,” has called Jews “dumb,” Judaism a “terrible” religion and referred to Fine as a “fat Jew.”
Bilzerian’s campaign treasurer, Patrick Krason, also served as treasurer for Kanye West’s short-lived 2024 presidential campaign. The rapper, who changed his name to Ye, engaged in a spate of antisemitic remarks and Holocaust denial in recent years. A Combat Antisemitism Movement report found that 33% of Bilzerian’s content on his campaign account was anti-Israel and antisemitic.
In recent days, Bilzerian posted antisemitic dog whistles, including that Florida’s “District 6 understands the Jewish problem,” and that “a vote for Randy is a vote for Israel.”
The imagery in Bilzerian’s closing campaign message has become quite provocative. In one AI-generated video, Bilzerian accuses Fine and his wife of engaging in “transgender pride groups that perform for children.”
Another AI video, posted Thursday, says Fine “wants you to die for Israel” and calls the congressman a “psychopath” who wants to watch “goyim cattle” die. He labels Fine a “Jewish supremacist” and “Satan’s creepy little minion” and says that the “fat Jew Randy” needs to be “tarred and feathered.” The video also includes AI-generated imagery of Fine dressed in a cheerleader’s outfit emblazoned with the Israeli flag and says it’s time for voters to “throw out Shylock and all his tricks.”
Fine said the video is “celebrating Hitler,” adding: “We have a choice on Tuesday, to embrace the kind of Nazism that led to the Holocaust or to repudiate this filth and reaffirm American values and character.”
Wonder if I can get them to play this on the radio in the district pic.twitter.com/IAXVV7pNp7
— Dan Bilzerian (@DanBilzerian) August 13, 2026
Other Republican primaries
A similar, if less blatantly antisemitic, theme is also showing up in the Republican primary for Marco Rubio’s former Senate seat.
Jake Lang, a far-right provocateur who was pardoned by Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, is running for the Senate seat held by Republican incumbent Sen. Ashley Moody. Lang, who said his mother is Jewish, renounced his connections to Judaism and Israel and built an online following around Christian nationalism and attacks on both Muslims and Jews. This included performing a Nazi salute outside AIPAC’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., and an “anti-Islamification” rally against New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani outside Gracie Mansion.
In the crowded Republican primary for governor to replace the term-limited Gov. Ron DeSantis, James Fishback has made opposition to Israel and AIPAC central to his campaign. Fishback, who said “Americans shouldn’t die for Israel,” has attacked the frontrunner, Rep. Byron Donalds, over support from pro-Israel donors. Fishback, who is polling at 18%, promised to pull Florida’s investments from Israel Bonds. Running what The New York Times described as a “rage bait” campaign, Fishback has associated himself with antisemitic personalities on the far-right. He also criticized politicians who “visit another country” only to end up “kissing a stupid wall,” a reference to prayer visits to the Western Wall.
Florida Republicans are not expected to abandon their party’s longstanding alliance with Israel when they vote in Tuesday’s primary. But these long-shot candidates have large online followings, and their campaigns are testing whether the growing anti-Israel movement on the right can also find its place in electoral politics.
In his recent memoir, Vice President JD Vance recounted a conversation with conservative activist Charlie Kirk months before he was fatally shot, in which Kirk warned about a growing strain of anti-Israel sentiment on the American right that has at times slid into outright antisemitism.
Fine’s stance
Meanwhile, since winning the special election in 2025 to replace now-Ambassador to the U.N. Mike Waltz, Fine has made his Jewish identity and support for Israel central to his political persona. Fine also served as Ron DeSantis’ Jewish outreach chair during the 2018 gubernatorial election.
Known for his combative nature, Fine has built his political brand as one of Israel’s most outspoken defenders in Congress, frequently using social media to target his critics. He has also said he began wearing a yarmulke in solidarity with Jewish students facing antisemitism on college campuses after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.
Last week, vandals spray-painted a swastika on one of Fine’s campaign signs outside an early voting location in Flagler Beach. Police are investigating the vandalism, which Fine described as an antisemitic attack.
There are roughly 750,000 Jewish residents in Florida, making it the third most-populous Jewish state after New York and California. Jews make up 4% of the Florida electorate. Nearly 60% of the state’s Jewish electorate identify as Democrats or lean Democratic, according to the American Jewish Population Project at Brandeis University.
Some Florida Democrats have also shown less interest in following the anti-Israel shift seen among progressives elsewhere, like in the Michigan Democratic primary win of Dr. Abdul El-Sayed for U.S. Senate.
Last week, the Hillsborough County Democratic Party canceled a planned keynote address at its annual gala by former New York Assemblyman Michael Blake, who made attacks on AIPAC a major part of his unsuccessful congressional campaign against Rep. Ritchie Torres. The Florida event also featured Democratic gubernatorial candidate, former Rep. David Jolly, a longtime supporter of Israel.
The contrast ahead of Tuesday’s primary is striking: In Florida, the loudest challenge to bipartisan support for Israel is coming not from the progressive left, but from the Republican right.
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Jewish watchdog urges NYPD to use cutting-edge detection tech after synagogue attack
(JTA) — A Jewish security watchdog is doubling down on safety measures in the wake of a Friday night attack against worshipers at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue, calling on police to identify cutting edge tactics to identify hot spots for potential hate crimes and to place more officers in those areas.
But Mitchell Silber, CEO of the Community Security Initiative, acknowledged that preventing situations like Friday’s is not straightforward.
“It’s difficult, because you’re trying to balance being open for the public for worship, and at the same time, keeping our sanctuary safe,” Silber told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Sunday.
On Friday night Larry Montes, 46, was able to make his way into Central Synagogue’s main sanctuary before he disrupted the service with antisemitic slurs and was apprehended by a security guard. Silber said he’s been in contact with Central Synagogue security leadership about the incident and understood that Montes had not initially raised any red flags when he entered the building.
“There wasn’t something so out of place that it required them to pull him aside, but they noticed him as not someone they were familiar with,” he said. According to CSI, the synagogue’s team was able to quickly defuse the situation anyway due to the training it had received.
In the wake of the incident, Silber said the CSI is sending a bulletin to synagogues about steps to improve synagogue safety, a copy of which was shown to JTA.
The CSI has begun discussions with the NYPD about using tools like “datamining, crime cluster mapping and pre-emptively deploying against hot spots” in order to prevent hate crimes before they can happen. The CSI coordinates security for Jewish institutions and communities in the New York area, and is jointly funded by the UJA-Federation of New York and the Jewish Community Relations Council. (70 Faces Media, the parent company of the JTA and New York Jewish Week, receives UJA funding.)
The CSI bulletin is also encouraging other synagogues to partner with the Community Security Service, another Jewish nonprofit that trains congregants to volunteer as greeters who can provide more personalized discernment of possible threats.
“Central Synagogue isn’t Park East, Park East isn’t KJ, KJ isn’t Congregation Beth Elohim — they’re all so different, and that’s why having members of the synagogue trained can really be a force multiplier,” Silber said, listing some of the city’s most prominent congregations.
In the incident on Friday night, Montes yelled during the service, disrupting it, and then struck a 63-year-old congregant and headbutted a member of security personnel who was escorting him out.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, the congregation’s senior rabbi, was away for a family event when the incident occurred on Friday, according to The New York Times. But she wrote on Instagram that the security director “heroically restrained and escorted” Montes out of the synagogue, which occurred within one minute of him disrupting the service.
Montes has three previous arrests in New York City, each for a robbery between 2019 and 2023, according to police.
He was arrested at the scene and arraigned in criminal court immediately that night, where, according to police, he was charged with four counts of assault as a hate crime, two counts of assault, criminal mischief as a hate crime, criminal mischief, disruption of a religious service, criminal trespassing as a hate crime, two counts of aggravated harassment and two counts of harassment.
The District Attorney’s office requested bail at $50,000 cash with $150,000 bond and the judge set bail at $10,000 cash with $30,000 bond. Montes’ next court date is August 20, according to the DA’s office.
The attack comes as antisemitic hate crimes against Jews in New York City have risen by 8.5% compared to 2025, as of the end of July. Debate has swirled this year over whether North American synagogues need to step up their security in the mold of European congregations in the wake of attacks like the attempted one in West Bloomfield, Michigan, in which a man drove a fireworks-laden truck into a synagogue.
A number of politicians have weighed in to condemn Friday’s attack.
New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish official in the U.S., wrote, “When American Jews say they feel unsafe, this is why. Antisemitism is real and it’s increasing by the day.”
Some have ascribed a lack of safety to rhetoric used by the city’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, a longtime Israel critic who turned heads with his recent video panning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Ofir Akunis, consul general of Israel in New York, called the attack “a direct result of Mayor Mamdani’s sustained campaign of incitement” in a post on X.
Meanwhile, some of Mamdani’s Jewish allies have pointed out that a Facebook profile that appears to belong to Montes has shared a number of posts criticizing the mayor.
Mamdani wrote that he was “horrified by the assault” at the synagogue, and that all New Yorkers “must be able to observe their religion without fear of violence.”
Montes’ social media posts include sharing a video of a Prager U commentator taking down Israel critics and multiple photos that suggest support for Israel, including a hand shaded with the Puerto Rican flag shaking another hand shaded with the Israeli flag.
His aunt, who lives in Puerto Rico, told the New York Post that her nephew “might not have been in his right mind,” and that he has expressed a desire to become Jewish.
“I told him he had to be careful with that because those things are sacred — you have to approach them seriously,” she told The Post in Spanish.
A woman named Michele Anenberg-Poma posted a photo of herself on Instagram with wounds on her lip and arm, and wrote, “I am the woman who was assaulted last night at Central Synagogue.”
She added, “You will not punch out our Jewish light. You will not stand and cause harm to our eternal light.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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