Tucker Carlson wanted to know: What does Nick Fuentes actually believe?

“Everybody’s going to be like, ‘You’re a Nazi, you just like Fuentes,’” the former Fox News personality mused on his show Tuesday. “But then I’m like, ‘I don’t think Fuentes is going away. Ben Shapiro tried to strangle him in the crib in college, and now he’s bigger than ever.’”

So Carlson invited the avowed antisemite and white nationalist livestreamer onto his online talk show. There, the two had a friendly conversation about the Jews, and whether it was right to blame them for everything.

And Fuentes, whose own platform has only grown in the wake of the assassination of conservative archrival Charlie Kirk, made clear what he believes. Asked who in the conservative movement needed to be taken down, he responded, “These Zionist Jews.”

The sit-down, which had been rumored for weeks, carries implications for the growing popularity of antisemitism and anti-Israel voices on the right. Both men have followings in the millions, and Carlson has maintained close ties in President Donald Trump’s orbit even as he has become a vociferous critic of Israel and helped platform Holocaust revisionists.

Fuentes, meanwhile, has launched a far-right attack on mainstream conservatives using antisemitism as his chief plank — an ideology that an increasing number of young conservative operatives are also embracing. On YouTube, the top comments under the two-hour episode were rife with antisemitic memes.

Even as he signalled broad alignment with Fuentes’s views on Israel, Carlson gently sought to distinguish himself from his guest’s more overt antisemitism.

“I’m not that interested in ‘the Jews,’ but I am very interested in the foreign policy question,” Carlson said at one point, bringing up his fingers for air quotes. Later, he told Fuentes, “The second you’re like, ‘Well, actually, it’s the Jews,’ first of all, it’s against my Christian faith. Like, I just don’t believe that and I never will. Period. And second, then it becomes a way to discredit. That’s when I was like, ‘This guy’s a fed.’”

In response, the young man who opens his “America First” online shows with animated depictions of Jewish conspiracies outlined his own core belief: that “neoconservatism,” an ideology he opposes, is Jewish in nature because it prioritizes allegiance to Israel over traditional conservative principles.

“As far as the Jews are concerned, you cannot actually divorce Israel and the neocons and all those things that you talk about from Jewishness: ethnicity, religion, identity,” Fuentes told Carlson. While some Jews do oppose Israel, he acknowledged, among his enemies in conservatism, “I see Jewishness as the common denominator.”

Fuentes continued, “They’re a stateless people. They’re unassimilable. They resist assimilation for thousands of years. And I think that’s a good thing. And now they have this territory in Israel. There’s a deep religious affection for the state. It’s bound up in their identity.” Modern neoconservatism, he said, stemmed from “Jewish leftists who were mugged by reality when they saw the surprise attack in the Yom Kippur War.”

Fuentes insisted he doesn’t hate all Jews: “Not to be that guy and say that thing, but my best friend is a Jewish person,” he said, also claiming his “assistant” is Jewish (it was unclear if he was referring to the same person). He then went on to blend his understanding of Jewish American anxieties, some of which have been articulated by leading Jewish communal figures, with the dual-loyalty trope.

“If you are a Jewish person in America, it’s sort of rational self-interest, politically, to say, ‘I am a minority. I am a religious, ethnic minority. This is not really my home. My ancestral home is in Israel,’” Fuentes said. “They have this international community across borders, extremely organized, that is putting the interests of themselves before the interests of their home country.”

Even beyond Israel, Fuentes also sought to paint Judaism as incompatible with the European tradition to which America’s modern right aspires. “They hate the Romans because the Romans destroyed the Temple,” he said. “We don’t think that, as Americans and white people.”

To hear Fuentes tell it, his radicalization was a story of first being taken in by, before later rebelling against, influential Jewish conservatives. Israel was his breaking point, he insisted.

Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin and Dennis Prager were his right-wing heroes in high school, Fuentes said; he would parrot Shapiro talking points in debates and was a member of a Facebook group for young fans of PragerU. As a college freshman in 2017 he fell into the orbit of The Daily Wire, Shapiro’s media company, after a debate against his school’s progressive student body president went viral. Fuentes would soon drop out of college to pursue conservative media full-time.

Quickly, Fuentes claimed, he became suspicious of Shapiro’s pro-Israel views. When a staffer asked him if he had any interest in traveling to Israel, he responded, “No, I think I have everything I need right here in America…. And that was a little bit of foreshadowing.”

Later, he said, he would challenge Daily Wire staff: “I would say, ‘So, why do we give Israel all this money?’” he recalled. “They would say, ‘You’re asking it in an antisemitic way.’”

But Fuentes, in his recollection, “was genuinely inquisitive. I wanted to know. Is there an actual reason?… There’s a lot of these neocon Jewish types behind the Iraq War.” The Daily Wire’s rejection of his questions on Israel, he said, spurred his shunning across the broader mainstream conservative movement and led to him going independent with his preaching of more insidious forms of Jewish control.

Comparing himself to Shapiro, Fuentes reflected, “I didn’t come from some strange background. I come from a normal home. My parents are Catholic.” (In recent weeks, Shapiro and some other voices on the right have warned of a rise in antisemitic conspiracies among their ranks.)

Even as Fuentes became a Trump loyalist in the run-up to the 2016 election, he said, he broke with conservatives by supporting President Barack Obama’s decision to abstain from, rather than back, a National Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

“Fox News and all the pro-Israel conservatives are calling him an antisemite. They’re saying, ‘He hates Jews! He’s an antisemite! He hates Israel!’” Fuentes recalled. “It seemed hypocritical. It seemed like how, when conservatives would critique anything about race, we got called racist. Or anything about feminism, we got called sexist. All Obama did was uphold US policy on the West Bank that we’ve had since ’67, which is, we don’t support the settlements. I said, how is it antisemitic to just be consistent on our U.S. foreign policy?”

On Israel, Carlson said, they agreed.

“I always thought it’s great to criticize and question our relationship with Israel because it’s insane and it hurts us,” Carlson told him. “We get nothing out of it. I completely agree with you there.” He also blasted Christian Zionists on the right he used to support, including U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, whom he said have been “seized by this brain virus.”

Later discussing the war in Gaza, Carlson added, “One of the reasons I’m mad about Gaza is because the Israeli position is, everyone who lives in Gaza is a terrorist because of how they were born, including the women and the children. That’s not a Western view. That’s an Eastern view. That’s non-Christian. That’s totally incompatible with Christianity and Western civilization. They say, ‘Oh, we’re the defenders of Western civilization.’ Not with that attitude, you’re not.”

The two did agree on some Jews they both respect, including Glenn Greenwald, an iconoclastic Israel critic formerly on the left who himself hosted Fuentes recently on his own podcast, and Paul the Apostle.

Elsewhere, the men discussed whom Fuentes wants to see be president next (he picked Ye, the superstar rapper who has embraced Nazism) and his 2022 dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Ye and Trump, where Fuentes said the once and future president said, “This guy’s hardcore. I like this guy.” (Trump has since claimed he didn’t know who Fuentes was when they dined together.)

When asked to share his unfettered core beliefs with Carlson, Fuentes obliged, painting a vision of a future America that Jews did not have the right to inherit.

“We do need to be right-wing. We do need to be Christian. We do, on some level, need to be pro-white,” he said. “Not to the exclusion of everybody else, but recognizing that white people have a special heritage here, as Americans.”

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The post Tucker Carlson hosts Nick Fuentes for a friendly conversation about ‘these Zionist Jews’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Sometime around the 16th inning of last night’s marathon World Series game, Dodger manager Dave Roberts admitted to a Fox sideline reporter he was on his last relief pitcher.

But some viewers, perhaps growing delirious as the clock approached midnight in Los Angeles, had an idea for who Roberts should call on next: a retired 89-year-old southpaw sitting behind home plate.

“If this game goes any longer,” one fan wrote on X, “Dodgers are gonna have to put in Koufax.”

It was one of the most improbable and most interminable baseball games ever played, a cosmic struggle between two powerhouses on the game’s biggest stage—cinema, if movies could run for six hours and 39 minutes. The Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays combined to use 44 players, 220 baseballs and throw 609 pitches. The game went so long there was a 14th-inning stretch — and then four more frames, before the Dodgers finally won 6-5 in the 18th inning.

Sandy Koufax, the Jewish sports hero and four-time World Series winner, was there for all of it. As the Dodgers and Blue Jays stayed deadlocked at 5 runs apiece for nearly 10 innings, Fox kept cutting to him, holding out for a breakthrough like every other diehard. More than a few marveled that he was still awake.

Sticking around meant Koufax witnessed not only one of the greatest baseball games ever played, but an incredible full-circle moment involving his heir apparent, Clayton Kershaw. Kershaw and Koufax, both of whom played their entire careers with the Dodgers, are said to be close; Kershaw, the only lefty to rival Koufax’s pitching dominance since the latter’s retirement in 1966, will retire after this World Series.

But comparisons between the two fall apart in the playoffs, where Kershaw has historically crumbled. Now 37, Kershaw was kept on the Dodgers’ World Series roster in case of emergency — an injury to a starting pitcher, for example, or other long-relief duties. Anything other than a Sisyphean set-up.

Instead, Dodger fans everywhere held their breath as Roberts called on Kershaw with the bases loaded and two outs in the 12th inning of a tie game. It was Kershaw’s first All he needed was to get one out. This time, he did. As he walked off the mound, the broadcast cut first to Koufax applauding his old friend.

Nobody deserved this more than Clayton Kershaw. pic.twitter.com/Ja1Y2gCyTy

— Michael Bier (@MichaelJBier) October 28, 2025

One person wrote the scene was “as good as it gets for baseball history nerds.”

It must have pained Koufax to see his friend — Koufax-like in so many ways — fall short in the postseason so many times in the last 18 years. How cool is it that he was there to see Kershaw come through at the end? It must have meant a lot to Kershaw, too.

That was it for Kershaw, but not Koufax. Kershaw was replaced by Edgardo Henriquez, who was then replaced by journeyman right-hander Will Klein. Klein (not Jewish, to save you a search, though a few friends joked an unkempt red beard recalled a Chabad rabbi) had never thrown more than 30 pitches in a single appearance as a pro. On Monday, with no relief pitchers waiting behind him, Klein threw seventy-one, in a four-inning shutout performance that kept the Dodgers alive long enough for Freddie Freeman’s 18th-inning walkoff home run to deliver victory.

After the game, Koufax reportedly made his way to the Dodger clubhouse to congratulate Klein on his effort. It was well-past midnight by the time he got there.

“Nice going, kid,” Koufax told Klein, according to ESPN’s Jeff Passan.

You’d have to think Koufax had a moment in the clubhouse with Kershaw, too. Those words have not yet been revealed to us. What they shared on the field — and what fans watching got to share with them — is cool enough to suffice.

Sandy Koufax at the beginning of last night’s game. https://t.co/V6CAR3ldTI

— JonathanLightman (@JonathanLightm1) October 28, 2025

The post It’s so cool that Sandy Koufax was there for that appeared first on The Forward.

Police in New York City have opened a hate crime investigation in response to reports of a violent assault in Midtown Manhattan on Monday afternoon against an Israeli man following the theft and desecration of his kippah.

Near the Mr. Broadway kosher restaurant, an unknown man reportedly saw Rami Glickstein, pointed to his head covering, and instructed him to “tell me what your religion is.”

The 58-year-old from Ofra — north of Jerusalem in the West Bank — ignored the provocation, which in turn led to further escalation. The man — described as in his 20s or 30s — grabbed Glickstein’s kippah, threw it on the ground, and spat on it. When Glickstein knelt to retrieve the violated symbol of his Jewish identity, his attacker punched him in the face and ran, according to multiple reports.

Witnesses on the scene around 6:30 pm on West 38th Street called an ambulance for Glickstein which then took him to the Mount Sinai Beth Israel hospital, where he was treated for injuries to his face.

“My pride as an Israeli was wounded more than my body,” Glickstein said of the incident, according to local news outlet 5TownsCentral. “I froze — I’ve never encountered hatred like this in my life.”

Ofir Akunis, the consul general of Israel in New York, released a statement following the hate crime.

“The attack is a direct result of the daily incitement worldwide, including in the United States, against Jews and Israel,” Akunis said. “Lies, verbal violence, calls to carry out another Oct. 7 massacre, and blood libels that are spread without any restraint — such as the false blood libel about Gaza — influence many, some of whom do not hesitate to attack physically.”

New York City has experienced a surge in anti-Jewish hate crimes since the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, amid the ensuing war in Gaza. The US as a whole and several other countries around the world have reported similar spikes in antisemitic activity, with many incidents against Jews or Jewish institutions invoking Israel and the Gaza conflict.

Akunis called for “all US public leaders” to “immediately and forcefully condemn the attack and the calls for violence such as to ‘globalize the intifada.’”

Glickstein, an educator who works as a lecturer for the Israel Defense Forces speaking on the topics of Jewish history and resilience, declared that “my Israeli pride was hurt,” adding that “it pains me that I couldn’t fight back, and I regret that deeply.”

Responding to the attack, the Combat Antisemitism Movement posted on X that “the rise in antisemitism in New York has become unbearable.”

On Wednesday, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released research about antisemitic crime in New York City in 2024, recording 976 incidents. Of New York’s boroughs, the ADL identified Manhattan as possessing the highest number with a count of 587, followed by Brooklyn with 253 and Queens at 85. The researchers reported 24 in Staten Island and 27 in the Bronx.

The ADL described the figures as “the highest count in any US city last year and the highest count in any US city since ADL has been tracking such incidents.”

According to the ADL’s researchers, last year over 50 percent of the anti-Jewish physical attacks in the city “targeted Orthodox Jewish victims (36 out of 69 total), though this group makes up only about one-fifth of New York City’s total Jewish population. Observant Jewish people often wear visible markers of their Judaism, such as [kippahs], making them vulnerable to random antisemitic attacks in public, which we fear have become increasingly normalized.”