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A Jewish journalist takes sides in America’s ‘slow civil war’
(JTA) — Jeff Sharlet admits up front that his book about what he and others call the “Trumpocene” epoch is not objective.
“Transparent subjectivity is a virtue for this kind of reporting,” he said. “I am trying to understand the proliferation, which is very real, of fascist flags [across America]. I don’t like it when I see a movement [creating] fascist folk art.”
In “The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War,” the religion reporter and writing professor chronicles his recent journeys across America interviewing QAnon acolytes, Christian nationalists, proud misogynists, unrepentant January 6ers, armed militia men and strict anti-abortion activists — all still in thrall to Donald Trump.
It’s a familiar story of an America on the edge, but Sharlet adds the perspective of a journalist who has long covered religion. He was among the first to note that Trump rallies were less political events than religious revivals. And like many religions, he says, Trumpism is resistant to the kinds of “civil discourse” that many people propose as an antidote to polarization.
“We cannot fact check a myth, right?” Sharlet told me in a video interview from his home in Vermont. “It’s not going to work to say, ‘That’s not true.’”
I wanted to speak to Sharlet to discuss what he calls the “gospel of Trump” and how it differs from partisan politics as usual. And I wanted to know more about his own Jewish background and how that has informed his project.
Sharlet, a professor of writing at Dartmouth College, shapes his narrative largely around the story of Ashli Babbitt, the 35-year-old woman who was killed by a Capitol police officer during the Jan. 6 riot. He talks to those who lionize Babbitt, standing on porches under flags reading “F— Biden” and “No Surrender.” He describes the ways she has become a martyr on the far-right, part of a mythology that inverts what happened on that day.
Babbitt, he suggests, was a victim of the “undertow” of the book’s title: a sense of “grief and loss and mourning” that animated protesters like her. Trump spoke directly to this “erosion of white power, which was felt more severely down the socio-economic ladder,” Sharlet said. “Ashli Babbitt experiences it as a loss, but she can’t name the structural details – like the fact that there’s such a lack of banking regulation that she ends up with a loan that literally nobody can pay back.”
So she joined the mob charging the Capitol. “Unprocessed grief curdles into rage, rage that just sits there until along comes Trump,” said Sharlet. The result is a stew that he unhesitantly calls fascism, which he has defined as a right-wing cult of personality that takes pleasure in violence, disdains democracy and considers its opponents decadent.
Sharlet visits churches where the same rage is heard in the pulpit and where Trump is regarded as a prophet, leading outsiders to wonder how faithful Christians could embrace Trump despite his own lack of Christian values.
On the latter assertion, Sharlet notes that Trump does have Christian values, rooted in the teachings of his childhood pastor, Norman Vincent Peale. The author of “The Power of Positive Thinking” and a proponent of the “prosperity gospel,” Peale saw material wealth as a sign of divine providence, and “applied Christianity” as a way to achieve it.
“Politicians have long borrowed from religion the passion and the righteousness, but no other major modern figure [before Trump] had channeled the tension that makes Scripture endure, the desire, the wanting that gives rise to the closest analogue to Trumpism: the prosperity gospel, the American religion of winning,” he writes.
He also speaks to pastors and followers who would read Trump’s words “like Scripture”: “Every tweet, every misspelling, every typo, every strange capitalization — especially the capitalizations, said [one pastor] — had meaning.” Sharlet compares this to Gnosticism, the heretical Christian movement that believed in “a form of exclusive knowledge reserved for the faithful, a ‘truth’ you must have the eyes to see.”
Sharlet, whose earlier book “The Family” was about a fundamentalist ministry influential among the Washington political elite, said Christian nationalists who are drawn to dictators and flawed strongmen often cite the story of King David. The Old Testament king gains God’s favor despite killing his rival Uriah and, depending how you look at it, seducing or raping Uriah’s wife Bathsheba. “They’re very invested in this idea of chosenness, and King David is chosen,” said Sharlet.
All this mixing of religion, power and grievance made me wonder if liberal denominations have an adequate response to the stirrings on the far right.
“In the book I go to Glad Tidings, a church in Yuba City, California. And you walk in and there’s no crosses, because the pastor thinks the cross is a weak symbol of sacrifice. Instead the pulpit is made of swords,” said Sharlet. “That’s not to say that liberal religion is always weak — I mean, you have Reverend William Barber of the Forward Together Moral Movement in North Carolina, and liberal, religiously motivated activists who put themselves in the position of abortion clinic defenders.”
Rage also curdles into conspiracy theories. Many of his interviewees share the dark fantasies of QAnon, which imagines that the U.S. government is secretly controlled by Satan-worshiping pedophiles. As outlandish as these ideas sound, he said, “It’s hard to find Republicans now who have not absorbed some element of QAnon. People have never even heard of QAnon, but are worried about pedophiles in the schools, ‘grooming’ their children, apocalyptic visions of cities as battlegrounds of crime. This is straight out of QAnon.”
An audience member holds up a large “Q” sign, representing QAnon, a conspiracy theory group, while waiting in line to see President Donald J. Trump at his rally in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, August 2, 2018. (Rick Loomis/Getty Images)
I ask Sharlet if his sample is selective, and if he only looked for and included people on the fringe to prove a point.
He countered by recalling his conversation with a woman who believed that the deadly Las Vegas shooting, by a high-stakes gambler who left 58 dead in 2017, was actually an attempt by ISIS on the life of Trump (who wasn’t in Vegas at the time). Sharlet was convinced the idea was hers alone. But a Google search told him that the theory was gaining traction on the far right, and that Tucker Carlson had invited a former congressman and retired brigadier general to talk about the “Vegas mystery” on his Fox News show.
Before his abrupt ouster last week, “Tucker Carlson had an audience of 4 million and a reach they say of more around 70 million – which is immeasurably greater than mine,” noted Sharlet. “So who is fringe? Me or Carlson?”
QAnon, he said, agrees with those who say QAnon draws on classic antisemitism. “It infuses QAnon,” he said. “You know, the blood of children being used to keep a secret elite, a secret cabal, directed by [Jewish financier and philanthropist George] Soros, and all the ‘globalist’ language. I was asked on a podcast what they mean by globalists and my answer was simple: the Jews. That’s what they mean, even when they don’t know that they mean it.”
Sharlet, the son of a Jewish dad and a Christian mom, describes himself as “a weird Jew, a secular Jew.”
“I was maybe more forcibly aware of this Jewishness when I grew up in a small town called Scotia, New York, and I got beat up for being a Jew,” he said.
After getting a degree in American history at Hampshire College, he went to work at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he edited Pakn Treger, its literary magazine.
“I don’t like to say that my Jewishness is formed by antisemitism,” he said. “My Jewish education is working for the Yiddish Book Center and all the complications of Yiddish.”
He says the anger he encountered on the road has come to his small town in “a very blue area.” “The folks opposed to fascism still outnumber those who are coming to praise it,” he said. “But my kid goes to a school district that is facing legal threat from far-right people, including Jews, who think that it is too supportive of kids like my queer kid and they want the school to be reporting any instances of kids showing up not wearing the right gender clothes and so on.”
That experience has also shaped his response to those who ask if he is elevating a fringe through his writing.
“I have a queer nonbinary child who is being criminalized in about 20 states now. This is where I keep coming back to,” said Sharlet. “To the folks who say, ‘It’s just terrible what they’re doing to the trans kids,’ I want to say that they really haven’t learned from history. They think that fascism is like, ‘Well, we got our victim. We’re all done here now.’ No. It comes for everybody.”
If there is a solution to this unraveling, Sharlet says it will come from liberals who learn from their right-wing counterparts and create institutions that fight for their values.
“The prime example is higher education,” he said. “For a long time liberals want to insist that higher education is neutral.” And while the left is insisting on neutrality, the right is creating colleges — Regent University in Virginia Beach, the evangelical Liberty University, Oral Roberts University, Hillsdale College in southern Michigan — dedicated to its ideas. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis is diverting state funding to transform a small liberal arts college, New College of Florida, into a conservative-leaning school.
“We have to build out cultural institutions and we have to recognize and own up to the fact that colleges are places of values,” he said. “They do not sit with fascism. So own that space, defend that space, be proud of that space. I think every synagogue in America whether it wants to accept this or not and even some of the politically conservative ones have to ask, which side are you on? Neutrality isn’t an option. As Jews especially, we don’t have a choice.”
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Zoom chat: Memories of Yiddish and Bund gatherings in Melbourne
אין קאַרלטאָן, אַ געגנט אין מעלבורן, האָט מען אַ מאָל געהערט ייִדיש אויף דער גאַס; געגאַנגען אויף בונדישע פֿאַרזאַמלונגען און אין ייִדישן טעאַטער, און געזונגען ייִדישע לידער.
אין אָט דער וועלט איז אויפֿגעוואַקסן דער שרײַבער אַרנאָלד זייבל, אַ קינד פֿון בונדישע אימיגראַנטן פֿון פּוילן. זונטיק, דעם 15טן נאָוועמבער, 7 אַ זייגער אין אָוונט ניו־יאָרקער צײַט, וועט אלי בענעדיקט, פֿון דער ייִדיש־ליגע, פֿירן אַ זום־שמועס מיט זייבלען וועגן זײַנע קינדער־יאָרן אין מעלבורן — דער עיקר, וועגן די ייִדישע שולן, טעאַטערס, לידער און די מענטשן וואָס האָבן געשאַפֿן יענע וועלט.
זיי וועלן אויך אַרומרעדן ווי אַזוי די זכרונות פֿון יענער וועלט לעבן ווײַטער אין זײַנע ביכער.
אַרנאָלד זייבל איז אַ שרײַבער, דערציילער און אַקטיוויסט פֿאַר מענטשנרעכט. זײַנע ביכער, וואָס זענען אויף ענגליש, באַהאַנדלען טעמעס פֿון אימיגראַציע, זכּרון און גלות. צווישן זײַנע באַקאַנטע ביכער געפֿינען זיך „קאַפֿע שעהעריזאַד“ און „בריליאַנטן און אַש“.
די אונטערנעמונג איז פֿרײַ פֿון אָפּצאָל. כּדי זיך צו פֿאַרשרײַבן, גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ.
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At Moontower Minyan, cowboy hats meet kippot
AUSTIN, Texas – In an old churchhouse in Austin, with light streaming through the arched windows, a man wearing a cowboy hat and strumming an acoustic guitar croons the classic Willie Nelson ballad, “I thought about you, Lord.”
Along with his cowboy hat, the singer is also wearing a tallit. His bandmates, plucking at the bass and playing the drums, choose a different type of headcovering: yarmulkes. Welcome to Shabbat at Moontower Minyan, held at a former church turned artist collective.
Rabbi Dan Ain and his wife, poet Alana Joblin Ain, started Moontower Minyan shortly after the Hamas-led attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 — when many Jews in Austin who didn’t have ties to a community sought meaningful ways to express their Judaism and meet others seeking a similar creative outlet.
“We wanted to have experiences where we didn’t feel locked into expressing Judaism in only one monolithic way,” said the rabbi, who moved to Austin from San Francisco at the end of the COVID pandemic. “We wanted to experience the diversity of what it could be in this town in order to be more human and more alive.”
In a population of more than 2.5 million in the greater Austin area, more than 62,000 are Jewish. According to a recent study of Austin by the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University, 44% of Jewish adults have lived in Greater Austin for less than one decade, while just 10% were raised locally.
The Ains are two of the 11,800 who have lived in the city for less than five years – part of a larger trend of people from the coasts coming to Austin to find something more laidback and affordable. With Moontower Minyan, they are trying to infuse that vibe into Judaism, along with a healthy dose of country tunes.
Think Purim pageants with country ballads about Esther, prayers sung to bluegrass melodies or a Honky Tonk Hanukkah with two-step lessons. Ain says Moontower Minyan is doing what Diaspora Jews have always done: blending local culture and their religion. And in a city once dubbed the “Live Music Capital of the World,” a minyan would not be authentically Austin without live music.
Though services often include traditional prayers, they also include bluegrass, jazz and other melodies. In addition, congregants take turns “making offerings,” which at Moontower means taking up a mic or an instrument and joining the band.
“If you go to a traditional synagogue, you’ll often hear melodies that are German,” Ain said. “If you go to a Reform synagogue, you might hear Debbie Friedman melodies, which are from the 1960s.”
“These are aesthetic choices, and the people that I’m meeting in Texas want to figure out ‘How do we create a Jewish community that looks and feels and sounds like us without it having to be reflected through how Eastern European Jewry looked and felt?’” he added.
David Rabinowicz, 32, moved from Boston five years ago with aspirations of gaining a foothold in the music scene. He quickly found his footing, but after Oct. 7, a lot of his industry friends turned their backs.
“I lost a pretty significant amount of my community,” he said. “A lot of the arts got dominated by anti-Jewish sentiments. It became very clear to me very quickly: I wished I had invested some time into building a Jewish community, in part as a safety net, and it became clear to me that was a very important thing to me missing from my life.”
Determined to do more “Jewish things,” he attended a Shabbat dinner where he met Ain and eventually became creative director of Moontower Minyan.
“It’s done a lot for me to get to take these ostensibly different sides of my life and not only have them coexist, but actively feed off of each other,” he said.
Jew Boom
Ain, now 50, hadn’t always planned to be a rabbi. He graduated law school, took the bar exam, and was about to begin practicing in Manhattan when 9/11 happened.
“I felt a calling to serve the Jewish people, in particular those who — like me — felt called back to their faith,” he said.
The following year, Ain enrolled in rabbinical school at the Jewish Theological Seminary, part of the Conservative movement. For two decades now, he has served Jews both through traditional congregations and independent minyanim, creating start-up projects with his wife, including a Brooklyn-based group called Because Jewish, which offered musical meditations.
Raised in Long Island, he never saw himself living in the Lone Star State.
Little did he know, for more than a century, Austin had been home to a small Jewish population until 1968, when the community began to grow. Since then it has grown 20-fold, one of the fastest growing Jewish communities in the U.S. University of Texas at Austin,
the flagship of the University of Texas system, has had much to do with that growth, bringing Jewish professors and students from all over the country.
As Austin became a center for high-tech industry, more Jewish adults moved there in the 1980s to work for companies like IBM, Texas Instruments and Motorola. But it was a single company, started by a Jewish UT Austin student, Michael Dell, that really made the city’s Jewish population explode: Dell Computers.
The company transformed Austin from a medium-sized college town to a booming tech-hub, drawing workers from across the country. In 2000, Michael Dell shaped the Jewish community in another way, creating the Dell Jewish Community Campus, which hosts the city’s JCC, federation, a day school and three synagogues.
Austin saw another boom during the COVID pandemic, when the Austin metro area’s population grew by 15 %. Moving to Austin in 2022 from San Francisco where Dan was a rabbi at a Conservative congregation, the Ains became part of this boom.
But the suburban-style Texas sprawl of Austin covers nearly 320 square miles, a footprint larger than New York City. Only 13% of Austin’s Jewish
families live in close proximity to the Dell campus in northwest Austin. For the Ains and many other Austin residents, getting there is practically a road trip. That might explain in part why the Brandeis study found that only
15% of Jewish households belong to a Jewish congregation either locally or elsewhere.
Light up the Texas night
Moontower Minyan fills a void in more ways than one.
Ellie Cohen, 23, is one of the few members of Moontown who was born and raised in Austin. She left for college at the University of California in Los Angeles, then came back, hoping to take advantage of the laid back vibe and musical culture. But she discovered her hometown, whose slogan famously used to be “Keep Austin Weird,” now wasn’t all that different from other American cities with high tech hubs and corporate headquarters.
As the city has become a destination, it’s also gotten more expensive. Artists have been priced out and homegrown live music venues have shuttered. For Cohen, worshiping with Moontown Minyan conjures what she missed.
“I didn’t think Jewish life could be cool in Austin, Texas,” Cohen said. “Judaism is such an intimate way to get to
know people. I love what Moontower is doing to awaken that in a lot of people.”
Moontower Minyan’s name is inspired by Austin’s history. More than a century ago Austin erected its first “moontowers,” 165-foot steel lighting structures to light up the darkness. The city still has 17 in use today, and they even got a shout out in the film “Dazed and Confused,” where the characters party under a moontower.
Dan Ain likes the imagery of a light in the darkness: “lighting up like a menorah, wanting to light up the Texas night, is a nice feeling for us.”
The minyan’s monthly Shabbats, held at the Something Cool Studios artist collective, draw around 60 people. High Holiday services were standing room only.
The Ains are even expanding the community into the area’s Hill Country, a rapidly-growing area right outside the city.
“When you leave a service that he does, you feel really good about yourself, and you feel really good about being Jewish,” said Sarah Kline, a mother of four who lives in the Hill Country town Dripping Springs. “That’s what I want my kids to feel.”
Phill Brush, a bluegrass bassist and singer who regularly performs at Moontower Minyan, had never thought to incorporate his Judaism into this bluegrass.
“Rabbi Dan is the first rabbi I hung out with since I graduated Hebrew school,” said Brush.
“His service style is not the typical sit down and say the prayers that we always say, and do that,” said Brush. “He is building and cultivating his own style and interpretation of spirituality, especially based around art and music, which resonates with me.”
Moontower Minyan even inspired Brush to start a new band, “Old Time Religion,” which sings bluegrass songs about stories from the Hebrew Bible and has become Moontower Minyan’s house band.
At a recent Shabbat dinner with Moontower’s leadership team, Alana Joblin Ain covered her eyes as she recited the blessings over the Shabbat flames. Dan Ain blessed the wine and challah, tore the bread and tossed chunks to guests across the table as he delivered a d’var Torah based on the parsha. He compared the Tower of Babel, built after the flood, to an ancient AI data center. Both illustrate humanity’s tendency toward self-preservation and conformity in the face of fear.
“God comes down and says this is not good,” he explained. “It’s not good if we lose the point of being human, which is to express our creativity and our individuality and our humanity the way God intended.”
“If you want to think about sort of after a tragedy when a lot of people wanted to get together and express their Jewish identity,” he said, referring to Oct. 7, “we’ve begun to create a space where people can do it in a way that feels authentic.”
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Jewish voters split on giving Mamdani a second term — and see Jessica Tisch as his strongest rival, new poll shows
Jewish New Yorkers divided over Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s handling of antisemitism and criticism of Israel are also split on whether he deserves a second term, with some eyeing his Jewish police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, as a potential challenger, according to a new poll. Mamdani, the city’s first Muslim mayor, won a bitterly contested Democratic primary last year without securing a majority of Jewish voters.
The survey by Honan Strategy Group of 269 Jewish Democratic primary voters across the five boroughs, shared exclusively with the Forward, found that Tisch narrowly leads Mamdani 44% to 42% in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup for mayor in 2029.
Mamdani remains the frontrunner, according to the poll, even among Jewish Democrats in a crowded primary field that hypothetically includes three Jewish rivals. He received 44% support, compared with 25% for Tisch, 7% for City Council Speaker Julie Menin and 4% for Rep. Dan Goldman, in the poll. Another 13% were undecided.
The poll was conducted Oct. 2 through Oct. 7 via text-to-web, with a margin of error of plus or minus 6 percentage points. Among all 967 likely Democratic primary voters surveyed, Mamdani leads Tisch 54% to 17% and enjoys a 73% job approval rating. The margin of error for the overall primary voter sample was plus or minus 3.2 percentage points.
The results highlight the unusual political position of Tisch, who has become one of the most popular figures among Jewish New Yorkers while serving under a mayor whose views on Israel and handling of antisemitism have drawn widespread criticism from the community. Asked whether Mamdani should be reelected in 2029, 44% of Jewish primary voters said it was time for someone new.
But the findings also show the limits of a potential challenge.
Mamdani has a relatively stable base of Jewish support — 45% approve of his job performance, 41% favor giving him another term, and he receives between 44% and 43% in potential head-to-head matchups against Menin and City Comptroller Mark Levine, respectively.
Jewish voters make up only an estimated 16% of the primary electorate, and even before his election, Mamdani had built a coalition of Jews who support him, including some Hasidic sects that continue to embrace him. Mamdani swept progressive Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Manhattan on his way to a citywide win last November, according to analysis of election districts where at least 10% of voters have Jewish-identifiable surnames.
The results, which seem to show an increase in support for the incumbent mayor, also come nearly three years before the next mayoral election, with no indication that Tisch is considering a run.
Why Tisch stands out among Jewish voters
Tisch, who comes from a prominent Jewish family and has publicly expressed support for Israel, has emerged as a reassuring presence for many Jewish New Yorkers who have deep concerns about Mamdani’s leadership. In the poll, 51% said they disapprove of Mamdani’s job performance, including 39% who strongly disapprove.
A separate Honan poll, conducted during the same period among 503 respondents, found that nearly two-thirds of all Jewish voters disapproved of Mamdani’s handling of antisemitism. By contrast, 75% approved of Tisch’s performance on the issue.
The partnership between Mamdani and Tisch has offered political benefits to both. Earlier this year, Mamdani declined to march at the annual Celebrate Israel Parade, citing his longstanding criticism of the Israeli government. Tisch, however, marched and represented the city.
Tisch has also made her Jewish identity visible in her public role. She placed a mezuzah on the door of her NYPD office, a gesture that resonated with Jewish New Yorkers concerned about rising antisemitism. And she spoke at Central Synagogue, where she’s been a lifelong member, at Shabbat services one week after an attack in the sanctuary.
Gov. Kathy Hochul, who endorsed Mamdani after the primary, revealed in a recent interview with Politico magazine that, before offering her support, she had urged him to retain Tisch as head of the police department, citing her Jewish identity. “I thought it was very important because she’s a credible voice, she is a Jewish woman, has a successful family,” Hochul said. “It’s important that she stays. She knows her role is important. He knows her role is important.”
Asked whether Tisch might eventually run for office, Hochul said, “I don’t know, and she had an opportunity last spring if she wanted to, as well.”
Mamdani has repeatedly defended his decision to keep Tisch in her role despite pressure from his progressive allies. “Jessica Tisch is the police commissioner. I have no plans to change that,” Mamdani said at a recent press conference following an Immigration and Customs Enforcement shooting in Manhattan that sparked protests over the NYPD’s response.
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