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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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The post A Jewish journalist takes sides in America’s ‘slow civil war’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Stop Letting Israel’s Enemies Write the Dictionary
The Western Wall and Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
When people chant “From the river to the sea,” they pair it with familiar phrases: “Palestinian” land, “occupied Palestinian territories,” “indigenous Palestinians,” and “settler-colonial Jews.”
Most people argue about the slogans and maps. Far fewer ask a prior question: Who wrote the dictionary that makes those slogans sound plausible?
For decades, Israel’s enemies have understood something many Jews and Israel-supporters have missed: if you control the language, you control the story. Define the key terms and you can turn an ancient indigenous people into supposed foreign invaders and recast repeated wars of annihilation against Israel as “anti-colonial resistance.”
To say that “Palestinian” is a political brand is not to deny that there are real Arabic-speaking people who today live under that name. The question is how this identity was framed and to what end.
During the latter half of the 20th century, “Palestinian” was carefully positioned as the indigenous victim of Zionist “intruders,” even though the Jewish people’s presence in the Land of Israel predates Islam, Arab nationalism, and the modern state system by millennia.
For centuries, under various empires, Jews and Arabs lived in the broader region that Europeans later (and briefly) called “Palestine.”
There was no sovereign “Palestinian” state and no distinct “Palestinian” nationality in the modern sense. Those constructs were shaped in the mid-20th century as part of a strategy to turn repeated Arab attempts to destroy the Jewish State into a moral story of dispossession.
“Palestinian” was not simply discovered; it was branded, a label that let Arab leaders and their allies invert reality: the side that tried, again and again, to wipe out the Jews of Israel would now be cast as the timeless victim of “foreign” Jews who supposedly have no home there at all.
How “occupied Palestinian territories” rewrites history
The phrase “occupied Palestinian territories” flows off the tongue so easily that people rarely ask what it means.
Before 1967, Judea and Samaria were annexed by Jordan, and the Gaza Strip was under Egyptian control. Neither Arab state created a sovereign “Palestinian” entity there.
Before that, the area was “owned” by the British Mandate, and before that, the Ottoman Empire. There has never been an independent “Palestinian” state whose recognized sovereign territory Israel is supposedly occupying.
Yet by repeating “occupied Palestinian territories,” these activists import a package deal: that there once was a “Palestinian” state; that the land in question is inherently and exclusively “Palestinian,” despite its deep Jewish history; and that Israel’s presence there is automatically illegal, regardless of how it came about or what the real legal debates are.
The phrase “occupied Palestinian territories” is not neutral; it is a weapon. It erases Jewish indigeneity to places whose Hebrew names — Judea and Samaria — tell their own story. It suggests that Jews crossing an invisible line on the western bank of the Jordan River are “settlers,” while Arabs are always “natives,” no matter when their families arrived. On campus and in much of the media, this vocabulary is treated as settled fact. But that’s not truth — it’s narrative.
From the seminar room to the street
Weaponized language does not stay confined to UN resolutions or academic journals. It shapes how ordinary people think and feel. When a student hears, year after year, that Israel is a “settler-colonial” project oppressing “indigenous Palestinians,” he or she is being given a moral script: Jews are the guilty party; Arab violence is an understandable reaction to “occupation”; and terrorism against Jews is justified “resistance.”
So what can be done? We cannot force hostile actors to abandon terms that serve their agenda. But we can stop doing their work for them.
First, we must recognize that words like “Palestinian,” “occupation,” and “settler-colonialism” are not neutral. They come packaged with stories about history, power, and morality. If those stories are false or one-sided, we have a responsibility to say so.
Second, we should speak accurately about the land itself. Instead of reflexively saying “West Bank,” we can talk about Judea and Samaria, or at least about disputed territories captured in a defensive war, rather than “occupied Palestinian territories.” Rather than treating “Palestinian” as a synonym for indigeneity, we can speak of Arab residents of Judea and Samaria and Arab Israelis, alongside Jewish communities with deep roots there. Third, we should unapologetically affirm Jewish indigeneity. Jews are not recent “European imports” into the Middle East. Our ancestral language, scriptures, and rituals are woven into the geography of Israel itself. The burden of proof should not rest on Jews to justify their presence in Jerusalem, Hebron, or Shiloh.
Finally, communal leaders, journalists, and educators must become more intentional about the language they use. It is not pedantic to insist on accurate terminology. It is strategic.
If we care about truth — and about the safety and legitimacy of the Jewish people — we cannot afford to keep speaking in our adversaries’ vocabulary. In every generation, Jews have had to push back against efforts to write us out of our own story. Today, that effort happens with hashtags, slogans, and selective “human rights” language, as much as with bullets and rockets.
We do not have to accept a dictionary written by those who want to annihilate us. We can tell the truth plainly: Jews are indigenous to the Land of Israel, and we will not surrender that reality to anyone’s branding campaign — no matter how sophisticated their propaganda might be.
David E. Firester, Ph.D., is the Founder and CEO of TRAC Intelligence, LLC, and the author of Failure to Adapt: How Strategic Blindness Undermines Intelligence, Warfare, and Perception (2025).
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The Jewish ‘Bubble’ — and Why It Still Matters for Our Future
Muhlenberg College students leaving for a Birthright Israel trip.
Photo: Facebook via Hillel: Taglit-Birthright Israel.
One of the most revealing questions you can ask a Jewish college student today is not what they think about Israel or how they view campus politics. It is whether they ever lived inside a real Jewish world before arriving at school.
Dan Senor‘s three touchstones — Jewish day school, Jewish summer camp, and a meaningful trip to Israel — turn out to be less about nostalgia than about survival. As antisemitism continues to erupt across America’s elite campuses, the students who remain confident, anchored, and unafraid are almost always those who experienced these “Jewish bubbles” long before anyone tried to tell them what being Jewish should mean.
I saw this long before I became a professor embedded in the world of higher education.
In my essay “High School Should Be Upsetting,” I wrote about attending Akiba Hebrew Academy — a pluralistic Jewish day school outside of Philadelphia — where nothing was uniform and everything required thinking. Some classmates kept kosher; others grabbed pizza and burgers freely. Some welcomed Shabbat with reverence; others barely thought about it. These were not superficial differences. They forced us into the daily work of argument, interpretation, and meaning-making. We learned that Jewish identity can withstand disagreement — that disagreement is itself a generative part of Jewish life. That formation did not insulate me from the world. It prepared me for it.
It also gave me something deeper. As I argued recently in “The Lessons We Were Taught and the Ones Being Forgotten,” Jewish classrooms once fused the study of prophets with photographs of Auschwitz, maps of Israel, and the trembling voices of survivors.
We learned early that justice without memory collapses into performance, that Jewish survival is not just historical but moral, and that being a Jew means carrying responsibility, not merely sentiment. These lessons were not designed to make us comfortable. They were designed to make us serious. That seriousness — an identity rooted in obligation rather than performance — is exactly what steadies young Jews today when campus climates turn hostile or morally confused.
Senor’s intuition about the “bubble” is more than anecdotal. It is empirically true. Jewish day school graduates consistently exhibit higher levels of Jewish literacy, deeper ritual practice, and stronger communal commitment, according to decades of Avi Chai Foundation research.
Jewish summer camps extend that formation into adolescence; the Foundation for Jewish Camp has repeatedly shown that alumni maintain Jewish friendships at dramatically higher rates and build Jewish homes of their own with greater confidence and intention. These friendships become ballast — the quiet, steadying presence of peers who share memory and meaning.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks captured the heart of this when he wrote, “Moses and Aaron epitomize the two great roles in Jewish continuity — horim and morim — parents and teachers. A parent hands on the Jewish heritage to their children; a teacher does likewise to their disciples.” That investment — of presence, attention, and seriousness — is exactly what day schools, camps, youth groups, and Israel programs offer when they are at their best. They do not simply transmit heritage; they cultivate character. They shape conscience. They give young Jews a framework sturdy enough to meet the world without losing themselves.
Israel trips add something irreplaceable: narrative consciousness. Research on Birthright and other immersive Israel programs shows that participants return with a firmer sense of peoplehood, greater historical awareness, and a deeper understanding that being Jewish is a source of responsibility rather than defensiveness. Students who have walked the streets of Jerusalem or listened to the wind on the Golan Heights are not easily undone by slogans or distortions. They have seen complexity — and beauty — for themselves.
These experiences form a pipeline. Day schools cultivate literacy. Camps cultivate community. Israel cultivates memory. Together, they produce adults who are not bewildered by the demands of identity but strengthened by them. When students have studied texts, lived in Jewish community, and seen Jewish history with their own eyes, they carry an inner architecture that does not collapse when external pressure rises.
That was the theme running through the 2025 Tikvah Jewish Leadership Conference, where Senor spoke to a standing-room crowd. Again and again, speakers returned to the same truth: Jewish continuity will not be secured through slogans or reactive outrage. It will be secured through communities and institutions that form Jews — thickly, relationally, substantively. The future belongs to those who build Jewish life with depth, not performance.
And yet we find ourselves in a moment when the very infrastructure that sustains Jewish identity is thinning. Too many families treat day school as a luxury, camp as optional, Israel trips as politically fraught, and synagogue life as intermittent. Young Jews arrive on campus with warm feelings but thin foundations — a Judaism made of nostalgia rather than knowledge. Then the pressure comes, from peers and professors alike, and the identity that once felt easy suddenly feels fragile.
The greatest threat to young Jews today is not a lack of passion. It is a lack of preparation. Jewish identity cannot be episodic. It cannot survive on aesthetic appreciation or occasional observance. It flourishes when it is lived — daily, joyfully, rigorously, and in the company of others. If we want Jewish students to stand tall under pressure, then we must give them foundations deep enough to bear the weight.
Senor’s questions are diagnostic. They reveal whether a young Jew has ever inhabited a Jewish world strong enough to carry them through a hostile one. They show whether a student possesses not just ancestry but anchoring, not just identity but backbone.
The “bubble” is not a retreat from reality. It is preparation for reality. It is where young Jews learn who they are before others attempt to define them. And at a moment when antisemitism is rising, institutions are wobbling, and confusion is spreading, we should not apologize for strengthening these bubbles. We should expand them — boldly.
If we want confident, resilient, morally serious Jewish adults, we must give them confident, resilient, morally serious Jewish childhoods. Identity does not appear out of thin air. It is formed — deliberately, lovingly, and over time.
The bubble, it turns out, is not the weakness our critics imagine.
It is the most important thing we still know how to build.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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France Claims Palestinian Authority Wants Peace — Here Is Proof It Continues to Support Terrorism
French President Emmanuel Macron welcomes Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, Nov. 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Benoit Tessier
Ever since French President Emmanuel Macron recognized a Palestinian state, claiming that Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Mahmoud Abbas “condemns terrorism,” supports “demilitarization,” and shows a “genuine willingness to move forward,” the PA’s official and controlled media outlets continue to constantly glorify terrorists, praise violence, and present “armed struggle,” i.e., terrorism, as the core of Palestinian identity.
Nothing in the PA’s messaging has changed since France supported a Palestinian state. In fact, the months following Macron’s declaration show the exact opposite.
One of the clearest examples came when official PA TV aired a glowing tribute to poet and Fatah member Salah Al-Din Al-Husseini, the writer of one of the Palestinians’ many iconic terror-promotion songs, My Weapon Has Emerged From My Wounds.
The song, which Palestinian Media Watch has documented being broadcast hundreds of times on PA TV and Fatah’s Awdah TV, is a musical celebration of the gun, bloodshed, and “Martyrdom.”
In the new PA TV report, the song was played over archival footage of weapons training while the narrator proudly highlighted its message.
The lyrics openly endorse the ideology of permanent armed struggle and blood sacrifice, followed by Al-Husseini himself reciting another poem praising the “blood of the Martyr” as “music” and a force that “shakes the enemies”:
From my wounds, my weapon has emerged
Oh, our revolution, my weapon has emerged
There is no force in the world that can remove the weapon from my hand
There is no force in the world that can remove the weapon from my hand
My weapon has emerged
My weapon has emerged
He who offers his blood does not care if his blood flows upon the ground
As the weapon of the revolution is in my hand, so my presence will be forced [upon Israel]
My weapon has emerged
My weapon has emerged
Poet Salah Al-Din Al-Husseini: “The blood of the Martyr — O my song — shines above the peaks, the blood of the Martyr is music, the sacrifice shakes the enemies.”
[Official PA TV, The Story of a Homeland, Nov. 23, 2025]
In addition, senior PA and Fatah leaders, such as Jibril Rajoub and Laila Ghannam, have continued holding mass rallies devoted entirely to honoring convicted terrorist murderers.
These rallies are shown on official PA TV, and the terrorist prisoners are called “national icons,” “a source of pride and glory for all our people,” and authors of “an epic of heroism.”
The PA reporters frame these terrorists as “important leaders” under Israeli “aggression,” further presenting the murderers as victims and heroes simultaneously, which is a classic component of PA terror promotion.
Official PA TV newsreader: “In response to the call of the Fatah Movement… residents and family members of prisoners [i.e. terrorists] participated in several districts in rallies to express support and solidarity with the prisoners… and the prisoner leaders inside the occupation’s prisons, foremost among them leader Marwan Barghouti. In El-Bireh a popular procession took place, attended by several members of the Fatah Central Committee and the [Fatah] Revolutionary Council.”
Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub: “[This is a rally of support] for the prisoners and their family members, as these people are national icons deeply rooted in the consciousness of all the Palestinians.”
Visual:
The poster shows terrorist prisoner Marwan Barghouti making a “V” for “victory.”
Text on poster: “Freedom for heroic prisoner Marwan Barghouti”
Official PA TV reporter: “Participants in this support rally raised banners and pictures of leader symbol Barghouti…z’
Ramallah and El-Bireh District Governor Laila Ghannam: “Marwan is the symbol of the Palestinian prisoner… The Palestinian people supports the prisoners who are a source of pride and glory for all our people …”
Official PA TV reporter: “The occupation regime is taking aggressive steps against the prisoners and their important leaders, who are writing an epic of heroism.” [emphasis added]
Visual:
The posters feature terrorist prisoner Walid Daqqa, who murdered one person and terrorist prisoner Jum’a Adam, who murdered five.
Text on poster on left: “The Palestinian Prisoners’ Club: Freedom for prisoner Walid Nimr Daqqa”
Text on poster on right: “Palestinian Prisoners’ Club: Freedom for prisoner Jum’a Ibrahim Adam”
[Official PA TV News, Aug. 20, 2025]
Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida praised a Jenin rally organized by Fatah, the PLO factions, the Prisoners’ Club, and the Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs — all PA-funded or PA-aligned bodies — and celebrated the terrorist prisoners by calling them “knights” who are “awaiting the breaking of their chains”:
At the entrance to the old market of Jenin … the rally was colored with images of the symbols of the prisoners’ movement, foremost among them Fatah Central Committee member Marwan Barghouti, Fatah Secretary in Jenin Ata Abu Rmeileh, journalist Ali Al-Samoudi, and dozens of knights awaiting the breaking of their chains.
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Dec. 1, 2025]
Macron and other Western leaders claimed Abbas condemns terrorism.
The ongoing glorification of terrorist murderers as heroes, icons, symbols, “knights,” and “leaders,” combined with PA TV’s public celebration of armed struggle and “Martyrdom,” shows clearly that the PA has no interest in rejecting terror and has implemented no reforms whatsoever regarding its terror promotion. It is the same terror ideology that the PA has promoted for decades.
Ephraim D. Tepler is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). Itamar Marcus is the Founder and Director of PMW, where a version of this article first appeared.