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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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Trump Says Iran Can Phone If It Wants to talk; Iranian Minister Heads to Russia
US President Donald Trump speaks about research into mental health treatments in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, April 18, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Nathan Howard
President Donald Trump said on Sunday Iran could telephone if it wants to negotiate an end to their two-month war and stressed it can never have a nuclear weapon, after Tehran said the US should remove obstacles to a deal, including its blockade of Iran’s ports.
Hopes of reviving peace efforts receded on Saturday when Trump scrapped a visit to Islamabad by his envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi shuttled to and from mediators Pakistan and Oman on Sunday before heading to Russia, where he is due to meet President Vladimir Putin.
Oil prices rose, the dollar inched higher and US stock futures wobbled lower in early Asia trade on Monday after the peace talks stalled, leaving Gulf shipping blocked.
“If they want to talk, they can come to us, or they can call us. You know, there is a telephone. We have nice, secure lines,” Trump told “The Sunday Briefing” on Fox News.
“They know what has to be in the agreement. It’s very simple: They cannot have a nuclear weapon, otherwise there’s no reason to meet,” Trump said.
Axios reported on Sunday, citing an unnamed US official and two sources with knowledge of the matter, that Iran gave the US a new proposal through Pakistani mediators on reopening the Strait of Hormuz and the ending of the war, with nuclear negotiations postponed for a later stage. The US State Department and White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the report.
Iran has long demanded Washington acknowledge its right to enrich uranium, which Tehran says it only seeks for peaceful purposes, but which Western powers say is aimed at building nuclear weapons.
Although a ceasefire has paused full‑scale fighting in the conflict, which began with US-Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28, no agreement has been reached on terms to end a war that has killed thousands, driven up oil prices, fueled inflation and darkened the outlook for global growth.
TRUMP FACES DOMESTIC PRESSURE TO END WAR
With his approval ratings falling, Trump faces domestic pressure to end the unpopular war. Iran’s leaders, though weakened militarily, have found leverage in negotiations with their ability to stop shipping in the economically vital Strait of Hormuz, which normally carries a fifth of global oil shipments.
Tehran has largely closed the strait while Washington has imposed a blockade of Iranian ports.
Before heading to Russia, Araqchi returned to Islamabad after holding talks on Sunday in Oman.
Iranian state media said Araqchi discussed security in the strait with Omani leader Haitham bin Tariq al-Said and called for a regional security framework free of outside interference.
Araqchi said on X that the focus of his Oman talks “included ways to ensure safe transit that is to benefit of all dear neighbors and the world.”
Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency said topics for Araqchi’s talks with Pakistani officials included “implementing a new legal regime over the Strait of Hormuz, receiving compensation, guaranteeing no renewed military aggression by warmongers, and lifting the naval blockade.”
Iran’s envoy in Russia, Kazem Jalali, said in a post on X that Araqchi would meet with Putin “in continuation of the diplomatic jihad to advance the country’s interests and amid external threats.”
“Iran and Russia are present in a united front in the campaign of the world’s totalitarian forces against independent and justice-seeking countries, as well as countries that seek a world free from unilateralism and Western domination,” Jalali said.
On Saturday, Trump said he canceled his envoys’ visit due to too much travel and expense for what he considered an inadequate Iranian offer. Iran “offered a lot, but not enough,” he said.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian told Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif by phone on Saturday that Tehran would not enter “imposed negotiations” under threats or blockade, an Iranian statement said.
He said the United States should first remove obstacles, including its maritime blockade, before negotiators could begin laying the groundwork for a settlement.
US AND IRAN HAVE EXTENSIVE DISAGREEMENTS
Disagreements between the US and Iran extend beyond Tehran’s nuclear program and control of the strait.
Trump wants to limit Iran’s support for its regional proxies, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, and curb its ability to strike US allies with ballistic missiles. Iran wants sanctions lifted and an end to Israeli attacks on Hezbollah.
After the latest diplomatic trip was called off, two US Air Force C-17s carrying security staff, equipment and vehicles used to protect US officials flew out of Pakistan, two Pakistani government sources told Reuters on Sunday.
Trump said on Saturday there was “tremendous infighting and confusion” within Iran’s leadership.
Pezeshkian said last week there were “no hardliners or moderates” in Tehran and that the country stood united behind its supreme leader.
The war has destabilized the Middle East. Iran has struck its Gulf neighbors and conflict between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon has been reignited.
In Lebanon, Israeli strikes killed 14 people and wounded 37 on Sunday, the health ministry said.
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Seismic shift in Israeli politics as opposition leaders Lapid and Bennett form joint party
(JTA) — Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett teamed up once before to unseat Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, striking an unusual power-sharing deal after Israel’s 2021 election that briefly ousted Netanyahu from power.
Now, the two men are going even further in seeking to repeat their feat. Lapid and Bennett announced on Sunday that they would run in this year’s election in a shared party called Yachad, or Together.
“Our unity is a message to the entire people of Israel: The era of division is over. The era of correction has arrived,” Bennett said at a press conference announcing the collaboration.
The two men are betting that Israelis will see their coming together as an antidote to the polarization that has deepened under Netanyahu, who was reelected in late 2022 after an 18-month interlude in which Bennett was prime minister for a year and Lapid for six months. They hope that Lapid’s centrist supporters and Bennett’s center-right backers can overlook policy differences, which they acknowledged, for the greater good of the country.
Their announcement invigorated some Israelis on Sunday who believe it is essential to unseat Netanyahu, who has been prime minister for about 14 of the last 17 years and who is facing both criminal prosecution and calls to reckon with the security failures that led to Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Many of them are willing to make compromises on policy nuances to achieve that goal.
But the union also ignited scorn on the right, as even some who might prefer to see Netanyahu unseated said they could no longer support Bennett if he is working with Lapid, whom they perceive as left-wing. Both Netanyahu and his far-right coalition partners posted on social media suggesting that Yachad would partner with Arab parties or even do the bidding of the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, posted an AI-generated image of Abbas presiding at a wedding of Lapid and Bennett, whom he called “an extreme leftist.”
Neither Bennett nor Lapid has prioritized resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or supported the creation of a Palestinian state. Their 2021 coalition included an Israeli Arab party.
Current polls show that the two men alone would not garner enough votes to be able to form a coalition on their own this year. But they could negotiate to add other parties to reach a governing majority either before or after the election, which must be held before the end of October. Gadi Eisenkot, a former army chief of staff who launched his own party last year, reportedly called for a three-way union earlier this year.
Their union in some ways resembles the pre-election alliance-building conducted by Peter Magyar in Hungary, who recently unseated Netanyahu’s ally Viktor Orban there. Many Israeli critics of the current government see the election in Hungary as a template for what could happen in Israel.
In the lead-up to the Yachad announcement, Bennett in particular announced some personal policy shifts that could make him more palatable to centrist and non-Orthodox voters. He said that he would now support same-sex unions in Israel and back public transportation operating on Shabbat.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Seismic shift in Israeli politics as opposition leaders Lapid and Bennett form joint party appeared first on The Forward.
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His kippah was a symbol of coexistence. Israeli police officers seized and destroyed it.
(JTA) — Alex Sinclair had no idea what would follow when he posted a picture of his mutilated kippah to Facebook on Thursday.
Sinclair, who lives in central Israel, described being detained by police officers who told him that his kippah, which had both the Israeli and Palestinian flags woven in, was illegal. When he was released from their custody, he was allowed to take his kippah home — but only after the Palestinian flag was cut out, leaving him with roughly half a head-covering.
To Sinclair, a British-born writer and educator whose books include “Loving the Real Israel: An Educational Agenda for Liberal Zionism,” the situation was galling, and not just because he had been accused of breaking a law that does not exist.
“She’d taken my possession, a religious ritual object, something that is very dear to my heart, and destroyed it,” he wrote about the officer who returned his kippah. He added, “That was it. I walked home, shaken, angry, depressed.”
A day after publishing his account of the encounter, eliciting hundreds of almost universally supportive comments, Sinclair said he had not heard from anyone in the government about his Facebook post or the complaint he filed on the Israel Police website.
But he had gotten offers of legal aid; calls from left-wing politicians, including Yair Golan; and even Shabbat flowers from a prominent liberal activist. His phone had been ringing off the hook with calls from journalists, and someone he barely knows was planning a rally for outside the police station in Modiin where he was detained.
“I’ve never experienced anything like this,” Sinclair said in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday afternoon.
The Israel Police has acknowledged the incident, saying publicly that a man had been detained after they were contacted about his kippah and had been released “following a clarification process.” They said the official complaint about the incident prevented further comment.
Sinclair said he thought the image of the defiled kippah was resonant for Jews who instinctively associated it with centuries of antisemitism. But he said he wondered whether the depth of the response reflected something else, too.
After the ceasefire in the Iran war, Israelis were “beginning to be able to breathe a little bit and look above the parapet and just sort of see, OK, maybe we can start to think about the future in a way that we really weren’t able to as a society for the past couple of years,” he said. Now, the thought for many is: “If we are looking ahead, oh my God, is this what is in store for us?”
The incident comes amid a broad crackdown on Palestinian symbols in public spaces, and allegations that police, who have come under the control of a far-right minister, are increasingly intimidating liberal activists.
Soon after being named national security minister in January 2023, Itamar Ben-Gvir told Israeli police officers to exercise wide latitude in removing Palestinian national flags from public places in order to preserve public order. He characterized the flag as a terrorist symbol, even though it is legal in Israel.
“It cannot be that lawbreakers wave terrorist flags, incite and encourage terrorism, so I ordered the removal of flags supporting terrorism from the public space and to stop the incitement against Israel,” he said at the time. Following the Oct. 7 attack on Israel later that year, the crackdown intensified even more.
During the same period, the police have been accused of using inappropriate force against people protesting against the right-wing government. Sinclair said he was concerned about the threats to liberal values in his chosen country.
“The job as a police officer is not to police people’s political opinions,” he said. “That happens in other countries that we don’t want to become.”
Among the hundreds of people responding to Sinclair’s Facebook post were many who echoed that sentiment — even while saying they did not share his appreciation for the Palestinian flag. (Elsewhere in Israel and online, Sinclair drew more scorn.)
“While I don’t agree with your choice of kippa, I do agree you have every right to wear it,” wrote one commenter. “This is awful and I’m sorry you experienced it. And I hate that this is where we are now, that someone could be detained for something like this.”
Gilad Kariv, a Reform rabbi and member of the opposition in Israel’s parliament, said in a statement that there was “systemic madness” within the Israel Police and that he believed a criminal investigation and civil lawsuit would be appropriate. He also called for introspection.
“If police officers had cut off a Jew’s kippah in any other country in the world, there would have been an uproar here in Israel,” Kariv wrote.
Sinclair said the kippah that was destroyed was not his first with the same design. After the wind blew away the first one, which he had custom-made by a popular Jerusalem vendor nearly 20 years ago, he ordered a replacement — that’s how motivated he was to wear his values on his head.
“I’m a Zionist, and I believe in the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in this part of their historic homeland. And I also think that the Palestinians are also people who have a right to self-determination in part of this place, which is also their historic homeland,” Sinclair said.
“By the ironies of history, the same chunk of land ended up being a place where two peoples have a legitimate connection, and we have to figure that out,” he continued. “People from both sides who want to delegitimize or erase the other side forget about whether they’re being nice or nasty; they’re just not being true to history.”
That was once a relatively widely held view among Israelis and Jews around the world. But decades of failed peace efforts, violent attacks on Israelis from Palestinian terrorists, and increasing extremism among both Jews and Arabs have caused a two-state solution to fall sharply out of favor during that period.
Sinclair says he sees himself as a peace activist, though he called the term “grandiose” and said, “I’ve got a lot of respect for people whose life is much more about the activism than mine.”
What he is, he says, is a Jew who loves Israel and is scared for its future. His next book, out this fall, will tackle what he believes is “a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people,” a topic on which he has suddenly become an unwilling case study.
On one side, he said, are far-right extremists, including Ben-Gvir, who “want a kind of Judaism and an Israel which doesn’t have a place for all kinds of things that feel very important to me,” including egalitarianism, Palestinians and left-leaning politics. (That side, he noted, is currently advancing legislation that would ban egalitarian prayer at the Western Wall.) On the other, he said, are those who promote an Israel that “is open and pluralist,” one in which people tolerate people who practice Judaism in ways they would not and hold values they do not.
“We’re in a struggle between these two versions of Judaism and versions of Zionism,” Sinclair said. “I very much hope that we’ll win the struggle. I think it’s not too late to win that struggle. … But it’s not a slam-dunk. And we, the Jewish people, are in real trouble if we lose.”
Sinclair believes his book could help turn that lofty vision into a how-to guide for Israeli liberals. But he also has more practical concerns, like where to get another kippah. He isn’t sure the vendor who made it before will be willing to do so again. And this time, it’s not just him but many of his friends who say they are interested in getting their hands on one.
“Some bright lefty entrepreneur,” he joked, “has got a big money-making opportunity there.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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