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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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‘Blue Wave’: Israel Expands Diplomatic, Security Ties Across Latin America Amid Shifting Regional Politics
Argentine President Javier Milei speaks during a Plenum session of the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, in Jerusalem, June 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
A new wave of diplomacy in Latin America has seen several governments adopt a friendlier, more supportive stance toward Israel, deepening bilateral ties that Jerusalem is now leveraging on the global stage while signaling a potential shift in regional political alignments.
In a new interview with Israel’s Channel 12, Amir Ofek, deputy director for Latin America at Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, explained that the country is undergoing a major shift in its diplomatic engagement across the region, marked by a series of significant developments.
“There have been shifts in countries that were once our allies, and we have faced periods under very critical and challenging governments,” Ofek said. “We respond quickly to these changes, stay in close contact, and we are now beginning to make real progress.”
In a significant regional breakthrough, Israel and Bolivia formally restored diplomatic relations late last year, ending a two-year rupture sparked by the war in Gaza and reopening channels of official dialogue between the two countries.
In December, Bolivian Foreign Minister Fernando Armayo also announced that the country will lift visa requirements for Israeli travelers, a move that Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar praised as helping to “strengthen the human bridge between our peoples.”
Chile and Honduras are also leading the way among other Latin American nations making a striking turn toward Israel
Last year, Chile elected far-right President José Antonio Kast, who promised to reshape the country’s foreign policy toward the Jewish state, overturning the stance of a previously hostile administration.
This year, Honduras also chose a far-right candidate, President Nasry Asfura, who expressed hopes for a “new era” in bilateral relations and stronger ties with Jerusalem.
“The shift in Honduras is part of a broader regional trend: a ‘blue wave’ across Latin American countries that embrace freedom and democracy and align closely with US policy in the region,” Nadav Goren, Israel’s ambassador to Honduras, told Channel 12. “We are in a very optimistic period for Latin America.”
With the official launch of the Isaac Accords by Argentina’s President Javier Milei last year, Israel has been working to expand its diplomatic and security ties across the region, in an effort designed to promote government cooperation and fight antisemitism and terrorism.
Modeled after the Abraham Accords, a series of historic US-brokered normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab countries, this new initiative aims to strengthen political, economic, and cultural cooperation between the Jewish state and Latin American governments.
“Israel offers globally recognized expertise that meets the needs of many countries, covering areas such as agricultural technology, water management, food security, cybersecurity, and innovation. Partners understand that Israel can help propel them forward, even in the context of internal security,” Ofek said.
The first phase of the Isaac Accords will focus on Uruguay, Panama, and Costa Rica, where potential projects in technology, security, and economic development are already taking shape as this framework seeks to deepen cooperation in innovation, commerce, and cultural exchange.
The Isaac Accords will also aim to encourage partner countries to move their embassies to Jerusalem, formally recognize Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations, and shift longstanding anti-Israel voting patterns at the United Nations.
Less than a year after the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Argentina became the first Latin American country to designate the Palestinian Islamist group as a terrorist organization, with Paraguay following suit last year.
Building on a deepening partnership, Saar and Paraguay’s President Santiago Peña also signed a landmark security cooperation memorandum, as the two countries continue to expand their relationship following Paraguay’s move to relocate its embassy to Israel’s capital of Jerusalem in 2024.
“Over the past two very difficult years, our friendship has shown its strength through international forums, mutual cooperation, official visits, and measures against Iran. We have expressed our friendship in meaningful, if sometimes implicit, ways,” Ofek told Channel 12, referring to the country’s growing ties with Paraguay.
In recent years, Latin America has gained strategic importance for Israel as a frontline in countering Iran and its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah, whose growing influence and criminal networks in the region — especially in Venezuela and Cuba — have prompted Jerusalem to expand its diplomatic, security, and intelligence presence.
“For us, this is a circle of allies that recognizes the same threat we face from Iran’s growing influence in the region, and it is only natural to cooperate to halt its expansion,” Ofek said. “We have seen firsthand how damaging this is, particularly in the context of attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets.”
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Australian Nurses Plead Not Guilty Over Viral Video Threatening to Kill Israeli Patients
Sarah Abu Lebdeh, 27, and Ahmad Rashad Nadir, 28, face criminal charges in Australia for statements made in an online video in February 2025 in which they allegedly threatened Israelis, prompting nationwide bans from treating patients. Photo: Screenshot
Two nurses in Australia who were charged over a viral video in which they allegedly threatened to kill Israeli patients pleaded not guilty during their arraignment on Monday.
Sarah Abu Lebdeh, 27, and Ahmad Rashad Nadir, 28, previously worked at the Bankstown-Lidcombe Hospital in Sydney until appearing on a video with Israeli social media personality Max Veifer in February 2025.
The footage, which circulated widely, featured Abu Lebdeh stating she would refuse to treat an Israeli patient and would instead kill them, while Nadir used a throat-slitting gesture when he confessed to having already killed many.
“It’s Palestine’s country, not your country, you piece of s—t,” Lebdeh told Veifer.
“One day your time will come, and you will die the most disgusting death,” she added.
Veifer began asking the two during a night shift discussion how they would respond if an Israeli seeking treatment landed in their hospital. Abu Lebdeh, preempting the question, interrupted: “I won’t treat them. I’ll kill them.”
Nadir interjected: “You have no idea how many s—t dog Israelis came to this hospital,” and using a throat-slitting gesture, continued, “I sent them to Jahannam,” the Islamic word for hell.
The video went viral and sparked global outrage, prompting a two-year nationwide suspension to prevent them from continuing to treat patients.
Abu Lebdeh was charged with federal offenses, including threatening violence against a group and using a carriage service to threaten, menace, and harass.
Nadir was also charged with federal offenses, including using a carriage service to menace, harass, or cause offense, as well as possession of a prohibited drug.
Speaking before Judge Stephen Hanley at Downing Center District Court in Sydney, Abu Lebdeh appeared “with tears streaming down her face,” according to Australia’s Sky News.
The Australian reported last year that Lebdeh has expressed remorse and is now experiencing extreme anxiety. An uncle told a journalist that she “will come out and make a statement when she’s ready, but you can’t talk to her now because she’s having a panic attack, an anxiety attack. We might be calling the ambulance for her.”
Lawyer Zemarai Khatiz represents Nadir and confirmed to Sky News that the defense strategy would seek to make the video inadmissible in court.
“It will be, yes,” Khatiz stated before declining to elaborate. “You will have to just wait until the first of June when the applications are heard.”
The video drew international attention, with Israel’s deputy minister of foreign affairs, Sharren Haskel, demanding action.
“There needs to be an investigation immediately into these two Australian medical professionals who are saying they will kill Israeli patients – and suggesting that they already have,” Haskel posted on social media after the video was released. “They are expressing criminal intent towards Jewish people; this must be stopped.”
Haskel went on to declare antisemitism “a disease that is spreading in Australia,” arguing the nurses should be fired and their behavior must “be treated with the highest consequences under the law.’”
“They have broken the Hippocratic Oath,” the diplomat continued. “They have talked about killing Jews, they show the true racism and hate that the Australian Jewish community is currently enduring.”
A US-born Jewish woman who moved from Israel to Australia six years ago told The Algemeiner last year that she no longer feels safe in hospitals given the atmosphere of heightened antisemitism.
“In the past year alone, my little boy has witnessed many hostile protests where ‘anti-Zionists’ have actually come into the Jewish community without permits to intimidate us. Time and time again, instead of [authorities] dispersing and arresting anyone in the crowd for screaming racial slurs and threats, Jews are asked to evacuate and told if they don’t run away, they are inciting violence,” the woman said.
“Now they actually brag online about killing Israeli patients,” she continued, referring to the case in Australia. “I don’t know how safe I would feel giving birth at that hospital.”
Following the video’s exposure and international condemnation, a group of 50 Muslim leaders and organizations came together in defense of Abu Lebdeh and Nadir. “This statement is not about defending inappropriate remarks,” the coalition wrote in a letter. “It is about pushing back against the double standards and moral manipulation at play while the mass killing of our brothers and sisters in Gaza is met with silence, dismissal, or complicity.”
The district court scheduled the suspended nurses’ trial for Aug. 31 with an anticipated five days of arguments and deliberations. A pre-trial hearing will take place on June 1.
The charges against Abu Lebdeh and Nadir reflect a global trend that has emerged since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel wherein medical practitioners come under scrutiny or even legal prosecutions following the exposure of antisemitic statements and behavior.
One notable case drawing attention involved Dr. Rahmeh Aladwan, a trainee trauma and orthopedic surgeon, who British police arrested on Oct. 21, charging her with four offenses related to malicious communications and inciting racial hatred. In November, she was suspended from practicing medicine in the UK over social media posts denigrating Jews and celebrating Hamas’s terrorism. She also described London’s Royal Free Hospital as “a Jewish supremacy cesspit” and declared her belief that “over 90% of the world’s Jews are genocidal.”
That same month, UK Health Secretary Wes Streeting called it “chilling” that some members of the Jewish community fear discrimination within the National Health Service (NHS)., amid reports of widespread antisemitism in Britain’s health-care system.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer unveiled a new plan in October to address what he described as “just too many examples, clear examples, of antisemitism that have not been dealt with adequately or effectively” in the NHS.
Another notable incident occurred in September, when a Belgian doctor reportedly listed “Jewish (Israeli)” as a medical problem in a child’s report.
Jewish writer Jonath Weinberger, a dual Belgian-Israeli citizen living in Amsterdam, recounted an episode in November about a nurse denying her medical care after refusing to remove a pro-Palestinian button
In Argentina, a Buenos Aires doctor received a suspension following a social media post in which he wrote about Jews that “instead of performing circumcision, their carotid artery and main artery should be cut from side to side.”
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‘Don’t be a wimp’: Josh Shapiro, Philly DA Larry Krasner spar over ICE-Nazi comparisons
(JTA) — The Jewish governor of Pennsylvania this week rebuked one of his state’s most visible elected officials for comparing ICE officers to Nazis, leading to a protracted war of words between the two men.
The spat between Josh Shapiro and Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, Democrats with a long-running rivalry, comes amid a rise in such incendiary comparisons used to describe weeks of chaotic Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz recently invoked Anne Frank when discussing ICE, and was criticized by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, among others. Celebrities like Bruce Springsteen and Stephen King have also compared ICE to the Gestapo. Some Jews, including those with connections to the Holocaust, have also made such comparisons as ICE’s behavior in the streets of Minneapolis and other cities has become more aggressive and deadly.
For Shapiro, such waters are proving especially difficult to navigate. Shapiro holds higher office aspirations and has become more vocal in his criticisms of ICE in recent days while also saying his office is more open to collaboration with agents.
The fight began last week when Krasner, a pugilistic progressive prosecutor, called ICE “a small bunch of wannabe Nazis” at a rally amid speculation that ICE could turn its attentions to his city. Then, musing about when Trump’s term ends, Krasner likened his own office to Nazi hunters like Simon Wiesenthal.
“If we have to hunt you down the way they hunted down Nazis for decades, we will find your identities, we will find you, we will achieve justice and we will do so under the Constitution and the laws of the United States,” he said.
Shapiro, in response, called Krasner’s comments “abhorrent” and “wrong, period.”
“We need to bring down the rhetoric, bring down the temperature, and create calm in the community,” the governor said in an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier.
Other state officials, including Democratic Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, who has vocally allied with the pro-Israel Jewish community, also condemned Krasner’s remarks. So did the White House, whose press secretary Karoline Leavitt shared video of Krasner’s comments and asked, “Will the media ask Dems to condemn?”
That didn’t deter Krasner, the son of an Evangelical minister mother and Russian Jewish crime novelist father who enlisted to fight Nazis in World War II. Instead of “bringing down the temperature,” the DA, who does not identify as Jewish, escalated.
“Gov. Shapiro is not meeting the moment,” Krasner told the Philadelphia Inquirer Tuesday. “The moment requires that we call a subgroup of people within federal law enforcement — who are killing innocent people, physically assaulting innocent people, threatening and punishing the use of video — what they are.”
He added, “Just say it. Don’t be a wimp.”
The interview came days after Krasner doubled down on ICE-Nazi comparisons during a CNN appearance, when he also claimed that white supremacists had threatened him with the gas chamber.
“There are some people who are all in on a fascist takeover of this country who do not like the comparisons to what happened in Nazi Germany,” Krasner told Kaitlan Collins on Thursday. “The reality is, they’re taking almost everything they do out of the Nazi playbook. And I say that as the son of a volunteer who served in World War II, who explained his experiences to me.”
Speaking to the Inquirer, Crasher went on to quote Rabbi Joachim Prinz, who fled Nazi Germany for the United States, became a civil rights and Zionist activist, and delivered a famous speech entitled “The Problem of Silence” at the March on Washington in 1963.
“Bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problem,” the DA quoted Prinz. “The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful, and the most tragic problem is silence.”
Krasner continued, “A reminder, Mr. Governor: Silence equals death.” Referring to ICE, he said, “These are people who have taken their moves from a Nazi playbook and a fascist playbook.”
The two men have longstanding differences, and it’s not the first time Nazis have come between them. In 2019, when Shapiro — then the state’s attorney general — hired away some of Krasner’s staff, Krasner and his remaining staff referred to them as “war criminals” and joked that they had fled to “Paraguay” (a country that housed fleeing Nazis after World War II). The joke received pushback at the time from the Anti-Defamation League.
Jews have been caught up in the fight against ICE in a myriad of ways. On Tuesday, the Washington Post reported that a British Jewish immigrant to suburban Philadelphia was subpoenaed by the Department of Homeland Security. Identified in reports only as Jon, the former Soviet Jewry activist had written a critical email to a federal prosecutor about his handling of an Afghan immigration case.
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