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A scholar sees a common root for antisemitism and racism: ‘Christian supremacy’
(JTA) — Magda Teter’s new book, “Christian Supremacy,” begins in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 11, 2017. Hundreds of white nationalist neo-Nazis who ostensibly gathered to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee from a local park broke into a chant: “Jews will not replace us.”
Other writers and scholars would note how antisemitism shaped white nationalism. But Teter, professor of history and the Shvidler Chair of Judaic Studies at Fordham University, saw something else: how centuries of Christian thought and practice fed the twin evils of antisemitism and racism.
“The ideology espoused by white supremacists in the US and in Europe is rooted in Christian ideas of social and religious hierarchy,” she writes. “These ideas developed, gradually, first in the Mediterranean and Europe in respect to Jews and then in respect to people of color in European colonies and in the US, before returning transformed back to Europe.”
In the book, subtitled “Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism,” she traces this idea from the writings of the early church fathers like Paul the Apostle, though centuries of Catholic and Protestant debates over the status of Jews in Europe, to the hardening of racist attitudes with the rise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Antisemitic laws and theology, she argues, developed within Christianity a “mental habit” of exclusion and dominance that would eventually be applied to people of color up to and including modern times.
Teter is careful to acknowledge the different forms antisemitism and racism have taken, distinguishing between the Jews’ experience of social and legal exclusion and near annihilation, and the enslavement, displacement and ongoing persecution of Black people. And yet, she writes, “that story began with Christianity’s theological relation with Jews and Judaism.”
Teter is previously the author of “Blood Libel: On The Trail of an Antisemitic Myth,” winner of the 2020 National Jewish Book Award. At Fordham, the Catholic university in the Bronx, she is helping assemble what may be the largest repository of artifacts and literature dedicated to the Jewish history of the borough.
We spoke Thursday about how groups like the Proud Boys embrace centuries-old notions of Christian superiority, how “whiteness” became a thing and how she, as a non-Jew raised in Poland, became a Jewish studies scholar.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Your book was conceived and written during the COVID lockdown. Where did the idea for the book come from?
It’s an accidental project. I’ve been teaching the history of antisemitism for years, and I live in Harlem so questions of race and racism are very stark in my daily life. And since I grew up in Poland, and American history was not something we were taught or studied, I’ve never been satisfied with the various explanations for the strength of antisemitism and history of racism. And as I mentioned in my prologue, I watched the Raoul Peck documentary, “I Am Not Your Negro,” which has a clip with James Baldwin saying that white people have to figure out why they invented the idea of the N-word and must “embrace this stranger that they have maligned so long.” You could also say that the European Christians created the idea of “the Jew” and that sort of caricature had absolutely nothing to do with flesh and blood Jews. I kept noticing these parallels, as an outsider, reading American and African-American history.
I was also thinking about this idea of servitude that was attached to Jews in Christian theology, and then in law.
You write in your book that “Over time, white European Christians branded both Jews and people of color with ‘badges of servitude’ and inferiority.” What do you mean by servitude in this context?
In Christian theology, from the earliest Christian texts, the idea of servitude and slavery is attached to the concept of Jews and Judaism. Paul does it in his Epistles. He uses this quote from the book of Genesis that “the elder shall serve the younger,” which becomes really embedded in Christian theology. It is the Jews, the elder people, who should serve the Christians, the younger people. Later on in medieval theology and canon law, Jews are in a servile position, consigned for their sin of rejecting Jesus to perpetual servitude. So even though Jews were free people and could live mostly where they wanted to live, marry whoever they wanted to marry — nobody was sold and some even had slaves — that idea of Jews as confined to perpetual servitude to Christians created a habit of thinking of Jews as having an inferior social status.
That language became secularized in modern times, and we see the development of the [antisemitic] trope of Jewish power: that they are in places where they shouldn’t be. I worked on fleshing out the parallels between the idea and then legal status of Jewish servitude and the conceptual perception of Black people in servile and inferior positions.
Magda Teter’s new book explores how “white European Christians branded both Jews and people of color with ‘badges of servitude’ and inferiority.” (Chuck Fishman)
What other kinds of parallels did you find between racism and antisemitism?
In the Christian theology, Black people, like Jews, will be seen as cursed by God. Jews were [portrayed as] lazy because they didn’t work physically — they made money and exploited Christians. Black people were [portrayed as] lazy because they were trying to avoid physical labor at the expense of white men. Both people were seen as carnal, both as sexually dangerous, and so on.
I was struck by the fact that the racist turn of Christian supremacy — justifying the enslavement of Black people on theological grounds — is a fairly late development, taking hold in the early modern period when Europeans established slaveholding empires.
That’s right. In the summer of 2020, the summer of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, we were all thinking about these issues of race and racism and America. And as I was in the middle of writing the article that became the book, I felt that there was a deeper history that needed to be told, and that slavery is not bound by color until the enslavement of Black Africans by Europeans during the colonial expansion of Europe.
After the French Revolution, when Jews were offered “emancipation” in much of Europe, there were deep debates about whether they could be citizens and be entitled to the same rights and protections as Christian citizens of France and England and other countries. How was that debate informed by Christianity?
In pre-modern Europe, there was obviously both a religious and legal framework under which Jews existed. They had their place in a social hierarchy. After the French Revolution, people are creating a new political reality. The idea of equality obviously challenged the social hierarchies that existed, including the idea that Christians were the superior religion. And that begins to play a role on two levels. One is the level of, well, “how can you be equal and be our judges and make decisions about us?” It’s fear of power — political power and political equality. That challenges the habit of thinking that sees Jews as inferior, in servitude and otherwise insolent and arrogant.
The other level comes from Enlightenment scholars who begin to place Jews in the Middle East and in the Holy Land, in Palestine. Jews are no longer seen as European. They are seen as “Oriental,” and they are compared to the non-European religions and practices that these Enlightenment scholars have been studying. Their differences are now also racialized. “They are not like us, they can’t assimilate. They can never be Frenchmen, they can never be Germans.”
And I guess it’s a short step from that to regarding people with dark skin as inferior and subordinate.
That’s right. Enlightenment scholars are also trying to to understand why it is justified to enslave Black Africans and they do it through “scientific” and other means. They classify Africans as inferior intellectually and they create this idea of race.
I began to think about these European politicians and intellectuals in terms of creating their identities, and what I ended up arguing is what we saw in Charlottesville, what we’re seeing in Europe. It’s not necessarily just about hate, but it’s about exclusion and rejection of Jews and people of color from equality, from citizenship.
And the common thread here is that whiteness and Christianity become inseparable. You write that “freedom and liberty now came to be linked not only to Christianity, but to whiteness, and servitude and enslavement to blackness.”
That’s right. White Christian “liberty” becomes embedded and embodied in law.
Did you see any pitfalls in drawing parallels between the Black and Jewish experiences? I am thinking of those in either community who might say, “How dare you compare our suffering to theirs!”
Yes, I was tempered. I think what some call “comparative victimhood” has paralyzed conversations about this subject, and I kept it in my mind all the time. What I hope comes through is that there’s incredible value in a comparative approach. Coming from Jewish studies as my primary field, the comparison with the Black experience gave me clarity on the nature of antisemitism as well as on the nature of the Jewish experience, and vice versa: The Jewish experience can also give clarity to some of the aspects of anti-Black racism.
What’s an example?
So, for instance, questions like, “Are Jews white? Are they not white? When did they become white?” That’s a whole genre of scholarship. And when you look at it through the lens of law and ideology, you begin to see that from a legal perspective, Jews were considered white in the United States because they could immigrate and they could be naturalized according to law. They did not have to go to court to become American. Their rights to vote were not challenged. There was discrimination, they couldn’t stay in hotels and in some places they couldn’t find employment, but by law, they were considered citizens. The debate about the whiteness of Jews is creating a fog of misunderstanding.
Black Americans were targeted by specific legal statutes from the very beginning in the Constitution and then in naturalization law and so on. And then there was the backlash even after the Civil War to the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments [aimed at establishing political equality for Americans of all races].
Statues at the Strasbourg Cathedral depict Ecclesia and Synagoga, representing the triumph of the church, at left, and the servitude of Judaism, which is represented by a blindfolded figure, drooping and carrying a broken lance. (Edelseider/Wikimedia Commons)
How much do modern-day white supremacists, like the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys, see themselves as Christian? Or is this a kind of white supremacy that doesn’t name itself Christian but doesn’t even realize how many of its ideas are based in theology?
I think they might not be conscious of this legacy, but neo-Nazis take from the legacy of the Nazis who themselves were not thinking of themselves as Christian necessarily. But what I argue in the book is that white Christian supremacy becomes white supremacy. It never discards the Christian sense of domination and superiority that emerges from its early relationship with Jews and Judaism.
In the United States, Black people serve as contrast figures to whiteness, in the law and in the culture. You cannot have whiteness without Blackness. For Christians, Jews serve as that contrast figure. Consciously or unconsciously, the Proud Boys are embracing that. They talk of “God-given” freedoms for white people. That is the Christian legacy.
You said that the Nazis didn’t necessarily see themselves as a Christian movement. But I must ask, even though it is not the scope of your book, was the Holocaust a culmination of white Christian supremacy? Because I think many Christian theologians would want to say that Nazism was godless, and a perversion of the true faith.
I’ll say that when exclusionary ideology is coupled with the power of the state, that’s where it can lead.
In the years since the Holocaust especially, there have been many efforts by Christian leaders to address the ideological failings of the past. You write about Nostra Aetate, the 1965 declaration by the Catholic Church absolving Jews of collective guilt in the death of Jesus and some Protestant documents of contrition. But I got the feeling you were disappointed that many denominations haven’t gone far enough in reckoning with the past.
There was a sort of a moral sense that something needs to be addressed after the Holocaust. But then it is not fully addressed. I don’t think anybody has addressed the issue of power — the roots of hate, yes, but not the dynamics of power. We’ll see where the book goes, but maybe theologians will begin to grapple with this legacy of superiority and domination, and the way hierarchical habits of thinking have been developed through theology and through religious culture.
What other impact do you hope the book may have?
White supremacy is very much in the air. We need to speak up against it, and make connections and allyships. I hope that maybe because the book deals with law and power, it may create bridges among people who care about “We the People” as a vision of people who are diverse, respectful and equal, and not the exclusionary vision offered by white and Christian supremacy.
A cross burns at a Ku Klux Klan rally on Aug. 8, 1925. (National Photo Company Collection)
I’d love to talk about your background. You’re not Jewish but you are chair of Jewish Studies at Fordham, a Catholic university. What drew you to the study of Judaism and the Jews?
I grew up in Poland with a father who from the time I was a little girl would point out to me that there had been Jews in Poland. We would drive through the countryside, and he’d say, “This used to be a Jewish town and there used to be a synagogue and there was the Jewish cemetery.” I grew up being very conscious of the past’s presence and this kind of stark absence of Jews in Poland, where in the 1970s when I grew up Jewish history was taboo.
As soon as Jewish books on Jewish subjects began to be published, including those that dealt with antisemitism, we would read it together. We would talk about it. He wouldn’t just shift the destruction and murder of Jews in Poland on to the Nazis.
There was no Jewish studies program in Poland when I was applying to universities, so I studied Hebrew in Israel, and then studied Yiddish in New York at YIVO. I came to Columbia University to get my PhD in Jewish history and my career went in the direction it did. I was a professor of history and director of the Jewish and Israel studies program at Wesleyan University. I came to Fordham eight years ago and created a program in Jewish studies.
Your previous book was about the blood libel, the historic canard that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood. This one’s about antisemitism. I don’t want to presume, but is your interest in these subjects in any way an act of contrition?
I grew up in a very secular household. I did not grow up Catholic. But I think growing up in Poland made me very, very aware of antisemitism and the history of antisemitism. I got my PhD from Columbia University in Jewish history, which did not emphasize Jewish suffering, but Jewish life, and I have studied Jewish life and teach about Jewish life — not just about Jewish suffering.
However, in the last few years, antisemitism has certainly been on the minds of many of us. I also am committed to the idea of shared history, and therefore all my scholarship, as much as it is about Jews, it is also about the church and Poland and the law. Jews are an integral part of that history and culture. And, as such, I’m committed to that, to teaching about the vibrancy of Jewish life as much as the dynamics of what made that life difficult over the centuries.
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The post A scholar sees a common root for antisemitism and racism: ‘Christian supremacy’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Do European Nationalists Really Love Israel?
A police officer stands at the scene, after a man was arrested following a stabbing incident in the Golders Green area, which is home to a large Jewish population, in London, Britain, April 29, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Hannah McKay
For decades, major pollsters around the world have conducted surveys on attitudes toward Jews. For decades, these surveys have produced more heat than light.
“Thinking of Jews, is your attitude generally positive or negative?” — that is the typical formulation. Time after time, pollsters found that in the West in general, and in the Anglosphere in particular, negativity toward Jews was low. Perhaps 10–15% of the Western public would openly state that they see Jews negatively.
That number may still sound high to some. But what does it actually mean in terms of the potential for rapid political mobilization? Nobody really knows. Yet much of the academic research on antisemitism — conducted in major universities and sponsored by well-meaning donors — never seriously bothered to ask the crucial questions: what does this figure mean, and is it a lot or a little?
But there is another puzzle hiding in plain sight, equally gracefully ignored. The trend in negativity toward Jews is flat. If surveys are to be believed, not much has changed in the minds of Westerners over the past decade, and possibly longer. And yet, with reports constantly highlighting a global surge in antisemitic incidents reported by Jews to the police, one is tempted to ask: who is lying? Jews who report incidents to the police and Jewish communal bodies? The police? Or the surveys?
I have an answer: the surveys are. Or rather, the surveys are asking the wrong question.
What they should be asking, and some do, only less enthusiastically than they should, is whether the Western public is negative toward Israel.
And this is emphatically not because what people feel about Israel is an objectively true measure of Jews’ status, or even Israel’s status, in the Western imagination. It is because attitudes toward Israel function as a mirror: they reveal the respondent’s own identity, the way they see themselves, and their hopes for their society. In a way, Jews and Israel can almost be forgotten. They are only needed as instruments to tease out people’s real political selves.
Have you noticed a finding that some consider “strange,” others applaud, but nobody explains convincingly? When surveys ask about attitudes to Israel and also ask about political affiliation — and when the responses are cross-classified — it turns out that nationalist circles in the West are often quite pro-Israel.
In a recent YouGov survey in Britain, for example, 39% of Reform UK supporters (the most nationalistic large British party) identified as pro-Israel, and only 13% said they were anti-Israel.
Contrast this with the currently surging far-left force, the Green Party: only 4% of Green supporters were pro-Israel, while 60% were anti-Israel. The British political old-timers — the Conservatives and Labour — show similar dynamics in essentials. While the traditionally nationalistic Conservatives lean more pro-Israel than anti-Israel, Labour leans in the opposite direction.
These findings are not new. Nor are they limited to a single pollster.
It is true that the British political map has been redrawn in recent years. The old two-party dynamic — similar to what exists in the US — no longer holds, at least for now. The Conservatives and Labour are no longer the uncontested icons of Right and Left. Instead, both look like spent forces. British politics now has clearer, more sharply defined right-wing and left-wing agendas, represented by Reform UK and the Greens. But the basic pattern — the positivity of nationalists toward Israel and the hostility of socialist circles toward it — has existed for years. It is traceable back at least a decade.
The lack of serious commentary on this is astonishing, especially given that both radical left and right-wing forces are rising across Europe. So what is happening to the nationalists? Do they really care about Israel? And should this be celebrated by those who care about Israel?
My answer, from the crossroads of demographic and historical research, is simple: British nationalists care first and foremost about themselves. They are pro-Israel because Israel is useful to their self-understanding.
The way European nationalists see Israel is simply the way they want to see themselves. Israel, in their eyes, is a Western country — close in manners and sensibilities to their own. It is a muscular Western democracy, defending its citizenry and saying a decisive “yes” to prosperity and innovation, and a decisive “no” to attempts to valorize terrorism or relativize good and evil.
While such games could be played for a while in the West, Israel did not have the luxury of indulging in them for long. And so, not by design but by historical slippage, Israel became the version of the West that Western nationalists crave but can no longer see around them. At the same time, Israel’s neighbors and insurgents are associated with anti-Western sentiments and terrorism — and, more broadly, with what is not the West. The very West of which Britain is a formative part, and which nationalists believe deserves celebration.
In a recently published feature refreshingly titled “Zionism for Everyone,” Alana Newhouse proposes a simple test of national wellbeing. Can a country maintain its demographics? Can it defend itself? Are its people happy?
In Israel’s case, the answer to all three questions is a resounding yes. Israel’s population grows naturally. Israel fights wars — not without successes, to put it mildly. And Israelis report some of the highest levels of happiness in the Western world. Zionism, Newhouse argues, is a recipe for everyone.
Is this merely wish-casting — an expression of the author’s political preferences? Not so fast. It looks like large swathes of European nationalists feel similarly. Listening to their critiques of their own societies, it is procreative confidence, pride, muscularity, and optimism that they identify as both lacking and desirable.
And what of British Jews?
Their politics is also being redesigned. Like the rest of the UK, they are increasingly interested in the newly popular right-wing and left-wing forces — Reform UK and the Green Party. Like the rest of the UK, they are less interested in the old political brands, Conservatives and Labour. Recent surveys of British Jews make this clear.
Yet British Jews are not overwhelmingly aligned with Reform UK. The extent to which nationalist pro-Israel sentiment affects Jewish voting behavior remains unclear. At the risk of sounding dramatic, this resembles unreturned love.
Put more analytically: British Jews, and Diaspora Jews more broadly, do not share a single unified vision of their host societies — or of themselves. People often speak of “Jewish interests.” Perhaps the only idea that unites both antisemites and philosemites is the belief that Jews have some collective “interest” that they coordinate politically. The difference is that antisemites describe this alleged interest in sinister terms, while philosemites relate to it with sympathy. Both miss the point.
Jewish political instincts do not boil down to guarding some uniquely defined and unambiguous “Jewish interest.” Jews are as divided over what is good for them as their host societies are. And that is perhaps the best-kept secret about Jewish politics.
So what are these competing visions of society now being contested in Britain?
One vision, promoted by British nationalists, holds that nations are natural units of human existence. Their elites, however flawed, should take care of them. Borders should be guarded. National identity should be celebrated. In that broad family of nations, Britain, Israel, and the West more generally are benevolent forces — associated with lifestyles conducive to freedom and prosperity.
An opposing vision, promoted by the far left and expressed eloquently by the leader of the British Green Party, Zac Polanski, is one in which no country has a right to exist. Similar sentiments have been voiced before. In this worldview, individuals — not nations — are the natural units of humanity. Nations are retrograde, perhaps ridiculous. End of story. Full stop.
From this menu of national versus post-national dishes, the whole of the West — majorities and minorities alike, including Jews — is now choosing. These choices dictate voting behavior and political rhetoric.
If we adopt this framework, the nationalists’ love of Israel at this particular historical moment, as well as Jewish ambivalence toward nationalist parties, becomes simultaneously explainable. Until now, both the nationalist affection for Israel and Jewish lack of enthusiasm for nationalists have seemed puzzling. But a single explanation that solves several puzzles at once is usually the strongest explanation — assuming Occam’s razor still holds.
In today’s West, broadly speaking, whoever loves the West loves Israel. The two loves are connected because Israel is perceived as the West — condensed, sharpened, and made morally legible. By extension, whoever cannot tolerate the West cannot bear Israel.
And so, as long as the West remains capable of self-love at all, Israel will remain acceptable in its books.
Dr. Daniel Staetsky is an expert in Jewish demography and statistics. He is based in Cambridge, UK.
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Exposing The New York Times’ Tucker Carlson Interview
Tucker Carlson speaks on first day of AmericaFest 2025 at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona, Dec. 18, 2025. Photo: Charles-McClintock Wilson/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Like everyone who has sat down in recent months to interview Tucker Carlson, The New York Times’ Lulu Garcia‑Navarro too often allowed him to do what he does best: answer anything and everything with a mixture of sophistry, dishonesty, and vagueness.
Overall, she did a better job than most. Economist editor‑in‑chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, for example, all but avoided Carlson’s most insidious claims about Israel and Jews in her own interview, preferring to spar with him on safer, domestic territory.
Garcia‑Navarro, by contrast, doesn’t duck the subject at all.
Naming the Trope Without Truly Challenging It
She pointedly asked him about “rhetoric where everything is blamed on Israel, where Israel is seen as the core of all of these problems,” and notes how his rhetoric “has echoes of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” rhetoric that “opens the door to this idea that there is a very powerful sect of Jewish people who want global war and global conflict.”
She challenged his platforming of Nick Fuentes and tied it to Holocaust denial and to the way dehumanizing language paves the way for mass violence.
“The Holocaust didn’t start with the gassing of Jews. It started with the dehumanization of Jews, with the way that they were spoken about, with the language that was used,” she told him. It is a powerful line.
But she followed it with a curiously soft question: “Why do you think you get tagged so often with antisemitism?”
“Tagged” as antisemitic? Why ask Carlson how he feels about the label rather than confront him with his own words?
Why press him him on his claim that Dick Cheney’s office was “completely controlled … by people who were putting Israel’s interests above America’s interests,” or his description of Donald Trump as a “slave” to Benjamin Netanyahu and his “advocates in the United States,” and ask him directly how that is not trafficking in classic antisemitic narratives about Jews driving wars?
Why not force him to account for his line that “Israel pushed the United States president” into war with Iran and sought to keep the conflict going until Iran was “destroyed and chaotic, which is the Israeli goal”?
The Question Garcia-Navarro Never Really Asked
What Garcia‑Navarro too often failed to do is what so many interviewers before her have also failed to do: ask Carlson for evidence and stay on the claim until he either substantiates it or admits he cannot. When he portrayed Trump as a “hostage” and “slave” to Netanyahu and suggested Israeli leaders drove both the Iraq and Iran wars, she largely let those claims stand without demanding proof in the moment.
At his most evasive, Carlson falls back on one of his most familiar tactics: either feigning ignorance or retreating into an undefined “they.”
To her credit, Garcia‑Navarro did at one point press him on that famous “they” — asking him explicitly who “they” are when he talks about shadowy forces pushing Trump toward war. That, precisely, is what a good interviewer should do.
Carlson’s “They” and the Return of Old Conspiracies
But then, at other moments, she let him wriggle away. She raised the Protocols of the Elders of Zion herself, clearly aware of how central that forged text is to the idea of a Jewish cabal manipulating global events. Carlson responds by saying he has merely “heard references to it” and that it is “like a Tsarist forgery or something.”
This is one of the most prominent right‑wing media figures in America, a man who opines constantly about antisemitism, Jews, and Israel. How is it conceivable that he has not properly “heard of” one of the foundational antisemitic texts of the last century? Why not simply ask that? Why not point out that he is disavowing knowledge of the book while reproducing its very structure in his claims about shadowy pro‑Israel forces controlling presidents and forcing wars?
Letting Conspiracy Theories Stand Unchallenged
Carlson deserves to be challenged at the level of evidence, not just rhetoric.
On Iraq, he made the claim that former Vice President Cheney’s office was being controlled before concluding, “I would say the Iraq war was to a great extent a product of that.” On Iran, he similarly claimed that “Israel pushed the United States president” and that Israeli strikes on civilians in Lebanon were designed to sabotage diplomacy and “keep this going until Iran was destroyed and chaotic, which is the Israeli goal.”
On the latter point, Garcia‑Navarro mostly restated his claims and tacitly accepted the framing by asking why Trump has been uniquely susceptible compared with previous presidents. On both wars, she never put to Carlson the obvious counter‑facts: post‑9/11 doctrine, US intelligence assessments, the role of Gulf states, or Iran’s own conduct. She never tests whether “Israel did it” is anything more than a monocausal conspiracy theory.
Israel’s Legitimacy Treated as an Open Question
The same pattern holds for Israel’s basic legitimacy. Carlson was allowed, repeatedly, to pivot to his preferred talking points. He questioned whether Israel has any “unique right to exist” based on scripture and whether “people whose ancestors didn’t live here now occupy the land.”
Garcia‑Navarro did note that this rhetoric veers into delegitimizing Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people, but she did not test his reasoning. Israel is not a case of “Bible or bust.” There are non‑theological bases for its legitimacy — UN partition, international recognition, state practice — that never entered the conversation.
By keeping the debate locked inside Carlson’s chosen frame — is Israel’s biblical claim valid? — the interview ended up treating the very question of Israel’s right to exist as an open, almost abstract dilemma.
Would Garcia‑Navarro ever entertain, in the same way, the question of whether Algeria or Pakistan “really” have a right to exist, on the grounds that their borders are disputed and their populations include people “whose ancestors didn’t live there” a hundred years ago?
The New York Times Problem
In that sense, Garcia‑Navarro becomes a proxy for broader New York Times tendencies. She is very good at naming labels: antisemitism, “cabal” tropes, the Holocaust, genocide, “delegitimizing Israel.”
But when Carlson made concrete empirical claims — that Israel decides US wars, that it deliberately targets civilians in Lebanon to blow up peace talks, that “hundreds” of people in Britain have been arrested simply for “criticizing Israel,” that Israel practices “collective punishment” — she rarely forced him to supply proof or confront counter‑evidence.
The Times is comfortable talking about antisemitism as a feeling or fear. It is much less comfortable adjudicating factual narratives about Israel, even when those narratives echo some of the oldest antisemitic myths in circulation.
Antisemitism as Rhetoric, Not Fact-Checking
That asymmetry runs through the interview. Throughout, Garcia‑Navarro seems more at ease challenging Carlson on certain narratives than others. She pushed repeatedly on his theological musings about Trump as a possible “Antichrist” and on Christian morality in the age of Trump. Yet she took a comparatively light touch toward Carlson’s sweeping claims about Israel’s agency and Israel as the prime driver of Middle Eastern conflict.
That choice is particularly striking because Garcia‑Navarro is not a novice on these issues. She has previously hosted ADL chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt to discuss antisemitism, anti‑Zionism, and “double standards” toward Israel, and she has reported extensively on Israel and the Palestinians. She knows that “Israel controls US policy” narratives are a staple of modern antisemitism. Precisely because she knows this, the decision to let so many of those claims pass without forensic challenge is important.
When Caveats Replace Journalism
When a platform as powerful as The New York Times invites Tucker Carlson to explain why Israel supposedly drives American wars, the minimum journalistic standard cannot be to name the antisemitic tropes and then leave his assertions hanging in the air.
It has to be to interrogate them, to demand evidence, and to put his story about Israel alongside the facts about how US policy is actually made. Otherwise, even a well‑meaning interview risks laundering a familiar narrative — that a small, uniquely suspect Jewish state and “its advocates” pull the strings — into the mainstream with only the thinnest of caveats.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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EU sanctions Israeli settlers after Hungary, under new leadership, clears path
(JTA) — The European Union decided to sanction Israeli settlers over violence against Palestinians in the West Bank on Monday, moving forward a measure that had been blocked for months.
The EU’s 27 foreign ministers agreed on the sanctions at a meeting in Brussels after Hungary’s new government gave its approval.
The measure had been blocked by a close ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Viktor Orban, who was Hungary’s president for 16 years before being unseated in April.
The backing from Peter Magyar, who was sworn in as Orban’s replacement on Saturday, is seen as portending a new era in which the consensus-oriented European Union adopts a more united tone against Israeli policies.
Magyar has pledged to restore ties with the EU after Orban’s far-right politics isolated Hungary. He also said he would pursue a “pragmatic relationship” with Israel and vowed to recommit Hungary to the International Criminal Court, which Orban withdrew from after the court issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu over alleged war crimes.
“It was high time we move from deadlock to delivery. Extremisms and violence carry consequences,” Kaja Kallas, the EU’s top diplomat, said on X.
Kallas said ministers also agreed to impose “new sanctions on leading Hamas figures,” who were not specified.
Kallas did not name the Israelis that will now be sanctioned or specify whether they will be organizations, individuals, or both. Several groups play crucial roles in promoting, developing, financing and defending Israeli settlements, while multiple individuals have previously faced sanctions by individual governments over their alleged involvement in violence against Palestinians.
Settler violence in the West Bank surged after the Gaza war began in October 2023 and further intensified since the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran broke out in February. In March, thousands of Diaspora Jewish leaders called on Israeli President Isaac Herzog to take action to stop the violence.
Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Saar said Israel “firmly rejects” the EU’s decision and accused the bloc of imposing sanctions on Israeli citizens and groups “because of their political views and without any basis.”
“Equally outrageous is the unacceptable comparison the European Union has chosen to make between Israeli citizens and Hamas terrorists. This is a completely distorted moral equivalence,” Saar said on X. He added that Jewish people have a “moral and historical right” to “settle in the heart of our homeland.”
Peace Now, which advocates for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said the EU had sent “a grave warning sign” and “a call to the Israeli public to wake up to the reality we have created through decades of occupation.”
“The rampant violence of settlers in the West Bank, encouraged and supported by the government, is leading Israel into a moral abyss and casting an indelible stain on the state of Israel,” the group said in a statement.
Broader measures against Israel remain stalled by a lack of support. Spain, Ireland and Slovenia have pushed for the EU to suspend its trade agreement with Israel and sanction its far-right cabinet ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. France and Sweden have called for tariffs on imported products from settlements in the West Bank. Other member states, such as Germany and Italy, have refused to support those measures.
Under the Biden administration, the United States sanctioned multiple settler leaders, settler groups and West Bank outposts in 2024. Trump canceled the sanctions a day after reentering office in January 2025.
In March, Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said the administration had expressed concerns about settler violence to the Israeli government and anticipated that the government would take action.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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