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Amid an incoherent war with Iran, antisemitism fills the vacuum
One of the most striking elements about the war with Iran is how little the Trump administration and its supporters have done to explain their rationale for starting a new war in the Middle East.
There’s no shortage of possible explanations — the Iranian government’s repression of protesters, its sponsorship of foreign terrorist attacks, the threat its missiles or nuclear program poses to the United States or to Israel — but Trump and his advisers haven’t been able to pick one or even to say what the war’s objective is and when it might end.
“You’ve said the war is ‘very complete,’ but your defense secretary says ‘this is just the beginning,’” a reporter asked Trump on Monday. “So which is it?”
“Well, I think you could say it’s both,” Trump replied.
People don’t like this lack of explanation — recent polling has found that the Iran war has lower public approval, at 41%, than any other modern conflict that the U.S. has participated in — and are quick to supply their own reasoning for why their government is willing to sacrifice American lives and hundreds of millions of tax dollars to bomb a foreign country.
Some, apparently fueled in part by an Iranian propaganda campaign, have claimed the war is intended to distract from disclosure of the Epstein files or from setbacks on domestic policy, where presidential powers are far more limited than they are in military action.
Others have pointed to Trump’s longstanding obsession with toppling Iran’s leadership.
But many have zeroed in on a familiar claim: It’s the Jews.
Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News host, spoke for many in the conspiracy-laden isolationist sphere of the conservative movement — dominated by figures like Kelly, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and the Holocaust-denying Nick Fuentes — when she argued this war was the doing of Jewish pundits, donors and, for good measure, the senior senator from South Carolina.
“Mark Levin wanted it, it’s his war, Ben Shapiro, Lindsey Graham, Miriam Adelson — that’s obvious,” she said. “They are the ones who’ve been pushing us into it.”
At least it’s true that the folks Kelly named are hawkish political figures who have long called for confronting Iran. But Jews outside of the political sphere have also come under attack. Carlson suggested that the U.S.-Israel campaign against Iran is a Jewish religious plot intended to destroy Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and build the Third Temple — and that it was orchestrated by “Chabad, C-H-A-B-A-D.”
Carlson’s outlandish claim, shared widely on social media, prompted the Lubavitcher Orthodox Jewish movement to boost security at its many remote outposts, which are often the only formal Jewish presence in cities around the world.
This rhetoric echoes what we saw last spring when the far right openly trafficked in antisemitism as influencers voiced opposition to American airstrikes on Iran. “We are done being blackmailed, bribed and killed by Jews,” one prominent conservative said at the time.
And it fits in with a long pattern of scapegoating Jews for death and destruction. Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent claimed that Jews “found wealth in the debris of civilization” following World War I, while the celebrity aviator and isolationist Charles Lindbergh claimed the “British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration” had conspired to drag the U.S. into World War II.
When convenient, Jews have also been blamed for losing wars. The Nazis promoted the stabbed-in-the-back myth to claim Jews were among those who had caused Germany to lose the Great War, while President Richard Nixon was obsessed with how many of his Democratic opponents were supposedly Jewish anti-Vietnam peaceniks.
Often these conspiracies have been complete fabrications. But even when there’s a germ of truth — many Jews did, of course, oppose the Vietnam War — the most straightforward rebuttal is that it’s offensive and ignorant to attribute the actions of individual Jews to “the Jews,” as if every Jewish person is part of a vast global conspiracy.
What makes the current uproar blaming Israel or Jews — sometimes the public has a hard time separating the two — for the Iran war is that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did seem to play an integral role in convincing Trump to strike Iran.
“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters. “We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”
And while the American war objectives are clear as mud, Israel faces a far more obvious threat from Iran — as witnessed by the hundreds of missiles fired at the country since the war began — which likely accounts for the widespread support for the war in Israel.
It’s not incorrect or antisemitic, then, to note that Israel encouraged the U.S. to attack Iran and that many of its American supporters have cheered on the campaign.
But assigning the country outsized influence is where one starts to get into dicey territory. The notion that the United States has become subservient to Israel has made its way into the discourse across the political spectrum. “A rogue client state has completely overtaken the host,” James Li, a conspiratorial content creator, wrote on X last week.
This sentiment teeters on the edge of the absurd. Israel may have sought to force Trump’s hand by threatening its own attack, but the U.S. has tremendous leverage over Israel and has stopped Israel from launching similar planned attacks in the past.
And the lack of a more straightforward explanation for why the war was in America’s own interests should not inevitably point to a nefarious Israeli plot. Trump has done a lot of things that either belie logical explanation — like a tariff regime that even protectionist economists have looked askance at — or have been justified in fluid ways, or not at all.
But conspiracies help people make sense of confusing and stressful events especially in the absence of a more sensible explanation.
And where conspiracies begin, antisemitism almost inevitably follows.
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UK adopts sweeping measures against antisemitism in schools
(JTA) — The U.K. has adopted sweeping measures to combat antisemitism in English schools, prompting pushback from the country’s largest teachers’ union.
The move came after a new government-commissioned review found that three in five Jewish students reported experiencing antisemitism in English schools. The most common incidents were jokes, stereotypes and comments about Jewish people. About half of respondents who witnessed or experienced antisemitism said the incidents were not reported, most often because they did not think they would be taken seriously.
The government on Wednesday accepted 27 recommendations from the report, including dedicated antisemitism training for leaders and staff, improved recording of antisemitic incidents and moves to build a better understanding of Jewish life, identity and contemporary antisemitism.
The government commissioned the report following a spate of high-profile attacks on Jews in Britain, including an attack on a synagogue in Manchester last year that left two men dead.
The report’s author, Sir David Bell, the vice chancellor of the University of Sunderland and former chief inspector of schools in England, recommended addressing antisemitism distinctly from other forms of racism. He argued that antisemitism was a “uniquely complex” problem because of intertwined racial and religious dimensions, since Jewish identity can encompass both an ethnicity and a religion, along with expressions of prejudice that hold all Jews responsible for the actions of Israel.
The government will also encourage English schools to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism. The definition is supported by many mainstream Jewish organizations and has been adopted by 47 countries, including the U.K., but critics say that it conflates some forms of antisemitism with criticism of Israel.
British Education Secretary Lucy Powell called Bell’s review a “generational moment” and said that “implementation is now my priority.”
However, the National Education Union, the largest union representing teachers, lecturers, teaching assistants and support staff in the United Kingdom and Europe, raised concerns on Wednesday about recommending the IHRA definition for schools. NEU general secretary Daniel Kebede said in a statement that the definition “risks deepening the problem rather than tackling it, and actively undermining efforts to confront antisemitism.”
“The IHRA’s contested framing risks blurring the line between antisemitism and legitimate criticism of the Israeli government and the genocide in Gaza, leaving teachers with uncertainty when they need clarity,” said Kebede. He cited a risk that “children who cannot critically explore issues through classroom discussion will instead seek their answers in online and unsafe groups.”
Kebede also encouraged Britain’s Department for Education to strengthen guidance on all forms of racism, not only antisemitism, saying that 65% of teachers report they have not received any antiracism training in the past year.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews, an umbrella organization for British Jewish communities, celebrated the antisemitism report and the government’s adoption of its proposed measures. The group specifically praised the report’s “clear recommendations that schools and local authorities follow government guidelines by adopting the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism as a tool to deepen understanding of contemporary antisemitism.”
“We remain concerned about undue external influence on schools driven by narrow political agendas, and tendentious materials seeping into schools and increasing disharmony, and we will continue to press for vigilance against this,” said the Board of Deputies.
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Orthodox Jewish man stabbed in midtown Manhattan
(New York Jewish Week) — An Orthodox Jewish man is in stable condition after being stabbed on Wednesday evening in the Diamond District of midtown Manhattan. Police are investigating the attack as a possible hate crime.
Police told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the NYPD’s Hate Crimes Task Force is investigating the incident as a possible antisemitic attack, and Manhattan Shomrim — the Jewish community watch group — has asked people to share footage as police search for the suspect. No arrests have been made.
The victim was identified by police as a 26-year-old man, and Orthodox Jewish outlet COLLive identified him as a resident of Crown Heights, the neighborhood that is home to the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement’s headquarters.
He was taken to Bellevue Hospital in stable condition. Police said they were called at about 5:50 p.m. on Wednesday after the man was stabbed in the back with “an unknown sharp object” on 47th Street near Fifth Avenue. ABC7 reported that the victim told investigators he believed he was stabbed with a needle or syringe.
According to the Chabad website, which published an interview with the victim, he is a recently ordained Hasidic rabbi named Joseph, who commutes to Midtown each day to wrap tefillin with Jewish merchants. The attacker, Joseph told the website, was a woman who seemed to be following him prior to the stabbing.
The attack comes as Jewish New Yorkers have been targeted in more than half of the hate crimes committed in New York City this year, despite making up about 12% of the city’s population.
In July, an assailant stabbed two men on the Upper West Side, including one who was leaving a synagogue, while yelling “Allahu akbar,” and was charged with committing hate crimes.
Louis Keene contributed reporting.
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VIDEO: A Hasid gives us a tour of Morocco in Yiddish
דער ירושלימער יוטוב־שטערן וועלוול קירשנבוים האָט לעצטנס אַרויסגעשטעלט אַ ווידעאָ אויף ייִדיש פֿון אַ פּרעכטיקן וויזיט, וואָס ער האָט געמאַכט אין מאַראָקאָ. עס באַגלייט אים זײַן חבֿר אַבֿרהם פּרץ.
אינעם ווידעאָ זעט מען ווי קירשנבוים דאַוונט שחרית מיט די אָרטיקע ייִדן און באַזוכט אַ גוט אָפּגעהיטענעם בית־עולם, וווּ עס ליגן באַערדיקט גרויסע צדיקים ווי למשל הרבֿ חיים בן עתר (1696–1743), באַקאַנט ווי דער „אור החיים“. „מענטשן מיינען, אַז נאָר אין אייראָפּע זענען דאָ קבֿרים פֿון צדיקים!“ זאָגט קירשנבוים.
מיר זעען אַ גרויסע, שיינע שיל מיט אַ פֿײַנער אַרכיטעקטור אין קאַזאַבלאַנקאַ; דעם גרויסן אַראַבישן שוק, וווּ קירשנבוים קויפֿט זיך אײַן מלבושים פּונקט ווי די מאַראָקאַנער גייען אָנגעטאָן. ער באַוווּנדערט אויך די שיינע טיי־גלעזער און טשײַניקן, וואָס מע פֿאַרקויפֿט דאָרט, און באַקענט זיך מיט אַ ייִדישן סוחר וואָס האַנדלט מיט זילבער און גאָלד, פּונקט אַזוי ווי זײַן טאַטע און זיידע האָבן געטאָן פֿאַר דור־דורות.
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