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Conservative students grill Vance on support for Israel at Turning Point USA event
Vice President JD Vance fielded skeptical questions about American support for Israel, including one conspiratorial remark about Judaism, from conservative college students while headlining Wednesday’s stop on the right-wing group Turning Point USA’s nationwide tour.
The event, at the University of Mississippi, was a further sign of shifting priorities among young conservatives when it comes to support for Israel, a long-held GOP tenet that has seen sharp erosion since Oct. 7 and the Gaza war.
Following the talk, Vance — who recently declined to condemn a group chat of Young Republican leaders joking about Hitler and gas chambers — received criticism from Jewish conservatives for failing to take another opportunity to condemn antisemitism.
Charlie Kirk, the murdered conservative activist and TPUSA founder whose legacy on Israel has been sharply debated since his death, was invoked by both Vance and his questioners.
“I’m a Christian, and I’m just confused why there’s this notion that we might owe Israel something, or that they’re our greatest ally, or that we have to support this multi-hundred-billion dollar foreign aid package to Israel, to cover this, to quote Charlie Kirk, ‘ethnic cleansing in Gaza,’” one student wearing a MAGA hat asked the vice president.
That student went on to assert, of Judaism, “Not only does their religion not agree with ours, but also openly supports the prosecution of ours.” The student did not elaborate, though young right-wing Christians have taken Israel to task for recent videos of Jewish Israeli extremists spitting on Christians in the country.
His was the second critical Israel-related question of the night. An earlier questioner had asked Vance, “Do you think it’s a conflict of interest for Miriam Adelson, an Israeli donor, to give millions of dollars to his campaign, and then Trump have pro-Israeli policies?” (Adelson, a major pro-Israel GOP donor, is Israeli-American.)
The questions mirrored a growing anti-Israel flank within the MAGA movement, as polls reflect a growing antipathy for the Jewish state among young Republicans. The movement is fueled by figures including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who maintains an influential presence on YouTube and X. Carlson in particular spoke at Kirk’s funeral, and has platformed open antisemites — most recently including Nick Fuentes — while also headlining other stops on the current TPUSA college tour and maintaining close ties with Trump and Vance.
At Ole Miss, Vance responded to both Israel questions in an America-first framing — and suggested that his own support for Israel was not unequivocal.
“He pursues the interests of Americans first,” Vance said about his boss to the student who had asked about Christian allyship with Israel. “That doesn’t mean that you’re not going to have alliances, that you’re not going to work with other countries from time to time.”
Vance continued, ”Israel, sometimes they have similar interests to the United States, and we’re going to work with them in that case. Sometimes, they don’t have similar interests to the United States.”
In praising the recent ceasefire and hostage return deal brokered by Trump, Vance said the president succeeded by “actually being willing to apply leverage to the state of Israel” — something many left-wing activists had pressured former President Joe Biden to do, largely unsuccessfully.
That “leverage,” Vance said, proved that Trump was acting in America’s interests, not Israel’s. He then hinted at a conspiracy theory of his own. “So when people say that Israel is somehow manipulating or controlling the president of the United States, they’re not manipulating or controlling this president of the United States,” he said.
He then attempted to address the student’s comments about the divide between Jews and Christians.
“Jews disagreeing with Christians on certain religious ideas, yeah, absolutely. It’s one of the realities, is that Jews don’t believe that Jesus Christ is the Messiah. Obviously Christians do believe that,” he said. “My attitude is, let’s have those conversations. Let’s have those disagreements when we have them.”
Vance named protecting the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, a holy Christian site, as an area “I really, really care about” and wanted to work with Israel on. Vance, a convert to Catholicism, attended mass at the church during his state visit to Israel last week. The church is primarily tended to by Palestinian Christians, and has been the site of contested real-estate disputes as far-right Israeli settlers have sought to secure control of historical Christian sites in Jerusalem.
Israeli-American billionaire Miriam Adelson is recognized during a special plenum session in honor of U.S. President Donald Trump at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament in Jerusalem, on Oct. 13, 2025. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
To the student who asked about Adelson, the vice president denied that Trump was influenced by her Israel views — even as he acknowledged that Israel appeared to be her primary cause as a top Republican donor.
“She is very clear about the fact, she doesn’t hide the fact, that she really loves Israel, and that is part of what motivates her political giving. That is a reality. At the same time, the president of the United States is America first, through and through,” Vance said, adding that he, too, had “a very good relationship” with Adelson. The widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson was present at Trump’s Knesset address announcing the Gaza ceasefire, and received several shout-outs from the president.
Vance also said that Trump’s anti-war critics, some from his own party, hadn’t given him enough credit for the ceasefire.
“I remember when people said that the president of the United States was going to get us into a multi-hundred-thousand troop, regime-change war for Israel,” the vice president said. “I wonder if they stepped back and said, ‘You know what, we were wrong about that.’”
Vance’s performance has attracted ire from Jewish conservatives who increasingly have been warning of rising, unchecked antisemitism on the right.
“Tonight the vice president had an opportunity to denounce antisemitism amid its historic surge,” Jewish conservative activist Sloan Rachmuth wrote on X. “He could’ve set an example for the young people who are steering in that direction. JD Vance chose not to.” Conservative writer Jonah Goldberg wrote that Vance was “a profile in cowardice.”
“At a Turning Point USA event this week, a young man said something that should have been met with instant moral outrage,” the pro-Israel commentator Daniel Mael wrote on his Substack. “Instead, the Vice President of the United States treated it as a legitimate question.”
Mael took issue with several of Vance’s phrasings, including his remark about Trump not being “controlled by Israel.”
“The meaning was obvious. It implied that past presidents—Biden, Obama, and George W. Bush—were controlled by Israel,” he wrote. “With one careless phrase, the Vice President of the United States echoed one of the most poisonous lies in history: that Jews secretly control governments and act against others for their own gain.”
Vance’s failures to respond to claims that Israel was committing “ethnic cleansing” and to the remark about Judaism targeting Christians were also troubling, Mael wrote. “The claim that Judaism attacks Christianity is not ignorance; it is the sewage of the alt-right media machine…. If conservatives do not confront this now, the movement will rot from within. The world’s oldest hatred has returned, speaking the language of patriotism and pretending to defend faith. ”
At the conclusion of his Q&A, Vance —- who also raised eyebrows by stating he hoped his Hindu wife, Usha, would convert to Christianity — thanked the Israel critics in the audience for strengthening the conservative movement.
“We don’t need, in our political movement, people who agree with us on every single issue. We got a couple of questions about Israel,” he said. “What we need is people of good faith who love the United States of America and are willing to work hard to save it.”
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The post Conservative students grill Vance on support for Israel at Turning Point USA event appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Iran Expands Child Soldier Recruitment, Cracks Down on Dissent Amid Escalating US-Israeli Strikes
A blaze after Israel’s Fire and Rescue Service said that an industrial building and a fuel tanker at Israel’s Oil Refineries were hit by debris from an intercepted Iranian missile, amid the US-Israel conflict with Iran, in Haifa, Israel, March 30, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Rami Shlush
As US and Israeli strikes pound Iranian military sites, Iran is lowering the enlistment age for security roles to 12 and threating civilians with death for photographing war damage, fueling international outrage.
Last week, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) announced a campaign recruiting children as young as 12 to serve as “Homeland Defending Combatants for Iran,” assisting with patrols, checkpoints, and logistics.
With the minimum age for war roles officially lowered to 12, human rights groups are now condemning the move, demanding that Iranian authorities immediately halt the campaign while imposing a complete ban on enlisting children under 18 in all military and paramilitary forces.
“There is no excuse for a military recruitment drive that targets children to sign up, much less 12-year-olds,” Bill Van Esveld, associate director for children’s rights at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “What this boils down to is that Iranian authorities are apparently willing to risk children’s lives for some extra manpower.”
“The officials involved in this reprehensible policy are putting children at risk of serious and irreversible harm and themselves at risk of criminal liability,” Van Esveld continued. “Senior leaders who fail to put a stop to this can make no claim to care for Iran’s children.”
For years, Iran has drafted children under 18 into the Basij militia, with Human Rights Watch documenting boys as young as 14 years old killed in combat, revealing a brutal pattern of exploiting children on the battlefield.
In the past, widely circulated social media images and videos have repeatedly shown children and teenagers in military-style uniforms cracking down on protests, including during the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, which erupted nationwide after Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman, died in a Tehran police station following her arrest for allegedly violating hijab rules.
Under international law, Iran’s latest initiative flagrantly violates the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which explicitly prohibits the use of children in military activities, marking a dramatic breach of its global obligations.
Human Rights Watch also uncovered multiple other war crimes, including the Iranian government’s relentless use of cluster munitions delivered by ballistic missiles at Israel since the conflict erupted last month. At least four civilians have been killed in these strikes, which constitute clear violations of international humanitarian law.
“Iran’s use of cluster munitions in populated areas in Israel pose a foreseeable and long-lasting danger to civilians,” Patrick Thompson, a researcher in HRW’s Crisis, Conflict, and Arms Division, said in a statement. “Cluster munition bomblets are dispersed over a wide area, making them unlawfully indiscriminate in violation of the laws of war.”
Fired from rockets, missiles, or aircraft, cluster munitions spread dozens of explosive bomblets across large areas, leaving many unexploded and posing a long-term, landmine-like danger to civilians for years or even decades.
Amid relentless US and Israeli attacks and mounting international pressure, the regime is also intensifying its domestic crackdown, now warning that photographing war-damaged areas could carry the death penalty.
Under this newly enacted policy, people accused of spying or cooperating with “hostile states” could face the death penalty and have all their assets confiscated.
Anyone caught photographing damaged sites could be accused of espionage, potentially providing intelligence to coalition forces, and face execution.
“People who take photos or videos of damaged sites and share them are effectively confirming whether strikes hit their targets,” Iran’s judiciary spokesperson Asghar Jahangir said on Tuesday, describing the action as the equivalent of cooperating with and providing intelligence to the enemy.
According to Iranian media and watchdog groups, more than 1,000 people have been arrested this month for filming sensitive locations, sharing anti-government content online, or allegedly “cooperating with the enemy.”
Against the backdrop of large-scale US and Israeli strikes pounding key regime strongholds in Shiraz and Isfahan — where critical military infrastructure has been repeatedly hit — tensions have surged to a boiling point as the pressure campaign intensifies
On Tuesday, the Israeli Air Force launched another sustained wave of precision airstrikes against Iranian weapons production and research facilities around Tehran, seeking to disrupt and dismantle the missile supply and manufacturing networks that support Tehran’s military arsenal.
Meanwhile, the IRGC this week threatened 18 American multinational technology and industrial companies, accusing them of involvement in “terrorist operations” and labeling them as “legitimate targets.”
“We advise the employees of these institutions to immediately distance themselves from their workplaces to preserve their lives,” the statement published on Tuesday said. “These companies should expect the destruction of their respective units in exchange for each terror act in Iran, starting from 8 PM Tehran time on Wednesday, April 1st.”
Among the companies mentioned were major corporations such as Microsoft, Google, Apple, Intel, IBM, Tesla, and Boeing.
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Jews paused Indiana’s abortion ban — by turning a religious freedom law against the evangelical right
When Elly Cohen chose to terminate her pregnancy in 2022, it aligned with her understanding of Jewish law that life begins at birth, not conception.
Cohen and her husband were eager to give their then 4-year-old daughter a sibling. But her fetus had been diagnosed with Trisomy 18, a severe chromosomal disorder that, in most cases, leads to death before birth or within the first year of life. She decided to end the pregnancy.
Had she gotten pregnant just a few months later, she might not have had that choice. She lives in Indiana, one of 13 states that enacted near-total bans on abortion following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade.
Indiana’s law does allow abortion for for lethal fetal anomalies up to 22 weeks, but doctors bear legal risk in determining whether a particular diagnosis meets the statute’s definition — a gray area that can lead to delays or reluctance to provide care.
That reality stirred Cohen into action. She co-founded Hoosier Jews for Choice, a Jewish group that advocates for abortion access, which joined five anonymous women of multiple faiths in a lawsuit backed by the American Civil Liberties Union. Their argument relied on a religious freedom law — the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA — signed by former Indiana governor Mike Pence in 2015. It was one of many such state laws passed amid calls from some evangelical Christians to establish their right not to do business that violated their beliefs, such as baking a wedding cake for a gay wedding.
Hoosier Jews for Choice saw an opening for Jews to exercise their religious freedom under the same law, but for a purpose at odds with evangelical Christianity: to gain access to abortion. Earlier this month, Judge Christina Klineman of Marion County Superior Court agreed, permanently blocking enforcement of the state’s abortion ban for plaintiffs with sincere religious objections.
Hoosier Jews for Choice is celebrating the ruling as the biggest legal win to date in support of the argument that abortion bans violate Jews’ religious freedom. The group is hopeful that similar cases can build on the Indiana case’s success nationwide.
The ruling could still be reversed: Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita has appealed the decision, and the case is headed to the Indiana Supreme Court, where all five justices are Republican appointees. Meanwhile, Klineman, elected to the bench in 2014 after winning a Democratic primary, has faced calls for her impeachment over her decision, in what U.S. Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) called “one of the most ridiculous rulings I’ve seen in a long time.”
But for Amalia Shifriss, who testified on behalf of Hoosier Jews for Choice in the lawsuit, the latest ruling is a positive sign that the law will be applied consistently. If religious freedom applies to Christians objecting to baking a same-sex wedding cake, she said, then it must apply to liberal Jews, too.
“RFRA should not just be for what some lawmakers see as the religious right,” Shifriss told the Forward. “It should be for all religions.”
‘Perversion of the law’s intent’
In winning the right to an abortion, Hoosier Jews for Choice relied on a law passed by Pence, who would become Donald Trump’s vice presidential running mate on the strength of his reputation as a stalwart advocate for evangelical Christians. Pence rose to national prominence based on his unwavering opposition to abortion — and his conservative leadership as Indiana governor.
Anti-abortion advocacy organizations — including Indiana Right to Life and SBA Pro-Life America — supported the law.
Back in 2015, the debate over RFRA centered on small-business owners that sought to refuse service to LGBTQ+ people. Eric Miller, a conservative activist who was in the room when Pence signed the law, wrote then that “Christian bakers, florists and photographers should not be punished for refusing to participate in a homosexual marriage!”
Massive backlash against the law — notably by the NCAA the weekend before the Final Four basketball game was slated to occur in Indianapolis — led Pence to sign into law a clarification that businesses could not use the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to deny services to people on the basis of their sexual orientation.
But the law itself remained on the books — ripe for abortion-rights groups to wield a decade later.
Now, a little over a decade after Indiana first passed RFRA, organizations that once supported the law’s broad application have changed their tune.
“For the court to rule that taking the life of an unborn child is an exercise of religious freedom is deeply distressing — and a perversion of the law’s intent,” Indiana Right to Life president Mike Fichter said in an online statement following Klineman’s March 5 ruling. Indiana Right to Life did not respond to the Forward’s request for comment.
That shift has been part of a larger legal trend: Conservative Christian groups like Alliance Defending Freedom have long argued that the government must have a compelling reason to force someone to act against their religious beliefs — whether mandating vaccines, serving LGBTQ clients, or covering contraception in employee health care plans.
But when it came to religious plaintiffs who support abortion access, some on the Christian right didn’t think the same expansive view of religious freedom applied.
“Indiana’s religious freedom laws were passed for the purpose of protecting religious practice, not to protect the ending of a human life,”Indiana’s religious freedom laws were passed for the purpose of protecting religious practice, not to protect the ending of a human life,” Alexander Mingus, executive director of the Indiana Catholic Conference, said in an online statement after Klineman’s ruling. “Religions that preach violence are not protected by religious freedom claims.”
Mingus did not respond to the Forward’s request for an interview.
The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a nonprofit that has made its name arguing religious freedom cases in front of the Supreme Court, also objected to the Jewish plaintiffs’ interpretation of RFRA. In 2014, Becket successfully argued in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. that employers could refuse to cover contraception on religious grounds. Meanwhile, in the Indiana case, Becket filed a brief questioning the sincerity of the Jewish plaintiffs’ religious beliefs.
“The case fails RFRA’s test for multiple reasons, including allowing people to join Hoosier Jews for Choice by filling out an anonymous Google form with zero requirement to actually agree with Jewish religious teachings,” Lori Windham, senior counsel for Becket, said in a statement to the Forward.
Cohen disputed that characterization. She said that all members of Hoosier Jews for Choice were required to share their name and contact information, which it did not make public in order to protect members’ confidentiality. She added that group members who joined the lawsuit were asked to indicate whether they could connect their view on the abortion ban to their Jewish values and beliefs, and the vast majority of members did.
David Schraub, an assistant professor at Lewis & Clark Law School who has written about the Indiana case, said that courts do assess whether a religious belief seems genuine. But according to Schraub, the bar for establishing sincerity is low — typically an issue only in cases clearly brought in bad faith. For instance, Schraub recalled a case in which a defendant, trying to avoid paying taxes, cycled through various legal arguments before ultimately inventing “the Church of Ayn Rand.”
The Indiana case is fundamentally different, Schraub said, given the long-standing religious grounding for more permissive Jewish views on abortion.
“They tried to argue that this was not a sincerely held religious belief, which I think was really quite disrespectful, because it flies in the face of a lot of evidence about what we know about how Jews conceptualize the relationship to reproductive freedom,” Schraub said. “They’re just not willing to accept that there is such a thing as a sincere and genuine liberal religious tradition.”
Jewish beliefs, Jewish practices
A 2014 Pew Research poll found an estimated 83% of American Jews believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. That’s likely because Jews across denominations largely agree that life begins at birth, not conception. Sources in the Talmud say that in the first 40 days of pregnancy, the fetus is considered “mere water.” Jews value the fetus as “potential life,” gaining the legal status of nefesh, or personhood, at birth.
Still, Jews do not have monolithic views on abortion. Orthodox groups are divided, though couples generally consult rabbis on the matter and believe the choice to get an abortion should be governed by Jewish law, not personal choice.
The Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly supports the right to choose abortion in cases where “continuation of a pregnancy might cause severe physical or psychological harm, or where the fetus is judged by competent medical opinion as severely defective.”
Reform Judaism emphasizes bodily autonomy, with the view that “the decision to terminate a pregnancy is one that, in all circumstances, should ultimately be made by the individual within whose body the fetus is growing.”
Rabbi Sandy Sasso — one of three rabbis the ACLU asked to give expert testimony in the Indiana case, and the first woman ordained a rabbi in Reconstructionist Judaism — told the Forward that the diversity of opinion within Judaism underscores the argument for challenging abortion bans.
“That actually is just the point — there are different religious views,” Sasso said. “The Constitution does not allow you, since there is separation of church and state, to enshrine one religious view over the other.”
Can religion and abortion coexist?
Shira Zemel, abortion access campaign director at the National Council of Jewish Women, is helping lead a national push to reframe “reproductive freedom as religious freedom.”
Each year since 2021, the Council has organized “Repro Shabbat,” which aligns with the Torah portion from Exodus Parashat Misphatim. The portion says that if a man pushes a pregnant woman, causing her to miscarry, he should pay a fine. But if any other damage results, the punishment should be according to the principle of “eye for an eye.” The portion is often interpreted as evidence that Judaism does not view a fetus as having the same legal status as a person.
The group has also backed that argument in court, filing a brief with 21 other organizations of faith in support of the plaintiffs challenging Indiana’s abortion ban — and hoping similar lawsuits will build on that case’s success nationwide.
The legal pathway exists in many places: 29 states have their own versions of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, including at least 11 that severely restricted abortion after the Dobbs decision. According to Ken Falk, legal director of the ACLU of Indiana, the same legal reasoning used in Indiana could feasibly be applied in any of those states.
Some legal challenges are already underway, including in Kentucky and South Carolina, where litigation is ongoing. Others have faltered: In Missouri, a judge upheld the state’s abortion ban after a group of interfaith clergy sued on religious grounds. In Florida, a Jewish-led challenge to a ban after six weeks of pregnancy fizzled out after Rabbi Barry Silver, who brought the case on behalf of his synagogue, died of colon cancer in 2024.
Zemel said she hopes the Indiana case can serve as not only a legal blueprint, but also as a sign of a broader cultural shift in how religion is understood in the abortion debate.
“It’s incredible to me to see how this legal argument is bolstering what I like to think is a huge narrative shift,” Zemel said. “For far too long, it’s been weaponized that religion and abortion can’t coexist, but we know that that’s not the case.”
The post Jews paused Indiana’s abortion ban — by turning a religious freedom law against the evangelical right appeared first on The Forward.
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Syria Will Stay Out of Iran conflict Unless It Faces Aggression, President Says
Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa attends the Ministry of Awqaf conference titled “Unity of Islamic Discourse” at the Conference Palace in Damascus, Syria, Feb. 16, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Khalil Ashawi
Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa said on Tuesday that his country will stay out of the US-Israeli war against Iran unless Syria is subject to aggression and has no diplomatic solutions.
“Unless Syria is targeted by any party, Syria will remain outside any conflict,” the Syrian president said at an event hosted by think tank Chatham House in London.
“We do not want Syria to be an arena of war. But unfortunately, today, things are not governed by wise minds. The situation is volatile and random,” the president said.
The month-long conflict has spread across the region, killing thousands, disrupting energy supplies, and threatening to send the global economy into a tailspin.
“We want Syria to have ideal relationships with the entire region, with Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and world powers like the UK, France, Germany, and the US. I think that Syria is qualified to start a strategic relationship network,” he said, responding to a question on whether Syria would stay neutral while the conflict goes on.
Syria has been keen to stay on the sidelines of the regional conflict that has pulled in neighboring countries, including Lebanon, where armed group Hezbollah is locked in fighting with Israeli ground troops, and Iraq, where Iran-aligned factions have launched drone and rocket attacks.
Syria sent thousands of troops to its western border with Lebanon and its eastern border with Iraq earlier this month. Syria‘s defense ministry said the deployment was part of efforts to “protect and control the borders amid the escalating regional conflict.”
“We had enough war. We paid a large bill. We are not ready for another war experience,” Syria‘s president said.