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How Donald Trump and JD Vance Should Respond to Rising Antisemitism
U.S. President Donald Trump delivers an address to the nation accompanied by U.S. Vice President JD Vance, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S. June 21, 2025. Photo: Carlos Barria via Reuters Connect.
An irony of the Trump administration is that it has done more than any predecessor in recent memory to push back against antisemitism on the left, only to watch it rise on the political right.
The far-left in America views the Jews as among the “white” ruling class and seeks liberation from supposed Jewish oppressors. Meanwhile, the far-right questions the loyalty of American Jews, whom they view as powerful manipulators of the US government and inimical to “white America.”
Whereas pro-Jewish Christians take God’s Biblical injunction to Abraham — “I will bless those that bless thee and curse those that curse thee” — literally, a growing number of young Christians now subscribe to “replacement theology.” This antisemitic belief holds that Christians have replaced Jews as God’s “chosen people” and therefore bear no commitment to their well-being.
The rise of “replacement theology” within the American right has coincided with a resurgence of “replacement theory,” which argues that Jews and other minorities are systematically replacing White Christians in the US. These two canards – one theological, the other racial – have gained new purchase as the right’s traditional guardrails against antisemitism have eroded.
This antisemitism is not just creeping into the mainstream — it is rushing into it.
And the spread of antisemitism is aided by those who either refuse to address it, or even explicitly tolerate it, putting political expediency ahead of principles. This has been the case mostly on the left in recent years, as witnessed by the rise of Zohran Mamdani and his endorsement by prominent Democrats.
But the growing popularity of Tucker Carlson, who platforms antisemites like Nick Fuentes and recently declared that the people he hates most are Christian Zionists, is equally concerning.
That Kevin Roberts, who heads the conservative Heritage Foundation, said that Carlson will “always” be a friend casts a dark shadow over an institution long known for its prudent, sensible conservatism. Roberts is no William Buckley, the intellectual godfather of the modern American right, who distanced himself from the extremist John Birch society and made clear that antisemitism has no place in American conservatism.
There is nothing more dangerous to America than the growing normalization of antisemitism on both sides of the political divide. America’s embrace of the Jews — unlike the old world that expelled, ghettoized, marginalized, and murdered them — has been a pillar of American principles. And Jews, in turn, have embraced and loved America like no other nation that came before it, referring to it as the “golden state” and seeing in its liberal values their salvation from millennia of persecution.
Our greatest statesmen have all known that America is healthy when it gives full rights and respect to Jewish Americans.
“May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants,” George Washington wished the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island in 1790. America, he added, “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”
Almost two centuries later, Ronald Reagan recalled that America’s divine providence is grounded in its shared Judeo-Christian heritage, observing that “Americans… are not Jews or Christians …. They are Americans awed by what has gone before, proud of what for them is still … a shining city on a hill.”
Conversely, an America in which there is no place for Jews, in which Jews are not seen as Americans or afforded the right to live freely as Jews, will be cast down from that hill.
If allowed to spread from the extremities into the bloodstream of American political discourse, antisemitism will surely devour and destroy the soul of our great nation, just as it has that of all those societies whom it has infected in the last century: Venezuela, Iran, the Soviet Union, Germany. These acts usually reflect, or are harbingers of, larger destructive forces.
Winston Churchill, perhaps the greatest Western statesman of the 20th century (and, unsurprisingly, an object of derision by Carlson), understood this well when he decried anti-Jewish pogroms in Czarist Russia.
As JINSA President & CEO Michael Makovsky writes in Churchill’s Promised Land, Churchill employed an adage attributed to Benjamin Disraeli: “The Lord deals with the nations as the nations dealt with the Jews.”
President Trump and Vice President Vance should follow in the footsteps of Washington and Reagan, ostracize this antisemitism, and restore America to its rightful place on the hill.
Jared Stone is Research Associate for the President & CEO of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA). He is the author of the newly released book, A Brief History of Israel and the Jewish People.
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He may have been the world’s most famous mime, but in this play, he won’t shut up
There is a kind of sublime poetry in Marcel Marceau’s first act.
As a young man in occupied France, Marceau (then Mangel) forged identity papers and shepherded dozens of Jewish children across the Alps to Switzerland. In scenarios where staying quiet was essential for survival, Marceau soothed his charges into silence with his own.
In Marcel on the Train, Ethan Slater and Marshall Pailet’s play of Marceau’s pre-Bip life, the world’s most famous mime is anything but silent.
The action of the play, which bounces through time back to Marcel’s father’s butcher shop and forward to a P.O.W. camp in Vietnam (don’t ask), unfolds over the course of a train ride. Slater’s Marceau is chaperoning four 12-year-old orphans, posing as boy scouts going on a hike.
The kids — played by adults — are a rambunctious lot. Marceau tries to put them at ease juggling invisible swords, performing Buster Keaton-esque pratfalls and exhausting his arsenal of Jewish jokes that circle stereotypes of Jewish mothers or, in one case, a certain mercenary business sense.
Pailet and Slater’s script toggles uncomfortably between poignancy and one-liners with a trickle of bathroom humor (the phrase “pee bucket” recurs more often than you would think.)
The terror of Marceau’s most melancholy escortee, Berthe (Tedra Millan) is undercut somewhat by her early, anachronistic-feeling declaration, “Wow, we’re so fucked.” The bumptious Henri (Alex Wyse) would seem to be probing a troubled relationship with Jewishness and passing, but does that discussion a disservice when he mentions how it wouldn’t be the biggest deal if he “sieged a little heil.” Adolphe (Max Gordon Moore) is described as “an exercise in righteousness” in the script’s character breakdown. Sure, let’s go with that.
The presence of a mute child, Etiennette (Maddie Corman), is tropey and obvious. It doesn’t suggest that she inspired him to abandon speaking in his performances, but it doesn’t dismiss that possibility either.
But the chattiness and contrived functions of the fictive children are made more disappointing by the imaginative staging maneuvering around the shtick. Slater, best known for his role in the Wicked films and as Spongebob in the titular Broadway musical, is a gifted physical performer.
When things quiet down, Pailet’s direction, and the spare set by scenic designer Scott Davis, create meadows of butterflies. Chalk allows Marceau to achieve a kind of practical magic when he writes on the fourth wall. One of the greatest tricks up the show’s sleeve is Aaron Serotsky who plays everyone from Marceau’s father and his cousin Georges to that familiar form of Nazi who takes his torturous time in sniffing out Jews.
Surely the play means to contrast silence and sound (sound design is by Jill BC Du Boff), but I couldn’t help but wonder what this might have looked like as a pantomime.
While the story has been told before, perhaps most notably in the 2020 film Resistance with Jesse Eisenberg, Slater and Pailet were right to realize its inherent stage potential. It’s realized to a point, though their approach at times leans into broad comedy that misunderstands the sensibilities of its subject.
Like Slater, who learned of the mime’s story just a few years ago, Marceau was an early acolyte of Keaton and Chaplin. But by most accounts he cut a more controlled figure — that of a budding artist, not a kid workshopping Borscht Belt bits on preteens.
The show ends with a bittersweet montage of Bip capturing butterflies (not jellyfish — you will probably not be reminded of Mr. Squarepants). It means to frame Marceau’s established style as a maturation that nonetheless retains a kind of innocence, stamped by the kids he rescued.
“You’ll live,” Berthe tells him in a moment of uncertainty. “But I don’t think you’ll grow up.”
In Marceau there was, of course, a kind of Peter Pan. But there’s a difference between being childlike and being sophomoric.
Marcel on the Train is playing through March 26 at Classic Stage Company in New York. Tickets and more information can be found here.
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US soldier who protected Jews in POW camp during WWII to be awarded Medal of Honor
(JTA) — An American soldier who is credited with saving the lives of 200 Jewish comrades in a prisoner of war camp in Germany during World War II will receive the U.S. military’s highest decoration, the Medal of Honor.
The award to Roddie Edmonds, who died in 1985, was announced last week. It comes more than a decade after Israel’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, recognized him as a “Righteous Among the Nations” for his bravery and six years after President Donald Trump recounted his heroism during a Veterans Day parade.
Edmonds, a sergeant from Knoxville, Tennessee, was the highest-ranking soldier among a group taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge in January 2045 when the Nazis asked him to identify the Jews in the group. Understanding that anyone he identified would likely be killed, Edmonds made the decision to have all of the soldiers present themselves as Jews.
When a Nazi challenged him, he famously proclaimed: “We are all Jews here!”
The show of solidarity came to light only after Edmonds’ death, when a Jewish man who had been among the soldiers at the camp shared his recollection with the New York Times as part of an unrelated 2008 story about his decision to sell a New York City townhouse to Richard Nixon when Nixon was having trouble buying an apartment following his resignation as president.
When they found the article several years later, it was the first that Edmonds’ family, including his pastor son Christ Edmonds and his granddaughters, had heard about the incident. Soon they were traveling to Washington, D.C., and Israel for ceremonies honoring Edmonds, one of only five Americans to be credited as Righteous Among the Nations, an honor bestowed by Israel on non-Jews who aided Jews during the Holocaust.
As the family campaigned for a Medal of Honor, Edmonds was also the recipient of bipartisan praise from two American presidents.
“I cannot imagine a greater expression of Christianity than to say, I, too, am a Jew,” President Barack Obama said during remarks at the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., on International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2016.
Three years later, President Donald Trump recounted the story at the New York City Veterans Day Parade. “That’s something,” he said. “Master Sergeant Edmonds saved 200 Jewish-Americans — soldiers that day.”
Last week, Trump called Chris Edmonds to invite him to the White House to receive the Medal of Honor on his father’s behalf, Chris Edmonds told local news outlets. The Medal of Honor ceremony is scheduled for March 2.
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Jewish hockey star Jack Hughes’ overtime goal propels US to historic gold medal in Olympic hockey
(JTA) — Jewish hockey star Jack Hughes scored the game-winning goal Sunday to clinch a gold medal for the U.S. men’s hockey team, its first since 1980.
The New Jersey Devils star center, who had scored twice in Team USA’s semifinal win, sent the puck between the legs of Canadian goaltender Jordan Binnington 1:41 into overtime to give the American team a 2-1 win.
“This is all about our country right now. I love the USA,” Hughes told NBC. “I love my teammates.”
The win broke a 46-year Olympic drought for Team USA, which had not taken gold since the famous “Miracle on Ice” team that upset the Soviet Union on its way to gold in 1980. The United States also won in 1960.
“He’s a freaking gamer,” Quinn Hughes, Jack’s older brother and U.S. teammate said, according to The Athletic. “He’s always been a gamer. Just mentally tough, been through a lot, loves the game. American hero.”
Quinn Hughes is a defender for the Minnesota Wild and a former captain of the Vancouver Canucks who won the NHL’s top defenseman award in 2024. He was also named the best defender in the Olympic tournament by the International Ice Hockey Federation after scoring an overtime goal to send the U.S. team to the semifinals.
The third Jewish member of the U.S. team, Boston Bruins goaltender Jeremy Swayman, won the one game he played, a Feb. 14 preliminary-round victory over Denmark.
The Hughes family — rounded out by youngest brother Luke, who also plays for the Devils — has long been lauded as a Jewish hockey dynasty. They are the first American family to have three siblings picked in the first round of the NHL draft, and Jack was the first Jewish player to go No. 1 overall. They are also the first trio of Jewish brothers to play in the same NHL game and the first brothers to earn cover honors for EA Sports’ popular hockey video game.
Jack, who had a bar mitzvah, has said his family celebrated Passover when he was growing up. Their mother, Ellen Weinberg-Hughes, who is Jewish, represented the U.S. women’s hockey team at the 1992 Women’s World Championships and was on the coaching staff of the gold-medal-winning women’s team in Milan. Weinberg-Hughes is also a member of the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.
Hughes’ golden goal ushered in a burst of Jewish pride on social media, with one user calling it “the greatest Jewish sports moment of all time.” The Hockey News tweeted that Hughes was “the first player in hockey history to have a Bar Mitzvah and a Golden Goal! Pretty cool!”
Jewish groups and leaders also jumped on the praise train. “Special shout out to @jhugh86 on scoring the game-winning goal!” tweeted Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League. “Beyond his incredible skill on the ice, Jack makes history as a proud representative of the American Jewish community, reminding us that the Jewish people are interwoven into America in her 250th year! Mazel Tov, Jack!”
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