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In making a Christian case for Shabbat, Charlie Kirk stripped off its Judaism
Charlie Kirk isn’t wrong about Shabbat — he just has some funny ideas about what it should be.
In the conservative influencer’s new book, Stop, in the Name of God: Why Honoring the Sabbath Will Transform Your Life, released following his assassination in September 2025 and instantly sold out on Amazon, the outspokenly devout Christian describes the day of rest adoringly. It’s a “gift,” a taste of redemption, a break from the incessant noise of the newscycle and workday. It’s a time to connect with family and the single most important sign of God’s covenant with humanity.
These are all ideas straight out of Jewish thought. And, indeed, Kirk quotes from The Sabbath, by Jewish luminary Abraham Joshua Heschel, in nearly every chapter, often multiple times, while sprinkling in and other thinkers like Jonathan Sacks and Viktor Frankl.
But for many Christians — Kirk was a devout evangelical, and he was clearly writing for a similar audience — whether to observe a strict Sabbath is the subject of a lively debate. Foundational to Christianity is the idea that the coming of Jesus as messiah rendered God’s ceremonial laws — rules around food, behavior and temple sacrifice — obsolete and created a new order in which the Sabbath resides “in the heart,” rather than existing as a literal day of rest where you turn your phone off and cease work of any kind.
“Let no one act as your judge in regard to food or drink or in respect to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath day – things which are a mere shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ,” said Paul in Colossians. This idea has been understood by most Christians to mean that Jesus erased the need for Shabbat; instead, every day should be like Shabbat. (“Christ has set us free for something better: namely, the pursuit of holiness and fellowship with the living God as a daily lifestyle,” writes Focus on the Family in an article on the topic.)
Kirk, however, disagreed; he began observing Shabbat four years before his death — specifically as a Saturday Shabbat, not the Sunday rest more common in Christianity. Stop in the Name of God is both an explanation of why he did so and an argument for why everyone else should do the same.
And yet the book is less a simple paean to a core Jewish ritual and more a tortured argument for how Christians can reconcile a deep suspicion of Judaism while reaping the benefits of marking Shabbat — mixed in alongside the political grievances that Kirk is best known for: opposition to the pandemic lockdown and vaccines, exhortations to traditional gender roles and, most importantly, advocacy for a Christian nationalist vision of the U.S.
Just how Jewish is Shabbat?
Kirk clearly did his research. As he makes his case for Shabbat, he leans heavily into commentaries from Heschel, Frankl and Sacks along with Christian theologians including Martin Luther and John Wesley.
While Kirk makes a case for taking a day off each week on its practical merits (better sleep, better focus, lower blood pressure), most of his argument is rooted in religion; in addition to commentaries from Jewish thinkers like Heschel, Frankl and Sacks he cites Christian theologians including Martin Luther and John Wesley, along with the Bible itself, to argue that a day of rest is a Christian requirement. He digs into the deeper theological implications of Shabbat framing it as a mirror of God’s own rest in Genesis. Noting that, biblically, Shabbat applies not only to the Israelites, but also to their animals and their workers — an element of Jewish law many readers are likely unaware of — he reads the day as a symbol of freedom. He even proposes that the fact that Shabbat applies equally to all makes it the foundation of all morality, a surprising point from someone who was outspoken about his negative views of a wide array of minority groups.
This vision of Shabbat is deeply Jewish, as are many of the interpretations Kirk borrows, and he clearly has an appreciation for the Jewish rituals. The Shabbat meal “is not dinner. It is liturgy,” he writes. “Eating becomes an act of worship.” Though he says he knows readers might view prohibitions against electricity or cooking on Shabbat as “burdens,” he argues instead that they are “scaffolding for sacred life” that “create space for joy to flourish undisturbed.”
Kirk comes across as almost envious of Orthodox Judaism.
But he can’t stay in this mode of admiration, because he isn’t speaking to Jews; his main audience is conservative Christians. And for them, Kirk has to address a specific controversy rife with antisemitic undertones: Christians believe that Jesus, as the messiah, fulfilled all of God’s ceremonial laws and rendered them irrelevant, forming a new covenant that requires only having faith in Jesus and living a broadly moral life. That means anyone — especially Jews — who still follows them is engaging in “legalism,” a term that carries a pejorative tone in Christianity.
“Observance of a weekly day of worship, whether it be Sunday, Saturday, or any other day, should never be allowed to become a matter of religious legalism,” is how Focus on the Family put it; the emphasis is theirs.
The gist of this argument is that anyone adhering to the biblical laws fulfilled by Jesus is following a false religion, nit-picking specifics instead of leaning into devotion. Kirk’s attempt to reconcile this contradiction — respecting Shabbat without falling into dreaded “legalism” — characterizes the book.
Kirk writes in his opening chapter that the Christian God is his “ultimate authority” but he recognizes “not everyone who reads this book shares this belief and I deeply respect that.” In the very next paragraph, however, he writes that “the Bible has built the West and it is the Bible that will ultimately guide and restore it.”
This tendency to proclaim respect only to immediately undermine himself is repeated throughout the book, particularly when he discusses Judaism. Despite his clear love of the Jewish Shabbat, he cannot help but reject it because it’s not Christian. And this is key to his argument: At its roots, Kirk’s praise of Shabbat is more concerned with convincing his readers to embrace Christianity than it is with learning from Judaism. It is only Christianity, he writes, “that can heal the divisions of our age and restore meaning to a world desperately in need of it.”
Kirk can only endorse Shabbat — for himself and for his audience — if he can prove it’s Christian, and he devotes two entire chapters to making this case, taking pains to prove that his understanding of Shabbat is free of the sin of “Judaizing.” Jesus, he writes, is “the Lord of the Sabbath” who “invites us not to legalism or laziness — but to life.” He promises that, though “the Pharisees had turned it into a crushing yoke,” Jesus’ Sabbath is not “legalism — it is liberation.”
In doing so, he reinforces the idea that Judaism is, in some way, evil, immoral and a false religion. For all his admiration toward Jewish practices, he agrees with his more skeptical co-religionists that Judaism must be exorcised from Shabbat if Christians are to observe the practice.
This discomfort with Judaism is perhaps best summarized in one, strange choice.
Though the book quotes generously from Heschel’s The Sabbath, Kirk’s prime example of the benefits of Shabbat observance comes not from Orthodox Jews, but from Seventh-Day Adventists — a small Christian movement that strictly abstain from work on the Saturday Sabbath. He waxes poetic about their “unique behavior patterns” that include “device-free” prayer and meals in the home. “Their weekly withdrawal from the world’s pace is not escapism — it is resistance,” he writes. “It is prophetic.”
Of course, they’re not the only group to do observe a Sabbath in this way — but Kirk seems more comfortable making his case for Shabbat’s benefits using a Christian group than he does praising Jews.
The point of a Christian Shabbat
It’s no great shock that Kirk spends much of the book arguing for the primacy of Christianity.
For all his proclamations that Shabbat is for everyone — and that his argument is neither religious nor political — Kirk was famous for participating in contentious debates on exactly those topics, and can’t help but turn to them even in a book about the day of rest. He spends time not just on Judaism, but on a multitude of what he considers to be liberal enemies of Christianity.
In the introduction, Kirk includes a rant about Joe Biden, a tirade against the pandemic lockdowns and a series of boastful descriptions of his own success. He notes that he is a busy man running three different companies with 300 people on payroll, emphasizes his essential ability to fundraise millions of dollars and touts his close relationship with President Trump. The chapters go on to offer a questionably scientific defense of creationism, a rant against materialism (and selfies), and several critiques of what Kirk believes are “false religions.” This last point, which crops up in multiple chapters, serves as an opportunity to bash Greta Thunberg, who Kirk accuses of leading an idolatrous cult of nature worship; Anthony Fauci, who is the figurehead of what Kirk calls “scientism”; and a meandering rant against Herbert Marcuse, one of the figures of the Frankfurt School, a fairly esoteric school of philosophy that Kirk blames for “woke” ideology.
None of these things have any obvious connection to Shabbat, and Kirk doesn’t attempt to make much of one. Still, their inclusion in a book ostensibly tied to a Jewish practice is revealing. An increasing number of Christians are adopting Jewish practices — not only Shabbat, but Passover Seders, wearing tallits and blowing shofars.
Yet however philosemitic these practices may appear, Stop in the Name of God demonstrates how comfortably they coexist with an antisemitic worldview that places Christianity above all else. Kirk’s argument for Shabbat is less about an appreciation for Jewish practice than a final entry in his life’s work advocating for a United States ruled by biblical values. The book is less about Shabbat than it is about Christianity. Ultimately, Kirk argues that all other religions are evil, morality cannot exist without God and that Western civilization will fall if it does not obey the Bible.
That’s not to say there isn’t real appreciation for Jewish practice woven into the book. But Kirk bends the meaning of Shabbat to his real mission: Christian nationalism.
The post In making a Christian case for Shabbat, Charlie Kirk stripped off its Judaism appeared first on The Forward.
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Germany’s far-right AfD, riding state win, targets more gains in elections from east to west
(JTA) — Germany’s far-right, riding high after winning an eastern state, seeks to capitalize on its momentum in a series of upcoming elections — starting with municipal voting this weekend, followed by two closely watched state contests.
The first test for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party comes Sunday in municipal elections in the western state of Lower Saxony. A week later, the AfD has its sights on state elections in the capital, Berlin, and the Baltic coast state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.
The AfD beat out other parties in Saxony-Anhalt on Sept. 6 with 43.8% of the vote and 39 of 83 state parliament seats, falling just short of a majority and marking Germany’s greatest far-right victory in a state election since World War II.
“From previous elections, we know that the AfD is currently able to mobilize almost totally its own constituency and potential voters, while its democratic competitors have much more problems,” said Gideon Botsch, the head of the Emil Julius Gumbel Research Unit on Antisemitism and Right-Wing Extremism at Potsdam University.
While polls do not predict the next state election results will match the historic win in Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD currently leads other parties in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania with about 35% of the vote. And in Berlin, long a stronghold of Germany’s political left, the AfD is jockeying with the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the left-wing Linke for first place, with all three polling around 20%.
The AfD, a nationalist, anti-immigrant party whose leaders have proposed rejecting Germany’s “guilt complex” over the Holocaust, has regularly topped nationwide opinion polls for the past year. In surveys asking Germans which party they would choose if federal elections were held “this Sunday,” the AfD often receives the highest results, Botsch told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
The AfD has built a dedicated and growing base, said Botsch. Its popularity signals frustration with the mainstream parties in power, particularly the CDU, Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s party, amid a sluggish economy. The AfD is especially popular in eastern Germany, where voters are poorer and hit hard by high energy prices exacerbated by the wars in Iran and Ukraine.
The AfD is likely to perform more weakly in the west, where Lower Saxony will hold a municipal election on Sunday. The party has stronger influence in the east, and Germany’s municipal elections tend to hinge more on well-known figures from established parties, said Roger Stöcker, a political scientist at Otto von Guericke University in Magdeburg. Still, even if the AfD doesn’t transform governments, Stöcker said that making inroads to further entrench itself in Lower Saxony would be “a strategically significant success.”
“It’s conceivable that the AfD wins a town hall or a county administration here and there or strengthens its presence in local councils, expanding its local base,” said Stöcker.
The three upcoming elections are being closely watched for signs of the AfD’s wider-scale momentum, said Daniel Schuster, who heads the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s European office.
“Taken together, these elections can help show whether Saxony-Anhalt was an exceptionally strong eastern result or part of a broader national expansion of the AfD’s electoral base,” said Schuster.
Remko Leemhuis, the director of the American Jewish Committee Berlin Lawrence and Lee Ramer Institute for German-Jewish Relations, added that residents will feel the effects of the AfD’s success even if it falls short of its victory in Saxony-Anhalt. A “very strong AfD result,” short of managing to enter government coalitions, would still “raise serious concerns” for Jewish residents about the party’s influence, said Leemhuis.
Residents in Saxony-Anhalt are waiting to see the ramifications of the AfD’s election victory. Without an outright majority, the party needs partners to join a coalition. Its nationalist agenda in the region includes teaching children less about Hitler, banning Pride flags in public buildings and requiring artists and cultural organizations to sign a declaration that they will not “disparage Germany and its culture” if they seek state funding.
State governments also control domestic policing and parts of the judiciary. The AfD could use its power in these areas to “put pressure on minorities it dislikes,” including immigrants, Muslims and Jews who are identified with Holocaust remembrance, said Stöcker. At the same time, the AfD could direct policing and intelligence away from right-wing extremism in Saxony-Anhalt, which recorded the second-highest number of right-wing extremist crimes per capita of Germany’s 16 states last year, Leemhuis said.
The AfD’s victory in Saxony-Anhalt marked a “watershed moment” in German politics, according to Roland Abold, the managing director of Infratest Dimap, a German election research institute. Abold said that the result heaped pressure on Merz and the federal government, as “calls for a change in political direction and a reassessment of cooperation with the AfD are likely to intensify.”
The CDU for now is standing behind Merz, the most unpopular chancellor in modern German history after 16 months in power. But if the CDU faces further heavy defeats in the upcoming elections, questions about Merz as the party’s leader could escalate, said Stöcker.
The AfD already has its eyes on his job. Alice Weidel, the national AfD’s co-chair, announced on Monday that she wants the party to win “at least 40% of the vote” in Germany’s next federal election in 2029.
Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD candidate in Saxony-Anhalt who hopes to become the state premier, said in the same press conference that his goal was “very clear.”
“As perhaps the next Minister-President of Saxony-Anhalt, I need a Federal Chancellor Alice Weidel here in Berlin, so that we can write here history side by side,” said Siegmund.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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I was born after 9/11. I still carry the memories of that day.
Earlier this week, I was talking with my mother over the phone about her experience on 9/11. She walked me through the familiar parts — how she was in our Upper West Side apartment when she learned about the attacks from a relative, how she went to the garage to get the car so they could drive to a friend’s house upstate once she realized the attacks were acts of terror. There were still hijacked planes in the air, and she worried New York City might be targeted again. Then, she said, “This part is going to make me cry.”
I hadn’t remembered what came next, but suddenly it came back to me. “Oh no, me too,” I said.
While she waited for my father to come back uptown from his office in the Financial District, she stopped inside a fire station across from the garage. Inside was a lone firefighter, who’d stayed behind to man the station while the rest of his company was inside the towers. He was watching the news on television, and my mom stood next to him, watching too, when the towers fell.
“We just lost so many men,” he said.
I wasn’t there when it happened; I wasn’t even alive. But I’d heard this story before, I’d walked dozens of times past that same fire station, which now has a plaque commemorating the seven firefighters who died on 9/11. Hearing the story again on the phone, I found myself walking down the streets of Washington D.C., bawling.
I’m 23, born a year-and-a-half after 9/11. Most Americans my age learned about the attacks in school, as history. I’m part of the 16% who learned through family or friends.
The discovery happened by accident, when I was in kindergarten. My mom and I were in a children’s store on the Upper West Side, when we started flipping through a picture book about the history of New York City. Most of the book was unremarkable, but the end was unexpected: a scene of the smoldering twin towers.
I forget what exactly happened next, but here’s what I do remember: My mom was upset that the shop hadn’t provided a warning about the book’s end, and I was confused about why she was upset. I was five, too young to understand the image and never one to let a question go unanswered; I must have pestered her until she offered up an explanation.
She hadn’t been prepared to tell me about terrorism. She’d been evading the topic for some time, telling half-truths to avoid it. When I’d ask her why we had to take our shoes off in line at the airport, she’d just say it was to make sure no one had anything dangerous, leaving out the part about how a man had tried to get on a flight with bombs hidden in his shoes.
“9/11 is a huge thing for a parent to have to tell a kid about,” my mom told me this week. “You were a happy kid, and I didn’t want you to get scared or traumatized.”
The events, and impacts, of that day slowly unfolded for me as the years passed. I learned that my father had watched from Battery Park as the South Tower fell; he ran westward as plumes of smoke billowed toward him. I learned that my parents had friends who’d died in the towers, one of whom was the father of a boy I grew up with. I remember going to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum when it opened in 2014, feeling sick as I watched footage of people jumping out of the towers.
The New York Times recently interviewed dozens of Gen Z Americans about 9/11. I was struck by how disconnected many felt from the event. “It’s hard to feel sad about something that you don’t remember,” said Annika Heegaard, a 25-year-old now living in New York.
But for me, 9/11 doesn’t feel quite so far away. By now I’ve lived through other mass casualty events, like the Parkland shooting and the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. But 9/11 is the only tragedy that my family members had such a direct connection to. “It was devastating,” my mom said.
I think the reason I can remember the exact moment I found out about 9/11 is because it changed my view of the world. I remember being almost unable to comprehend that anyone would do what the hijackers did. I wasn’t, as my mom feared, traumatized by learning about the attacks; I didn’t fear for my safety each day. But the knowledge was in some ways a loss of innocence — a discovery that people could do awful things and that the world wasn’t as safe a place as I had assumed.
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The DSA’s latest win was not about Israel — and it hurts the Jewish community to insist it was
When Democratic socialist David Morales defeated the incumbent mayor of Providence, Brett Smiley, in a historic primary win this week in Rhode Island, the election quickly became part of a narrative that has been coalescing around progressive political wins in the last year — the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City, Abdul El-Sayed’s primary win in Michigan, the sweep of DSA-backed candidates in New York City’s recent primaries. The idea is that this race was all about Israel — that it turned on a struggle between Zionists and pro-Palestinian activists.
A Jewish Telegraphic Agency story on Morales’s win features a quote from the founder of the Rhode Island-Israel Collaborative that Morales’s campaign was “fueled by pro-Palestinians and Israeli haters.” The founder of the far-right Rhode Island Coalition for Israel called some of Morales’ stances “anti-Israel and anti-Jewish.” Jewish Insider published a story the day before the primary headlined, “Antisemitism roils Providence mayoral race.” The Times of Israel’s story on the election is titled, “Jewish mayor of Providence loses Democratic primary to anti-Israel challenger.” (Smiley converted to Judaism in 2024, and made a controversial visit to Israel in 2025.)
But this narrative is false: Israel did not play a decisive role in this election. In reality, Morales was laser-focused on affordability, and — like most progressive candidates this year — rarely, if ever, brought up Israel unprompted. Indeed, the defining issue for the Morales campaign was not Israel, but rent stabilization.
Last April, Smiley vetoed legislation passed by Providence’s City Council to cap annual rent hikes at 4%. This ordinance is desperately needed: A recent study found that Providence is the least affordable city for renters in the country. Longtime residents are getting priced out, and essentially everyone who rents — and renters comprise 59% of the households in the city — understands that our trajectory is simply not sustainable.
By vetoing the most significant-ever attempt to bring this crisis under control, Smiley made this a race about a challenger fighting to make Providence affordable and an incumbent prioritizing his corporate donors, who gave Smiley a historically large $1.3 war chest for his campaign. (Morales had less than $300,000, largely from individual donors.)
This issue served as precisely the kind of defining contrast that pro-Israel Super PAC spending became in recent congressional elections elsewhere. Support from AIPAC has provided an impossible-to-obscure contrast to Democratic primary voters in races such as Illinois’s 9th Congressional District, New York’s 10th Congressional District, and Michigan’s Senate primary. But in Providence, the scandal wasn’t AIPAC donors — it was the wealthy developers and corporate landlords who funded Smiley’s campaign.
It is true that Morales criticized Smiley’s active participation in the Combat Antisemitism Movement, a project so Trumpian that the Jewish Federations of North America and Jewish Council for Public Affairs both left the group after it released a video claiming that diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts are antisemitic. Morales also came out in support of a ballot initiative that would require the City of Providence to divest from the debt of foreign countries “conducting ethnic cleansing, apartheid, illegal military occupation, or genocide,” as determined by U.S. and international law. Some of Morales’s supporters — and in particular some portion of his army of campaign volunteers — were undoubtedly motivated by an appreciation for Morales’s willingness to take a moral stance. But it simply wasn’t a top five, or even (by my estimation) a top 10 issue in this race.
And I don’t understand the inclination to claim otherwise. Certainly it doesn’t make sense for members of the Israel lobby; after all, having another election be lost due to voters’ anger over a politician’s fealty to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not good for their political project. But more importantly, these allegations — particularly the false claim that this race was somehow “roiled” by antisemitism — are harmful to Rhode Island’s Jewish community as a whole.
Take, for example, the “antisemitism” referenced by Jewish Insider, which consisted, in total, of a few instances in which a Hitler mustache and devil horns were drawn on Smiley’s campaign signs. Of course, defacing political signs is never good, and Morales immediately condemned the vandalism. But as a Jewish former elected official who experienced actual antisemitism over the course of my time in Rhode Island politics, I have to laugh at the idea that this graffiti was antisemitic.
To compare someone to Hitler is basically to say they’re the worst person ever. It’s often a problematic comparison (because almost nobody is actually as evil as Hitler), but it’s not antisemitic to say, in effect, “Hitler was bad, and so is this other guy.” And vandals were drawing devil’s horns on pictures of Smiley years before he converted. In fact, I don’t think the average Providence voter even knows Smiley is Jewish; it’s certainly not an important part of his political identity, given that he literally wasn’t yet Jewish when he first won election to the mayor’s office in 2022, or during his prior run for the seat in 2014.
Antisemitism is a real and growing problem — in our country, and here in Rhode Island. Just a few years ago, dozens of swastika-brandishing neo-Nazis rallied a block from my home. Every time that cynical politicians cry wolf on this threat, they are minimizing its danger in the eyes of most people, making our community less prepared to respond to actual incidents of antisemitism when they occur.
Even worse, when some partisans of Israel claim that everyone who dares to say Israel is committing genocide and apartheid is an antisemite — that is, someone who hates all Jews — the implication is that Israel’s wars and violence against Palestinians are somehow projects undertaken by all Jews, rather than the crimes of a specific far-right government and its supporters. And if you repeat that message often enough, some people are going to start believing it — which certainly does not make me or my young Jewish sons safer.
David Morales ran on a pledge to build a Providence for all. “All” includes members of the Jewish community, many of whom — including myself, and Morales’s campaign manager and field director, to name just a few — are excited to support his vision. It is to no one’s benefit — least of all Providence’s Jews — to try to seed conflict and distrust in what should be a moment of profound hope and possibility for our whole city.
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