Top conservative influencers Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens have significantly ramped-up anti-Israel rhetoric on their platforms over the past year, according to a new study by the Jewish People Policy Institute.

The study by the Jerusalem based think tank, published Monday, comes as alarm over growing antisemitism from the right has reached a fever pitch in recent months, with several top Jewish conservatives calling for the party to draw a line against the rising influence of antisemitic voices.

“Antisemitism on the American far right is now overt and out in the open,” said Shuki Friedman, the director-general of JPPI, in a statement. “The data should serve as a flashing warning light for Israel and its leadership regarding the kind of support it can expect from the right, today and in the future. Only a determined effort to counter this extremism can help preserve this vital base of support in the United States.”

The new study analyzed roughly 3,000 YouTube videos from Carlson and Owens and used ChatGPT to identify antisemitic content and classify their mentions of Israel as either positive, negative or neutral.

For Carlson, who set off a firestorm within the party after he hosted a friendly interview with antisemitic and white nationalist livestreamer Nick Fuentes in October, Israel first became a predominant topic on his YouTube channel, which has 5.1 million followers, in April.

Over the last six months, the share of Carlson’s content about Israel that was labeled as “negative” by JPPI rose to 70%, up from roughly half the previous six months.

For Owens, 96% of her mentions of Israel were already classified as negative by JPPI at the start of the year, but the volume of her mentions of Israel and Jews sharply increased over the course of the year.

Increasing anti-Israel sentiment on the far has been attributed to several factors, including the isolationist “America First” ideology and opposition to “forever wars” prominent in the MAGA movement, parts of which view U.S. aid to Israel is an excessive use of taxpayer money.

At the same time, some right-wing influencers have been critical of Israel in ways that JPPI and other groups have said are indistinguishable from classic antisemitic tropes.

“Across multiple videos, [Carlson and Owens] employ sharp rhetoric, including comparisons between Israel and Hamas, use of the term ‘genocide,’ accusations of deliberately killing children, and the circulation of conspiracy narratives alleging Israeli influence over the United States,” the study read.

While Carlson was named “Antisemite of the Year” by the activist group StopAntisemitism last week, the JPPI analysis did not identify “consistent or explicit antisemitic statements” in his content. Rather, the group said that Carlson has repeatedly offered an “uncritical platform to well-known antisemites,” including Fuentes.

But the study found that Owens, who earned the accolade last year, has increasingly made antisemitism a hallmark of her YouTube account, which has 5.7 million subscribers. Over the past six months, three-quarters of Owens’ videos that made mention of Jews were classified as antisemitic by JPPI’s algorithm, compared to 45% of videos from the first six months of the year.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Conservative influencers Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens sharply increased anti-Israel rhetoric in 2025, study finds appeared first on The Forward.

Three thousand miles from his New York City home, as the August dawn broke over the Austrian landscape, 24-year-old Army draftee Stephen Wechsler took off his shoes, waded into the Danube River, and began to swim. He struggled at first, then realized the current was carrying him toward his destination: the Soviet zone of occupied Austria.

Wechsler’s act of betrayal took place in 1952. The U.S. Army had discovered that the young Jewish private first class had lied on his induction papers, denying that he had ever belonged to the Communist Party or any affiliated organizations. In truth, he had belonged to several Communist groups, starting at age 14.

When a letter arrived ordering him to appear before a military judge in Nuremberg, it didn’t specify the charge. It didn’t need to. Wechsler understood immediately. And in his mind, there was only one path left: flee the American zone and seek refuge behind the Iron Curtain.

What followed is one of the more improbable personal odysseys of the Cold War. Starting a new life in Communist East Germany, Wechsler remade himself as Victor Grossman — establishing himself as a columnist, interpreter for visiting American leftists like Jane Fonda, defender of his adopted homeland, crusader against fascism, and sharp critic of American capitalism.

In his final years, Victor/Stephen wrote an online newsletter called Berlin Bulletin, warning about the threat to German democracy posed by the far-right Alternative for Germany, and to American democracy posed by Donald Trump.

Victor/Stephen died last week in Berlin at age 97, bringing to a close a 73-year exile.

I came to know him through a cousin of his in Portland, Oregon, where I live. I interviewed him by phone last year, reaching him at his apartment on Karl Marx Allee, in the formerly Communist half of Berlin. He had just turned 96. I call him Victor/Stephen because he was known as the former in Germany and the latter among his friends and relatives in the U.S.

Victor/Stephen’s story is as much about love as it is about betrayal — perhaps more so. It was love for Renate, the East German woman he married soon after his desertion, that anchored him.

“I was homesick. But I was very much in love, and that made up for it,” he told me about Renate, who died some years ago.

He sometimes wondered whether he was like Don Quixote, jousting with windmills. But his ideals were so deeply rooted that he fought for them until his final years, writing his Berlin Bulletin with the same passion he had carried since adolescence.

From his teen years through Harvard and in factory jobs after graduation, Stephen Wechsler had been deeply involved in Communist causes. In the infamous 1949 riot that disrupted a Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill, N.Y., young Wechsler was among the leftists on buses attacked by stone-throwing white mobs while police stood by and did nothing.

His activism was interrupted by the Korean War, when he was drafted into the Army. He was relieved to be sent to West Germany rather than to the front lines. But his radical past caught up with him. Facing a possible five-year sentence in a military prison for lying on his induction papers, he decided to desert.

After his swim across the Danube, Wechsler didn’t know what to expect from Austria’s Soviet occupiers. Would they suspect he was a spy? He soon found himself in Bautzen, East Germany, where the Soviets had established a kind of halfway house for Western deserters. He found work in a factory, joined the German-Soviet Friendship Society, and so impressed his hosts that they appointed him culture director of a clubhouse for foreign deserters — organizing dances, ping-pong tournaments, chess matches, billiards, and other diversions from the temptations of Bautzen’s bars.

He fell in love with Renate, enrolled in the journalism program at Karl Marx University in Leipzig, married her, and after graduation went to work for an East Berlin publishing company, as he later wrote in his autobiography Crossing the River: A Memoir of the American Left, the Cold War, and Life in East Germany. He and Renate started a family, raising two sons.

Victor/Stephen caught the attention of John Peet, a British expatriate who published the German Democratic Report, an English-language newsletter sent abroad from East Berlin to counter negative portrayals of the German Democratic Republic. He worked for Peet for four years, helping publish reports that embarrassed West Germany by using Nazi-era documents to reveal how deeply the Federal Republic’s judiciary and bureaucracy were staffed by former officials of the Third Reich

He next worked for East Germany’s state radio network. A unique opportunity arose when East Germany’s Academy of Arts asked him to create an archive dedicated to Paul Robeson. Freelance work followed: articles on U.S. affairs for fellow Karl Marx University graduates now in senior media positions, dubbing dialogue for East German films, writing English subtitles.

He began writing his own books, including a history of the United States that emphasized the roles of women, Black Americans, peace movements and unions — themes that aligned with the ideals of Communist East Germany, at least partly because of their propaganda value against the West.

The opening of the Berlin Wall tossed him into a predicament. While he welcomed the end of travel restrictions on East Germans, he feared it would lead to the demise of East Germany as an autonomous state. Of course, he was right.

When West Germany formally merged with East Germany on Oct. 3, 1990, it was a stab in the heart for him. His wish was not to see “little GDR,” as he called it, swallowed by the capitalist West, but to take a middle path — allowing political freedom to bloom while preserving socialism and what he saw as the virtues of the East German state.

“I had always made clear that I was against the boils and carbuncles,” he wrote of the GDR’s abuses, “but wanted to cure, not kill the patient.”

When I interviewed him last year, he spoke wistfully about the GDR: child care, university education, dental care, eyeglasses, and hospital stays were free; rents were cheap; there was virtually no joblessness, he said; crime was practically nonexistent. While East Germans couldn’t travel to the West, they enjoyed inexpensive vacations in Prague, Budapest, and other Eastern Bloc cities.

“Life was not what people in the West imagined,” he told me.

In his recent writings and interviews, Victor/Stephen argued that the East German state took better care of its citizens than the U.S. does of its own. In a 2019 interview with the socialist magazine Jacobin, he said, “I shine a light on issues that Americans face: evictions, homelessness, mass incarceration, food banks, and the lack of access to food, healthcare, education, maternity leave, and childcare. I draw on some truly ghastly yet upsettingly commonplace examples.”

Although Victor/Stephen could sound like an ideologue, from my phone and email communications with him I got the distinct impression that love was a factor in his decision not to move back to the States. It was love not just for Renate, but also for East Germany, for its people, and for a dream he pursued until his final days: of trying to improve the lot of all humankind.

In our times, with authoritarianism on the rise around the world, with human rights and social justice slipping away, who is to fault Victor/Stephen for never abandoning such a dream?

 

The post A Jewish-American exile behind the Iron Curtain, he never lost his love for East Germany appeared first on The Forward.

In a recent viral video responding to Ben Shapiro’s accurate description of her long-standing pattern of spreading baseless fear and animus, Candace Owens urged her audience to “wake up” about Jews, Judaism, and what she called “Talmudic Jews.”

As part of that exhortation, she recommended a book titled The Talmudic Jew, presenting it not as a historical artifact, but as a suppressed key to understanding not only Shapiro, but Jewish behavior and morality writ large. 

This is not a new genre of argument. It is one of the oldest weapons in the antisemitic arsenal.

Owens’ framing follows a familiar script: for those predisposed to view Jews as powerful, alien, or suspect, the explanation is presumed to lie hidden in Jewish religious texts.

The Talmud, in this telling, is not a complex legal and ethical corpus but a secret code — one that allegedly explains Jewish behavior and justifies suspicion toward Jews as a group. Owens’ invitation for non-Jews to “wake up” is actually an invitation to stop seeing Jews as human beings — let alone as neighbors or fellow citizens — and to begin seeing them as something else entirely: a threat.

In the same video, Owens widens the accusation. She urges viewers to believe that Jews are behind conflicts pitting “Christian against Christian” and “Christians against Muslims” around the world — an echo of a medieval antisemitic fantasy that casts Jews as the hidden engineers of war and civilizational collapse. This trope, documented for centuries, has no basis in history. Its function is not explanation but absolution: it diverts responsibility away from actual political, religious, and imperial actors, and deposits it onto a convenient, ever-available scapegoat.

Owens then extends this logic further, telling Black audiences that “white people” were not responsible for the Transatlantic slave trade — or slavery more broadly — and that Jews were. This claim is not merely false; it is grotesque.

The Transatlantic slave trade was a European enterprise, driven by explicitly European Christian empires — British, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and later American — whose colonial economies depended on enslaved labor. Likewise, the vast Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades were driven primarily by Arab-Muslim empires and traders over many centuries. Between roughly the 7th and 19th centuries, European and Arab imperial systems conquered and controlled much of the known world — and they were the principal engines of slavery wherever it was practiced. Jews, overwhelmingly a tiny, marginalized minority without imperial power, were not — and could not have been — the drivers of these systems.

The Talmudic Jew, the book Owens cites approvingly as the purported “key” to understanding Jews, was written by August Rohling, an Austrian, German-language Catholic theologian of the late 19th century whose work relied on mistranslations, selective quotation, and outright fabrication. Rohling did not attempt to understand rabbinic Judaism. His aim was polemical: to portray Judaism as inherently immoral and hostile toward non-Jews, and to argue that Jewish emancipation in Western Europe had been a catastrophic mistake.

Rohling’s book was discredited even in his own time. Contemporary scholars demonstrated that he mistranslated Hebrew and Aramaic texts, stripped legal debates of context, treated marginal opinions as binding doctrine, and in some cases invented quotations outright. Yet the book endured because it served a purpose: it gave readers permission to see Jews not merely as wrong, but as inherently dangerous.

That durability proved deadly. In the 20th century, Rohling’s arguments were revived and repurposed by Nazi ideologues, who cited anti-Talmud literature like The Talmudic Jew as supposed evidence that Jewish tradition itself justified exclusion, persecution, and annihilation. The book did not cause the Holocaust — but it helped supply the intellectual scaffolding that made genocide conceivable.

Owens’ amplification of Rohling is therefore not incidental. It places her squarely within a long and infamous lineage of antisemitic accusations that treat Jews as the hidden hand behind social conflict, moral decay, and historical evil.

When Owens speaks of “Talmudic Jews,” she is not describing a religious practice. She is issuing an indictment: that Jews are governed by a hidden code that renders them morally alien and hostile to the societies in which they live. That indictment depends on a fundamental misrepresentation of the Talmud itself.

The Talmud is not a single book or a secret code. It is a sprawling legal record spanning centuries, comprising 63 tractates and more than 2,700 folio pages, dense with debate, disagreement, and layered interpretation. It preserves arguments rather than decrees, questions rather than answers, and features minority opinions alongside majority rulings. To lift a line from this corpus and present it as “what Jews believe” is not scholarship. It is distortion.

That distortion is not accidental. It is the engine of a genre designed to turn Jewish complexity into Jewish hate.

Candace Owens presents herself as a truth-teller urging her audience to “wake up.” What she is really doing is attempting to mainstream a discredited and dangerous form of antisemitic propaganda — one that history has already tested and found catastrophic. When such claims are broadcast by someone with her reach and influence, they do not merely misinform. They habituate. They train audiences to see Jews as a civilizational menace. And once a people are cast as a menace, cruelty is easily rebranded as responsibility — and even as self-defense.

Terrible moments in history do not repeat themselves automatically. They are repeated when influential figures persuade their followers that ancient libels are newly discovered truths.

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.