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Ted Cruz to Jewish Republicans: Antisemitism is ‘an existential crisis in our party’
(JTA) — LAS VEGAS — Ted Cruz warned of rising antisemitism on the right — and a lack of Republican voices calling it out — as he kicked off the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual summit Thursday night.
The speech reiterated comments he made at a San Antonio megachurch last week, including the core message that he’s recently seen more right-wing antisemitism than ever before.
“In the last six months, I’ve seen more antisemitism on the right than I had in my entire life,” Cruz said.
“This is a poison,” he continued. “And I believe we are facing an existential crisis in our party and our country.”
The RJC’s annual gathering, being held this weekend at the Venetian Resort Las Vegas, comes as a growing number of conservatives are turning against Israel, while right-wing voices who are spreading antisemitic conspiracies are finding mainstream audiences.
Cruz, a longtime supporter of Israel, presented the moment of division on the right as “a time for choosing.”
“And as for me, I choose to stand with you,” Cruz said to the room of about 100 Jewish Republican donors. “I choose to stand with Israel, and I choose to stand with America.”
As at the megachurch, Cruz, who is Christian, did not name names in his criticism of the “anti-Israel right.” But on Thursday he hinted strongly that he was speaking about Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News personality who recently hosted a friendly conversation with the white nationalist livestreamer Nick Fuentes. Carlson said during the interview that GOP supporters of Israel — including Cruz — are infected by a “brain virus.”
“If you sit there and nod adoringly while someone tells you that Winston Churchill was the villain of World War II, if you sit there and nod while someone says, ‘There’s a very good argument America should’ve intervened on behalf of Nazi Germany in World War II,’ if you sit there with someone who says ‘Adolf Hitler was very, very cool,’ and that their mission is to combat and defeat global Jewry, and you say nothing?” Cruz said. “Then you are a coward and you are complicit in that evil.”
His comments came just hours after Kevin Roberts, the president of leading conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, answered mounting questions about whether he would continue to associate with Carlson after the Fuentes interview — with a resounding defense of Carlson.
RJC CEO Matt Brooks told Jewish Insider that, after working with Heritage over the years, there would be “a reassessment of our relationship with Heritage in light of this.”
Cruz called out the silence of Republican elected officials who’ve not spoken out against increasing right-wing antisemitism.
“I have to say, too many people are scared to confront them,” he said, referring to the “grotesque bigots” who do not plainly see Hitler as “the embodiment of evil.”
“How many elected Republicans do you see standing up and calling this out?” Cruz said. “How many do you see willing to take on the voices on the anti-Israel right?”
One name invoked by Cruz in a positive light was President Donald Trump, whom the Texas senator called “the most pro-Israel president in the history of the United States,” to loud applause.
Cruz affirmed to the RJC’s membership that with Trump in the White House, their interest in assisting Israel in its conflicts would be upheld, and kept away from the skepticism of a growing isolationist faction that would rather the United States not get involved.
(Trump has not publicly weighed in on Carlson hosting Fuentes; Trump once dined with Fuentes and rapper Ye between presidential terms in 2022, later saying that he had not known who Fuentes was.)
But Cruz then pointed to the post-Trump future as a fork in the road moment for the Republican Party.
“When Trump is not in the White House, what then?” Cruz said.
One man called out, “Ted Cruz!”
One potential candidate for Republican leadership in 2028 was not named in Cruz’s speech: JD Vance.
Cruz lauded Trump’s efforts in taking on Hamas and cracking down on campus protests, but did not name Vance as a friend of Jewish Americans.
Vance faced criticism this week after failing to push back on skeptical questions about Israel, including one laced with an antisemitic conspiracy theory, at a Turning Point USA event at Ole Miss. Vance also downplayed the messages sent in the recent Young Republicans leak, saying the text messages sent by early-career GOP activists — which included jokes about gas chambers, racist slurs and praise of Hitler — were simply immature “jokes” and that critics should “grow up.”
Cruz emphasized the need to “engage in college campuses” and “engage in the facts” in order to overcome the “handful of voices that are spreading this garbage,” whom he said were “giving every one of us a time for choosing.”
He thanked the crowd for being “patriots.”
“You love America — although the fact that you are Jewish means that there are idiots who would accuse you of not loving America simply because of it,” he said, invoking the dual loyalties trope to which Fuentes subscribes.
Cruz’s 25-minute speech included celebratory jokes about Israel’s pager operation that killed some and wounded hundreds of members of Hezbollah, condemnations of what he called a growing “pro-Hamas wing” of the Democratic Party, and a reflection on the horrors of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
But its main thrust was that the Republican Party has reached a point where its Jewish and pro-Israel membership must think about how to stave off a growing anti-Israel movement, and quell the proliferation of antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Cruz began his speech by remarking that this was the RJC’s 40th-anniversary summit — a fact that he said poignantly reinforced the weight of this moment.
“Thinking back over the last 40 years, I don’t know that there has been a year in those 40 that the Republican Jewish Coalition was more needed than right now,” Cruz said.
The post Ted Cruz to Jewish Republicans: Antisemitism is ‘an existential crisis in our party’ appeared first on The Forward.
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German Antisemitism Commissioner Targeted With Death Threat Letter After Arson Attack on Home
Andreas Büttner (Die Linke), photographed during the state parliament session. The politician was nominated for the position of Brandenburg’s anti-Semitism commissioner. Photo: Soeren Stache/dpa via Reuters Connect
Andreas Büttner, the commissioner for antisemitism in the state of Brandenburg in northeastern Germany, has been targeted the second attack in under a week after receiving a death threat, sparking outrage and prompting local authorities to launch a full investigation.
According to the German newspaper Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten (PNN), the Brandenburg state parliament received a letter on Monday threatening Büttner’s life, with the words “We will kill you” and an inverted red triangle, the symbol of support for the Islamist terrorist group Hamas.
State security police have examined the anonymous letter under strict safety measures, determining that a gray substance inside was harmless. Authorities are now probing the incident as part of an ongoing investigation into threats against the German official.
Ulrike Liedtke, president of the Brandenburg state parliament, condemned the latest attack on Büttner, describing the death threats and harassment as “completely unacceptable.”
“Threats and violence are not a form of political discourse, but crimes against humanity,” Liedtke said. “Andreas Büttner has our complete support and solidarity.”
A former police officer and member of the Left Party, Büttner took office as commissioner for antisemitism in 2024 and has faced repeated attacks since.
On Sunday night, Büttner’s private property in Templin — a town located approximately 43 miles north of Berlin — was targeted in an arson attack, and a red Hamas triangle was spray-painted on his house.
The home of Germany’s antisemitism commissioner, Andreas Büttner, was set on fire overnight in a targeted attack.
His family was inside the house at the time.
This is the second attack against Büttner in the past 16 months. His car was previously vandalized with swastikas. This… pic.twitter.com/cAbFnMIwQ7
— Combat Antisemitism Movement (@CombatASemitism) January 5, 2026
According to Büttner, his family was inside the house at the time of the attack, marking the latest assault against him in the past 16 months.
“The symbol sends a clear message. The red Hamas triangle is widely recognized as a sign of jihadist violence and antisemitic incitement,” Büttner said in a statement after the incident.
“Anyone who uses such a thing wants to intimidate and glorify terror. This is not a protest, it is a threat,” he continued.
Hamas uses inverted red triangles in its propaganda videos to indicate Israeli targets about to be attacked. The symbol, a common staple at pro-Hamas rallies, has come to represent the Palestinian terrorist group and glorify its use of violence.
In August 2024, swastikas and other symbols and threats were also spray-painted on Büttner’s personal car.
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Harvard President Blasts Scholar Activism, Calls for ‘Restoring Balance’ in Higher Ed
Harvard University President Alan Garber speaks during the 374th Commencement exercises at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, May 29, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
Harvard University president Alan Garber, fresh off a resounding endorsement in which the Harvard Corporation elected to keep him on the job “indefinitely,” criticized progressive faculty in a recent podcast interview for turning the university classroom into a pulpit for the airing of their personal views on contentious political issues.
Garber made the comments last week on the “Identity/Crisis Podcast,” a production of the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Jewish think tank which specializes in education research.
“I think that’s where we went wrong,” Garber said, speaking to Yehuda Kurtzer. “Because think about it, if a professor in a classroom says, ‘This is what I believe about this issue,’ how many students — some of you probably would be prepared to deal with this, but most people wouldn’t — how many students would actually be willing to go toe to toe against a professor who’s expressed a firm view about a controversial issue?”
Garber continued, saying he believes higher education, facing a popular backlash against what critics have described as political indoctrination, is now seeing a “movement to restore balance in teaching and to bring back the idea that you really need to be objective in the classroom.”
He added, “What we need to arm our students with is a set of facts and a set of analytic tools and cultivation of rigor in analyzing these issues.”
Coming during winter recess and the Jewish and Christian holidays, Garber’s interview fell under the radar after it was first aired but has been noticed this week, with some observers pointing to it as evidence that Harvard is leading an effort to restore trust in the university even as it resists conceding to the Trump administration everything it has demanded regarding DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), viewpoint diversity, and expressive activity such as protests.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Garber has spent the past two years fighting factions from within and without the university that have demanded to steer its policies and culture — from organizers of an illegal anti-Israel encampment to US President Donald Trump, who earlier this year canceled $2.26 billion in public money for Harvard after it refused to grant his wishlist of reforms for which the conservative movement has clamored for decades.
Even as Harvard tells Trump “no,” it has enacted several policies as a direct response to criticisms that the institution is too permissive of antisemitism for having allowed anti-Zionist extremism to reach the point of antisemitic harassment and discrimination. In 2025, the school agreed to incorporate into its policies a definition of antisemitism supported by most of the Jewish community, established new rules governing campus protests, and announced new partnerships with Israeli academic institutions. Harvard even shuttered a DEI office and transferred its staff to what will become, according to a previous report by The Harvard Crimson, a “new Office of Culture and Community.” The paper added that Harvard has even “worked to strip all references to DEI from its website.”
Appointed in January 2024 as interim president, Garber — who previously served in roles as Harvard’s provost and chief academic officer — rose to the top position at America’s oldest and, arguably, most prestigious institution at a time when the job was least desirable. At the time, Harvard was being pilloried over some of its students cheering Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel and even forming gangs which mobbed Jewish students wending their way through campus; the university had suffered the embarrassment of its first Black president being outed as a serial plagiarist, a stunning disclosure which called into question its vetting procedures as well as its embrace of affirmative action; and anti-Israel activists on campus were disrupting classes and calling for others to “globalize the intifada.”
Garber has since won over the Harvard Corporation, which has refused to replace him during a moment that has been described as the most challenging in its history.
“Alan’s humble, resilient, and effective leadership has shown itself to be not just a vital source of calm in turbulent times, but also a generative force for sustaining Harvard’s commitment to academic excellence and to free inquiry and expression,” Harvard Corporation senior fellow Penny Pritzker said in a statement issued on behalf of the body, which is the equivalent of a board of trustees. “From restoring a sense of community during a period of intense scrutiny and division to launching vital new programs on viewpoint diversity and civil discourses and instituting new actions to fight antisemitism and anti-Arab bias, Alan has not only stabilized the university but brought us together in support of our shared mission.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Holocaust Survivors Sent Care Packages to Oct. 7 Hostages for Hanukkah
The Menorah for Hanukkah on the Square 2025 in Trafalgar Square, London, United Kingdom, Dec. 14, 2025. Photo: Matthew Chattle/Cover Images via Reuters Connect
Survivors of the Holocaust spread holiday cheer this Hanukkah by delivering care packages to a group of 20 hostages whom the terrorist group Hamas recently released from captivity to fulfill the requirements of a ceasefire which suspended hostilities with Israel.
The gifts, dropped off at the Israeli consulate office in New York City, was made possible by The Blue Card, the only US-based charity organization which provides financial assistance and other services to survivors of the Holocaust. Originally founded in 1934 to assist Jews who had fled Germany to escape Hitler’s persecution of the country’s Jews, it has operated ceaselessly for nearly a century.
Over the past two years, the world has seen a revival of antisemitism unlike any since the period in which The Blue Card was founded, sparked by the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre that claimed the lives over of 1,200 Israelis and stole years and even more lives from 251 more who were kidnapped and held hostage in Gaza.
Some of the hostages who survived captivity have been released in stages since Israel and Hamas agreed on a ceasefire in October, and on Monday, Blue Card executive director Masha Pearl said the organization felt it necessary to reach out to them due to their having experienced a plight that is painfully familiar to what its clients endured in Europe during the Holocaust. Pearl also discussed the Bondi Beach mass shooting, in which a father and son inspired by Islamism opened fire on Jews celebrating the start of Hanukkah, murdering 15 people and injuring 40 others.
“Holocaust survivors and former hostages share a uniquely painful bond shaped by survival and resilience,” Pearl said. “After witnessing a mass shooting at a Chanukah event in Sydney, it felt even more urgent for our survivors to deliver these care packages now, spreading light at a moment that feels dark for the entire Jewish world. The resilience of the Holocaust survivors we assist, the former hostages, and now the survivors of the attack in Australia remind us that even in the face of hatred and violence, the Jewish people remain united.”
In a press release Blue Card said the care packages “carried profound meaning,” being filled to the brim with goods of all sorts, from blankets and water bottles to chap stick and even handwritten notes from the Holocaust survivors who sent them.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.