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There’s something rotten in our approach to antisemitism. Tucker Carlson exposed it
The federal government has cracked down on antisemitism from the left, while ignoring or justifying antisemitism on the right. That’s a cold, hard and very uncomfortable fact.
After anti-Israel protests swept campuses amid Israel’s military response to the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack, Congressional panels subjected university administrators to withering public cross-examinations over antisemitism. President Donald Trump’s administration levied millions in fines, and withheld or threatened to cancel billions in federal funding, including to university medical research.
It was a quick and harsh reaction to protests that, in some cases, veered into antisemitism and singled out Jewish students. “Nobody gets the right to harass their fellow students,” Vice President J.D. Vance said at the peak of the student protests. “Nobody gets a right to set up 10 encampments and turn their college campuses into garbage dumps. And nobody gets the right to block their fellow students from attending class.”
Contrast that to Vance’s reaction earlier this month, when the conservative broadcaster Tucker Carlson hosted the far-right activist Nick Fuentes on his popular podcast, kicking off a massive debate about the mainstreaming of extremist views on the right.
Fuentes, who has expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin and called for the execution of “perfidious Jews,” told Carlson that the great challenge to American social harmony is “organized Jewry.” Carlson didn’t push back. And when asked for comment, Vance said he didn’t want to take part in Republican “infighting.”
Trump, too, declined to join the Carlson critics.“I mean, if he wants to interview Nick Fuentes, I don’t know much about him, but if he wants to do it. Get the word out. Let them,” Trump told reporters.
Get the word out? What, exactly, is going on?
Ignoring horseshoe theory, at our peril
Defenders of this lopsided response might argue that the administration actually has leverage over universities in the form of billions of taxpayer dollars. The government has legal recourse to hold colleges and individual students accountable.
Carlson’s choice to play nice with Nazis, on the other hand, is a matter of free speech — even if it is ominous, incendiary speech. What action could the government take against a privately-funded podcaster?
The obvious answer is: At least condemn it. But that has not happened at any level of this administration.
Carlson himself, in a long new interview with a New York Times reporter, downplayed Fuentes’ overt antisemitic statements and positioned himself as someone who, like Fuentes, merely questions U.S. policy toward Israel.
“Mr. Carlson said he abhors antisemitism and that he has numerous Jewish friends who share his qualms with the Israeli government,” wrote the Times reporter.
If that sounds awfully familiar, it’s because anti-Israel protesters at the other extreme say much the same things. Some of their best friends are Jewish, and they too hate what Israel’s leaders are doing.
American Jews are witnessing the horseshoe theory of politics in real time — the idea that the far-left and the far-right bend more toward each other than to the center. The ideology that the extremes are converging on is that Jews are the problem.
Both extremes, beginning with outrage at Israel, have a propensity to slide into overtly anitsemitic conspiracy theories that blame Israel for the Iraq War, 9/11, NYPD violence, manipulating Congress, and the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
Meanwhile, the political leaders who can confront both these extremes through words and policy, only seem to be hammering away at one side: the left.
A virus among young conservatives
The organized Jewish community, too, is highly attuned to instances on the left when anti-Israel attitudes bend toward outright Jew hatred. The most vocal critics of New York’s Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani accused him of just that — fomenting antisemitism and supporting antisemites in opposing Israel.
Immediately after Mamdani’s election, the ADL announced it was debuting a special program to monitor his administration for antisemitism.
But the ample evidence that a growing segment of the right is slipping back into the well-worn alliance that characterized the United States in the 1930s, when isolationists and antisemites made common cause against the Jews, doesn’t raise the same institutional alarms.
Trump has engaged with the extremist right, where antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment have both flourished for years, since the beginning of his first presidential run. Yet his Jewish supporters have given him far more leeway than they would ever think of giving Mamdani.
Meanwhile, that antisemitic segment of the conservative movement has quietly expanded, and found increasing tolerance in mainstream conservative spaces. The conservative analyst Ron Dreher wrote recently that he estimates some 30 to 40% of the Republican Gen Z’ers who work in official Washington are Fuentes fans.
Antisemitism “is spreading like a virus among religious conservatives of the Zoomer generation,” he wrote.
Antisemitism for me, but not for thee
That boom might explain the disparity between Trump and Vance’s stance on college protesters and on Carlson and Fuentes.
Like so much else in our polarized society, antisemitism itself has become politicized. Your Jew-hatred is abhorrent, the thinking goes, but mine is free speech. Yours must be prosecuted. But I’m just asking questions.
The best hope American Jews have is that enough brave souls from across the political spectrum will step up and speak out, even against their own political tribe, knowing the dark fate of societies that go down this path.
Dreher, in a private meeting with Vance earlier this month, told the vice president that standing up to Nazis and their publicists like Tucker Carlson is not “infighting,” but a fight for the soul of the Republican Party, and of the U.S.
No word on how Vance responded. But can I suggest the ADL monitor him, too?
The post There’s something rotten in our approach to antisemitism. Tucker Carlson exposed it appeared first on The Forward.
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A Super Bowl Ad Against Antisemitism with No Consequence Misses the Mark
Robert Kraft. Photo: New England Patriots/Wikimedia Commons
I greatly respect Patriots owner Robert Kraft and his efforts to warn about the dangers of antisemitism. The Jewish community has largely failed in fighting this disease, for which there is no cure.
Some will also say that no ad will stop antisemitism, and argue that it’s a waste of money to run advertisements at all. But I strongly disagree.
There are a range of people in America, including some who have hatred in their hearts but have not yet acted on it, or some who don’t even know Jews personally. In a world where millions are listening to Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and laughing at Kanye West’s “Heil Hitler,” it would be useful to have some persuasive media strategy against antisemitism.
I’m not sure how many Americans watch Douglas Murray, Ben Shapiro, or follow Hillel Fuld online, but more than 100 million watch the Super Bowl annually.
It is a fantastic decision to spend money on an ad against antisemitism if it can get people’s attention, be emotionally impactful, show consequences for a perpetrator of hate, and make people think for a second.
Many tools must be used in the fight against antisemitism, and there is no reason why ads can’t be one of them. While they won’t likely change the mind of people planning to assault Jews, they might change the minds of others. I have a friend whose son was called a dirty Jew in school. The student likely called him that because he figured there would be no consequence.
This year’s ad — which follows ads in 2024 and 2025 — featured a Jewish boy who is pushed. We see a post-it calling him a “Dirty Jew.” An African-American student puts a blue square on it, and notes that Black people have experienced similar hatred.
The ad is a failure because it doesn’t grab your attention, shows no perpetrator, and more importantly — shows no consequences.
It is a slight improvement over last year’s ad with Tom Brady and Snoop Dogg, as that had zero authenticity. This ad has some authenticity, but by showing no perpetrator, it actually normalizes antisemitism — as if we should expect students to write “Dirty Jew” on the backpacks and lockers of students. We should have seen the student writing it, and seen some repercussions — be it a suspension, students looking at them as losers, or something of that sort.
There should be funds allocated to making meaningful ads about Jew-hatred both on regular TV and online. It is inexplicable that this is not being done, and there are so many Jewish celebrities that could be involved. I just wished Kraft’s ad had done a much better job.
The author is a writer based in New York.
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Beyond the Bunker and the Billboard: A New Approach to Fighting Antisemitism
Tens of thousands joined the National March Against Antisemitism in London, Nov. 26, 2023. Photo: Tayfun Salci/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Earlier this month, Bret Stephens delivered the “State of World Jewry” address. At the risk of oversimplifying his speech, Stephens’ message was a somber pivot: the millions of dollars spent fighting antisemitism are largely wasted. We cannot “cure” the world of this hatred. Instead, we should spend those resources strengthening Jewish identity — funding Jewish day schools, summer camps, and building a fortress of internal resilience.
On Sunday, Robert Kraft’s Foundation to Combat Antisemitism continued their diametrically opposite approach. During the Super Bowl, they ran an ad featuring a Black student showing allyship to a Jewish student who is being bullied. The message is optimistic: Education, awareness, and cross-cultural empathy can win the day.
One strategy is retreat and fortify; the other is reach out and persuade.
I believe both are destined to fail.
Stephens is right that we cannot logic our way out of hate, but his solution surrenders the public square. Kraft is noble in his pursuit of allyship, but his solution relies on empathy that simply may not exist in large enough quantities.
There is a third path. It does not rely on Jewish introspection, nor does it beg for non-Jewish affection. It relies on universal enforcement.
The Failure of “Particularism”
If you poll Americans on how they feel about “antisemitism” (or its modern fraternal twin, “anti-Zionism,” which is a label that now mostly serves as a cover for Jew-hatred), the results are messy. Resistance to these specific bigotries is not universal; it is partisan, generational, and fraught with “context.”
However, if you poll Americans on the universal moral taboos — overt bigotry, dehumanization, and the endorsement of violence — the consensus is overwhelming. Even in our divided era, I am certain that more than 90% of the country agrees that persecuting a racial or religious group or celebrating violence is socially unacceptable.
This is the strategic flaw in both the Stephens and Kraft approaches: They treat antisemitism as a unique problem requiring a unique solution.
But we don’t need a “Jewish” solution. We need a universal solution, and fortunately one already exists.
The most effective way to protect the Jewish community is to stop asking society to protect Jews specifically, and start demanding society protect civilization generally and all of its people equally.
We must broaden the fight. We recruit the entire country not to defend Jews against Jew-hatred, but to defend the core American value that all overt hatred is an inadmissible taboo.
When we make the standard universal, we strip away the “exceptions.” If society agrees that “dehumanization is a firing offense,” then a person dehumanizing a Zionist must be fired the same as if they dehumanized Black or gay Americans — not because the employer loves Zionists or Black or LGBT people, but because the employer fears tolerating and normalizing these taboos of hate regardless of the group being targeted.
To do this, we must re-acquaint the mainstream with the concept of moral taboos.
As Jonathan Haidt explored in The Righteous Mind, true moral taboos are not intellectual; they are visceral. We don’t debate whether incest is wrong; we recoil from it. We need to restore that same visceral recoil to bigotry and the endorsement of violence, which largely exists, but then we must re-familiarize society with the mechanism for enforcing taboos: social consequences.
Stephens gives up on the outer world. Kraft tries to persuade it with carrots. The Third Path uses the stick of social ostracism. Social consequences are society’s immune response. When the immune system is working, a “Rejoicer” who cheers for violence is expelled from the body politic — not by law, but by consensus.
The Binary Choice
While restoring these taboos sounds like a generational challenge, the alternative makes the choice obvious.
We are either going to restore these universal guardrails — punishing those who egregiously violate them, just as we did to the KKK — or we will allow hate to be normalized until it spills over into political violence that no amount of Jewish Day Schools or Super Bowl ads can stop.
We don’t need to beg the world for its affection, nor should we retreat into a fortress. We need to remind the world that the taboos which protect us are the same ones that hold civilization together. If we lead the fight to restore those universal standards, we won’t just be securing a future for the Jews — we’ll be saving the country from itself.
Erez Levin is an advertising technologist trying to effect big pro-social changes in that industry and the world at large, currently focused on restoring society’s essential moral taboos against overt hatred. He writes on this topic at elevin11.substack.com.
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How the Palestinian Authority Hides ‘Pay-for-Slay’
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas visiting the West Bank city of Jenin. Photo: Reuters/Mohamad Torokman
On Feb. 10, 2025, under intense pressure from Western countries, Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Mahmoud Abbas announced the cancellation of the PA Commission of Prisoners’ terror rewards program known as “Pay-for-Slay,” saying that the payments to terrorist prisoners and so-called Martyrs’ families would be moved to the Palestinian National Economic Empowerment Institution (PNEEI) and be based on social welfare criteria.
While many Western leaders have praised the PA for promising to stop paying terrorists in prison, the PA has another huge terror rewards program for released terrorist prisoners with more than 10,000 hidden Pay-for-Slay recipients receiving more than $230 million a year. And the PA has no intention of disclosing it or stopping it.
The PA enlarged this already existing program in 2021, when it took nearly 7,500 released prisoners who were receiving payments and moved them from the PA Commission of Prisoners into other frameworks. In addition, there are more than 13,500 families of Martyrs and injured living outside the PA areas who are receiving over $86 million a year.
The PA Prisoners and Released Prisoners Law requires the PA to reward terrorists who were imprisoned for more than five years with lifetime salaries. After Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) exposed in 2020 that there were at least 7,500 released prisoners to whom the PA was paying monthly terror reward salaries, the PA was condemned by the donor countries.
As the PA explained: “Europe, the US, and Israel” did not accept that the PA paid released terrorists merely because “they killed.”
The PA acted quickly. In early 2021, Mahmoud Abbas issued a Presidential Order to “integrate” all the thousands of released terrorists receiving Pay-for-Slay salaries into government and PA Security Forces (PASF) jobs, and he changed PA pension laws to enable thousands of ineligible terrorists to receive PA pensions.
The PA set up a special committee to work continuously, “even on vacation days,” to hide these recipients. By the end of 2021, all 7,500 recipients of terror salaries were erased from the Commission of Prisoners lists and, although unqualified, were granted jobs and pensions to receive their hidden Pay-for-Slay without Western scrutiny.
These recipients are so well hidden that some Western donor countries, to avoid funding Pay-for-Slay, have been designating their support specifically to pay civil servants or PASF salaries and pensions — the very places that the PA has hidden its terrorists.
With this terror reward program below the West’s radar, the PA is not planning to stop these terror payouts to released terrorist prisoners. PMW estimates that with these two programs, at least 23,500 terrorists received hidden Pay-for-Slay payments in 2025, amounting to $315 million in hidden Pay-for-Slay.
Part 3 of our recent report includes transcribed conversations between recipients of Pay-for-Slay in the first months of 2026, confirming that the PA is expanding its Pay-for-Slay by at least 6,000 recipients. The PA is intentionally lying to the US, the EU, France, and other Western countries, while working continuously to find ways to secretly reward Palestinian terrorists.
The author is the Founder and Director of Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this article first appeared.