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Why was Tucker Carlson pushing for DNA testing for Jews? What to know about the ‘Khazar’ theory that antisemites can’t shake.
(JTA) — During Tucker Carlson’s interview last week with Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, both men made considerable waves with their takes on history and theology.
Huckabee sparked a diplomatic row by citing the Bible to argue that Israel had a divine right to claim all of the Middle East — even though he didn’t back doing so politically.
But Carlson’s own interpretation of Israeli sovereignty was also notable, as the far-right pundit insisted that Israelis should undergo genetic testing to determine if they have a rightful claim to the land.
“Why don’t we do genetic testing on everybody in the land and find out who Abram’s descendants are?” Carlson asked Huckabee at one point, using the name Abraham used before he made a covenant with God to become the first Jew. “It’s really simple. We’ve cracked the human genome. We can do that. Why don’t we do that?”
At another point, Carlson singled out Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu specifically as an illegitimate Israeli.
“What you’re saying is that certain people have a title to a highly contested region. They own it, in some deep sense,” he told Huckabee. “So I think it’s fair to ask, who are they, and how do we know? So the current prime minister’s ancestors weren’t from here within recorded history. He has no deed. Bibi Netanyahu, on one side, his family’s from Poland, they’re from Eastern Europe. So how do we know he has a connection to the people who God promised the land to?”
The line of questioning made little sense to many Jewish listeners, who understand Judaism as a blend of religion, ethnicity and community in which converts have always been accepted. For Jewish listeners, too, the idea of tracing bloodlines is often associated with the Nazis, who chose their victims based on how many Jewish ancestors they had.
But both Carlson’s critics, and supporters across the ideological spectrum who have agreed with his views on Israel, understood what he was getting at. They identified his line of questioning as a variation on the “Khazar theory”: the belief that Ashkenazi Jews, like Netanyahu, are genetically descended from a Turkic minority that converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages rather than from the 12 tribes of Israel.
“The people currently occupying Israel are Khazarian Turks,” far-right pundit Candace Owens, a promoter of many antisemitic conspiracy theories, wrote on X.
“He has ZERO ancestral connection to the land. He’s Polish,” the far-left influencer Shaun King wrote on X about Netanyahu in praise of Carlson’s interview. “His real last name is Mileikowsky.”
The theories as to why the Khazars, who were a real people, would have converted en masse to Judaism have varied according to the teller; one tale holds that a Khazar royal held a debate between representatives of Judaism, Islam and Christianity to hold the best religion, and Judaism won out. But no matter how it happened, the theory goes, Jews who trace their genetics to Eastern Europe should not be considered rightful heirs of Israel, and should instead claim the Caucasus as their ancestral home.
The Khazar theory has a long history but was largely discredited with the advent of DNA analysis. Yet it has grown in prominence among antisemitic circles since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks in Israel and ensuing Gaza war, according to research by the Anti-Defamation League.
“Antisemites suggest that if Jews are descended from people not native to Israel (i.e., Khazars), then they have no legitimate claim to the land,” the ADL’s own description of the theory’s popularity notes. “In addition, because Nazis sought to expel Jews and others from their homes in Europe in order to obtain lebensraum (‘living space’) for ‘Aryan’ people, antisemites have argued that Jews are doing the same thing because they have no historic claim to the land of Israel.”
The ADL also notes that, setting aside the validity of the theory, most Israeli Jews are not Ashkenazi but rather trace their roots to North Africa and elsewhere in the Middle East.
The origins of the Khazar theory date back centuries and have always had some promulgation from Jews; Hungarian Jews in the 19th century latched onto the theory, according to researchers. The Khazar theory has also been promoted by some Jewish and Israeli scholars in more recent years, including Arthur Koestler in his 1976 book “The Thirteenth Tribe”; Shlomo Sand, a historian at Tel Aviv University who identifies as “post-Zionist,” in his controversial 2008 book “The Invention of the Jewish People”; and Israeli geneticist Eran Elhaik.
This has further boosted the theory’s seeming validity among proponents: Owens, for example, has cited Sand’s book on X as evidence for the theory.
But such studies are largely refuted by established historical scholarship. “This claim, pardon my chutzpah, is nonsense,” Shaul Stampfer, an emeritus history professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has said about the Khazar theory in college lectures.
In Stampfer’s own research into the Khazars, he said that while there were a few Jews among the Khazars, he has found no genetic links between the ancient Central Asian tribe and modern Ashkenazi Jews (whose own genetics have been thoroughly studied owing to a preponderance of genetic diseases in the population). There are, however, genetic links between Ashkenazi Jews and ancient Palestine, as well as to North Africa, he says.
In addition, there are very few Turkic origins to be found in Yiddish, while there are extensive Latin origins in Yiddish, further boosting evidence of broader Jewish migration to Europe and decreasing the likelihood of mass migration from Turkey.
There are other practical considerations, too, Stampfer told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency this week.
“Take a look at a map,” he wrote in an email. “Even if the Khazars had converted, they would not have dragged themselves to Poland. It is far away and cold in the winter.”
The National Institutes of Health, too, published an extensive genetic study in 2013 that found “no evidence from genome-wide data of a Khazar origin for the Ashkenazi Jews.”
The researchers assembled what they called “the largest data set available to date for assessment of Ashkenazi Jewish genetic origins,” as well as available genome sets from the Caucasus. Their conclusion, the abstract notes, “corroborates the earlier results that Ashkenazi Jews derive their ancestry primarily from populations of the Middle East and Europe, that they possess considerable shared ancestry with other Jewish populations.”
None of the evidence has stopped the Khazar theory from emerging as a lodestar of modern antisemitism, thanks in part to influential right-wing personalities such as Carlson. This is not the first time he has toyed with the idea of genetics testing for Jews, though he previously seemed to be aware that such an ask would carry undesirable connotations.
“In order to determine who’s actually inherited the land, we would have to conduct global genetic testing to award property on the basis of the results,” he texted right-wing filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza months ago, according to D’Souza, who shared the text on a recent podcast. Carlson continued, “Sounds like a Nazi project to me. As a Christian, I reject that.”
“I don’t think that’s necessary any more than it’s necessary to genetically test Indians to make sure their ancestors are from India,” D’Souza, who is Indian-American, responded. “Remember Jews maintained their tribal identity. Very little intermarriage. They didn’t try to convert people, as Christians did.”
D’Souza continued, “Shakespeare’s ‘Merchant of Venice’ conveys the picture very vividly. The Jews don’t mix. So their continuity as a group is generally more secure than virtually any other group.” (“The Merchant of Venice,” which features the Jewish villain Shylock, is generally seen as promoting antisemitic stereotypes.)
Carlson responded by returning to the genetics question — and this time seeming more open to it than when he first called it a Nazi project. “I agree with all that and I admire it. I’m hardly against Jews,” he texted D’Souza. “But if the claim is that Jews have a genetic right to certain pieces of land, it’s going to be necessary to do genetic testing.”
The broader lurch into conspiratorial thinking on the right, exemplified by the views on the Jews and Israel espoused by Carlson, increasingly has some other conservatives worried about losing control of the narrative.
“The most popular digital content on the Right is now ‘Erika Kirk killed Charlie,’ ‘Epstein was leading a pedophile blackmail ring for the CIA’ and ‘Jews are a diabolical power destroying the world,’” Christopher Rufo, an influential right-wing thought leader who helped orchestrate the larger push against diversity initiatives, warned on X. “In these instances, we need to correct public opinion, rather than cave to it.”
For his part after the Carlson interview, Huckabee accused his interrogator of drawing on a “dangerous conspiracy theory” from “some of the darkest realms of the Internet” for his genetic testing line of questioning.
“I do know that the discredited idea that most Ashkenazi or European Jews descended from the ancient Turkic kingdom of Khazaria is bunk,” Huckabee wrote on X. “It’s also been weaponized by people trying to deligitimize [sic] Jews, to strip them of their history, and to call them ‘imposters’ or ‘fake Jews.’”
Stampfer was hesitant to diagnose why the Khazar theory may be growing in popularity today.
“People who don’t like Jews might be attracted to the idea that this is one more Jewish lie,” he offered. Yet, he added, “Explaining why people believe what they believe is a tough business.”
The post Why was Tucker Carlson pushing for DNA testing for Jews? What to know about the ‘Khazar’ theory that antisemites can’t shake. appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel, Hezbollah War Persists Despite Truce Extension
Smoke rises following an Israeli strike in Choukine, Lebanon, May 18, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer
Israel carried out airstrikes in southern Lebanon on Monday, Lebanese security sources and the state news agency said, while Hezbollah announced new attacks on Israeli forces, continuing the war in Lebanon despite the extension of a US-backed truce.
Since the war began on March 2, more than 3,000 people have been killed in Lebanon, the country’s health ministry reported in its latest casualty toll on Monday. Most of those killed have been Hezbollah terrorists, according to Israeli officials.
Reignited by the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, hostilities between Iran-backed Hezbollah and Israel have rumbled on since US President Donald Trump first announced a ceasefire on April 16, with fighting mostly contained to southern Lebanon.
A 45-day ceasefire extension, announced after a third round of US-hosted talks between Lebanon and Israel on Friday, began at midnight, a Lebanese official said.
The US-led mediation has emerged in parallel to diplomacy aimed at ending the US-Iran conflict. Iran has said ending Israel‘s war in Lebanon is one of its demands for a deal over the wider conflict. Hezbollah, which opened fire at Israel on March 2, objects to Beirut taking part in the talks.
AIRSTRIKES, EXPLOSIVE DRONE
Overnight, an Israeli strike near the eastern Lebanese city of Baalbeck killed a commander of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group, a Hezbollah ally, along with his daughter, security sources in Lebanon said.
The Israeli military said it had killed the commander, Wael Mahmoud Abd al-Halim, in a strike, after taking steps to “mitigate the risk of harm to civilians.” It made no mention of Halim’s daughter.
Hezbollah said it launched an explosive drone at an Iron Dome air defense position in the Galilee area of northern Israel and carried out other attacks on Israeli forces in Lebanon.
Israel‘s military said some “launches” aimed at Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon, as well as an explosive drone, had crossed into Israeli territory.
Lebanon’s National News Agency reported Israeli airstrikes on more than half a dozen locations in south Lebanon.
The Israeli military said it could not comment on the reported airstrikes without the coordinates of each one and didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the attack claimed by Hezbollah on the Iron Dome position.
The Israeli military said earlier on Monday it had struck more than 30 Hezbollah sites in southern Lebanon in the previous 24 hours and warned residents of three villages in the south to leave their homes, saying it intended to act against Hezbollah.
DEATH TOLL RISES
Israeli forces have occupied a self-declared security zone in the south, where they have been razing villages, saying they aim to shield northern Israel from attacks by Hezbollah fighters embedded in civilian areas.
Lebanon’s health ministry reported that the death toll in Lebanon had risen to 3,020 people, among them 619 women, children, and health-care workers.
Its toll doesn’t say how many combatants are among the dead. Various reports have put the figure at thousands of Hezbollah fighters.
However, sources familiar with Hezbollah‘s casualty numbers have said many Hezbollah fighters who have been killed in the war are not included in the health ministry death toll.
Reuters reported on May 4 that several thousand Hezbollah fighters had been killed in the war, citing casualty estimates from within the group. The Hezbollah media office said at the time the figure of several thousand fighters killed was false.
Israeli authorities say 18 soldiers have been killed by Hezbollah attacks or while operating in south Lebanon since March 2, in addition to a contractor working for an engineering company on behalf of Israel‘s defense ministry. Hezbollah attacks have killed two civilians in northern Israel.
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Recognizing Shabbat Is Not Establishing a Religion
Shabbat candles. Photo: Olaf.herfurth via Wikimedia Commons.
The backlash to President Trump’s “Shabbat 250” proclamation reveals something deeper than disagreement over a single president or a single ceremonial gesture. It reveals how uneasy a slice of American Jewish leadership has become with the public acknowledgment of a tradition that helped shape America’s moral vocabulary.
The timing matters. Since October 7th, antisemitism has surged on a scale unfamiliar to most American Jews living today – across college campuses, in major cities, on social media, in synagogue parking lots that now require armed guards and entrances fitted with metal detectors. Against that backdrop, a sitting president has used a White House proclamation to honor a core Jewish practice, to invoke George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, and to name Haym Salomon – the Jewish immigrant financier who helped fund the Revolution – as a model of Jewish American patriotism. One might have expected the organized Jewish community to receive that gesture with something closer to unanimity. Instead, the response has split.
As eJewishPhilanthropy recently reported, the divide ran along predictable lines. Orthodox and politically conservative organizations – Chabad communities, Agudath Israel, the Orthodox Union, the Rabbinical Council of America, Young Jewish Conservatives – embraced the proclamation immediately. Progressive institutions and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs raised church-state concerns. The fault line itself is worth noticing. It tracks, with unsettling precision, which segments of American Jewry still feel confident about Jewish practice in public and which have grown uneasy when Jewish tradition appears outside the synagogue.
The critics’ anxieties are not frivolous. Jewish history is full of governments that used religion coercively and turned on the minorities they once flattered. American Jews were right to be cautious about religious majoritarianism in the past, and a cautious American Jewish political tradition has long taken that lesson seriously. But caution becomes distortion when even symbolic recognition of Jewish practice is treated as a constitutional threat.
The most serious version of the objection comes from Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, who warned in the eJP piece that when church-state lines blur, “one day you’re in and the next day you could be out.” The worry deserves a real answer, not dismissal. But Spitalnick herself drew the right distinction in the same interview. A government celebration of Jewish identity and practice, she said, “is very different than trying to utilize the government to advance a specific approach to religion.”
A proclamation honoring rest, gratitude, and the Jewish American contribution to the national story falls squarely on the first side of her line. It establishes no theology. It privileges no denomination. It requires nothing of anyone. It is ceremonial recognition: the same category as presidential Hanukkah candle-lightings, Ramadan iftars, Easter messages, and Thanksgiving statements that have rolled out of the executive branch for generations. The American constitutional order does not require a public square emptied of faith; it requires a public square open to all of them. A president who honors Shabbat one season and hosts an iftar the next is not establishing a religion. He is doing what American presidents have done since Washington: recognizing that the country contains many traditions and that none of them needs to be hidden to be American.
A different objection comes from Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie of Lab/Shul, who wrote that we should observe Shabbat “not because a leader commanded it, but because our humanity demands it.” That is a theological worry, not a constitutional one, and it deserves a theological answer. Trump has commanded nothing. All he has done is acknowledge that Shabbat exists, that millions of Americans keep it, that the country is better for the practice.
One can hold separate concerns about this president’s habit of telling Jews how to be Jewish. Those are concerns about a man. They are not an argument against the proclamation. The principle would be right whether the proclamation came from this president or any other, and an American Jewish community that could only accept public recognition from presidents it liked would not be defending the Constitution. It would be practicing politics.
The deeper problem with the church-state framing is that it gets American Jewish history almost exactly backward. American Jews did not flourish because the public square was scrubbed of faith. They flourished because the public square was open to faith – to all faiths -and because the founding promise of religious liberty was extended to a people who had never before been treated as full citizens anywhere in Christendom. Washington’s letter to Touro Synagogue, which the proclamation invokes, did not promise the Newport congregation that religion would be banished from American life. It promised them that the new republic would “give to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance” and that the children of the stock of Abraham would sit safely under their own vine and fig tree. That is not the language of secularism. It is the language of religious confidence extended to Jews as Jews.
The Jews who arrived in America did not ask for invisibility. They asked for equality, and America’s founding promise made that claim possible in a way nearly no other country had. Haym Salomon – born in Poland, jailed by the British, dead in poverty at forty-four after pouring his fortune into the Continental cause – did not finance a revolution so that his descendants could ask the public square to please not mention Jews. The American Jewish bargain has always been the opposite: be visible, be present, be unembarrassed about being Jewish in public, and the country will be the better for it. The First Amendment was designed to prevent a national church. It was never designed to scrub religion from American public life. Covenant, human dignity, moral obligation, liberty under law, the sanctity of conscience; none of it appeared from nowhere. Recognizing that inheritance is not theocracy. It is historical literacy.
It is worth saying plainly what Shabbat is, because much of the anxious commentary proceeds as though the underlying practice were a minor ritual rather than one of the central institutions of Western civilization. Shabbat is the weekly insistence that human beings are not merely productive units. It is the structural refusal to let work, commerce, and noise consume the whole of life. It builds in, by law and by habit, a day for family, for study, for rest, for gratitude and for the things that markets cannot price and bureaucracies cannot manage. The Jewish tradition holds that Shabbat sustained the Jewish people through exile, dispersion, and persecution: more than the Jews kept Shabbat, Shabbat kept the Jews.
That a weekly cessation might be good for an entire country – and not merely for Jews – is not a controversial proposition. It is one of the most quietly radical contributions the Jewish people have made to human civilization. A country drowning in screens, in noise, in the demand to be always available, might reasonably want to pause and acknowledge the institution that taught the West how to stop.
The split inside the American Jewish community over “Shabbat 250” is, in the end, a split about confidence. The progressive instinct to guard the church-state line is the right instinct, applied to the wrong case; the Jews who worry about state-favored religion are reading from the correct historical script, only on the wrong stage. The Orthodox and conservative Jews who embraced the proclamation did so because they still feel ownership over Shabbat; because the practice is theirs, lived, and they are glad to see it honored. Some progressive leaders responded with discomfort because seeing Shabbat publicly honored by political authority now feels unfamiliar, uncomfortable, perhaps even weaponizable. That asymmetry says something painful about where parts of American Jewish life now stand in relation to their own tradition.
Recognizing Shabbat is not the establishment of religion. It is the recognition of a gift; a gift this country received from the Jewish people, and a gift it is finally, in its 250th year, pausing long enough to say thank you for. At a moment when Jews on American campuses are being told they do not belong, and Jews in major cities are being assaulted for being visibly Jewish, the proclamation says something the Jewish community badly needs to hear from the highest office in the land: you are not foreign here. You built this. The country is grateful.
The answer to that gesture is not worry. It is the lighting of candles.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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Stacey Bosworth selected as the Forward’s next Vice President of Development
Forward Publisher and CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen announced today that Stacey Bosworth has been selected as the Forward’s next Vice President of Development, beginning June 1, 2026.
Bosworth comes to the Forward from documentarian Ken Burns’ Better Angels Society, where she served as Chief Development Officer, leading donor strategy and philanthropic initiatives. Prior to that, she was the Director of Development and Co-Chief Advancement Officer at the Sundance Institute. At both Sundance and Better Angels, she worked with major donors and foundations such as the Emerson Collective, the Ford Foundation, the Doris Duke Foundation and others to secure funding for stories that needed to be told.
Bosworth also served as Vice President of Advancement at MacDowell Artists Residency, where she launched a journalism fellowship fund, was the president of Aaron Consulting, supporting various nonprofit organizations in fundraising strategy, and founding executive director of the Joyful Heart Foundation.
Bosworth began her career at the Workers Circle, then located in the Forward building on 33rd Street in Manhattan. She is also on the board of The Old Stone House in Brooklyn, where she lives.
The post Stacey Bosworth selected as the Forward’s next Vice President of Development appeared first on The Forward.