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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.”
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Fight wildfires and other climate crises with this spiritual guide to catastrophe
As smoke from Canadian wildfires blankets much of the Northeast and Midwest in a hazy fog, some Jews are observing this Tisha B’av by mourning a different kind of destruction: that of a planet in crisis.
Tisha B’av, the saddest day on the Jewish calendar that commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Temples, deals with themes of grief and resilience relevant to today’s climate crisis, said Rabbi Laura Bellows, director of spiritual activism and education at Dayenu: A Jewish Call to Climate Action.
In advance of Tisha Ba’av, Dayenu this week released a spiritual guide for the aftermath of extreme weather — including floods, storms, heatwaves and fires. It was a grim coincidence, Bellows said, that the guide’s publication coincided with a time when those prayers would be of particular use.
“The grief is real,” Bellows said. “Jewish tradition is really good at encouraging us not to ignore it, but actually to make space and time to be with that grief.”
The guide includes an adapted version of Mi Shebeirach, the prayer for healing, written by Rabbi Daniel Scher at Kehillat Israel in the Palisades. Scher wrote the prayer for his congregation after wildfires caused significant smoke damage to the synagogue’s building, leading it to close for several months. Roughly 250 synagogue members — and all three clergy — lost their homes.
“The fire has seared through our homes and hopes, yet we stand together in our pain, trusting that new life can blossom in our midst,” the prayer reads.
Other texts in the guidebook offer hope for rebuilding. Rabbi Zoe Klein of Temple Isaiah in Los Angeles adapted the daily prayer, “May it be your will that the Temple be speedily rebuilt in our own time,” into a plea for wildfire survivors: “May it be Thy will that homes be rebuilt in our own time.”
Another ritual offers a hand-washing ceremony for survivors of water-related natural disasters. Participants wash their hands and recite the Birkat HaGomel, a prayer traditionally said after surviving a life-threatening event.
It’s not the first year rabbis have linked the climate crisis to Tisha Ba’av. More than a decade ago, Rabbi Tamara Cohen, chief of program and strategy at the Jewish youth group Moving Traditions, co-wrote “Eikha for the Earth,” which adapts the Book of Lamentations traditionally read on Tisha Ba’av as a “lament for the Earth.”
“Checkerspot butterflies flee their homes; polar bears can find no rest. Because our greed has heated Earth,” the text reads.
The adapted text aims to “welcome in Jews who are not so connected to the idea of mourning for the ancient temple, which doesn’t necessarily move lots of people today,” Cohen told the Forward.
But the timing of this year’s Tisha B’av makes the text feel eerily relevant, she said, pointing to the line “forest fires reach down and spread like fury.”
Jakir Manela, CEO of the nonprofit Adamah, which leads immersive Jewish experiences grounded in nature, said he’s also feeling particular grief for the earth this Tisha B’av. Manela lives in Baltimore, where he and his kids have been unable to go outside due to the unhealthy air.
“This is destruction in front of our very eyes, and affecting the largest population centers on the planet,” Manela said. “If folks have trouble connecting with Tisha B’av and the grief and mourning that it calls us to do, maybe this year is the time when it will hit home.”
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Why am I the only one troubled by an Anne Frank House shot glass?
Readers, how many of you have ever looked at the Anne Frank House and thought: “Wow, I wish I had a miniature version I could drink alcohol from” ?
Probably very few of you. And yet a ceramic replica of the historic house filled with approximately 1.7ozs of Bols Dutch gin is available from KLM Dutch Airways as part of a gift series for business class passengers on international flights.
The airline first launched the Delft Blue miniature house line in 1952 as gifts for business class passengers on intercontinental flights. I first discovered them last month, when I was flying with my dad to Maputo, Mozambique, to cover the centenary celebration of a local synagogue. My dad and I initially thought these would make good Christmas gifts for my cousin’s kids until we heard the liquid sloshing inside. We ended up keeping these recreations — which included the house of aviator Anthony Fokker and one of the last wooden houses left in Amsterdam — for ourselves.
While researching these unique souvenirs, I quickly discovered that one of the historic recreations is the Anne Frank House, aka “KLM miniature number 47,” which the Dutch airline added to the collection in 1975. My initial reaction was shock: How could the airline take a place that represents such a tremendous tragedy and turn it into a shot glass?
I reached out to KLM and asked if they had ever received a complaint about the item. A representative wrote back to say that, from what he knew, there had only ever been one critical Instagram comment: that KLM tried to make money off of everything. Collectors shared the souvenir online, but nobody I could find on the internet expressed the surprise and revulsion I felt.
My request to chat on the phone for further comments on why KLM included the Anne Frank House in their collection didn’t garner the response I expected. The representative responded via email that the house is historic and if I wanted to know more about it, I could just Google it. The subtext of my question — that it feels like a strange and possibly inappropriate choice to turn a solemn landmark into a cutesy flask — didn’t seem obvious to him.
So why did it feel so obvious to me?
For so many, Anne Frank is the symbol of how horrendous the Holocaust was. The fact that she is an innocent child exposes the depraved nature of the Nazis. Most Americans are first introduced to the Holocaust through the story of her confinement in that house in Amsterdam.
Even though it is not where Frank died (that was Bergen-Belsen, at the age of 16), it feels like the place where her fate was sealed. It is not just a landmark included in a famous book; it was her prison and the last stop on the way to her death. Although some may associate it with Frank’s enduring spirit of hope, filling it with alcohol still feels obscene.
Frank’s image has been co-opted over and over again. Two years ago, a Norwegian artist used an image of Frank in a keffiyeh to bring attention to children being killed in Gaza. More recently, Frank has become a symbol for anti-ICE protesters of the dangers of letting law enforcement target people based on their ethnic background. Then there’s the viral satirical comedy musical Slam Frank, which reimagines Anne Frank as a queer Latinx girl with a Black mom and gay, neurodivergent dad in order to poke fun at woke culture.The KLM house feels like a less charged appropriation of Anne Frank’s legacy; it’s not pushing any sort of political agenda.
The ceramic house is also part of a larger kitsch culture that blurs the fine line between commemoration and trivialization. So many tragedies have been commodified in this way that there’s a term for it: “dark tourism.” There are plenty of 9/11 related objects out there — a Twin Towers Christmas tree ornament, stuffed search and rescue dogs — that feel like they border on exploitation.
But what makes the KLM Anne Frank house stand out is its contents. To use a house of such suffering as the container for gin feels minimizing. (It is worth mentioning that a New York winery did at one point produce a 9/11 commemorative wine, although some of the proceeds were donated to the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.) Once the Anne Frank flask is emptied of its contents, it will just be a ceramic trinket that could help keep the memory of the landmark alive. Does the fact that it was originally made to carry alcohol negate that power?
I asked a similar question nearly one year ago in my very first Looking Forward column when I wrote about a recording of Nazi marching songs and speeches made by a Jewish producer. Since that piece was published, I haven’t found a satisfying answer to when memorialization becomes inappropriate, but I have become more comfortable acknowledging how complex this issue is.
This will be my last Looking Forward, as my last day as an employee of the Forward (at least for now, as I embark on a new pursuit) will be July 31. It feels fitting that my time with this newsletter will end similarly to the way in which it started: scratching my head about Holocaust kitsch. But having to grapple with such a topic in my writing is just another day at the Forward.
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I gathered the data on Jewish fiction publishing. The trends are alarming.
(JTA) — In early 2023, I wrote a novel that was Jewish in every possible way. The lovers called each other “ahuvati” and “neshama sheli” — Hebrew for my love and my soul. There were scenes in Tel Aviv, family histories shaped by the Holocaust, a climax involving cancellation by left-wing antisemites, and an overall tone of aching sadness.
I was already a successful nonfiction author with two books that had sold more than 150,000 copies. I had a track record and a substantial online platform, And my new book garnered substantial interest. When I began querying fiction agents in early 2024, I received 20 requests for the full manuscript and four offers of representation in just six weeks.
But there were warning signs. One non-Jewish agent told me that my Jewish social media presence might make the book impossible to sell. “At least your characters aren’t Zionists,” she said. (My characters were obviously Zionists.) A Jewish agent gave me painful but pragmatic advice. She told me that I should probably remove all Jewish content in the book that didn’t directly drive the plot. Most painfully, she suggested that I change the name of a character named Yael. “It’s one of my favorite names,” she said. “But it’s Israeli.”
I signed with an agent who assured me that no such changes were necessary, and the novel went out to publishers.
It did not sell.
There are countless reasons a book may not be published. Taste is subjective. Editors carefully build their lists. Nobody is owed a book deal. And it remains entirely possible that my novel wasn’t as good as the agents thought it was.
But after I shared my experience online, Jewish writers began telling me stories that sounded unnervingly familiar. Authors whose expected book deals vanished. Writers whose agents could “no longer champion” their careers. Books that were bought for six figures before Oct. 7 but barely promoted afterward. Israeli agents with stacks of manuscripts that American publishers would not even consider.
For Jewish authors, perhaps the most visceral gut punch was a viral spreadsheet titled “Is your fav author a zionist???” It was a list of Jewish fiction authors, color-coded by how Zionist they were perceived to be, with a column detailing their purported transgression. The spreadsheet itself was eventually taken down, but the message sent to the industry was clear: If you work with Jewish authors, it will cost you.
Aware that even the staggering evidence I was amassing remained anecdotal, I wanted to find a way to track the impact of what was happening more empirically.
I turned to Publishers Marketplace, the leading industry database where many book deals are announced, and reviewed fiction deals for books by Jewish authors that publicly signaled Jewish or Israeli content. What I found was grim. Between 2023 and 2024, there was a 76% decline in fiction deal announcements to large presses that mentioned Jews, Judaism or Israel. The numbers improved somewhat in 2025, but they did not recover. Compared with 2023, announced sales of Jewish books were still down 47% at large presses.
And the early 2026 numbers are worse: Looking at what has been announced so far this year and annualizing the comparison, fiction deals mentioning Jewish content are down 82% at large presses compared with 2023.
Like all data sets, this one is imperfect. Not every book deal is announced on Publishers Marketplace, and not every announcement mentions Jewish content when a book contains it. It may be that agents and publishers are less willing than they once were to mention Jewish themes in deal announcements, despite the content of the books themselves.
But the data is the best we have for now. And if the problem is that Jewish content is something the industry feels that it needs to obscure when announcing deals, that is also a major problem.
Whatever the explanation, I found that there is no question that publicly announced fiction deals foregrounding Jewish themes dropped sharply after Oct. 7, and the decline appears to be worsening. This should alarm anyone who cares about Jewish literature, but also anyone who cares about the free exchange of ideas.
I am currently working with the Anti-Defamation League as it examines antisemitism in publishing. Part of my efforts have been to understand what’s happening on an individual level, because while data is important, it can only tell us so much.
As someone well connected in the Jewish literary scene, I reached out on social media to ask people across the industry to share their experiences. I expected a handful of messages. Instead, my inbox filled with accounts from published and unpublished authors, agents, editors, Big Five employees, audiobook performers and marketers. People from every part of the industry described specific patterns of exclusion around Jewish writers, Jewish stories and Israel-related material. These trends fit with what PEN America related at length last week in its report on Jewish and Israeli exclusion in publishing — a report that I believe held back from reckoning fairly and honestly with what Jewish authors are facing.
I had begun my investigation wondering whether my own novel simply wasn’t good enough. And the truth is, it may not be. But this isn’t about any one book. What we’re looking at is a broader pattern: Jewish stories have become professionally risky, while Israel-related material has become positively radioactive. Because of that, many institutions within publishing appear to be choosing silence over confrontation.
The stakes here are not simply professional disappointment for Jewish authors, or even the destruction of creative careers. For the Jewish community, the stakes are existential. If Jewish stories are not published, then part of the Jewish record goes missing.
As a people, text has been our portable homeland. We have used words to bind ourselves together, in argument and agreement, across generations. Sentences have tied Am Yisrael to Eretz Yisrael. Modern Zionism was argued into existence through pamphlets and speeches. Law, memory, argument, longing, testimony, jokes, recipes, grief, liturgy: we have always carried ourselves through history in words.
In the rabbinic telling of the Roman siege of Jerusalem, Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai’s plea is: “Give me Yavneh and its sages.” He does not ask to save the temple or Jerusalem, but instead to save the Jewish people through the study of Torah. In the face of what could have been our obliteration, he helped usher in the era of Rabbinic Judaism by placing his faith in our texts.
In the Warsaw Ghetto, Emanuel Ringelblum and his fellow members of Oneg Shabbat secretly documented Jewish life under Nazi occupation. As the death vise of history tightened around them, they preserved Jewish testimony. And in 1949, just months after Israel’s War of Independence, S. Yizhar published “Khirbet Khizeh,” a novel documenting the moral complexity of 1948 in real time. He trusted his readers’ collective empathy and intellect, even while his new state was raw, precarious, traumatized and still fighting to understand herself.
Jews do not wait until history is finished with us. We write while the dust is still in our mouths.
But our stories don’t only serve as testimony to our pain. They are also about sex, food, family, money, mysticism, ambition, marriage, doubt, Israel, diaspora, bad decisions, holy arguments, vulgar jokes, longing, grief, pleasure, and survival. They are the record of people who are still here, still making art, still spinning stories in multiple languages.
It is true that many of our most lasting stories did not need a publishing house at all. But carrying those stories forward has always been collective work. If the institutions entrusted with publishing literature will not carry or promote Jewish stories, then Jews will have to build the institutions that will.
While I still hope to publish my own novel one day, this stopped being about my manuscript a long time ago. What matters now is reenvisioning Jewish publishing as an act of peoplehood — one that we must all roll up our sleeves to make happen.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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