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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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Trump urges Iran to make a deal after Iran fires missiles at Israel for first time in 2 months
(JTA) — Iran fired multiple barrages of missiles toward northern Israel on Sunday night local time, in the first direct fire from Iran on Israel since early April.
No one was immediately reported injured in the barrages, according to Israeli media, and the Israeli military said it shot down all the missiles aimed at the country on Sunday night.
The attack came hours after a stabbing attack by an Israeli Arab on Jews in central Israel killed one person and left several others injured.
The Iran salvo added to the turmoil for Israelis living in the north, who have been under constant fire from Iran’s proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon, and upsetting an uneasy quiet in the rest of the country. Schools across Israel will be closed on Monday.
Iranian officials said the barrage was a response to Israel’s strike earlier Sunday on a Hezbollah installation in the suburbs of Beirut, which the Israeli army said targeted a command center used to direct attacks on its troops.
Hezbollah last week rejected a U.S.-brokered ceasefire deal that would have halted Israeli strikes in Beirut, saying that it could not abide by terms that would have required it to exit southern Lebanon.
During a five-week war that Israel and the United States initiated against Iran on Feb. 28, at least two dozen Israelis were killed when Iran fired hundreds of missiles at the country in near-daily barrages. Active hostilities involving Israel ended when U.S. President Donald Trump initiated a ceasefire on April 8. He and Iran have not yet agreed to terms that would permanently end the war.
Trump said he was “not happy about” Israel’s strike in Beirut and signaled that he did not see Iranian barrage as an impediment to a future deal.
“It’s certainly not going to help negotiations,” he told Fox News. “We’re very close. I would say an agreement would be signed on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday of this coming week. And now this takes place.”
Addressing Iran directly, Trump said, “You’ve shot your missiles, that’s enough. Get back to the table and make a deal.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not immediately respond publicly to the Iranian attack on Israel.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Maine Democrats are poised to nominate Graham Platner, as Jewish Democrats withhold support
Maine Democrats are poised to nominate Graham Platner on Tuesday to challenge incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins in one of the most important Senate races this year. But a series of recent domestic violence allegations and controversies surrounding Platner could become a major political problem for the party in its effort to regain control of the Senate.
The controversy extends beyond questions about electability. Jewish Democratic organizations have withheld support from Platner over his past Nazi-linked tattoo, criticism of Israel and rhetoric that some Jewish leaders view as troubling, even as top national Democrats rally behind his candidacy.
The primary was effectively decided weeks ago when former Gov. Janet Mills suspended her campaign after lagging in polls and struggling to raise money. Mills never formally withdrew from the ballot, leaving open the possibility that some Democrats will use Tuesday’s primary as a protest vote against Platner
The dilemma facing Democrats is unusually stark.
Maine, considered a purple state, is widely viewed as one of the party’s clearest opportunities to flip a Republican-held Senate seat. Collins, 73, is running for a sixth term, though critics argue her image as a political moderate has diminished in recent years. In her last reelection campaign in 2020, Collins defeated her Democratic challenger 51-42. Sara Gideon, who is married to a Jewish lawyer, ran a competitive race and drew support from Maine’s estimated 15,000 Jewish voters and outside Jewish Democratic groups.
The 41-year-old Platner, an oyster farmer and former Marine, appeared to be the kind of insurgent candidate Democrats dream about. He led Mills by a significant margin and consistently ran ahead of Collins in public polling.
But the past two weeks have left Democrats struggling with his candidacy.
Reports about explicit messages sent to women while married and allegations from former partners describing threatening and troubling behavior, along with scrutiny of past online posts, put the Platner campaign on defense.
For Jewish voters, Platner’s rise and the party’s embrace of him were already hard to swallow. Platner faced backlash last year after acknowledging that a black skull-and-crossbones tattoo on his chest resembled a Nazi symbol. He has since covered it up. In past posts on Reddit, Platner defended a man with a Nazi SS lightning bolt tattoo who impersonated a federal officer at a Black Lives Matter protest in Las Vegas in 2020.
A New York Times story last week cited an ex-girlfriend who said Platner knew for years that the tattoo on his chest was associated with Nazi imagery, an allegation he has forcefully denied.
Also troubling to Jewish Democrats, Platner has accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza and suggested the U.S. should cut off all aid to Israel. Last week, Platner accused Collins of taking money from AIPAC and being “bought and paid for by Benjamin Netanyahu, and she votes accordingly.”
Halie Soifer, head of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said in an April interview that her group was not prepared to back Platner. JDCA had endorsed Mills in the primary before she suspended her campaign. On Sunday, Soifer said the group continues to stand by its endorsement of Mills, signaling that voters who remain uneasy about Platner still have the option of casting a vote for the former governor, whose name remains on the ballot.
“If he were running in Jersey, he’d either be thrown off the ballot or buried under the Meadowlands,” Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a Jewish Democrat from New Jersey, said on Friday.
Top Democratic strategists told Politico that Platner could face pressure to drop out of the race if Mills receives a significant amount of votes.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the highest ranking Jewish elected official in the U.S., has so far continued to show support for Platner. After meeting with Platner last week in Washington, D.C., Schumer told reporters that defeating Collins remains a top priority for Democrats seeking to reclaim power in the Senate.
The likely result is a question Democrats increasingly cannot avoid: If Platner wins Tuesday as expected, how much longer can national Democrats continue treating him as their standard-bearer and excuse conduct they would condemn in a Republican candidate? Jewish Democratic organizations, having already distanced themselves from Platner, will also have to decide how to respond if he becomes the party’s nominee, as other nominees are also coming under scrutiny for past remarks and associations with antisemitic influencers.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, in an interview Sunday on Fox News, was asked whether he’s concerned that his party “has an antisemitism problem,” citing Platner’s rhetoric and that of other Democratic candidates.
Platner is “going to have to speak for himself, and that’s what any candidate, particularly in a high-profile race, is going to be called upon to do,” Jeffries said. He added that the effort to crush antisemitism is an “American issue” and shouldn’t be a partisan issue. “It can’t be a red or blue issue. It’s a red, white, and blue issue.”
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Some Jewish Republicans say Tucker Carlson is no longer a threat. Others worry he’ll run for president.
(JTA) — At the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual gala last November, much of the discussion centered around right-wing antisemitism. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz warned that there was “an existential crisis in our party” as figures such as Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes built their online audiences, while right-wing firebrand Rep. Randy Fine of Florida slammed Carlson as an antisemite.
At the RJC’s “America 250” gala six months later, the mood was cheerier, and the cautionary words gave way to declarations that emerging antisemitism on the right was being dealt with properly.
Fine reminded the audience at the RJC event held in Manhattan on Sunday that in his speech to the RJC in November, he’d called Carlson “the most dangerous antisemite in America.” Now, he said, “I don’t know that that’s true anymore.”
Fine and other Republicans at the RJC gala told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that enough Republicans had spoken out against Carlson – most significantly, President Donald Trump – and his ilk to damage their image and dampen the threat they might pose. They also pointed to major GOP critics of Israel who had lost their seats in recent months.
But others have warned that it’s a mistake to celebrate too soon, or think Carlson’s star has really faded, especially amid speculation that he might launch a presidential run as a Republican.
Fine told JTA in a text that he now believes the country’s “most dangerous antisemite” is Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s anti-Zionist mayor. In contrast, he said, Carlson’s impact had only plummeted in the past half-year.
“I think that brand has been destroyed [in] the last six months,” he wrote, attributing the change to politicians like himself calling Carlson out, as well as “the damage he has done to himself.”
A number of speakers at the RJC who lauded Republicans’ response to antisemitism in the party also pointed to the recent primary defeat of outspoken Israel critic Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie. Brooks said to loud applause that the group spent $5 million in that race, and called the effort “a fight worth having and a victory worth celebrating.”
Speakers also recounted the resignation from Congress of Marjorie Taylor Greene in January, maintaining that the Republican Party is squashing its anti-Israel voices, while the Democratic Party is electing them.
“Being anti-Israel in today’s Republican Party is not — unlike the Democratic Party — a path to success,” said RJC CEO Matt Brooks during his remarks. Brooks later told JTA that Carlson, Owens and Fuentes’ “influence and credibility is less than it’s ever been” and that “they don’t represent” the mainstream of the MAGA movement.
But the Anti-Defamation League warned that it would be a mistake not to see the audience and impact of Carlson in particular as worthy of continued concern.
Oren Segal, the ADL’s vice president of counterextremism and intelligence, said in an interview with JTA that his organization’s biggest worry regarding Carlson is “not merely his relationship with any conservative or elected officials” but also the “normalization” of his views.
Segal pointed to the accusation that an Israeli attack on an American spy ship during the 1967 Six-Day War was intentional — used by conspiracy theorists as proof that the Jewish state cannot be trusted — despite U.S. investigations determining that it was a mistake.
“No one’s been a bigger boon to the USS Liberty Conspiracy of late than Tucker Carlson,” he said.
Segal added that it would be “absurd” to count out anyone as a potential presidential contender, while several political observers have speculated that Carlson may be weighing a run.
New York University professor Scott Galloway recently said on his New York Magazine podcast “Pivot” that the former Fox News host could be a serious contender. There is an “enormous lane,” he assessed, for a candidate who, like Carlson, has “very conservative values, an enormous media platform, an enormous army of acolytes that he could weaponize right away, and is anti-Trump and anti-the war on Iran.”
Some of Carlson’s allies are gunning for a campaign. Speaking Thursday on Russian state television during a trip to St. Petersburg, Owens said she personally did not plan to run for office but said Carlson would be a great candidate for president.
“I would love for him to run,” she said, adding, “I would gratefully get behind someone like Tucker Carlson.”
Back in March, TV host Piers Morgan asked Carlson whether he has White House ambitions. Carlson said that politics is “not what I do,” adding, “The whole idea of, ‘I’ve been a successful cable news host, I should be president!’ — that whole way of thinking is disgusting to me.”
Asked about the possibility of Carlson running for president, Brooks told JTA in a statement that the RJC would continue to push back against Carlson and similar anti-Israel figures.
“There is only one party where American Jews can be proudly pro-Israel, and it is the Republican Party — and those who imperil that will have to come through the RJC first,” Brooks said.
Others who attended Sunday’s RJC gathering felt the possibility of a Carlson candidacy was overblown. Shabbos Kestenbaum, a prominent Jewish conservative activist who sued Harvard University over alleged antisemitism, dismissed concerns that Carlson could be a serious presidential candidate.
In an interview, he pointed out that Carlson’s support of Massie and Ohio gubernatorial candidate Casey Putsch did not yield electoral success. Putsch, who has a history of dog whistling to neo-Nazis, received 17.5% of the vote in Ohio’s Republican gubernatorial primary. Unlike Massie, Carlson did not issue an endorsement for Putsch, but he did host Putsch on his podcast last year.
“His endorsements mean absolutely nothing, and outside of the ‘Podcastistan’ universe, his words carry very little weight,” Kestenbaum said of Carlson.
Brooks said in an interview with JTA that he feels “very pleased” with how the party has responded to voices like Carlson’s. President Donald Trump has publicly cast Carlson aside since his former ally sharpened his objections to the administration’s war in Iran.
“It’s been marginalized,” Brooks said of the party’s anti-Israel wing. “They tried to hijack the term MAGA. Groups like ours, but equally important, the president, has made it clear they are not MAGA.”
Asked about Vice President JD Vance, who has not offered a condemnation of Carlson to some Jewish Republicans’ chagrin, Brooks said, “When you have the president speaking, that’s the voice that matters right now.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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