Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been playing a double game in the Middle East and with the United States, says JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin. Turkey continues to back Hamas in Gaza. It also hasn’t halted its intervention in Syria, where it has a vested interest in suppressing Kurdish autonomy in order to undermine that people’s efforts to throw off repression inside Turkey. But the Turkish leader has maintained a cordial relationship with President Donald Trump.

Jonathan Tobin doesn’t hold back!

Will the failure of leading conservatives to disassociate themselves from the increasingly antisemitic former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and even more extreme figures like Candace Owens lead to the movement being hijacked by hatemongers? That’s the question posed by JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin in the wake of the shocking defense of Carlson by Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts in November.

Roberts walked back his denunciation of those who criticized Carlson’s platforming of Holocaust denial as well as neo-Nazi groyper leader Nick Fuentes as being part of a “venomous coalition.” But questions remain about Heritage’s future with many of those involved with the institution leaving as a result of the controversy. But according to Heritage Vice President Victoria Coates, the think tank remains committed to the fight against Jew-hatred and support for Israel.

Coates, who joins Tobin in this week’s episode of Think Twice, credits Roberts for the fact that Heritage has played a leading role on the issue. Its Project Esther helped provide the inspiration for President Donald Trump’s efforts to hold colleges and universities accountable for their toleration and encouragement of Jew-hatred on their campuses. But she admits that Roberts’ initial video expressing solidarity with Carlson was a mistake and that the think tank head understands that too and that he is determined for Heritage to continue to work against the spread of Jew-hatred. As troubling as the growth of hate on the right may be, she says the Bondi Bay Chanukah massacre of Jews is a reminder that the most potent threat to Jews and the West remains Islamist and leftist terror.

Coates, who, like Roberts, knows Carlson well, says she can’t explain his turn toward antisemitism as well as his bizarre willingness to deny that Islamists are persecuting and murdering Christians in Africa. But she says there’s no denying the growth of antisemitic attitudes among younger conservatives which she fears has become widespread. She says that’s a product of the crisis induced by leftist indoctrination in the schools as well as the Covid pandemic, not to mention the misinformation about Israel and the Middle East that is ubiquitous on social media. Coates believes what happened at Heritage will help to focus minds on the right on the threat from antisemitic extremism. 

Are Americans comfortable with an administration that is ready to defend their nation’s sovereignty? That’s the question posed by JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin. The criticism of the Trump administration for its actions attacking terrorist drug smugglers and closing the border to illegal immigrants is, he says, rooted in the toxic Marxist idea that national sovereignty is a problem rather than an expression of national security.

Why are so many in a conservative movement that looked to a passionate Christian Zionist like the late Charlie Kirk for leadership now willing to turn a blind eye to or even rationalize the antisemitism of Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes? That is the question that JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin has been pondering in recent months in the wake of Carlson hosting Fuentes on his podcast and the Heritage Foundation’s perplexing loyalty to the former Fox News host.

He’s joined in this week’s episode of Think Twice by Newsweek senior editor-at-large and podcaster Josh Hammer who was personally acquainted with Kirk and other leader conservative figures. He says it’s outrageous that Kirk is being portrayed by some on the right as a foe of Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he was, in fact, merely critical of some tactical decisions made by Jerusalem, not its war goals or of Zionism. Moreover, he was a fervent opponent of antisemitism and a friend of the Jewish people.

Hammer is similarly troubled by the way the Heritage Foundation, the leading conservative think tank and its president Kevin Roberts have refused to disavow Carlson, whom he labeled as “the most dangerous antisemite in American history.” He says Carlson deserves that distinction because of his mainstream appeal and strong connections to Republican leaders. He believes Carlson’s Jew-hatred is made obvious by the fact that antipathy for Israel and even Judaism has become the organizing principle of his advocacy. His goal is not so much to break up the U.S.-Israel alliance but to write Judaism out of Western civilization and, as a result, destroy President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement and replace it with something that is openly anti-Israel and antisemitic.

At the heart of the problem with conservative neutrality about Carlson and other even more extreme antisemites is their abhorrence for “gatekeeping” and the left’s tactics of canceling people they disagree with. But Hammer argues that there’s nothing wrong with maintaining boundaries between mainstream opinion and extremists and hatemongers.

Hammer believes that at some point, Vice President JD Vance, who is a close friend of Carlson and whose presidential ambitions for 2028 are no secret, is going to have to make a firm statement about his opposition to antisemitism and distinguish himself from the anti-Israel faction on the far right.

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Can American Jews shake off their defensive posture rooted in fear and a distorted conception of Jewish values to begin acting to both deter those who attack them and to convince them that the Jews are not easy prey for antisemitic thugs? According to JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin, that’s the question the Jewish community must confront of an unprecedented surge in Jew-hared in the two years since the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel.

He’s joined in this week’s episode of Think Twice by Benjamin Kerstein, author of the new book, Self-Defense: A Jewish Manifesto. He says it’s time for Diaspora Jews to shake off the constraints of what he calls “learned helplessness,” a mindset that conditions victims to believe they have no recourse but to endure violence without seeking to take action to defend themselves. Historically, this was overcome by the Zionist movement and the founding of the modern state of Israel. But in America, most Jews react to the post-Oct. 7 assault on their rights and safety with passivity. As we saw on college campuses where pro-Hamas mobs terrorized Jewish kids, they were told to shelter in place and to not confront their tormentors.

Kerstein argues that what happened at UCLA in 2024 was a model of how to end the harassment of Jews. There, a group of Jewish students responded to a pro-Hamas encampment by aggressively making it clear that Jews would not be intimidated. Though the action was flawed by violence, this forced the university administration to act to end the encampment. A better idea would have been non-violent action in which Jews confronted the antisemites wherever they sought to block access to campus sites.

He says the model not to follow was that of the Jewish Defense League and its leader Rabbi Meir Kahane. It descended to illegality and violence that not only led to the government shutting it down but also in discrediting the whole idea of Jewish self-defense for generations. Rather, what is needed is a Jewish version of the civil rights era group the Students Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) that confronted racism around the United States and helped usher in an era of equality. 

What is also clear, says Kerstein, is that the Jewish establishment and those organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, whose task it is to defend Jews are not doing their job. Their policies are a product of politics in which they have long preferred to focus on lesser threats like that of neo-Nazis rather than on the greater peril posed by progressives who have effectively imposed their antisemitic beliefs on the education system and much of American culture.

Above all, Jews must, he argues, embrace the anger they feel about what has happened in the last two years and start to make “good trouble”—the phrase coined by civil rights hero Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) who urged African Americans to non-violently stand up to discrimination. Jews must now do the same when it comes to the broad array of antisemitic threats posed by forces on both the political left and right.    

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How did supporters of Hamas and others who want Israel destroyed win over so many young people since Oct. 7? According to JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin, the answer lies in large measure in the ability of progressives to redefine words in such a way as to normalize Jew-hatred and help create a surge of antisemitism. 

He’s joined in this week’s episode of Think Twice by scholar Donna Robinson Divine, co-editor of the new book, October 7: The Wars Over Words and Deeds, a collection of essays exploring issues relating to the war on Israel and how the Jewish state’s opponents have helped turn truth on its head to demonize Israel.

According to Divine, on college campuses across the country, “feelings replaced thinking” as many young persons who know little or nothing about the Middle East, were convinced to believe that supporting a genocidal and antisemitic cause was the right thing to do. The veteran scholar of the Middle East said she was shocked not merely at the distorted nature of the discussion about the post-Oct. 7 war but also because not a single head of an elite university told their students to “go and study” the subject of their protests. She says that compared to student protest movements of the past, the pro-Hamas activists don’t seem to know what they’re talking about or have a clear idea of what they want. Other, that is, than wanting Israel to disappear, though even there they don’t seem to realize that doing so would involve Jewish genocide.

Divine points out that a study of the history of the conflict quickly reveals that the goal of the Palestinian movement isn’t about statehood, it’s the principle of not sharing any part of the land with the Jews.

Redefining terms is also important to the cause of delegitimizing Israel. Divine points out that by changing the meaning of the word “genocide”—coined in the aftermath of the Holocaust to mean an attempt to wipe out an entire people—to merely meaning “depriving them of agency,” the pro-Palestinians have smeared the Jewish state as guilty of genocide. Though she also notes that if the Palestinians have lost the ability to determine their own future, it’s because of their own decisions.

Just as sinister is the way Palestinian employed “extreme violence” and rape on Oct. 7, only to see their supporters deny these crimes happened, despite abundant evidence for them provided by the perpetrators.

Most important, is how the Palestinians and their supporters have worked to demonize the Israeli victims, both to make the terrorists appear as if their atrocities are justified and to depict the Jews as deserving of being murdered, raped or kidnapped.

Divine also says that the willingness of opponents of Israel to delegitimize the Jewish state’s actions when they are no different from those of other countries leads to the inevitable conclusion antisemitism is the explanation for these double standards.

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Though the study of history is being slighted by contemporary educators, according to JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan S. Tobin, knowledge of the past, including that of the ancient world, is more important than ever if we are to understand current dilemmas. And that’s especially true in the Middle East.

He’s joined in this week’s episode of Think Twice by Hoover Institution scholar Barry Strauss, one of the leading experts on the ancient world and the author of the new book, Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World’s Mightiest Empire.

Strauss’s book tells the story of the three rebellions fought by Jews against the Roman Empire over the course of a 70-year period stretching from 66 C.E. to 136 C.E. that included the Great Revolt, the destruction of Jerusalem and the Holy Temple, a little-known Diaspora revolt and the Bar Kochba rebellion. The history of these struggles is integral to the story of the Jews. But some historians call the Jews of the ancient world Judeans rather than Jews. Strauss disagrees with this since, as he says, “this is to write Jews out of Jewish history.”

The historian says there are some important lessons for Jews and Israelis to draw from these tragic episodes.

One is the danger of disunity. The divisions between the Jews fighting the Romans and each other inside besieged Jerusalem were, he says, “absolutely fatal.” He notes that, there should be a lesson that you can only take political disputes during a time of war or in a dangerous period “only so far.” That’s something that Israelis learned from the Oct. 7, 2023 attack, since the Palestinians believed they were too divided to unite and defend their county.

Strauss says another issue is the relationship between faith and politics. Jewish extremists believed that God would save them if they fought Rome no matter how steep the odds. “Faith is essential for Jews and for everyone in their own particular way. But when you are letting it lead you to politically dangerous, unintelligent decisions, then you have to really think things through and you have to be careful of what you're doing.”

Yet another lesson Strauss says that can be drawn from the revolts is that “small states never are fully independent.” In fact, he added, “Even large states are never fully independent. Everyone needs allies, but small states above all need allies. And so, I think Israel today must learn from the lesson of the failure of the rebels in the great revolts.” Speaking of the Jewish rebels, he says, “They had a plan that was an intelligent plan, which involved getting help from Parthia [an independent kingdom located in modern-day Iraq and Iran that successfully resisted Rome]. But they should have been able to do a cost-benefit analysis and say, it's not likely and maybe back down then.”

The author says the failure of America’s education system to teach history is “terrible” and largely the fault of progressives. “The so-called woke people are selling narratives that give a completely different view of American history and of the world, and that makes it easier for people to push the button of the oldest hatred and to cast the Jews as the villains,” Strauss says. “It’s absolutely essential for the next generation, for good people to get control of the educational system and to bring us back to a sensible educational system in which people can study history without fear or favor in an unbiased way. We know as citizens, whether we're Jewish or not, that education is absolutely essential. So, this is something that we have to prioritize.”

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The victory of Zohran Mamdani is a watershed moment for American Jewry, says JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin. For the first time in living memory, Jews are dealing with a surge of antisemitism that the election of an avowed anti-Zionist will exacerbate. He is joined in this week’s episode of Think Twice by Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York City, a leading liberal critic of Mamdani.

According to Hirsch, the danger from a Mayor Mamdani for New York Jews isn’t necessarily a matter of him downgrading protection for Jewish institutions. Rather, he says, “History demonstrates to us that wherever anti-Zionism is normalized and wherever it has support, anti-Zionism has support from high-level government officials, as night follows day, hostility to Jews increases.” Moreover, as he learned from a meeting between the mayor-elect and a group of rabbis, Mamdani is ideologically committed to the war against Israel, it’s “the core principle of his political ideology. That’s why he can’t explain away his support for “Globalize the intifada.”

Hirsch also notes that the surge of antisemitism since Oct. 7 has traumatized liberal Jewish New Yorkers who have seen their erstwhile allies fail them. “Many of them disappointed us and some of them actually betrayed us.”

The rabbi also noted that the disaffection from Israel on the part of many American Jews, is due in part to the failure of  liberal Jewish religious denominations including his own Reform movement. He says they “mistaught” the concept of tikkun olam by failing to make it clear that while universal values are a vital part of Jewish identity, many of the youngsters didn’t also learn that defending Jewish rights and expressing Jewish particularism, including support for Israel, is also integral to liberal Judaism.

At the core of the problem is, he said, “There's simply a very deep and broad Jewish illiteracy in the American Jewish community” that can only be corrected by increased emphasis and support for Jewish day schools, camps and trips to Israel.

Everything you learned about the horrors of nationalism and the importance of multilateral and supranational organizations like the United Nations is wrong, says JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin.

Much of the West has been taught to denigrate the idea of faith in a system of independent sovereign states after World War II and to support systems that undermine them. But the truth is that the most likely source of hate, bigotry and oppression in the 21st century doesn’t come from nationalists, but from liberals and leftists who seek to impose their ideas on the world by any means necessary.

He’s joined in this week’s episode of "Think Twice" by Yoram Hazony, author of the seminal 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism, which has just been republished in an updated edition. He points out that though modern liberals have accepted the idea that Adolf Hitler’s Nazism was a natural consequence of German nationalism, the truth is that it was a scheme for imperial domination, much like the ambitions of Napoleon and Stalin.

It had nothing to do with the notion of an international order of independent sovereign states that, as Hazony writes, is the best recipe for freedom, despite the fact that all countries are flawed. He also points out that the contemporary push to downgrade national freedom in favor of globalism and the rule of international organizations, like the United Nations or the European Union, is another instance of that same desire for imperial rule in which elites in one place seek to dominate other nations.

Hazony believes that the anti-Zionism and antisemitism directed at Israel is, in large measure, derived from the resentment of Marxists and Europeans who have lost faith in the rights of their own countries to national independence and sovereignty feel about the Jewish state’s willingness to fight for its right to exist and thrive. In this way, Israeli nationalism is viewed as unacceptable and paradoxically linked to the intolerance of the Nazis when, in fact, Zionism is a rational and much-needed response to the powerlessness and lack of national sovereignty of the Jews during the Holocaust.

The intolerance of these anti-nationalists on the left for those, like Israelis, who resist their diktats, is similar to the way true believers in an ideological faith regard those who resist their ideas, he said. That, along with traditional antisemitism, is fueling the fires of hatred against Israel.

Hazony, who leads the Edmund Burke Foundation, which has organized several National Conservative conferences in Europe and the United States since his book was first published, acknowledged that he was troubled by the growth of anti-Israel sentiment among some American conservatives since the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Most American conservatives have embraced U.S. President Donald Trump’s version of nationalism, which is very supportive of Israel. But some figures, labeled by Hazony as “alt-right,” seek to push Jews out of the conservative movement and are hostile to the Jewish state. That’s creating a problem for the Trump administration. Their need to keep their electoral coalition intact may be setting up a situation where they need to confront people like former Fox News host and current political commentator Tucker Carlson, but are “hesitant” to do so. But the author said he still has hope that it will do so in a firm way.

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