Last week marked an inflection point for American Jewish political conservatism, perhaps even a watershed moment. As Kevin Roberts, president of the hugely influential Heritage Foundation, defended Tucker Carlson’s interview with Holocaust-denier Nick Fuentes – saying Carlson “always will be a close friend” – politically conservative Jews may need to confront an uncomfortable truth: They may have been building their political home on quicksand.
The coalition that they assumed was based on Judeo-Christian values may have just been built on Christian-nationalist ones, leaving very little room for Jews.
Roberts dismissed Carlson’s critics as a “venomous coalition” serving “someone else’s agenda” and declared that canceling Fuentes was “not the answer.” The conspiratorial language should be enough to set alarm bells off. This is after Fuentes told Carlson that “organized Jewry” represents the “big challenge” to American unity and invoked “blood-and-soil” to describe Zionism, the terminology that underpinned Nazi Germany.
Are Jewish conservatives homeless?
For decades, many Jewish conservatives found ideological kinship in Heritage’s fusionist conservatism. Now, they’re watching as the institution’s president treats open antisemitism as a matter for “debate,” rather than moral condemnation.
Republican Jewish Coalition CEO Matt Brooks captured the betrayal: “I am appalled, offended, and disgusted that [Roberts] and Heritage would stand with Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes.”
Rabbi Yaakov Menken, founder of the Coalition for Jewish Values, a national organization claiming to represent 1,500 American rabbis, immediately distanced himself from Roberts and Heritage. They had been one of the few Jewish organizations to join the Heritage initiative to fight antisemitism. Ironically, the initiative was criticized for only attacking antisemitism as perceived to exist on the Left or extreme Left, but not the Right. They have certainly been blindsided.
Vice President JD Vance embodies the coalition’s contradictions. He called Fuentes “a total loser” in 2024 after Fuentes attacked his wife, yet defended Trump’s dinner with him, praising Trump for being willing to “talk to anybody.” When a MAGA (Make America Great Again)-hatted student this week claimed Judaism “openly supports the prosecution” of Christians, Vance failed to condemn the antisemitism, offering only theological discourse.
Carlson and Fuentes's antisemitism
Carlson and Fuentes agree that they both despise Christian Zionists; as Christians, they seem to consider it a form of apostasy. This is theological cancel culture on a grand scale.
This dovetails with another area of agreement between Carlson and Fuentes: US foreign policy is driven by Israeli and not American interests, and the Israel lobby and the neocons are basically the same thing. For Fuentes, this is a core pillar of the complete identification of Israel with the Jews and their inherent disloyalty to America given their historic stateless identity. Fuentes is not Carlson’s first guest to focus on the way Israel, and specifically Netanyahu, controls US policy in the Middle East.
The Israel connection complicates everything. While progressive antisemitism often masquerades as anti-Zionism, right-wing antisemitism increasingly attacks both Israel and American Jews’ loyalty. For Fuentes, this dual loyalty is key, and it is one of the oldest antisemitic tropes. Amplified by Carlson, it is now welcomed onto mainstream platforms.
MAGA’s free speech absolutism has become antisemitism’s Trojan horse – intended or casual. Vance once criticized X/Twitter for banning Fuentes, arguing that tech companies shouldn’t control speech, a position that helped replatform voices the conservative movement once marginalized. The result: Fuentes now has over a million followers on X, mainstreaming ideas that would have been unthinkable in GOP circles a decade ago.
The Trump administration’s dance reveals a coalition held together by electoral algebra: pro-Israel stalwarts like Jared Kushner and Mike Huckabee, alongside Vance’s studied silence and Carlson’s embrace of Fuentes. It is composed of techbros, evangelicals, Christian Zionists, Christian nationalists, and now seemingly casual or obvious antisemites.
The future of American conservatism
For Diaspora Jews, this moment should resonate with historical precedent. We’ve seen political movements decide Jewish support is expendable. Are American conservative Jews learning this lesson now?
Only a few weeks ago, Israeli-American intellectual Yoram Hazony, founder and chairman of the National Conservatism movement, lamented the rise of antisemitism within the NatCon coalition. During his address, he admitted that this was happening “for reasons that I don’t necessarily understand.”
I would humbly suggest that he and other leaders of the movement try to figure this out before the toxic antisemitism is not just normalized by Carlson – and now Roberts – but larger parts of the MAGA and conservative coalition.
Roberts insisted Heritage wouldn’t “cancel our own people,” but I would suggest this is blind loyalty combined with hyper-partisanship. If Heritage can only see antisemitism on the Left, then it is no surprise that they have a blind spot to Carlson and Fuentes.
Carlson should be shamed for his complete lack of willingness to challenge and attack an open antisemite and Holocaust denier. Carlson is not a neutral actor but has taken the time to promote those who promote racism, Holocaust revisionism, and glorifying Hitler (not to mention Stalin). All this is over and above his repeated and unabashed promotion of the Great Replacement Theory, itself based on antisemitic tropes.
For conservative Jews who bet their future on this coalition, the question isn’t whether to abandon conservative principles. It’s recognizing that a movement that treats their safety as negotiable may never have truly shared those principles.
When your political home chooses Tucker and Fuentes over you, citing “free speech,” while your children face “blood-and-soil” rhetoric, perhaps it was never really your home to begin with. The same challenges facing liberal, left-leaning Jews are now on the doorstep of their conservative, right-leaning co-religionists.
The writer is a founding partner of Goldrock Capital and founder of the Institute for Jewish and Zionist Research. He is a businessman and social activist. He is a founding co-chair of the Coalition for Haredi Employment and a former chair of Gesher and World Bnei Akiva.