Far-right antisemitism: “a growing cancer” |
An article by my friend Thane Rosenbaum should be read by and circulated to all those ostrich-like political conservatives who ignore, deny or trivialize present-day antisemitism in their midst.
“The antisemitic fervor and hatred of Israel on the far right is both growing and not all that different from the progressive Democratic left,” he wrote earlier this week in the Jewish Journal. “And the woke right is not influenced by the ahistorical revisionism on campus and the irresponsible journalism of mainstream media. The far right doesn’t need propaganda to feed its addictions.”
Rosenbaum highlights far-right luminaries Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, and Carrie Prejean Boller who have been anything but subtle in their crude antisemitic rhetoric.
I wholeheartedly agree with Rosenbaum that far-right antisemitism must be taken as seriously as its far-left equivalent. Others, unfortunately, feel differently. Ambassador Yehuda Kaploun, the U.S. State Department’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, took Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, the president of the Conference of European Rabbis and a former chief rabbi of Moscow, to task for saying at the Davos World Economic Forum that “the rise of the extreme right in many European countries is a response to the insecurity felt by the so-called old Europeans regarding the new immigrants who came from the Middle East.”
“Blaming ‘old Europe’ for the present surge in antisemitism is disgraceful,” Ambassador Kaploun posted on X in response, instead casting “mass migration” as “a huge driver of antisemitism” that “threatens the safety of Jews and all communities.”
The difference between Goldschmidt and Kaploun is that Goldschmidt understands that antisemitism emanates from both the extreme left and the extreme right while Kaploun appears to be deaf in his right ear. In this regard, Kaploun is in synch with Vice President JD Vance who declared in December that “the single most significant thing you could do to eliminate antisemitism” would be the reduction immigration to the United States.
Earth to Vance: condemning and ostracizing actual antisemites may be a wee bit more significant and would certainly be more effective. Vance has also refused to distance himself from, let alone repudiate, blatant antisemites such as Carlson, Owens, Fuentes, and Prejean Boller.
It seems worth noting that Carlson was born in San Francisco, Owens in White Plains, NY, Fuentes in Western Springs, Illinois, and Prejean Boller in San Diego. Not an immigrant among them.
When asked whether individuals holding antisemitic views belonged in his political coalition, President Trump told The New York Times last month, “I think we don’t need them,” albeit without singling any of them out by name. “I think we don’t like them.”
In sharp contrast to Vance, meanwhile, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) has affirmatively warned of what he calls “a growing cancer” of antisemitism on the American political right. Antisemitism is a “poison,” he said at a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition. “And I believe we are facing an existential crisis in our party and our country.”
“Fuentes and Tucker and the rest of that ilk have a right to say what they are saying,” Cruz said at the November 2025 convention of the Federalist Society. “Every one of us has an obligation to stand up and say it is wrong.”
The former “Miss California” Prejean Boller was unceremoniously booted off the White House’s U.S. Religious Liberty Commission after hijacking that body’s first public hearing by, among other things, asking whether her belief that Jews killed Jesus made her an antisemite. Spoiler alert: it was Pontius Pilate; and in answer to her question: yes, it does. On the other hand, the conservative (and Jewish) commentator Ben Shapiro seems to be one of the few who is willing to take Owens on head-on.
I have argued repeatedly and consistently on this platform and elsewhere that we must be attuned to and confront antisemitism on both extremes of the political spectrum. My concern is that there remain far too many conservative voices who, unlike Rosenbaum and Cruz, refuse to denounce Fuentes, Tucker, et al., just as there are far too many Democrats who remain silent when it comes to the likes of Representatives Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI).
Sajid Akram and Naveed Akram, the terrorists who murdered an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor, a 10-year-old Jewish girl, and thirteen others at a Hanukah celebration in Bondi Beach, Australia, on December 15, 2025, were “driven by Islamic state ideology.” Similarly, the Syrian-born Jihad Al-Shamie, who attacked the Seaton Park Synagogue in Manchester this past Yom Kippur 2025 had ties to, or at the very least was radicalized by ISIS.
There can be no question at this moment in time, especially in the aftermath of October 7, that these and other Jihadist and Hamas-inspired terrorists pose the greatest threat to Jewish communities, Jewish institutions, and individual Jews across the globe. But that does not mean that we can or should discount or underestimate antisemitic manifestations on the extreme right.
Robert Gregory Bowers , who murdered 11 Jews and injured seven at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in October 2018 was a white supremacist. So was John Earnest who perpetrated the fatal attack on the Chabad of Poway in California the following April. And Stephan Balliet, whose attempt to murder Jews at Yom Kippur services in Halle, Germany, on October 9, 2019, was a far-right Holocaust denier who proclaimed that “attacking the synagogue was not a mistake, they are my enemies”.
I mention the names of Bowers, Earnest, and Balliet to remind Ambassador Kaploun and Vice President Vance that they and the wider far-right antisemitism they represent should not be swept under the table or otherwise minimized.
Item: As reported by The Guardian, the global publishing platform Substack is generating considerable revenue “from newsletters that promote virulent Nazi ideology, white supremacy and antisemitism.” A recent post by one of these newsletters, NatSocToday, with 2,800 subscribers, described Adolf Hitler as ‘one of the greatest men of all time. And reiterated the antisemitic trope that “the Jewish race” was responsible for World War II.
Item: In Croatia, the wildly popular singer-songwriter Marko Perkovic, known as Thompson, regularly performs a song that begins with the “Za dom spremni!” (“For the homeland — Ready!”) salute of the pro-Nazi Ustaše regime of the Nazi-aligned “Independent State of Croatia” that murdered hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Roma during World War II.
Item: Leaders of the ultra-nationalist AFD (Alternative for Germany) party, while ostensibly proclaiming themselves to be pro-Israel and protective of Germany’s Jewish community, engage in Holocaust denial and the rehabilitation of Holocaust perpetrators. In 2024, a statement by Maximilian Krah, now an AFD member of the German parliament, the Bundestag, that members of the Nazi SS were not automatically “criminals” caused Marine Le Pen, head of France’s far-right Nationalist Rally, to sever relations between the two parties.
Item: Paula Sawicka, a Polish pro-democracy activist and the chairwoman of the programme council of the Open Republic Against Antisemitism and Xenophobia, writes that “antisemitic clichés are common in Poland and alas passed from generation to generation. They are responsible for the attitude of Poles toward their Jewish fellow citizens, regardless of whether they maintained Jewish distinctiveness or are rooted in Polish language and culture.”
In other words, antisemitism is very much an equal opportunity bigotry that finds fertile ground wherever it is allowed to fester.
All of which is why Thane Rosenbaum’s article must be a wake-up call for conservatives and liberals alike who remain on the fence with respect to antisemites in their respective political camps in the interest of some sort of ill-conceived political expediency. “All throughout history,” he writes, power is invested in bystanders who always refuse to exercise it. Antisemitic extremists on both left and right may have coalesced into a misshapen but not harmless horseshoe. But that’s no excuse for Jews wearing a dog collar and resigning themselves to yield.”