The Specter of Right-Wing Antisemitism
Tamara Berens fled her home in the United Kingdom for two reasons: (1) to escape the growing antisemitism there and (2) to join the American conservative movement she had long admired as welcoming to Jewish people like her.
Berens came to the United States in 2019. At first, she was pleased by her reception among conservatives in Washington, DC, where, she said, “One of the main attitudes that united them was their support for Israel and the Jewish people.”
Recently, however, Berens has watched as the once-fringe antisemitism of the alt-right has moved into political acceptability. In her essay “From Coy to Goy” in the June 5, 2023, issue of the conservative Jewish magazine Mosaic, Berens wrote,
Had I not stayed quiet when a friend voiced his sympathy for Kanye West in October of 2022, after West had tweeted to 30 million followers about going “death con 3 on Jewish people”? Had I not politely laughed when, at a holiday party for a conservative magazine in New York, an editor mocked Upper East Side Jews for acting like Bernie Madoff, complete with too many pairs of tacky shoes? Had I not stared back in silence when a classmate referred to Ben Shapiro as a “super Jew” in a sarcastically adulating tone?
Such experiences led Berens to sound the alarm on the mainstreaming of antisemitic views and rhetoric on the political right.
Whereas right-wing, neo-Nazi antisemites of bygone years seemed insular and contained, the new generation is spreading its tentacles using technology and outrage culture to promote itself and its anti-Jewish messages.
Known for entertaining conspiracy theories and making outlandish comments, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has speculated that “space solar generators,” funded by the Jewish Rothschild family, may have caused the 2018 wildfires in California.
The Georgia Republican also has spoken at far-right political conferences and falsely claimed that liberal financier George Soros, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor, was a Nazi sympathizer. Soros, Greene stated, “turned in his own people over to the Nazis” and is a “Nazi himself trying to continue what was not finished.”
More alarming is the fact that Greene is “the most politically powerful of the far right’s new figureheads,” Berens noted. Greene serves on two House committees and advises former President Donald Trump.
That someone like Greene, who traffics in conspiracy theories about the Jewish people and regularly makes incendiary comments about the Holocaust and Nazis, has significant influence on prominent Republican leaders is frightening.
Greene is hardly alone in her antisemitic behavior. Figures like white supremacist Nick Fuentes and others who believe in the Great Replacement Theory are gaining traction on the political right. The theory purports that a cabal of elite Jewish people is conspiring to facilitate mass immigration and open U.S. borders to extinguish the “white race” and ensure liberal politicians stay in office.
Berens worries that, in the future, right-wing politicians will view friendship with Israel and the Jewish people as a political handicap, not as a badge of honor. “Anti-Semitism,” she wrote, “even as it remains both officially and pretty widely denounced, is less likely to be a point of weakness on the right in 2024 than it is a weapon.”
Evangelicals, a dependably conservative voting bloc, must take seriously the mainstreaming of right-wing antisemitism. We can no longer assume that a self-proclaimed conservative candidate is a friend of the Jewish people.
No matter our political convictions, our supreme allegiance is to the King of kings and Lord of lords. He will bless His people’s benefactors and judge their enemies (Mt. 25:31–46).
