Is America still good for the Jews?

The right, which made much of the left’s lurch away from Zion, now stands by just as morally indolent as its own ranks are swelled by Jew-haters of the nativist variety. Nick Fuentes, who claims “there’s a Jewish conspiracy” and calls the Holocaust “exaggerated”, is now a mainstream figure within the very online Gen-Z right, and his profile among reactionaries more broadly raised by a softball interview with Tucker Carlson.

Fuentes and his groyper army are no longer meme-addled edgelords confined to livestreams and message boards. They are storming the barricades of the Republican Party with a successor ideology to conservatism that is unabashedly white supremacist, authoritarian and antisemitic.

That Fuentes has been signal-boosted by Carlson is no surprise, given the latter’s transition from the bow-tied, nepo-baby Republican of cable news to a cackling political arsonist merrily chucking a barrage of incendiaries at Israel while making some new friends in Qatar.

Carlson’s reinvention as an isolationist and anti-globalist – Sam Francis without the intellect, Pat Buchanan without the wit – has been perfectly timed at an inflection point for American right-wing politics.

A movement of Christian nationalists is on the rise and with it a project to transform the United States from creedal nation bound together by philosophy to heritage nation defined by blood, soil and authoritarian Christianity, the confession and denomination as yet unagreed.

The Christian nationalists have been especially vocal since October 7, 2023, amplifying Palestinian and Islamist propaganda about Israel’s conduct of its war of self-defence. The aim was to break the spine of American Christian conservative philosemitism and several vertebrae have undoubtedly been severed.

Mainstream Republicans have varied in their responses to these developments. Ben Shapiro is trying to save the soul of the American right and warned attendees at the right-wing AmericaFest not to head down the antisemitic rabbit hole or the one marked “conspiracy theories”. Podcaster Megyn Kelly accused him of being "Israel first” and said of the Daily Wire founder Shapiro and CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss: “Tucker is not making antisemites. They are.”

Vice President JD Vance has been decidedly muted on the matter. When he spoke at the same conference, he blandly advocated unity. Donald Trump has been firmer. When the New York Times asked his thoughts on antisemites within the MAGA movement, the US president said: “I think we don’t need them. I think we don’t like them.” He would “certainly” condemn them, he added, before bragging at length about his closeness with Israel and all he had done for the Jewish state.

Trump will not be around forever, and the antisemitic and isolationist right is an increasingly powerful faction within the GOP. By the time of the next Republican primaries, it could well be a kingmaker, a horrifying prospect in the party of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan.

Whether they care about the Republican Party or merely the republic, right-wingers cannot afford to be silent in the face of this hostile takeover attempt, which is not only contrary to the principles of conservatism but irreconcilable with the ideas that underpin the founding of the United States.

Jewish philo-Americanism and American philosemitism have been in conversation for as long as a distinct American civic consciousness has existed. In the late 19th century, the United States gained a Yiddish monicker courtesy of the Jews of eastern Europe: goldene medina, or golden country. Word had reached those toiling in the shtetls and the Pale of Settlement of a land of untold riches where Jews were free and equal to their Christian compatriots.

That it was a highly romanticised version of America did not mean it was an untrue one, and the millions who journeyed from the east to Ellis Island beginning in the 1880s found opportunities amid hardship and religious liberty amid antisemitism.

However, Jews were part of the American story long before these waves of immigration. In 1790, George Washington visited Newport, Rhode Island and was presented with an address signed by Moses Seixas, warden of the city’s Congregation Yeshuat Israel, which gave thanks for “a Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance – but generously affording to All liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship”.

If Seixas’ letter was seeking reassurance that his vision for America was shared by the first president, it came in an enthusiastic reply in which Washington repeated back the “no sanction, no assistance” formulation and declared that it was “now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights”. Rather, the United States government "requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens”.

Washington prayed that “the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants” and, quoting the Book of Micah, that “every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid”.

That biblical verse is by no means incidental. Though never uniform in personal faith, the founders thought and spoke in broadly Christian terms to an emerging nation in which even the least educated citizen had some familiarity with the Protestant Bible. The rights delineated in the founding documents were divinely created and Americans were in no doubt who that Creator was.

The union of political liberalism to a universal Protestantism was not unique to the United States but it was in that country where this union bore the most bountiful fruits. American presidents are less vocal about the Providential nature of the country today, but a collective belief in national, divinely ordained destiny helped build the United States into the premier world power.

And the Providence that guided America was the same that showed Abraham the Promised Land, anointed his children as the Lord’s chosen, and led the Israelites out of bondage and into Zion. David Gelernter argues that the United States is the product of an “American Zionism” that echoes that of the Israelites, and with good reason: American nationalism and Jewish nationalism spring from the same book.

Popular American sympathy for Israel is, depending on who you ask, the work of Holocaust memory, liberal guilt, AIPAC lobbying, or dispensational theology. In truth, it’s simpler than that: a nation founded on liberalism and Protestant ethics is one primed to feel not just sympathy but solidarity with God’s chosen people. Jews found a home in America because it was their God who built the house.

Nativists and Christian nationalists might call themselves “heritage Americans” and consider themselves to be fighting to restore an original America corrupted by a liberalism which some openly and some more tacitly identify as Jewish, but it is their early 20th century White America mythos that is the true perversion of the founding ideals. The Jews cannot be written out of America’s story because their tradition is its co-author.