Mask off
This is about Carlson, Fuentes, and Heritage
We’re back!
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With that! Onto news, views, and Jews.
THE NEWS
For the Forward, I asked why conversations around the New York mayoral race and Jewish safety don’t include the threat of having a mayor who resigned as governor because he had been accused of sexual harassment by multiple women.
From the AP: “The Trump administration is restricting the number of refugees admitted annually to the United States to 7,500 and they will mostly be white South Africans, a dramatic drop announced Thursday that effectively suspends America’s traditional role as a haven for those fleeing war and persecution.”
From CNN: “The Trump administration has lifted sanctions on a kleptocratic ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was removed this month as president of the Serb territory within Bosnia and Herzegovina for chipping away at the US-brokered peace deal that ended bloody ethnic violence in the Balkans in the 1990s.”
From Notes From Poland: “President Karol Nawrocki has created the new position of ‘ambassador for historical diplomacy,’ which will deal with issues in international relations relating to history.”
MY VIEWS ON…
…the right going mask off!
Tucker Carlson did an interview with Nick Fuentes. This is a big moment in that Carlson readily uses his massive platform to spew antisemitic conspiracy, ie Replacement Theory, but stops short of, say, denying the Holocaust, which Fuentes, who is a white supremacist, happily does. But this was then followed by another, arguably bigger moment: Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, defended Carlson (and, by extension, Fuentes, whom he said we shouldn’t “cancel”).
The reason this is notable is this: Prior to yesterday, there were two ends of the MAGA spectrum on antisemitism. On the one end, there were people comfortable with antisemitism (ie talked about globalists and Jewish money and spread conspiracy theories about George Soros) but who were supportive of Israel, and who thus had the protection of rightwing Jews—and, in some cases, prominent self-appointed Jewish leaders—from charges of antisemitism. On the other, there were people who spewed antisemitism and criticized Israel (one note on this, in case you are new here: the issue with Carlson and Fuentes is not that they criticize Israel, a thing many millions of people manage to do without dipping into white supremacy, and if you pretend that that is why you like them, I am going to assume you are lying or just born or both).
What we saw yesterday with Roberts’s announcement is that the one end is very comfortable giving cover to the other: that the mask ever so slightly on antisemitism, the kind that insists it is for “Judeo-Christian” values and that it can’t be antisemitic because look how supportive it is of Israel, will drop that in order to maintain these alliances. Roberts stressed, in his announcement, that he is Christian and American. If you can listen to that as a Jewish person and not understand that you are not invited to that party, good for you, I guess.
The other interesting part of all this is that the Heritage Foundation is the organization that gave us Project Esther, a plan to “fight antisemitism.” Project Esther, written largely without input from actual Jews, was actually pretty transparently about using the threat antisemitism—a real threat—to justify going after civil society, pro-Palestinian groups and individuals, and immigrants. But there were nevertheless prominent American Jews in this country who supported it, or said that some of it had merit, because they liked that the criticism being silenced was about Israel. If the trade was between liberalism and nationalism, well, count them in for nationalism, so long as it also included Jewish nationalism.
That it did not, in fact, include Jewish nationalism is one of the more obvious things to ever come to pass. Social media over the last several hours has seen more than one Jewish person who cheered Project Esther upset over Roberts’s refusal to break with Carlson. Perhaps they thought that the antisemitic conspiracy would only ever hit liberals like George Soros or the Jewish students protesting for Palestine, not them.
But when you throw in your lot with people who are, at minimum, comfortable using antisemitism for political purposes, you don’t get to decide how much and what kind of antisemitism. They do. If you’re going to go all in on ethno-nationalism, you don’t get to insist that it includes you. And a mask off moment is only ever really upsetting to those who can pretend a mask is convincingly covering much in the first place.
…AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS
I thought this, from the Guardian, was super: “Jewish New York’s reckoning with Zohran Mamdani: ‘He’s become a vehicle for our tensions’”
From Haaretz: “Twelve percent of French people believe it would be good for the country if its Jews packed up and left, a new survey shows, with one of the pollsters calling the numbers ‘a historic reversal’ reflecting a worsening of antisemitism on the left.”
From JTA: “A second rabbinic letter about the New York City mayor’s race repudiating the first has drawn hundreds of signatures in the day since its launch.”
In the Forward, Jake Wasserman has a dispatch from Germany: “Germany has made remembering the Holocaust central, but that commitment has been strained by Oct. 7 and the rise of the far-right. What happens if Germany loses its memory”
-ET
“Mask“ by Taylor Liberato is licensed under CC BY 2.0.