(RNS) — Last week, California beauty queen Carrie Prejean Boller was booted off President Donald Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission after criticizing Israeli actions in Gaza. In a commission meeting, she claimed her Roman Catholic faith does not support Zionism, and she verbally attacked a witness for portraying popular conservative YouTubers Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson as antisemites.
That, according to the commission’s chair, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, amounted to hijacking the commission for her own “personal and political agenda.”
And yet, these days, the smart money on the right is on the antisemitic side. A sign of this is the current tempest over the Israeli American conservative political theorist Yoram Hazony.
Several years ago, Hazony captured the attention of the right with a book, “The Virtue of Nationalism,” which he’s parlayed into an annual gabfest called the National Conservatism Conference. In an interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat back in November, he called antisemitism on the right “pretty bad,” noting how it was particularly gaining ground among the younger generation.
“We’ll see whether five years, 10 years, 25 years from now, whether American nationalism is going to be fundamentally like the movement that Trump built, which is very welcoming to Jews, or whether it’s going to be something very different,” he said in the interview.
Then, at an antisemitism conference in Jerusalem at the end of January, he blamed Jews and Christian Zionists for failing to prove that Carlson is an antisemite. After ticking off seven of Carlson’s antisemitic positions, he asked:
[W]here is the 15-minute explainer video, that I can show my friends on the political right, which proves that this very serious accusation against Tucker is true? Where is the carefully assembled research, with links and dates and timestamps, that could convince an impartial public figure who is open to being convinced?
The answer is: There is no such 15-minute explainer video. There is no such serious research. They don’t exist because, for some reason, there are no Jews or Zionist Christians, who think it’s their job to produce such things. Or if there are people who think it’s their job, they haven’t circulated anything of the sort — to me or to anyone else in Washington who’s in a position to do anything with it.
This is an extremely high level of incompetence by the entire anti-Semitism-industrial complex, some of whose representatives are sitting right here in this room. Maybe some of you think you were persuasively “fighting anti-Semitism” over the last six months. But the unfortunate truth is that you weren’t.
It turns out, however, that a 15-minute explainer video does exist and it was produced by Hazony’s own Edmund Burke Foundation, according to that organization’s former communications director, who worked to produce it. Hazony refused to release it, she claimed in a Tablet Magazine article.
Gobsmacked understates the reaction of Jewish conservatives. “Yoram Hazony’s Fifteen Minutes of Infamy,” is the headline on Josh Blackman’s column in Reason. In Commentary, James Kirchick compares Hazony to the obsequious rabbi who, in Philip Roth’s counterfactual novel “The Plot Against America,” becomes Charles Lindbergh’s court Jew after Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in 1940, and keeps the U.S. out of World War II.
Hazony’s real charge against the antisemitism industrial complex is not that it has failed to make the case (video or no video), but that it has leveled too much of its fire against what he calls the “nationalist wing” of the Republican Party — as distinct from the “alt-right” (antisemitic) and “liberal” (Zionist) wings. In the past, he has defended members of this nationalist wing when they refused to condemn the antisemites in their midst. For example, after Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts was pilloried for declaring the foundation’s undying support for Carlson, Hazony tweeted in response to critics of Roberts, “This story isn’t over yet. But whatever happens, I’ll never forget how these jackals circled, sniveling for blood.”
Hazony’s conservative critics seem to have a sense that he mainly wants to make sure the Trumpian tent is as big as possible. But the deeper problem is with his faith-based conception of nationalism.
“If America’s going to change, it’s going to change because you decide that Christianity is going to be restored as the public culture of the United States, or at least most parts of it where it’s possible,” he told attendees at the National Conservatism Conference in 2022. Don’t be afraid to say, he said, “This was a Christian nation, historically, and according to its laws, and it’s going to be a Christian nation again.”
An Orthodox Jew who makes his home in Israel, Hazony is hardly a proponent of worldwide Christendom. Rather — and unsurprisingly for a right-wing Israeli — his concept of nationalism requires a given nation to valorize its own religious tradition: Christianity in the United States, Judaism in Israel, Hinduism in India, maybe even Islam in Muslim countries.
But once you make a particular religion intrinsic to your nationalist ideology, you open the door to ancient religious hostilities. Is it any wonder the American right is experiencing a revival of the old-time antisemitism?