The Trump-Supporting Christians Accusing Jews of Antisemitism

Opinion|The Trump-Supporting Christians Accusing Jews of Antisemitism

In The New York Times this weekend, Katie J.M. Baker described a fund-raising pitch that the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank that gave us Project 2025, made for a campaign to crush a subversive movement that threatens “America itself.”

The pitch, she wrote, “presented an illustration of a pyramid topped by ‘progressive “elites” leading the way,’ which included Jewish billionaires such as the philanthropist George Soros and Governor JB Pritzker of Illinois.” Whether intentionally or not, Heritage was deploying a classic antisemitic trope, the notion of the wealthy Jewish puppet master. In the contemporary version of this conspiracy theory, Soros looms especially large; the Anti-Defamation League has multiple pages on its website about the antisemitic underpinnings of right-wing claims that Soros is working to destabilize society.

I emailed the Anti-Defamation League for its thoughts on the Heritage Foundation’s pyramid illustration but haven’t heard back. I won’t be surprised, however, if the organization stays silent, because the Heritage Foundation was demonizing Soros in the name of defending Israel.

The campaign Baker wrote about is called Project Esther, and it aims to destroy the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States. Heritage defines this movement broadly, in a way that includes virtually all attempts to shift American foreign policy in a less pro-Israel direction, including those by progressive Jews.

Here we see the perversity that can come from conflating antisemitism with opposition to an increasingly brutal and authoritarian Israeli state. “Those supporters of Palestine and Hamas who have claimed for decades that criticizing Israel’s policies does not equate to antisemitism are at best insincere,” said a strategic plan for Project Esther published online. In the twisted logic of Project Esther — which is also the logic of Donald Trump’s war on academia — ultra-Zionist gentiles get to lecture Jews about antisemitism even as they lay waste to the liberal culture that has allowed American Jews to thrive.

In its plan, Project Esther describes its opponents as a “Hamas Support Network” that aims to achieve its goals “by taking advantage of our open society, corrupting our education system, leveraging the American media, co-opting the federal government and relying on the American Jewish community’s complacency.” It’s a little unclear who falls under this sinister umbrella; the report targets both radical groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace as well as run-of-the-mill liberals. As Baker reported, most of the Americans who dreamed up Project Esther are Christian, though they worked in concert with Jewish Israeli officials. Several of the Americans singled out by Project Esther, meanwhile, are Jewish.