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THE TRUMP-SUPPORTING CHRISTIANS ACCUSING JEWS OF ANTISEMITISM  
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Michelle Goldberg
May 19, 2025
The New York Times
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_ Ultra-Zionist gentiles are transforming America into something out
of Jewish nightmares, pretending they're trying to ensure Jewish
safety. The campaign called Project Esther, and it aims to destroy the
pro-Palestinian movement in the United States. _

Pro-Israeli demonstrators gathered outside of the University of
Southern California for a “United for Israel March” organized by
Pursuit Church and the Christian worship leader Sean Feucht., Photo
credit: Alex Welsh for The New York Times

 

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
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“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
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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
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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.

At one point, Project Esther singles out the majority of Jewish House
Democrats who declined to censure their colleague Rashida Tlaib for
anti-Israel language, including her defense of the slogan “From the
river to the sea.” Their votes, said Project Esther, are
“indicative of the strong strain of antisemitism that is running
rampant through the progressive left” as well as a “dangerous
complacency and indifference across America’s Jewish community.”

It describes the Jewish congresswoman Jan Schakowsky as part of a
“Hamas caucus” in Congress, one that’s also supported by the
Jewish senator Bernie Sanders. Indeed, one clue that there’s
something off about Project Esther’s definition of antisemitism is
how often it tags Jews as perpetrators.

The outfit’s distorted definition of antisemitism matters because
Trump, since returning to the White House, has put into practice
orders that closely reflect Project Esther’s proposals. He’s
defunded universities on the pretext of punishing them for
antisemitism and attempted to deport pro-Palestinian student
activists.

If Project Esther has its way, the crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech
will go even further. It wants to see those it calls “Hamas
supporters” removed from university staffs, denied the right to
protest and banned from social media. Ultimately it hopes to see them
stigmatized the way the K.K.K. and Al Qaeda are.

American Jews overwhelmingly detest Hamas, of course, and a
recent survey
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Jewish voters by the Democratic research firm GBAO Strategies shows
that a large majority are worried about antisemitism on college
campuses. But most Jews are not onboard with the way Trump is enacting
the Project Esther agenda. According to the GBAO poll, 64 percent of
Jewish voters disapprove of Trump’s approach to antisemitism. Nearly
70 percent say the word “fascist” describes him.

This isn’t surprising. Jews tend to teach their children to be wary
of fascism from a very young age, with its nationalist bombast, its
cult of masculinity, its contempt for pluralism and its relentless,
bludgeoning lies.

Philip Roth, among the greatest of American Jewish writers, captured
this deep-rooted fear in his 2004 novel, “The Plot Against
America,” which envisions an alternative history in which Charles
Lindbergh, an outsider and a celebrity, defeats Franklin Delano
Roosevelt in the 1940 election and then signs a treaty with Nazi
Germany. Paging through the book now, I find some details newly eerie
— Lindbergh’s “America First” platform and his warning about
“the infiltration of inferior blood” into the country, his big
fictional pre-election rally at Madison Square Garden and the
narrator’s incredulity at a threatened war with Canada.

But even Roth, for all his prescience, couldn’t have foreseen a
modern-day Lindbergh who, in transforming America into something out
of Jewish nightmares, pretends he’s trying to ensure Jewish safety.
Roth was our pre-eminent chronicler of what he once called “the
indigenous American berserk.” He had no idea how berserk things were
going to get.

_[MICHELLE GOLDBERG has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is
the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s
rights and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public
service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.]_

* anti-Semitism
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* zionism
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* Christian nationalists
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* Christian nationalism
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* Nazis
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* white nationalists
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* MAGA
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* Donald Trump
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* Trump 2.0
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* Project Esther
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* Israel
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* Palestine
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* Palestine solidarity movement
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* ADL
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* AIPAC
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* U.S. foreign policy
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* Heritage Foundation
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* progressive Jews
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* Jewish Voice for Peace
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* #IfNotNow
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* Ceasefire
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* Jewish community
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* Jewish peace movement
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