Originally published in the Times of Israel
When non-Jewish groups work to fight antisemitism, they should expect to earn grateful appreciation from the Jewish community. This is especially true today if they have the ear of the incoming Trump Administration. But if those groups are politically conservative, some on the Jewish left are sadly unwilling to check their own partisanship in favor of basic Jewish and humanitarian interests. To them, conservatives can only be tagged as antisemitic for the silliest of reasons (think Elon Musk and his so-called “Nazi” hand motion), not acknowledged for their positive contributions to fighting hatred.
In response to the Hamas terror attack on Israel in October of 2023 and the explosion of open antisemitism that followed on campuses and cities across America, the Heritage Foundation teamed with an array of other organizations to form the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism (NTFCA). This led to Project Esther, a strategic plan to confront and reject the antisemitism hiding behind “Palestinian” advocacy, unveiled on the first anniversary of the Hamas massacre.
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Instead of embracing this groundbreaking initiative, numerous writers on the Jewish left responded with hostility. This reaction cannot be explained by flaws in either the NTFCA or Project Esther, but only by the cognitive dissonance that occurs when dearly held beliefs clash with cold reality. Clearly, many progressive Jews have yet to fully acknowledge that blatant Jew-hatred is now endemic among their erstwhile left-wing allies and “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) staff, much less to accept friendship and alliance from conservatives anxious to reject racism and hate. Heritage is the largest conservative think tank in the country, and thus they cannot conscience its support.
Examined on its merits and without political bias, Project Esther is a serious and welcome campaign to stop hatred against Jews, targeting its most obvious and potent agents today: what Project Esther terms the “Hamas Support Network,” the coalition of hateful, pro-terror groups and spokespersons embedded in American universities, media, and corporate DEI programs. Project Esther intends to dismantle the infrastructure behind that pro-Hamas network and “restore equal protection under the law for all Americans.”
No one should be surprised that Hamas supporters in outlets like Mondoweiss, Al Jazeera, and The New Republic characterize Project Esther as a “right wing action plan” to counter what they call “Palestine” activism or “anticolonial resistance.” This is because they invert reality: what they describe as “colonialists” are Jews living in Judea, while their “indigenous” are Arab invaders. Project Esther encourages Americans to reject terror and antisemitism, so it obviously faces opposition from propagandists for hate.
More concerning are the pieces from progressive Jewish writers transparently intended to impeach the integrity of Project Esther and the Task Force behind it. These represent a case study in ingratitude, of course, but this is where the failure of some to choose self-interest over partisanship is most evident.
In the Jewish Insider (JI), reporter Gabby Deutch focused not upon the laudable aims of the NTFCA, but her own assertion that most of the constituent organizations are from the evangelical Christian community. In reality, the NTFCA incorporates a broad swath of ethnic and other partners, including Jewish groups such as Coalition for Jewish Values and the Zionist Organization of America. One of the chairs is Ellie Cohanim, a Jewish refugee from Iran who served as Deputy Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism in the first Trump administration. So Deutch’s pejorative claim that Heritage “spurned” Jewish groups in creating the Task Force is simply untrue.
Besides, non-Jewish member organizations in the Task Force have produced outstanding research on anti-Jewish threats in America and led rallies to support Jewish victims of terror. Yet Deutch even criticized one NTFCA leader for having the temerity to point out that Jewish groups combating antisemitism have not been as effective as needed on their own.
Dove Kent in the Jewish Daily Forward not only referenced the same unjustified complaints highlighted by Deutch, but has been deceived by the ruse that groups like Students for Justice in Palestine, which declared its members to be actual participants in the terrorist attack on Israel in 2023, are merely “pro-Palestinian.” Kent even claimed that Project Esther, far from protecting the American Jewish community, will endanger it instead.
To understand this, note that Kent also characterized the steps taken by the House of Representatives last year to combat antisemitism as attempts by Republicans to “repress political organization by groups and institutions they disagree with.” She could not acknowledge the unquestionably positive efforts against Jew-hatred taken by Republicans, in part because she could not permit herself to recognize the bigotry and violence fomented by the “progressive” targets of their investigations.
Back in 2018, Kent wrote that antisemitism was exclusively a right-wing, “white nationalist” phenomenon, while random attacks on Jews across New York City were being perpetrated by overwhelmingly non-white assailants. And just this past November, Jewish writer Franklin Foer asserted in The Atlantic that Donald Trump, whose record of fairness towards Israel and the Jewish community is arguably unmatched in Presidential history, was “building the most Anti-Semitic cabinet in decades.” These claims, so wildly discordant with reality, signal a consistent inability of left-wing Jewish columnists to check their political biases when looking at both antisemitism and those who oppose it.
This also explains why all of Deutch, Kent, and Arno Rosenfeld, also writing in the Forward, unanimously resorted to “whataboutism,” accusing Project Esther of “ignoring” antisemitism on the right, when in reality it focuses exclusively upon the single antisemitic movement with the greatest traction in America today, without reference to others found on either political side. It is no fault of conservatives that the blatant Jew-hatred targeted by Project Esther is so dangerous precisely because it finds a sympathetic audience among so-called progressives.
To back Project Esther, one needs nothing more than the desire to reject Jew-hatred wherever it is found, and the ability to accept the alliance and support of prominent American conservative groups in that stance. Every American, and certainly American Jews, should embrace Project Esther and support its efforts, with the urgency and unity that this moment demands.
Photo Credit: Heritage Foundation by Mike Licht with CC BY 2.0 license, on Flickr.
