by Ben Lorber and Jess Schwalb in Jewish Currents

MAGA’s crusaders against right-wing antisemitism couldn’t seem to agree on the problem they had gathered to solve. Huddled in a basement conference room last Tuesday, attendees of “Exposing and Countering Extremism and Antisemitism on the Political Right” had been called to Washington, DC, by the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, authors of Project Esther, the Trump administration’s blueprint for attacking the left via its commitments on Palestine. The Task Force was in disarray. Just a few days earlier, it had split from the Heritage Foundation after the powerful conservative think tank defended Tucker Carlson when Carlson gave a friendly interview to Nazi apologist Nick Fuentes. The group was ostensibly gathered to counter the mainstreaming of nakedly antisemitic figures like Fuentes within the MAGA movement and to chart a path forward. But hours into the half-day event, speakers ping-ponged between trivializing the online antics of “stupid 20-year-olds in their grandma’s basement,” in the words of Task Force co-chair Ellie Cohanim, and warning against an “explosion” of antisemitism on the right whose “dimensions are enormous and incomprehensible,” per fellow co-chair Mario Bramnick. While some, like Mort Klein of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), expressed fear that “mindless, vicious hatred, is becoming mainstream,” others tried to downplay the impact of Fuentes, Carlson, and their followers: “They want us to get angry and offended, and there’s really no reason to. I mean, these are a bunch of freaks,” said Gen Z MAGA Jewish influencer Justine Brooke Murray.

Yaakov Menken, rabbi and founder of the right-wing Orthodox advocacy group Coalition for Jewish Values, contrasted the “educated Jews”—yeshivish rabbis of the Haredi enclave of Lakewood, New Jersey, who voted for Trump en masse —with the “nonsense” from “left wing Jewish clergy,” a broad category which for him included “Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, Jewish Renewal and mail order [rabbis] in the entire country.” The crowd met his delegitimization of most of the American Jewish rabbinate with applause.

Read the full piece in the Jewish Currents

Our comment: if the very-left-wing Jewish Currents thinks that left-wing clergy are “most of the American Jewish rabbinate,” it is unaware of current trends in the Jewish community and probably should give up its name. But the rest of the article is not much more accurate!