Christine Rosen, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, found out about the Hamas-led Oct. 7 terror attacks from the “very active” text chain of contributors to Commentary magazine, where she is a columnist and cohost of the daily podcast.
“I hate to say that I wasn’t that surprised about the antisemitism. I wasn’t, because I’ve spent enough time on college campuses over the last 10 to 15 years,” Rosen told JNS. “What did truly shock me was the cowardice of some of our elected leaders and cultural figures, and people who should absolutely have immediately responded in no uncertain terms in a strong moral voice, standing with Israel, standing with the Jewish people and denouncing this terrorism.”
Rosen continues to turn over the “puzzle” in her head of how it became tolerable for people to express things that they ought to be ashamed to think, let alone vocalize.
“It’s now openly endorsed by extremely powerful cultural and political leadership,” including the so-called “Squad” of progressive, anti-Israel members of the U.S. House of Representatives, whose young enthusiasts on social media have no grasp of Middle East history or anti-Israel and antisemitic terrorism, Rosen told JNS.
“That is where I probably shouldn’t have been surprised that there were so many political figures not willing to stand up,” she said. “That was an early marker of where the younger, more progressive wing of the Democratic Party has been headed for years.”
The “righteous among the nations,” according to Yad Vashem, are “non-Jews who took great risks to save Jews during the Holocaust” at “a time when hostility and indifference prevailed.” Rosen, who was raised a fundamentalist Christian, and other “righteous gentiles” in media with whom JNS spoke, didn’t hide Jews in their attics or, like Lafayette, arm themselves and fight in a foreign army for justice.
But Rosen, Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow and director of the initiative on critical race theory at the Manhattan Institute, and the conservative talk-show host Guy Benson told JNS about the slings and arrows they take on social media, and on other platforms, for defending the Jewish state and being outspoken about Jew-hatred. (The latter two have some 1.7 million followers combined across social media.)
“It’s been so encouraging to see non-Jews step in, and defend Israel and the Jewish people,” Karol Markowicz, a New York Post and Fox News columnist, podcaster and author who is Jewish, told JNS.
“It has cost them a lot. They take abuse for us and rarely get praise or an award,” Markowicz said. “Their bravery has made the silence of some Jews even more obvious and embarrassing.”
‘Don’t feel like I’m being heroic’
Benson, 40, who was born in Saudi Arabia, was raised Christian and remains a believing Christian. He has no recollection of the Muslim country where his father worked at the time, but told JNS that he would love to return there if it signs on to the Abraham Accords. “That would be a very satisfying thing,” he said. (He also lived for seven years in Hong Kong, though he was largely raised in the United States.)
Asked what he thought of the label “righteous gentile in media,” Benson said, “instinctively, I’m very honored to be mentioned in that category.”
He has written and spoken about the Jewish state for years. “Just looking at the facts of each case, it was just abundantly, unequivocally clear to me who was broadly in the right and who was broadly in the wrong,” he told JNS. “It was disturbing to me that there was really passionate disagreement on this subject.”
Benson sees himself as very open to debate and loath to shut down opposing views.
“I just felt like the facts spoke for themselves, and that was before Oct. 7. Then Oct. 7 came along, and it was this utterly crystal-clear good and evil litmus test,” he said. “Watching so many people try to slink by or just aggressively fail the litmus test has been disturbing.”
Since the anti-Israel voices are so loud and ubiquitous, Benson felt a “moral obligation not to make it all about me but just to speak up for the facts and the truth, which could not be any more plain in my view.”
Despite priding himself, as someone who self-identifies as center-right, on being able to at least understand and articulate an opposing view “somewhat,” Benson found that he couldn’t understand support for Hamas post-Oct. 7 “except through a very ugly and dark prism.”
“While I can amicably disagree with almost anyone on almost anything, this to me is a pretty bright moral line,” he told JNS. “Those who are on the wrong side of it do not have my respect and in many cases have earned contempt.”
He can understand how those who see the world in terms of oppressor and oppressed have concerns about the Palestinians and want to “draw attention to perceived injustices at the hands of the Israelis, who are the more powerful government and military within that dynamic.”
“I wouldn’t necessarily agree with them, but I could understand that. What I cannot understand, what I cannot respect, what I cannot allow to go unchallenged is the unbelievably deceitful, bigoted, fact-free, seething victim-blaming that started basically on Oct. 7 and the celebrations of these savages who committed the atrocities,” he told JNS. “The degree to which those celebrations and justifications began instantaneously, and were so widespread—that did come as a shock.”
“I still get a feeling, like a pit in my stomach, when I realize how widespread the combination of hatred and deceit has become,” he said.
It is a “no-brainer” for Benson to support Israel “vociferously,” just as it is to be a pro-Western conservative.
‘Ancient bigotry at play’
“The ideologies most closely associated with the hatred of Israel and the Jewish state are Islamism and hardcore leftism, and these are two of the worst and most destructive ideologies on the planet,” he said. “The fact that they team up in their Jew-hatred—and their reviling of and scapegoating of the Jewish state—is unsurprising.”
Those who hate America passionately aren’t exclusively Islamists or those on the hard left, but “it’s an awful lot of them,” according to Benson. “It’s not a coincidence that that same dirtbag coalition unites against Israel as well. Throw into that mix the ancient bigotry at play, and it’s even more irrational with Israel.”
“Find me someone who absolutely hates Israel, and I bet $100 that person also hates the United States of America in nearly every circumstance, and certainly hates the fundamental values of the United States of America,” he said.
Benson has received nasty messages on social media and other online pushback, and he has to avoid discussing Israel with some friends “to maintain relationships that I care about,” he said. “But I’m not willing to accede an inch to a position or stance that I think is at best misinformed and often far worse.”
“I don’t feel like I’m being heroic or doing anything special by just saying that is extremely dangerous, dishonest,” he told JNS. “I’m not going to let it stand.”
He says he doesn’t think that everyone who marches for or supports Palestinians is necessarily anti-Israel.
Often, it’s “just leftists stampeding in one direction together, because this is what they typically do,” he said. “Whatever the thing du jour might be, they go along with it and they don’t know much about it and they don’t think very deeply about it. I don’t really respect that, but it doesn’t bother me at the same level as the people who clearly know what these Hamas chants mean and believe them.”
JNS asked Benson what his constructive feedback would be for the Jewish state.
“It’s hard for me to sit here from the safety and comfort of the United States and tell Israel how it should be doing things better,” he said. “They’re the world’s only Jewish state, in a very hostile neighborhood, with multiple existential wars that have threatened them since their inception, with this massive coalition of Islamism and leftism taking rhetorical and literal shots at them as often as possible.”
Of Israel, Benson said that “the disproportionate criticism that it gets is that it is the lone Jewish state in the world. There is no doubt about it.”
He noted that the United Nations goes after Israel, which is the size of his home state of New Jersey, more than any other country.
“It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to piece together what’s happening here,” he said.
“Especially after World War II and the Holocaust, can we just please let the Jews have a place where they can live securely, safely, happily in their ancestral homeland?” he said. “The answer for many people is ‘no.’ All the yammering about ‘peace’ always ignores the reality that the other side doesn’t want peace, and if they wanted peace, they could have it. And if they just promised to stop killing Jews, they would have peace. Whereas if the Israelis disarmed, there would be a genocide and ethnic cleansing.”
As worried as Benson is about the “weaponization and the perversion of the word ‘genocide’” against Israel, he told JNS that he is also concerned that “ugly speech” is getting lumped together with criminal conduct.
“I understand the impulse of saying, ‘We think that it is absolutely horrible what these people are saying about us.’ In some places in the world, it’s illegal to say those things,” he said. “In our country, it’s not illegal to say those things, and it shouldn’t be.”
He finds it “annoying” how perfect Israel and American Jews have to be for a certain kind of acceptance, “whereas there seem to be absolutely no standards applied to the other side whatsoever. Anything goes. The bigger the lie, the better.”
“To maintain the moral high ground and intellectual consistency, and I think one of the highest American and Western values is and ought to be free speech and free expression,” he told JNS. “I would just say making constant distinctions between objectionable speech, that should be pushed back against and should be criticized, but should not necessarily be punished, versus conduct or behavior that should be punished.”
“I understand the instinct, but I also think that can then be used to say, ‘See, this is just a giant censorship thing. They just want to stifle dissent, and they don’t really believe in these Western values,’” he said. “I get it. It’s a rotten, cynical attack from opponents of Israel, but I don’t think it should be given to them as an option to try to use or wield.”
Benson also thinks that American Jews should be more judicious about tossing around the charge of antisemitism.
“There are a lot of people, including a lot of young people, who really harbor no hatred for Jewish people in their hearts. They are just caught up in these calumnies and lies about Israel and don’t even necessarily equate it with Jewish people,” he said.
“I think that it is still morally abominable to glom onto some horrible movement. They’re like, we don’t even really know what ‘from the river to the sea’ means,’” he said. “If I showed up at a Tea Party rally in 2010, and I heard them all chanting some weird stuff and I didn’t really understand what it meant, and I Googled it and saw it, I would leave the rally. I would not keep marching and chanting. There is moral culpability. There is agency.”
“I’m not letting them off the hook,” he said. “I just think if you’re going to immediately jump to, ‘Every single person saying these things is engaging in antisemitism,’ that might make people double down and calcify and harden more than they might otherwise, because accusing people of bigotry is what the left does all the time.”
Before Jews “drop the ‘antisemite’ bomb on someone or something—and unfortunately, it is widely deserved in so many areas of this broader debate right now—it’s just good to think twice and make sure that it is accurate and not counterproductive within the context,” he said. “It’s a judgment call.”
‘A thing of basic honor and integrity’
Rufo, 40, told JNS that when he was very young and his parents were starting their careers near Sacramento, Calif., they lived in a “pretty rough neighborhood.” After a child in one of the few other white families on the street came home bloodied and beaten one day, the kid’s parents told Rufo’s parents that the preschool in the neighborhood was unsafe.
Rufo’s parents sent him to a Jewish preschool until they were able to move.
“I was the only, as far as I remember, the only non-Jew at this school, but they really welcomed me with open arms,” he told JNS. “I remember the rabbi. I remember the children. I remember the little Hebrew lessons. I remember spinning the dreidel, and so I’ve had very warm feelings towards American Jews since that time.”
JNS asked if he was comfortable being thought of as a righteous gentile in media circles.
“I guess that’s up to you,” he said with a laugh. “Certainly, I like righteous. Certainly, I’m not Jewish. I’m Catholic, so I guess you could say gentile, and I’m in media, so I guess that’s right.”
Prior to Oct. 7, Rufo hadn’t thought about Jew-hatred in the United States that much, “because it wasn’t something I saw at scale,” he said. “I saw it intellectually in some of the postcolonial studies departments, but it didn’t have the immediacy or intensity that it did after Oct. 7.”
On Oct. 7, he was “glued” to Twitter. “It was, besides Sept. 11, just an utterly barbaric, shocking and horrifying set of images,” he said. “I was just transfixed by it because it was this eruption of barbarism that touched the modern world. It was also in the age of social media, so it was instantaneous, and it was horrifying.”
He had understood in theory that postcolonial theory, left-wing racial ideology, the “long-standing nexus between black nationalism and Palestinian nationalism,” and the rationalization of terror were baked into left-wing thinking.
“I understood it in theory, but I really understood it in the flesh in those days after Oct. 7, when you’d have thousands of academics celebrating the Hamas terror attack, justifying the Hamas terror attack,” he said. “I just thought it was one of the most revealing and appalling moments in all of the time I’ve been observing politics.”
Having seen the “bloodthirsty nature of left-wing elite ideology,” Rufo knew he had to use his experience researching the ideas underpinning it. He said he saw “extreme” hostility toward Israel and Jews on both the left and the right.
“I think it’s a duty to speak out against both as they’ve emerged. They’re different,” he said. “Antisemitism on the left is elite, academic, physical and driven by a real bloodlust. Antisemitism on the right is online, digital, anonymous, postmodern, and part of a paranoid, schizoid way of thinking.”
Since Oct. 7, he has grown “much closer” to some colleagues at the Manhattan Institute, including Jewish colleagues who he says have “gotten much more savage, unfair and unjustified criticism because of their background.”
“I felt that it was just a thing of basic honor and integrity to defend them—not that they’re not capable of defending themselves—but also to lay out a marker and say, ‘Hey, we’re gonna stand on principle, we’re gonna do the right thing, we’re gonna take whatever heat comes our way, and we’re gonna fight this one out,’” he said. “I’m very pleased to do so.’”
Asked for constructive recommendations for those who are pro-Israel, Rufo said that American Jews ought to resist their “natural defensive reaction” when they are under attack and “are tempted to grasp for whatever tools seem to address your problem and protect you immediately.”
“This is human. It’s understandable,” he said. “But I would counsel my American Jewish friends to very carefully consider the tools that they’re using in this fight to protect themselves and to combat antisemitism, left and right.”
As “tempting” as it is to try to use left-wing concepts, like diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and argue that they ought to apply to Jews, Rufo thinks that is “ultimately unwise.” He thinks the same about accusing anyone who criticizes Israeli policies of Jew-hatred and trying to censor or silence critics using the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s working definition of antisemitism.
“I understand the temptation and the allure of these concepts, but ultimately, I think there is a better path,” he told JNS. “I think that DEI is pernicious. I think that the overuse of the accusation of racism has diminishing returns, and I think that censorship is self-defeating.”
“You have to, in my view, fight antisemitism by locating American Jews in these universal American principles. Don’t say ‘DEI,’ say ‘protecting my basic civil rights under the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act,’” he said. “Don’t say ‘all critics are racist.’ Fight your critics with the facts and demonstrate that they’re not living up to the ideals of freedom and equality and civil and religious liberties, the anchor principles of our country.”
‘A sense of history’
A native of St. Petersburg, Fla., Rosen is a non-Jew who has worked at a Jewish magazine for many years.
Growing up, she said she learned about Israel associated with the purpose of proselytization, but more importantly, her father’s best friend was Jewish. She went to the bar mitzvahs of that friend’s children.
“We spent a lot of our free time together. It was just normal for me. We would have Seders,” she told JNS. “We did not celebrate the Sabbath with them, and they didn’t come to church with us, but it was, for me, just a normal part of my childhood.”
She remembers a Jewish kid telling her, when she was young, that someone had made fun of him because of his faith. “It was so baffling to me. I said, ‘What do you mean? That makes no sense,’” she said.
The Jewish kid explained it. “From a very young age, I recognized the irrationality and hatred of prejudice directed at Jews, because I had friends and grew up around Jews,” she said.
In college and graduate school, Rosen’s friend groups always included Jews, both observant and not. (She holds a doctorate from Emory University and a bachelor’s degree from the University of South Florida, both in history.)
Her ex-husband grew up as a “very secular” Jew, and he and Rosen sent their children to Jewish preschool, in which she was very involved. “For me, it’s always been part of my private world,” she said.
Defending Jews and Israel in the pages of Commentary and on its podcast has always felt natural to Rosen.
“I’ve always been a Zionist, and I’m trying to think about when I would have come to that notion, probably just studying history,” she said. “I was a history major undergrad. I never had to have that lightbulb moment of ‘I really should care about this.’ I always cared about it.”
After Oct. 7, Rosen thinks that it was very important for those who had rhetorically supported Israel and Jews to show it with action.
“They had to denounce antisemitism that was occurring on public streets and college campuses. They had to actually express those feelings in strong words that also had political implications,” she said. “That’s where actions spoke much louder than words. I think you saw a lot of people stand up and do that. I think you also saw, unfortunately, far too many people retreat into cowardly euphemisms about, ‘Oh. Both sides,’ and etc., etc., etc.”
It drives Rosen “absolutely crazy” that the Democratic Party has long had a problem of “bothsidesing any sort of expression of hate against the Jews.”
So you can’t just denounce antisemitism without saying ‘and also Islamophobia is bad too,’” she said. “They don’t do that when they’re talking about racial prejudice. Or even prejudice against women.” Leaders are supposed to lead amid crises, and Democrats “chose not to do that when it came to defending Israel,” she said.
The proliferation of U.S. college students wearing Hamas gear and “cosplaying terrorism as if it’s a joke or it’s just this cool, radical thing they did” surprised her. But she thinks she ought not to have been so surprised given their valorization of far-left “Squad” members Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), “who are always on social media winking at a form of extremist rhetoric.”
Rosen gets a lot of “vile, antisemitic email,” and some of her friendships have “really suffered” after Oct. 7, she told JNS.
“I do not stay silent when people say things that are either historically inaccurate or who are trying to pass off as anti-Zionism their own personal antisemitism,” she said. “There are people who can have serious, geopolitical strategic discussions about the Middle East, and then they say something. I always check myself and say, ‘OK. If you said this about this country and their people, would any reasonable person understand that you are prejudiced?’”
There has been tension, including with politically liberal friends who aren’t connected to the Jewish state.
“I have one friendship in particular, where we had to take a couple of months off from each other, because it was just getting—she only wants to talk about that, and I at a certain point was like, ‘I can’t be talked at in this way,’” she said. “We will repair.”
For younger Americans, like her college-age children, in particular, Rosen thinks that it would be very helpful for them to learn more about the history of the Middle East.
“I would love, love, love to hear more representatives of the State of Israel talking about the centuries-long presence of Jews in that region, because most young people today think everything started in the 20th century,” she said. “They know the story from the 1940s on. They know nothing about what comes before.”
Young people need to learn about “the strength of the Jewish people over time,” she said. “They all know about the Holocaust, but we are talking about centuries and centuries. The biblical story.”
“Understanding the survival of the Jews on that scale is useful for them to realize what the current conflict is about. It’s actually not about what they think it’s about,” she added. “The survival of Israel, and the reason it must survive, is a story that’s thousands of years old. Not just 100 or 50.”