Antisemitism on the left and the right in America, what’s behind it and what can be done to stop its rise was the topic of conversation at an “Antisemitism Roundtable” held by senior members of the Heritage Foundation at the offices of Exigent Capital, a financial services firm in Jerusalem, on Dec. 9.
Participants also talked about the recent storm at Heritage over its president’s defense of political commentator Tucker Carlson.
“Antisemitism on the left is a well-known problem. It is a horrendous problem,” said Victoria Coates, opening the discussion. “Now what has been revealed is we have also a problem on the right.”
Coates, a former deputy national security advisor to U.S. President Donald Trump, stressed that antisemitism on the left is ultimately the more pernicious of the two.
She currently serves as vice president of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at the Heritage Foundation. Her most recent book, The Battle for the Jewish State: How Israel―and America―Can Win, was published last year.
When speaking of left-wing antisemitism, “the biggest monster” is higher education, Coates said. The situation has only worsened since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on southern Israel, she said, referencing a report by StopAntisemitism, a U.S. nonprofit.
It graded 90 colleges on rising Jew hatred on American campuses. Fourteen flunked the exam. Thirty-nine percent of Jewish students reported hiding their identities on campus, and 62% reported receiving direct blame for Israel’s actions in Gaza.
The problem exists on campuses in all 50 states, Coates said, and it is most virulent in the most elite colleges. She related that, when visiting her alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, to give a talk in April 2024, she required three levels of armed guards due to the threat from anti-Israel groups.
Coates said the left has become entrenched in its anti-Israelism to the point where its supporters can’t be persuaded out of it. Visits to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., won’t help, she said. What’s left is “punishment,” by which she meant withholding funds from schools, legal action and legislative changes.
Cutting off funds is “the only thing they care more about—the federal gravy train—they want those annual grants and the millions of dollars to keep coming every year,” she said.
Project Esther, an initiative of the Heritage Foundation, has developed a strategy to combat what it terms the Hamas Support Network (HSN)—the loosely connected grouping of anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and anti-American groups that make up the pro-Palestinian movement in the U.S. Project Esther recommends starving institutions of higher education of resources and holding them legally accountable as they engage in activities that violate U.S. law, Coates said.
While Qatar, given the billions it pours into American universities, is considered enemy No. 1 when it comes to foreign influence over America’s youth, Coates said China is “much more pernicious in terms of getting into kids’ minds.”
She told JNS that, unfortunately, the deal to sell TikTok to a U.S. consortium headed by Oracle’s Larry Ellison isn’t “strong enough” to wrest control of the social media platform’s troubling algorithms from China. Those algorithms have been widely reported as providing a steady stream of anti-Israel and antisemitic content.
“I think the reason the Chinese are clutching [the algorithm] so hard is they know the kind of power this gives them. They’re seeing the division in our society. Are the Chinese antisemitic? Probably they don’t care. They just see it as a useful tool that is damaging to our kids and fracturing our society,” she said.
On the right, Coates expressed more hope that those tempted by antisemitic ideas can be persuaded to turn away from them.
Asked by JNS how prevalent she thought antisemitism was on the right, she said that she didn’t think anyone really knew. (One poll of Republicans, age 30 and under, showed that close to half held more favorable views of “Palestine” than Israel.)
The American Dream
Richard Stern, acting director of the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies and director of the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget at the Heritage Foundation, spoke of the underlying economic causes that have left conservatives susceptible to the world’s oldest hatred.
Many young Americans feel the American Dream is out of reach, he said. Housing has become unaffordable in nearly every major metro area. Though unemployment is low and jobs are available, young people are dissatisfied with their work, which doesn’t provide the income or stability they expected, he said.
Stern said that on the right, an idea has gained currency that certain American values are to blame, such as a commitment to limited government; that such ideas have turned America into an “economic zone” instead of a nation committed to a culture and civilization. It’s a popular idea that he encounters not just on Twitter, but also in professional circles.
What had been the accepted view, on both left and right, that America is a nation bound by a commitment to ideas expressed in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, has given way to the view, expressed by U.S. Vice President JD Vance in one of his signature lines, that “America is not just an idea ... , America is a nation.”
“There is a ‘blood and soil’ nationalism that, for the first time, is becoming very popular in the United States,” Stern said.
Americans who are disenchanted with their economic situation are also increasingly isolationist. “They view the U.S. military-industrial base with suspicion,” he said, seeing it as encouraging American involvement in foreign conflicts. Military aid to Israel has become wrapped up in this idea. “These circles see U.S aid as yet more spending on America’s military industrial complex,” he said.
Stern and Coates hope to appeal to those who are disaffected on the right through economic arguments. Their main purpose in visiting Israel is to explore ideas related to a March 12 Heritage Foundation report calling for phasing out U.S. military aid to the country.
The report notes that economic (non-military) assistance from the U.S. to Israel, which reached a peak of $1.95 billion in 1985, was almost completely eliminated by 2007, thanks to Israel’s economic success.
“Just as Israel once advanced from a financial assistance recipient to an economic partner of the United States, so, too, should it move from a military financing recipient to a security partner,” the report states.
Coates and Robert Greenway, director of the Allison Center for National Security at the Heritage Foundation, who served as senior director of the National Security Council’s Middle Eastern and North African Affairs Directorate during Trump’s first term, produced the report.
Ending aid will place the U.S.-Israel relationship on a firmer footing, Coates said. Instead of a relationship whose cornerstone is military aid, Israel will become a strategic partner. “The United States reserves this type of relationship with its closest and most trusted allies, such as the United Kingdom,” according to the report.
Coates told JNS that military aid is also a “PR problem” for Israel, making it look like Oliver Twist “holding out his hand.” Phasing out aid will deny the anti-Israel crowd one of its chief arguments.
The 10-year foreign military financing Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), which sets the amount of U.S. aid Israel receives, expires in fiscal year 2028, offering an ideal opportunity to reset the relationship, Coates said.
That the discussion was held at a financial services firm was not an accident. Coates said that as she researched the aid issue, she became aware of the unprecedented technological ties between the U.S. and Israel. She has since coined the term “quantitative technological edge” to describe the benefits both sides enjoy from this unique relationship.
Fostering tech ties would help negate anti-Israel attitudes by providing the sorts of well-paying, high-tech jobs young Americans are looking for but believe are no longer available to them, Coates said. They will appreciate the economic benefits Israel offers once they are explained to them. “We can educate them out of [their anti-Israel attitudes], unlike the left,” she said.
Coates and Stern addressed the “elephant in the room”—the public relations debacle the Heritage Foundation is still grappling with in the wake of Heritage president Kevin Roberts’s Oct. 30 video post to social media platform X, in which he defended Tucker Carlson after Carlson’s interview with self-avowed Hitler-lover Nick Fuentes, whom Roberts said in the video he opposed “canceling.”
Subsequent efforts at damage control only seemed to worsen the situation, leading to several high-profile resignations from Heritage and its Project Esther.
Coates and Stern decided to continue at Heritage. Coates said she was tempted to leave but saw that Roberts was “truly horrified and felt shocked by what he had done.” He is determined to make things right, she said. She also said Heritage is the conservative institution best-positioned to address the issue of antisemitism on the right. “Those two reasons I found persuasive, so I stayed on,” she said.
Stern argued that Roberts had wanted to relay a completely different message from the one that emerged from the botched video. He had wanted to say that if conservatives refuse to speak about Carlson and Fuentes, those two, and others like them, will eventually win over the majority. “He was actually trying to say this is a real threat. We need to engage with these people. We need to take the threat seriously,” Stern said.
Coates said she had known Carlson for a long time, having gone to Trinity College with him. She said a change came over him in the last few years.
“He’s pretty close to saying Jews are a demonic force who are out to get Christians. That’s kind of his mantra at this point. We can all agree that has to be unacceptable. You can’t argue that he’s only saying that 5% of the time, and the other 95% has value. The 5% offsets the rest at that point,” she said.
