Having split from the Heritage Foundation in recent weeks, the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, which still includes a Heritage vice president at its helm, is focused broadly on Jew-hatred on the right.
Ellie Cohanim, a task force co-chair and former U.S. State Department deputy envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, told JNS that the panel met in Washington on Tuesday to discuss “exposing and countering extremism and antisemitism on the political right.”
“We held a conference to allow a lot of prominent, esteemed individuals in the Christian and conservative movement to voice their opinion on the future direction of the United States,” she said.
Those assembled “heard resounding messages of support for the Jewish people, Jewish Americans and the Jewish State of Israel,” she told JNS. “We also heard a resounding rejection of any creeping antisemitism on the right.”
Sponsored by the Christian Conference of Presidents for Israel, the meeting came in the wake of Heritage president Kevin Roberts declining to decry former Fox News host Tucker Carlson for failing to challenge Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, whom he hosted on his podcast. Carlson has also been very focused on Israel and American Jews in his programs.
“We discussed the issues at large and the fact that it’s imperative that we would hold accountability on the right,” Mario Bramnick, a task force co-chair, Florida pastor and president of the Latino Coalition for Israel, told JNS.
Bramnick said he raised the lack of accountability when Jew-hatred began rising in the Democratic Party. “Now we have Mandami, AOC and Sanders running the party,” he said, of New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
“It’s really incumbent upon us, in addition to watching the antisemitism still on the left, to also focus our efforts on the right,” he told JNS.
Bramnick co-chairs the Christian Conference of Presidents with Luke Moon, a pastor and executive director of the Philos Project. Both have spoken publicly for months, well before the Heritage controversy, about the dire need to tackle right-wing antisemitism.
Heritage’s Project Esther launched as a national strategy to combat antisemitism, focused exclusively on left-wing and Islamist Jew-hatred. The think tank had provided resources to the panel in its initial efforts, including a half-time policy staffer and half-time administrator, as well as conference and meeting room spaces, Cohanim said.
“The immediate effect of our leaving the umbrella of the Heritage Foundation has been the financial aspect of needing to raise funds so that we could continue to operate and trying to organize the logistics of all that,” she told JNS.
“Many parties have reached out to us to let us know that they are supportive of the work and would like to find ways for us to collaborate,” she said. “We felt it was our immediate priority to hold a public event and let the national conversation take place to discuss the real challenge at hand, which is the virulent antisemitism that we are seeing exposed in some right-wing media figures and podcast hosts, who seem to have a growing audience with young conservatives and young Christians.”
Bramnick told JNS that the task force was “already moving forward with a several-point plan.”
“Our strategy is in educating people, and trying to bring awareness to those in authority,” he said. “We have had continual discussions, and now, obviously, the Heritage issue brought it front row center for everyone, not just us.”
‘Coalesce efforts in combating antisemitism’
Some 100 people attended the event on Tuesday, including Leo Terrell, who leads a Jew-hatred task force at the U.S. Justice Department, and Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.), who is Jewish. Former congressman Mark Walker, the Trump administration’s nominee for international religious freedom ambassador, also attended. Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, spoke remotely at the event.
Among the topics addressed was “replacement theology,” which holds that the church has usurped Jews as God’s covenant people.
“Many are getting confused within Christendom with some of the rhetoric from Tucker and Bannon and others on replacement theology,” Bramnick told JNS, of Steve Bannon, a former senior adviser to Trump.
“We went through the biblical basis and premise of both Old and New Testament, of the importance of Israel, the Jewish people in the land of Israel,” he said.
Ralph Reed, founder and chairman of Faith and Freedom Coalition, and Tony Perkins, president of Family Research Council, also spoke.
Several American Jewish advocacy groups sent representatives. The Heritage Foundation was absent, even though James Carafano, a Heritage fellow, had served as one of the four co-chairs of the task force.
“The impression was that it was a Heritage product, but it never was,” Bramnick told JNS of the task force. “The idea was to coalesce different institutions, Christian organizations and Jewish organizations, to coalesce our efforts in combating antisemitism. We clarified that the task force was, in a sense, above Heritage, but the perception wasn’t all that clear.”
Morton Klein, national president of the Zionist Organization of America, criticized recent remarks by U.S. Vice President JD Vance, which some interpreted as an insinuation that Jews or Israel has control of governments, and Vance’s dismissal of antisemitic comments made in group chats by members of the New York State Young Republicans.
“I’m disappointed,” Klein told attendees.
“We have to express our concern,” Klein said. He added that he wants Vance “to condemn it, to call this despicable.”
Trump was also given an opportunity to weigh in publicly, but only said Carlson should have an opportunity to interview Fuentes if he wants. “People have to decide,” Trump said.
Fine, the Florida congressman, said on Tuesday that Carlson “is dangerous because people remember who he was,” noting his long, prominent run as a host on Fox News.
“The choice is, are we going to do what the Democrats did?” Fine said. “Or are we going to stand up and are we going to punch it right in the face?”
Cohanim told JNS that the Heritage shakeup has had the positive impact of raising more awareness of anti-Americanism in the fringes of the radical right to the highest levels of the national conversation.
That gives Republicans an important opportunity “to confront this antisemitic hatred and for us to get our house in order before we head towards midterms and the 2028 election,” she said.
Cohanim said that she is confident that the “American moral majority stands with Jewish Americans,” and the Republican Party “needs to develop a unified stance on what the boundaries of our party are and who and who we consider legitimate voices and who we don’t consider legitimate.”
