Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Georgia Senate candidates exchange accusations of anti-Semitism and white supremacy

(JTA) — The two candidates in a critical runoff election for the U.S. Senate exchanged charges of associations with anti-Semites and white supremacists during a televised debate Sunday night.

The Rev. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, and incumbent Republican Kelly Loeffler faced off in Atlanta ahead of a Jan. 5 special election that could determine which party controls the Senate.

Loeffler twice scored Warnock, who is Black, for defending the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the Chicago pastor whose anti-Israel and anti-Semitic statements drove his one-time parishioner President Barack Obama to renounce him. Wright also is Black.

“He’s called Israel an apartheid state and said that we should end military assistance,” she said of Warnock. “He’s compared Israelis defending themselves against Palestinians, he has compared them to birds of prey. And he celebrated Jeremiah Wright, an anti-American anti-Semite. That’s divisive.”

Warnock has been sharply critical of Israel in his sermons, including in denouncing snipers targeting violent protesters on the border with the Gaza Strip. He once signed a document likening Israel’s occupation of the West Bank to apartheid South Africa’s occupation of Namibia; it did not liken Israel to an apartheid state. Warnock has said that he would uphold current levels of defense assistance to Israel.

The Democrat in turn reminded viewers of Loeffler’s close alliance with Marjorie Taylor Greene, a newly elected Georgia congresswoman who has embraced theories aligned with the QAnon conspiracy movement, which includes anti-Semitic tropes.

“She says she is against racism and that racism has no place, but she welcomed the support of a QAnon conspiracy theorist and she sat down with a white supremacist for an interview,” Warnock said. “I don’t think she can explain that.”

The white supremacist interview apparently refers to Loeffler’s friendly interview this summer with Jack Posobiec, a right-wing provocateur who at one point had associations with white supremacists, but more recently has been associated with what the Anti-Defamation League has termed the “alt-lite,” a branch of the far right that claims to seek the ouster of white supremacists from right-wing ranks.

If Democrats win both runoffs in Georgia next month, they will have control of Senate. The other race is between Jon Ossoff, a Jewish Democrat, and incumbent Sen. David Perdue. That race also has been marked by accusations of anti-Semitism — for instance, Perdue has run ads depicting Ossoff with a digitally altered nose to make it seem larger.

Perdue has refused to debate Ossoff, so the challenger appeared Sunday on a debate stage by himself.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.