At Republican antisemitism confab, Tucker Carlson is the villain — and JD Vance the unspoken question

Some Jewish Republicans are losing patience with Vice President JD Vance, who has not condemned Tucker Carlson. (From left: Madison Thorn/Anadolu via Getty Images; Joseph Strauss)

(JTA) — Nearly everybody called out Tucker Carlson at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s symposium on antisemitism.

Attendees clapped when Sen. Ted Cruz called Carlson “the single-most dangerous demagogue in the country,” and speakers praised President Donald Trump for recently casting him aside as “not MAGA.”

There was no such praise for Vice President JD Vance, however, who has made no decisive statement on Carlson, nor on Candace Owens. The two media personalities have come to represent an emerging, anti-Israel wing of the Republican party that indulges in antisemitic conspiracy theories and is anathema to the RJC and its rank-and-file. Vance’s silence has drawn skepticism and growing impatience from some Jewish Republicans.

But no speakers offered direct criticism of Vance on Tuesday and, after the event, a top RJC official said in an interview that he has no concerns about the vice president.

“I have a concern about Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, but not JD Vance,” said Norm Coleman, national chairman of the RJC and a former U.S. senator from Minnesota.

Coleman said he has known Vance for “many, many years” and has had discussions with him about Israel and supporting the Jewish people. He pointed to Vance’s 2024 speech at the Quincy Institute, an isolationist think tank, on why supporting Israel is in America’s national security interest.

“So he’s been there, he’s spoken out publicly, he’s walked into the lion’s den and kind of stood with the Jewish people and stood with Israel,” Coleman said. “He’s always done that in my conversations with him, and I got to believe it’s the same in his conversations with President Trump.”

Coleman did not mention Vance in his public remarks on Tuesday, which included heaps of praise on Vance’s boss.

In fact, the only direct mention of Vance on stage came from Ted Cruz, which came in the form of neither approval nor criticism. In an address focused on rising right-wing antisemitism and its spread among young people, Cruz recalled a pair of Turning Point USA events where students asked questions about Israel and made conspiratorial remarks about Judaism.

“There was one Turning Point event that JD Vance was at, at Ole Miss, where a kid gets up and asks this wildly anti-Israel question,” Cruz said. “And what happened next was extraordinarily revealing: Spontaneously, a third of the students burst into applause. That was their immediate reaction to that question.” What Cruz excluded was that Vance sidestepped the question without pushing back.

Cruz also blasted Republicans who haven’t explicitly condemned Carlson, saying, “Nick Fuentes is easy to denounce. And I actually think it’s a tell among Republican politicians if they’ll denounce Fuentes but they’re scared to say Carlson’s name.” But Cruz stopped short of naming any such politicians.

Later, Shabbos Kestenbaum, the high-profile critic of campus antisemitism who sued Harvard, cheekily addressed anyone who “is planning on running for president in 2028, and you are part of the Trump administration right now, and you want to — I didn’t say anyone’s name! — but you want to sort of nod and wink to this terminally online groyper base?”

Kestenbaum, who works for the conservative media organization PragerU, stopped short of naming names and joked that he doesn’t “want to get in trouble.” But he offered a clear message: “If our nominee is someone who, as I said, is winking to that online space, then we will lose elections and quite frankly we will deserve to lose elections.”

When asked after the event who he was referring to, Kestenbaum said he was addressing “anyone, whether you are a Republican or Democrat, who is trying to acquiesce to a radical anti-American and antisemitic base.”

He added, “I think President Marco Rubio has a really nice sound to it.”

Unlike Tuesday’s speakers, conservative personality Ben Shapiro has explicitly called on the vice president to condemn Carlson.

“I’d like to see Vice-President Vance change tack on a lot of this; I hope that he will,” Shapiro said last month in a New Yorker interview, when asked about who in the conservative world “would cast out the kind of characters that Tucker Carlson and company are encouraging.”

Shapiro’s comments, and his monthslong stand against right-wing antisemitism, have signalled a heightened urgency in how Jewish conservatives are approaching Trump’s potential successors amid fears that the party will cede ground to antisemitic right-wing figures. Similar to Kestenbaum, Shapiro said he would “likely” support Rubio in a primary over Vance.

Arlene Ross, who traveled from New York to attend what she said was an “outstanding” symposium, said she likes Cruz and Rubio. As for Vance, she believed his name would have come up on Tuesday if there were a Q&A session because the “Jewish community is not too keen on him” being “a little too cozy with the extreme right.”

Instead, Vance’s name was left out of the conversation, which Ross chalked up to speakers — a number of whom were elected officials — not wanting to cross the White House.

“I think they didn’t want to badmouth Vance because they were afraid of Trump’s reaction if they did that,” she said.