Joel Pollak launches his book, “The Agenda,” at a theme tavern at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, July 18, 2024. (Ron Kampeas)

(JTA) — MILWAUKEE — The document recommends encouraging church attendance, White House Bible study sessions, shutting out legal immigrants, restrictions on abortion and revenge on Donald Trump’s tormentors.

But it’s not part of Project 2025, the massive Heritage Foundation compilation of proposals for Trump’s next presidency that liberal critics have said is a blueprint for Christian nationalism.

Instead, “The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days” is the work of a Jewish author, Joel Pollak, who believes that a second Trump presidency would make American Jews safer by restoring purpose to a splintered society.

One notable Jewish-inflected proposal, establishing Aug. 21 as “Religious Liberty Day,” would mark George Washington’s famous 1790 letter promising American Jews they would live under a government that “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

”We’re losing the common threads that bind us together,”  Pollak told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “There’s no consciousness at all of any kind of higher power.”

Pollak has since 2016 been one of the most articulate spokesmen making the Jewish case for the Republican Party’s right flank, heralding a breakaway from a Jewish conservatism that for decades was more identified with moderate Republicans like the late John McCain.

In 2010, as a Tea Party candidate, Pollak challenged Rep. Jan Schakowsky, the long-serving Jewish Democrat in a Chicago-area seat.

His campaign in the heavily Jewish district where he grew up focused on what he depicted as her weak support for Israel, and he brought in his former Harvard Law professor, Alan Dershowitz, to campaign for him. She won handily but the experience got under her skin: Five years later she thanked J Street for helping her defeat a “Jewish Orthodox Tea Party Republican,” and then apologized for the gratuitous reference to Pollard’s religious denomination.

After his defeat, he joined Breitbart News, the preeminent voice of the a more hardline right-wing vanguard, working alongside other Jews including Ben Shapiro. Trump’s emergence as the Republican nominee in 2016 and his election made Pollak a go-to Jewish defender of Trump and the far-reaching changes he brought to conservatism. 

He told the Times of Israel in 2017 that he was comfortable in his skin as an observant Jew on the Republican right. “There’s a comfort in a sense that I place who I am on the table and so people know where I am coming from, and it’s not a part of myself I have to introduce or explain,” he said.

Now, Pollak is trying to use the following he has developed over time to shape what he hopes will be a second Trump presidency. He is bringing his ideas this week to the Republican Jewish Coalition confab in Las Vegas, where hundreds of Jewish Republicans will rally around retaking the White House.

One question facing Jewish Republicans is how much to focus on traditional concerns including Israel and how much to embrace a strain of Christian nationalism that is ascendant in their party. Pollak’s book does not make his Jewish identity central, but he applies considerable focus to Israel — and also to casting a Trump White House as a bully pulpit for the spread of religion in public life.

In 224 recommendations divided neatly into 32 clusters of seven, Pollak offers an agenda that comports with the right wing of the Republican Party and echoes a strain of conservative Jewish thinking that does not see expanded Christian expression as a threat. (That thinking featured large in the 2022 failed Ohio Senate campaign of Josh Mandel, a Jewish candidate who promoted “Judeo-Christian values.”)

He would ban even legal migrants from crossing the border with Mexico until changes are made to the immigration system. He would ban chain migration, the system of granting preference to relatives of legal U.S. residents and citizens.

Pollak wants the Department of Justice to protect “birth crisis centers,” the outlets that try to dissuade women from seeking abortions. He recommends a task force to promote childbearing and banning funding for military personnel seeking to travel to get an abortion. He also proposes ending “transgenderism” in the military.

Navigating between Trump’s endorsement of fertility treatments, including IVF, and those evangelical Christians who say the procedure involves destroying life, he says Trump should set up an ethics panel to “explore all of the difficult religious, scientific, and moral questions around IVF and make recommendations.”

Pollak wants funding for religious literacy in public schools and vouchers for religious schools, and calls for launching civil rights investigations of universities that inhibit conservative speech. (Some of that jibes with the interests, or tactics, of subsets of American Jews: Vouchers would help defray costs for Jewish day schools, while federal civil rights complaints alleging antisemitism on campus have become a favored tool of American Jewish groups since Oct. 7.)

And he proposes that White House functions should begin with a prayer, press briefings should begin with a moment of reflection and “the White House facility can hold daily Bible study events,” ticketed for the public.

“The point will be to reinforce church attendance as a norm in American life and to bring faith back to the center,” he writes. He adds, “These daily sessions will set an appropriate tone for the conduct of business in the White House and will encourage Bible study more generally throughout the country.”

Pollak’s blueprint is one that would discomfit most American Jews, who according to polls overwhelmingly want a strong separation of church and state. And many of his proposals buck majority American Jewish opinion on issues such as abortion and immigration.

“I understand the historic concerns that American Jews have had about public prayer,” Pollak told JTA. “People worry that there’s going to be imposition of Christian faith on Jews and others.”

But he said he thought his audience was ready for his recommendations, saying, “I do think that we’re at a point in American society where most Jews can be comfortable with public prayer.”

Amy Spitalnick, the CEO of the liberal-leaning Jewish Council for Public Affairs, said Pollak’s book is a recipe for what most American Jews would identify as Christian nationalism.

“It effectively reinforces the broader white Christian nationalist agenda that seeks to totally eliminate the line between church and state,” she said. “It’s Project 2025, just with a Jewish lens.”

Seth Mandel, a senior editor at Commentary, a conservative outlet, said Project 2025 came to mind when he heard about Pollak’s book. But he said fears of a Christian nationalist regime if Trump were elected are overstated.

“The first thing that popped into my head was that this sounds like what people are warning about Project 2025,” Mandel said. “If Trump has any authoritarian instincts, they are generally not about forcing women into becoming a sort of religious baby-making covenant. It’s not where his campaign wants to go at all.”

Mandel said he thought the public prayer elements of Pollak’s prescription would appeal little to Americans, much less American Jews, who are largely uncomfortable with the idea of presidents using the bully pulpit to preach. It’s what turned Americans off to Jimmy Carter, whose 1979 speech about a “crisis of the American spirit” and a lack of “faith in God” backfired and helped spur his electoral defeat, Mandel said.

“People really reacted negatively to the idea that there was going to be a preacher-in-chief, who is going to tell them how to cure what ails their soul,” Mandel said. “There’s nothing wrong with Bible study, but Americans don’t really tend to want the president to lead their Bible study group.”

In the interview, Pollak recognized that his plan would draw comparisons with Project 2025.

“I didn’t even look at the Heritage Foundation Project 2025,” he said without being asked while promoting the new book at the Republican National Convention last month.

Pollak has no illusions that Trump would read his book or take his recommendations. It’s a recognition he makes clear in his book and reiterates in interviews, and which distinguishes him from the Project 2025 authors who played up their associations with Trump until he shut them down, furious at the negative publicity the project was garnering.

“I have never been invited to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida estate, where he has surrounded himself with loyalists,” Pollak writes in the introduction. “I would serve in his administration, but I was not offered a post in the last administration, and I have no reason to expect I will be offered one in the next. I am writing this book solely because I believe I can help.”

Pollak making crystal clear that he does not have Trump’s approval is as savvy as it is honest. The Kamala Harris campaign is using Project 2025 and its 900-page manifesto to bludgeon Trump, linking him to its far-reaching and radical proposals to elevate the executive branch.

How adjacent to Trump the book is, or could be, is hard to say because Trump’s loyalties and favorites constantly shift. The book is published by War Room Books, an imprint started by Steve Bannon, the onetime Trump adviser who was for a time out of favor with the former president but now seems to be influential again.

Bannon’s podcast, “The War Room,” is popular with advisers close to Trump, who lamented his absence after he went to jail on July 1. He was jailed for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify about the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot that sought to overturn Trump’s electoral defeat. The last thing Bannon did before reporting to prison was write the forward to Pollak’s book.

“Joel Pollak correctly notes that, in November, ‘a victorious Trump will have completed the greatest political comeback in American history and will have the opportunity to make the kinds of big changes that come along once in a generation,’” Bannon writes, calling the book “an instant American classic.”

In his conversations with JTA, Pollak emphasized his Israel agenda — which maps to the party’s platform — and offered more detail about some of his stances that would appear to be most at odds with mainstream American Jewish views.

On immigration, he emphasized that he believed there should be mechanisms for people to come to the country if they are “genuine victims of religious and political persecution,” as many Jews were when they arrived at American shores. He also acknowledged the existence of an antisemitic version of “replacement theory” that posits that Jews are orchestrating the replacement of whites in Western countries with migrants of color.

But he said that conspiracy theory was distinct from his worries, and broader Republican concerns, about migration. He accused the Anti-Defamation League and other groups of intentionally conflating the two ideas, “falsely accusing some conservatives of antisemitism for opposing migration.”

Spitalnick said it was a distinction without a difference. “There are ways to talk about immigration policy without suggesting that there is a deliberate effort to replace the population or change the electorate or otherwise play into the very conspiracy theories and folks that we know have directly fueled deadly violence,” she said.

Regarding the White House bully pulpit for encouraging religious literacy and Bible study, he said, “The rules should prohibit proselytization, so that messages remain focused on spiritual lessons of a general and universal nature.”

Pollak faults Trump for not being prepared in his first term, advancing his agenda piecemeal, which allowed groups opposed to his plans to go to the courts to stop him. Among them were Jewish organizations, including HIAS, the lead Jewish refugee aid group that led and joined a number of briefs against Trump’s immigration restrictions.

With a more aggressive approach, he argues, Trump could overwhelm the liberal groups who would oppose his administration. He recommends signing hundreds of executive orders on his first day in office. Almost all of the steps he urges can be accomplished without appealing to Congress.

“Ten executive orders on the first day is what Biden did and Trump did” on their first days,” he told JTA. “I’m raising it an order of magnitude. I mean, if you add up the number of suggestions in the book, it’s over 200 things that Trump could do on the first day and it’s very, very hard to challenge all of those at once. How are you going to find 200 different federal courts?”

At his book party, Pollak, who said the book was spurred by his anger at Trump’s conviction on 34 New York State fraud felonies, said he was happy to have laid out his thoughts in a forward-looking manner.

“I’m tired of feeling negative and upset about what’s going on,” he said.

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