Yoram Hazony asks Jews to politically submit to antisemitic nationalists - opinion

The Book of Esther is not about political accommodation. It is about political courage at decisive moments. When Esther hesitates, Mordechai exhorts her: “It is for precisely this moment that you became Queen.” She is expected to use her position to defend the Jews, no matter the risk.

The speech begins promisingly. Hazony provides a damning catalogue of antisemitic content on Tucker Carlson’s show: Jews as “demonic force,” Jews “shot Kennedy,” Jews funded Churchill to start “an unnecessary war with Hitler,” the Hebrew Bible teaches “revenge and genocide.” He calls these “abusive, wild slanders.” So far, so clear.

Hazony claims Jewish groups are so unserious they never even assembled the evidence. This ignores years of documented criticism, from liberal and conservative circles alike, of Carlson’s repeated invocation of the Great Replacement Theory, his platforming of Holocaust revisionists, and his promotion of conspiracy theories including about the January 6 attacks. Repeated soft interviews with open racists and anti-Israel conspiracists ought not to require a highlight reel.

Hazony then declares “the fight over Tucker was lost” and moves on. But what fight? His entire speech argues that Jews should never have fought at all; they should have quietly cultivated nationalist allies instead of loudly objecting to antisemitic propaganda. He attacks the “antisemitism-industrial complex,” a remarkable phrase for a Jewish intellectual to deploy against fellow Jews concerned about antisemitism. It mirrors the very language antisemites use to dismiss Jewish concerns as manufactured grievance.

To frame this accommodation, Hazony offers a three-faction model of the GOP: liberal Republicans are dying (25%), the alt Right is fringe (10%), and his National Conservatism project sits at the center of a 65% nationalist bloc that will rule “for a generation.” Jews must therefore court the nationalists or face irrelevance.

But the model collapses under the weight of a single example. Where is Steve Bannon in this analysis? The highly influential voice in MAGA media, whose “Economic Nationalism” sits at the heart of Hazony’s supposed mainstream, recently called Ben Shapiro a cancer at a Turning Point USA appearance.

If Bannon is in the nationalist 65%, then Hazony’s safe mainstream already contains open hostility toward prominent conservative Jews. If Bannon is in the alt-Right 10%, then the lines between mainstream and fringe are far blurrier than Hazony admits. Conspicuously, the speech never mentions him.

This leads to the speech’s deepest evasion: Hazony never specifies what Jews must accept to join his nationalist coalition. Silence about Tucker’s content? Acceptance of Christian nationalist theology? Looking away when allies platform antisemites? The terms of admission are left carefully unstated, which is itself the answer.

Consider what Hazony presents as Tucker’s rehabilitation. Carlson said he is “not antisemitic” because Stephen Miller and Hazony are acceptable Jews, “you can’t generalize.” This is classic “good Jew, bad Jew” rhetoric. The antisemitic guests remain platformed, and the episodes stay online. This is what Hazony accepts as victory.

“Nationalist Republicans are not antisemites,” Hazony assures us. They are “mystified” why Jews attack them. But if the movement requires this much Jewish bridge-building to prevent antisemitism from dominating, then the indictment should be directed at the movement, not at Jewish strategy.

Hazony is right that moral pronouncements alone do not constitute political strategy. But politics without moral limits is not strategy either: it is capitulation. The question is not whether to be politically sophisticated – it is which principles are non-negotiable.

A movement that treats Jewish objections to antisemitism as “political stupidity” has already answered the question of how much it values its Jewish members. Mordechai understood that some forms of bowing are not strategic, but rather surrender. Hazony’s speech, for all its sophistication, asks Jews to bow.