This week, New York’s mayor called for the arrest of a foreign head of state over the war in Gaza. Meanwhile, a leader of one of the country’s most prominent young Republican clubs was photographed making what appears to be a Nazi salute.
The accusations against the mayor came fast, certain, and loud. The response to the Nazi salute came with qualifiers and calls for investigation. Some caution is warranted. But the gap in confidence says something about how the word antisemitism gets used, and against whom.
On Wednesday, ADL head Jonathan Greenblatt lashed out at NY Mayor Zohran Mamdani over a video urging the federal government to arrest Prime Minister Netanyahu as a war criminal by saying the mayor’s position stems from an “antisemitic worldview.”
The suggestion that opposition to Israeli government policies stems from a deep-seated hatred of Jews is unfounded, inflammatory, and divisive: it drives a wedge between us and our fellow citizens, it fuels tropes about Jewish responsibility for Israeli actions, and it harms the fight against real antisemitism.
Our community’s leaders have a responsibility to press for policies that protect Jews. And they have every right to debate, criticize, or oppose Mayor Mamdani’s positions on Prime Minister Netanyahu. But our community suffers when they confuse the two.
New York Magazine reports that the now-former treasurer of the New York Young Republican Club, a nearly 2,000-member group that has hosted Trump as a keynote speaker, ran an extremist X account filled with anti-Jewish and racist posts. A photograph shows him making what appears to be a Nazi salute in German military garb.
This follows a former executive secretary fired from their One America News network position for posting an AI video depicting Jews as cockroaches, and reports that Jewish board members have left under the current president’s leadership. Nexus’s Ella Messler breaks down the pattern: a commitment to Jewish safety means confronting antisemitism inside your own organizations. Anything less is just rhetoric.
Tucker Carlson recently claimed anti-white racism is a bigger threat than antisemitism, comparing Ivy League admissions for Jews versus white people. Our thread breaks down why this one moment matters: it shows racism and antisemitism working as a single system.
Racism supplies the grievance: that whites are being displaced. Antisemitism supplies the explanation: that Jews are doing it. Jews get cast as outsiders hoarding what belongs to “real” Americans, the same logic behind the Great Replacement conspiracy and the Ivy quotas of the 1920s. As Carlson gains credibility as a supposedly antiwar voice, the white nationalist framework underneath travels with him.
In its Weekend Interview with Tucker Carlson, Bloomberg used Nexus’s analysis to annotate Carlson’s claims, quoting our assessment that he is “one of the most important enablers of antisemitism in the United States today” and that he “substitutes the words ‘Israel’ and ‘Zionists’ for ‘Jews.'”
In a widely shared Searchlight Institute piece on AIPAC’s influence in Democratic primaries, Adam Jentleson cites the Shofar Report, where Nexus’s Scholar in Residence, Dov Waxman, wrote for Nexus: “giving Netanyahu and his far-right allies carte blanche to do what they like in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank does not protect Jews, it makes them less safe.”
This is what we do: track real antisemitism, call out when it’s weaponized, and make clear the difference. If you’d like to support this work, you can donate here. We’d love to connect.
We’ll continue offering clear responses, frameworks, and resources as these stories develop.
