In The New York Times this weekend, Katie J.M. Baker described a fundraising pitch that the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank that gave us Project 2025, made for a campaign to crush a subversive movement that threatens “America itself.”
The pitch, she wrote, “presented an illustration of a pyramid topped by ‘progressive “elites” leading the way,’ which included Jewish billionaires such as philanthropist George Soros and Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois.”
Whether intentionally or not, Heritage was deploying a classic antisemitic trope, the notion of the wealthy Jewish puppet master. In the contemporary version of this conspiracy theory, Soros looms especially large; the Anti-Defamation League has multiple pages on its website about the antisemitic underpinnings of right-wing claims that Soros is working to destabilize society.
I emailed the Anti-Defamation League for its thoughts on the Heritage Foundation’s pyramid illustration but haven’t heard back. I won’t be surprised, however, if the organization stays silent, because the Heritage Foundation was demonizing Soros in the name of defending Israel.
The campaign Baker wrote about is called Project Esther, and it aims to destroy the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States. Heritage defines this movement broadly, in a way that includes virtually all attempts to shift American foreign policy in a less pro-Israel direction, including those by progressive Jews.
‘Twisted logic’
Here we see the perversity that can come from conflating antisemitism with opposition to an increasingly brutal and authoritarian Israeli state. “Those supporters of Palestine and Hamas who have claimed for decades that criticizing Israel’s policies does not equate to antisemitism are at best insincere,” said a strategic plan for Project Esther published online.
In the twisted logic of Project Esther — which is also the logic of Donald Trump’s war on academia — ultra-Zionist gentiles get to lecture Jews about antisemitism even as they lay waste to the liberal culture that has allowed American Jews to thrive.
In its plan, Project Esther describes its opponents as a “Hamas Support Network” that aims to achieve its goals “by taking advantage of our open society, corrupting our education system, leveraging the American media, co-opting the federal government and relying on the American Jewish community’s complacency.”
It’s a little unclear who falls under this sinister umbrella; the report targets both radical groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace as well as run-of-the-mill liberals. As Baker reported, most of the Americans who dreamed up Project Esther are Christian, though they worked in concert with Jewish Israeli officials. Several of the Americans singled out by Project Esther, meanwhile, are Jewish.
At one point, Project Esther singles out the majority of Jewish House Democrats who declined to censure their colleague Rashida Tlaib for anti-Israel language, including her defense of the slogan “From the river to the sea.” Their votes, said Project Esther, are “indicative of the strong strain of antisemitism that is running rampant through the progressive left” as well as a “dangerous complacency and indifference across America’s Jewish community.”
It describes the Jewish Rep. Jan Schakowsky as part of a “Hamas caucus” in Congress, one that’s also supported by Jewish Sen. Bernie Sanders. Indeed, one clue that there’s something off about Project Esther’s definition of antisemitism is how often it tags Jews as perpetrators.
The outfit’s distorted definition of antisemitism matters because Trump, since returning to the White House, has put into practice orders that closely reflect Project Esther’s proposals. He’s defunded universities on the pretext of punishing them for antisemitism and attempted to deport pro-Palestinian student activists.
If Project Esther has its way, the crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech will go even further.
It wants to see those it calls “Hamas supporters” removed from university staffs, denied the right to protest and banned from social media. Ultimately it hopes to see them stigmatized the way the KKK and al-Qaida are.
American Jews overwhelmingly detest Hamas, of course, and a recent survey of Jewish voters by the Democratic research firm GBAO Strategies shows that a large majority are worried about antisemitism on college campuses. But most Jews are not onboard with the way Trump is enacting the Project Esther agenda.
According to the GBAO poll, 64% of Jewish voters disapprove of Trump’s approach to antisemitism. Nearly 70% say the word “fascist” describes him.
This isn’t surprising. Jews tend to teach their children to be wary of fascism from a very young age, with its nationalist bombast, its cult of masculinity, its contempt for pluralism and its relentless, bludgeoning lies.
Uncanny parallels
Philip Roth, among the greatest of American Jewish writers, captured this deep-rooted fear in his 2004 novel, “The Plot Against America,” which envisions an alternative history in which Charles Lindbergh, an outsider and a celebrity, defeats Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940 election and then signs a treaty with Nazi Germany.
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Paging through the book now, I find some details newly eerie — Lindbergh’s “America first” platform and his warning about “the infiltration of inferior blood” into the country, his big fictional preelection rally at Madison Square Garden and the narrator’s incredulity at a threatened war with Canada.
But even Roth, for all his prescience, couldn’t have foreseen a modern-day Lindbergh who, in transforming America into something out of Jewish nightmares, pretends he’s trying to ensure Jewish safety.
Roth was our preeminent chronicler of what he once called “the Indigenous American berserk.” He had no idea how berserk things were going to get.
Michelle Goldberg is a New York Times columnist.