Bruce Pearl, Auburn basketball coach and prominent Jewish Republican, has
delivered an ultimatum unto Vice President J.D. Vance: cut ties with Tucker Carlson, or he won't support Vance's 2028 presidential bid.
I don't know if Pearl will stick to his guns on this. I do feel quite confident that Vance will not oblige Pearl. Vance, if nothing else, sees which way the winds blow, and there is increasingly little profit in politicians paying heed to Jewish objections.
This, alas, is not unique to any party. If anything, it is more noticeable amongst Democrats -- not because the problem is "worse" there, but because Jews are of course far more successfully imbricated in the Democratic Party coalition and so the waning of influence is far more noticeable. But this cycle has already seen a slew of "local Jews raised the alarm about [candidate]" followed by "[candidate] wins anyway." It's gotten noticeable.
And while sometimes the "alarm" is making a mountain out of perfectly reasonable molehills, it isn't always. Graham Platner's totenkopf is an obvious example; Avila Chevalier attending an October 8 pro-Hamas rally is another. And while Melat Kiros' demurral on whether the Boulder firebombing murder was antisemitic isn't quite as bad as one might think from the topline description, it certainly isn't good. While it is clear (and I'm gladdened) that Kiros is quite clear in condemning the murder, it is in fact still quite bad when "is burning an elderly American Jewish woman alive because one is mad at Israel antisemitic?" is treated as a sort of trick question one must tip-toe around.
These are, in short, reasonable alarms to raise; and it matters that they are often ignored with impunity. And that's a change. So what caused it? Obviously, a lot of factors are in play, but one that looms large for me is that fragmenting of a hitherto relatively unified Jewish political consensus over the past few years. The Leviathan has fallen, and we are now in the era of the warring kingdoms. Here was my prediction at the onset of Trump 2.0, tell me if it looks familiar:
So what we are looking at over the next several years is an American Jewish community that simultaneously is under unprecedented threat and is wracked by unprecedented internal division. What I expect to see, then, is that a depressingly large proportion of Jewish political action will take the form of fratricidal squabbling and internal jockeying for position. If the suzerain is falling, the border lord upstarts are going to race to annex as much territory as possible.
[....]
Even as external threats grow ever grimmer, Jews will relentlessly concentrate on our own internal power plays -- trying to grab space for ourselves and prevent the growth of our rivals.
Now again, maybe you think that the status quo hegemony of the ADL-type organizations was sufficiently awful that this transition is necessary and salutary, notwithstanding the growing pains. I won't argue the point here. But necessary or no, during the anarchic interregnum it's hard to imagine Jews being able to leverage much in the way of political influence. We are weak externally, and we are weak internally, and that is a very scary position to be in no matter how you slice it.
I take no pleasure in vindication here. And (since this sort of caveat is always necessary whenever a Jew has a temerity to speak about Jews) I don't claim that this vulnerable position is unique to Jews, or is worse for Jews, or falsifies other vulnerabilities, or anything of the sort. I'm speaking about Jews-qua-Jews, not making some tacit comparative point. But for Jews, this is where we are. And it is a very unpleasant place to be.
This is a change for Jews. It used to be that "Jews are upset about X" was a substantial political negative, either intrinsically (people genuinely cared about Jewish feelings) or at least instrumentally (people correctly calculated that being perceived as being hurtful to Jews was a political loser), now both of those premises are increasingly shaky. The former has been rattled, but (perhaps more importantly) the latter has been decisively falsified. The lesson of 2026 is that backlash from Jews (and I'm trying here to be agnostic as to whether the backlash is "fair" or not) can be safely ignored.
Indeed, I might go further: it's not (at least not always) just a matter of people no longer feeling the need to listen to the Jews. It's more than agnosticism; Jewish discomfort or anger or panic is seen as a sign one is doing right -- akin to (in the Democrats case) learning that an evangelical church is sounded the alarm about the candidate. But even that undersells it, because it doesn't account for the libidinal sense of release being experienced. There is, at least in some quarters, a very strong undercurrent of glee in standing against the Jews -- a sensation that people are throwing off shackles that had constrained them. So it's more than just not caring about what Jews think, and it's more than a sort of negative polarization based on correlating Jews with conservatism. It's a more primal desire that associates Jews with these negative feelings of self-censorship and walking on eggshells and suppression, and now suddenly feeling free to break the chains.
This was central to my thesis about Platner, of course. And he's hardly alone. What crystallized this thought for me was an odd duck story about a local Portland coffee shop, Heretic Coffee, which received a donation routed through the Jewish Federation (the shop had made the news for offering free meals to persons facing hunger due to SNAP cuts). There was clearly some confusion about the donation, which was unsolicited. The shop owner initially reached out unsuccessfully to the Portland JFed, when the gift actually was from someone working through the SF JFed (hence perhaps why the former initially had no idea what the coffee shop was assking about). And the shop owner didn't seem to realize that it wasn't really a gift from the JFed at all, but rather an individual Jewish donor using the federation as a donor-advised fund.
But what could have just been a comedy of errors became something grimmer when the shop owner decided to "do his own research", determined that the gift must be "blood money" due to the JFed's alleged support for Israeli genocide, and defiantly tore the check up. Again, much of this misapprehends the structure of a donor-advised fund in the first place, but I don't actually want to focus on these details. Rather, what stood out to me was the owner's preemptive acknowledgement that he would likely face severe backlash from the Jewish Federation's supporters, and that he was ready for it and eager to receive it and prepared to be martyred by it. At one level, it stands out for viewing Jewish antipathy as a positive -- if the Jews cry out, he won't take that as a cause for concern but as further proof of his righteousness. But at another level, the bravado about his bold stand masks a pretty clear calculation -- and I think probably a correct one -- that the owner doesn't think he'll be martyred at all. For every mad Jew, there will be countless others ready to fete him for his bravery (see also: the Cornell student who said he wasn't interested in working for a Jew and then quickly raised $20,000 off the ensuing backlash).
So yeah. This is a new era for Jews in American politics -- an era where Jewish concerns are routinely ignored, if not viewed as an outright positive. It won't last forever -- nothing does -- but I don't harbor much optimism for the near-term.
