Antisemitism has gained ground in segments of the American populist right. EEW Magazine examines the ideology, the data, and what Scripture says about the Jewish people and the cross.

By EEW Magazine Online Staff

Aviator Charles Lindbergh (left) blamed American Jews for pushing the United States toward war with Nazi Germany in 1941. Some today have shunned President Donald Trump (center) for his support of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (right), accusing him of operating under Jewish influence. (Photo illustration: EEW Magazine)

In September 1941, aviator Charles Lindbergh stood before a crowd in Des Moines, Iowa, and named the forces he believed were pushing the United States into war with Nazi Germany.

He listed three: the British government, the Roosevelt administration, and American Jews. The remarks destroyed his public reputation.

They also marked the apex of the America First Committee, an isolationist organization that had gathered nearly a million members behind that banner. The committee dissolved after Pearl Harbor.

The name did not.

Col. Charles A. Lindbergh, (left), with R. Douglas Stuart, Jr., National Director, when the flyer enrolled in Chicago as a member of the America First Committee. (Credit: Bettmann/Getty Images)

That name has been claimed in recent years by a segment of the American populist right whose arguments have traveled far beyond immigration policy or economic nationalism.

Holocaust denial. Open admiration for Adolf Hitler. Dual loyalty accusations against Jewish citizens. Conspiracy theories about Jewish control of media, banking, and government.

The genealogy is direct.

Within this movement, President Trump has become a strange and revealing target. Many of its loudest voices have turned against him, accusing him of being controlled by Jewish interests because of his record of support for Israel. The accusation, examined closely, reveals more about the ideology than about Trump. Inside a worldview organized around Jewish conspiracy, no political leader who supports Israel can be trusted.

This way of thinking also requires ignoring the genuine complexity of the conservative coalition. Millions of evangelical Christians support Israel on theological grounds rooted in the Hebrew scriptures. Others view it as a strategic democratic ally in a volatile region. Still others hold serious criticisms of Israeli policy while harboring no animus toward Jewish people.

Treating every pro-Israel position as evidence of manipulation is one of the oldest antisemitic arguments in circulation.

The alarm has been sounded from within the Republican Party itself. In November 2025, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz told a gathering of Jewish conservatives that he had seen more antisemitism on the right in the previous six months than in his entire lifetime, calling it an existential crisis for the party. The following month, Ben Shapiro condemned prominent right-wing media figures at a major conservative conference as "charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty."

In January 2026, a Likud member of Israel's Knesset addressed that parliament in English, calling the antisemitic rhetoric circulating in American conservative media "a poison being sold to the American people as patriotism."

According to its 2025 Annual Audit, the Anti-Defamation League counted 6,274 antisemitic incidents across the United States that year, the third-highest annual total in the more than four decades the organization has been tracking them. Those numbers span the political spectrum and reflect a range of motivations. Physical assaults rose 4 percent over the prior year regardless, and assaults involving a deadly weapon increased by 39 percent. Three people were murdered in antisemitic attacks on American soil in 2025, the first such fatalities since 2019.

EEW Magazine Online — Data

Antisemitic Incidents in the United States

Annual totals recorded by the Anti-Defamation League, 2015–2025. All figures verified from ADL annual audits.

2025 incidents

6,274

3rd highest on record

2024 incidents

9,354

Record high (ADL confirmed)

Increase, 2015–2024

+893%

Per ADL 2024 audit

2017

JCC bomb threat wave; Charlottesville

2021

May Israel-Gaza conflict

2023

Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel

Source: Anti-Defamation League Annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents, 2015–2025. All figures verified from official ADL audit reports.

Research by the Jewish People Policy Institute, analyzing thousands of videos from prominent right-wing content creators, found antisemitic content, as defined by the IHRA working definition, increasing sharply through the year.

According to ADL chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt, "Numbers that would have shocked us five years ago are now our floor."

Every generation believes it would recognize the great hatreds of history if they returned. History suggests otherwise.

Hatred arrives translated. It changes its language, adopts the concerns of the day, borrows the vocabulary of patriotism, justice, or the courage to say what everyone else is afraid to say. By the time most people recognize it for what it is, it has already become familiar.

Skepticism of powerful institutions is commonplace and legitimate, indispensable in any functioning democracy. Skepticism that hardens into fixed suspicion of a particular group has crossed into something else entirely. Left unchallenged, that suspicion becomes conspiracy. Conspiracy demands a face.

History shows, with a consistency too painful to be coincidence, whose face gets assigned. Jewish people have occupied that role across centuries, continents, and political systems.

Hatred survives by being reasonable.

The most vocal voices in this space do not, as a rule, present themselves as bigots. They present as skeptics. Holocaust denial becomes historical inquiry. Conspiracy theories about Jewish control of banking and media become questions about elite power. Ideas that most audiences would not accept directly are carried across a line, packaged as courage and candor.

Scholars, journalists, theologians, and Israeli citizens themselves have raised substantive objections to Israeli military conduct, settlement expansion, and the direction of Israeli leadership. That is political discourse. Anti-Zionism, the political position that Israel should not exist as a Jewish state, is a more contested category. Some ground it in political theory or international law. Others use it as a vehicle for antisemitic ideas.

The line is crossed when criticism of a government becomes a claim about Jewish people as a collective.

When Israel becomes shorthand for a global Jewish conspiracy. When the rhetoric reaches Holocaust denial, praise for Hitler, or the assertion that American Jews owe their primary loyalty somewhere other than the country of their birth.

A rally to combat antisemitism in Miami Beach, Florida. (Photo Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

For centuries, the accusation that the Jews killed Christ has circulated through Western civilization as settled biblical fact. The New Testament tells a more precise, and more theologically significant, story.

History asks: Who crucified Jesus? The gospel asks: Why did He choose to be crucified? Those are not the same question.

Rome carried out the execution. Crucifixion was a Roman practice, and the Jewish religious leadership under occupation did not hold the authority to impose the death penalty, which is precisely why Jesus was brought before Pontius Pilate.

Roman soldiers scourged Him, drove the nails, cast lots for His garments, and posted the inscription declaring Him King of the Jews.

The Gospels also record that certain Jewish religious leaders pressed for His death. That belongs in the account. To read "certain Jewish leaders" and conclude "the Jewish people" is no more faithful to the Gospels than reading "Roman soldiers" and concluding "all Romans."

The mother of Jesus was Jewish. His disciples were Jewish. The thousands who followed Him were Jewish. Those who received salvation at Pentecost were Jewish. The earliest church in Jerusalem was Jewish. Christianity begins within Judaism.

There is another irony the history rarely mentions. The New Testament was written almost entirely by Jewish followers of Jesus. Matthew, John, Peter, James, Jude, and Paul were all Jewish believers. Luke is the likely exception. To use their testimony as justification for hatred of the Jewish people is to turn their words against the very community from which those words came.

The New Testament carries the story beyond human actors.

Before His arrest, Jesus told Peter: "Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels?" (Matthew 26:53, KJV). Twelve legions stood ready at His command. He did not call for them. His arrest was His voluntary submission to the Father's will. No chief priest, no governor, no soldier present held ultimate authority over Him.

He states it plainly: "No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself" (John 10:18, KJV).

At Pentecost, Peter preaches to a Jewish crowd and holds two truths at once. He acknowledges their role in rejecting Jesus, then immediately calls them to repentance, and thousands believe. No perpetual ethnic guilt is decreed. Forgiveness is extended. And Peter roots the entire event in something above all human actors: Jesus was "delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God" (Acts 2:23, KJV). Human beings were morally accountable. The cross was God's redemptive plan.

Both are true.

Paul lifts the lens to its widest point. "Christ died for our sins" (1 Corinthians 15:3, KJV). Not for the sins of one nation. For our sins. Then, in Romans, he removes any remaining illusion that one people stands uniquely guilty before God: "For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23, KJV). In Romans 11, he warned Gentile believers not to grow arrogant toward the Jewish people, reminding them that they had been grafted into promises they did not originate.

The ground at the foot of the cross is level. No nation stands there as the uniquely guilty one. Every sinner does.

The church's long history of silence in the face of antisemitism, and in some chapters active participation in it, is a wound the body of Christ has not fully healed. It is also what happens when a faith community stops reading its own Scripture carefully.

The ancient hatred this article has traced has never been simply about difference. At its deepest level, its accusation has always been that Jewish people stand uniquely and perpetually guilty before God. The gospel overturns that claim entirely.

At the cross, Scripture does not isolate one people beneath sin. It declares every human being guilty before a holy God and offers one Savior to all. Any message that resurrects collective blame where the gospel proclaims universal need has not drawn closer to the heart of Christianity. It has wandered away from it.

The gift of discernment was not given to the church for the obvious evil. It was given for the palatable one.

The church has faced moments like this before. It cannot afford to mistake them again.

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