Courtesy of JTA. Photo credit: Luke Johnson for The Washington Post via Getty Images
Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, speaks during the Remember October 7th Rally Monday, Oct. 7, 2024, hosted by The Philos Project on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
(JTA) — A prominent Jewish lawyer has quit a national initiative to fight antisemitism over comments by the president of the Heritage Foundation defending Tucker Carlson’s decision to host the white supremacist Nick Fuentes on his popular streaming show.
Mark Goldfeder, CEO of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, announced in a letter posted to social media on Sunday that he is quitting the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, convened by the Heritage Foundation, because of Kevin Roberts’ comments last week. The president of the Heritage Foundation both rejected calls to cut ties with Carlson and called conservatives criticizing him “a venomous coalition” within the Republican Party.
Goldfeder wrote that he had joined the national task force, launched in 2023, because he believed it would be nonpartisan, “transcend[ing] politics, ideology, and institutional affiliation.” Roberts’ defense of Carlson, he said, showed that it had departed from those values.
“Elevating him and then attacking those who object as somehow un-American or disloyal in a video replete with antisemitic tropes and dog whistles, no less, is not the protection of free speech. It is a moral collapse disguised as courage,” wrote Goldfeder, who is also an Orthodox rabbi.
He continued, “It is especially painful that Heritage, an institution with a historic role in shaping conservative policy, would choose this moment to blur the line between worthwhile debate and the normalization of hate.”
“Free speech protects the right to speak. It does not compel anyone to provide a megaphone for a Nazi,” he wrote. “Those of us who lead or advise efforts to combat antisemitism have a responsibility to draw that line clearly. If we fail to do so, and if we equivocate when hatred dresses itself in the language of populism, we betray both our mission and our values.”
Goldfeder is not the first Jewish voice on the right to break ties with the Heritage Foundation, a key architect of conservative policy, over Roberts’ comments. Rep. Randy Fine, one of four Jewish Republicans in Congress, announced at the Republican Jewish Coalition convention in Las Vegas over the weekend that he would no longer allow Heritage staffers into his Capitol Hill offices and called on his colleagues to do the same.
Roberts’ video and the backlash has spurred open discord within an organization known for its unified conservative voice. The Free Press reported on Sunday that multiple people affiliated with Heritage had denounced the video on social media, and that Roberts’ chief of staff, seen as responsible for it, had been moved to another position.
Roberts responded to the backlash — and to goading by Fuentes — in a second social media statement late Friday that explicitly denounced Fuentes, citing specific comments in which Fuentes downplayed the Holocaust and called for the death penalty against Jews.
It did not mention Carlson, who is closer to the Republican Party’s mainstream and was the subject of protest at the Republican Jewish Coalition convention.
“Nick Fuentes’s antisemitism is not complicated, ironic, or misunderstood. It is explicit, dangerous, and demands our unified opposition as conservatives. Fuentes knows exactly what he is doing. He is fomenting Jew hatred, and his incitements are not only immoral and un-Christian, they risk violence,” Roberts wrote.
“Our task is to confront and challenge those poisonous ideas at every turn to prevent them from taking America to a very dark place,” he added. “Join us — not to cancel — but to guide, challenge, and strengthen the conversation, and be confident as I am that our best ideas at the heart of western civilization will prevail.”
The new statement earned praise from Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, which has long criticized Fuentes and Carlson as elevating antisemitism on the right. The ADL, founded to fight on behalf of Jews facing discrimination a century ago, had criticized the Carlson interview and amplified news reports critical of Roberts’ video.
