Conservative American Jews should “know their place,” a Southern Baptist influencer told a gathering in Israel last week.
William Wolfe, a former Trump administration official and founder of the Center for Baptist Leadership, spoke at the first National Conservatism conference held in Israel. His comments were reported by Rod Dreher in a column for The Free Press.
Dreher, a conservative columnist, was not impressed with Wolfe’s views.
He called Wolfe’s presentation “an odd speech larded with antisemitic tropes that, in all fairness, I doubt he recognized.”
However, Wolfe “might have been the most significant speaker, precisely because his unvarnished complaints mirror much of what younger white male Americans say online.”
Rod Dreher
Dreher’s column is about what he heard from the New Right in Jerusalem. Part of that lesson, he said, is that younger generations of American conservatives — including Wolfe — do not see undying American support for Israel as a given.
Wolfe explained that Jews who vote Republican are a vanishingly small part of the conservative coalition, Dreher reported. Therefore, they should “know their place.”
Dreher opines: “The battle lines for the future of the post-Trump right are emerging. Rising antisemitism is just one sign.”
Wolfe told the Jerusalem crowd his ancestors have been in North America since the Revolutionary War era but noted no Jews signed the Declaration of Independence.
“Well, no, they didn’t, as Jews made up only 0.1% of the colonies’ 2.5 million people in 1776,” Dreher said. “It’s hard to read Wolfe’s remarks as anything other than a barely coded declaration that Jews not only aren’t Republicans, but aren’t really One of Us.”
He added: “This blood-and-soil nationalism might make a kind of sense in Europe, where the nations were founded on tribal identity. But even though the Founders were Anglo-Protestant, blood-and-soil nationalism is profoundly un-American. Yet in a country where the left has for decades encouraged Americans to embrace ethnic identity and have built an anti-white politics around it, it is, alas, not surprising when young, right-wing white men like Wolfe do so too.
“Wolfe articulated the widely shared new-right view that right-wing complaints about rising antisemitism are in truth attacks on JD Vance’s putative presidential candidacy,” Dreher explained.
“Reading the transcript makes his point clearer: That conservatives who notice and protest the virulent antisemitism among young activists are really acting as agents for power-seeking Jews who never reconciled themselves to the Trump presidency. … The real problem, according to Wolfe, are not antisemites on the right, but those on the right — Christians and Jews alike — who notice them and say something about it. They are demonstrating disloyalty to the conservative tribe, and ought to stay in their place.”