Gabby Deutch
Jewish Insider, Oct. 14, 2024
“This is a very well-meaning effort. But the writing process was a little bit one-sided and not terribly iterative. And also, while I do believe that left-wing antisemitism is a larger systemic problem, the fact that it doesn’t touch right-wing antisemitism is, I think, a mistake, because of the credibility issue.”
On the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, one of the most venerable conservative think tanks in Washington announced a major effort to combat antisemitism. The Heritage Foundation touted what it dubbed “Project Esther” — encompassing a 33-page report and a task force that it said included dozens of organizations — as a “national strategy to counter antisemitism,” meant to be a conservative counterweight to the Biden administration’s antisemitism national strategy released in May 2023.
Focused on what the report’s authors deemed the global “Hamas Support Network,” the strategy trains its eye exclusively on antisemitism emanating from left-wing, anti-Zionist spaces. Its authors described the report to Jewish Insider as a serious conservative effort to address antisemitism and to demonstrate that fighting antisemitism is a priority for the conservative movement — a position espoused by many of the task force’s member organizations, most of whom come from the evangelical Christian community rather than the Jewish community.
But Heritage’s tactics — including criticizing the White House document that several nonpartisan Jewish organizations had a hand in writing,, purposely.,spurning Jewish groups in the “Project Esther” task force and ignoring concerns about antisemitism on the right — have antagonized some would-be allies. … [To read the full article, click here
