Speaker after speaker at RJC warned that increased opposition to Israel wasn't restricted to Democrats
“We clearly have an antisemitism element of our party. It’s a very small minority, but we have to confront it,” Republican Sen. Dave McCormick told JNS. “It’s never in my opinion appropriate to give platform, to give license, to people who are explicitly pro-Hitler, pro-Nazi, explicitly antisemitic.”
By Jonathan D. Salant
JNS
Nov 2, 2025
As Jewish Republicans gathered in Las Vegas this weekend to celebrate their successful efforts to re-elect U.S. President Donald Trump and cheer the return of the Israeli hostages in a deal that he brokered, one concern dampened their enthusiasm: rising Jew-hatred and anti-Israel rhetoric among younger conservatives.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) sounded the warning bell first at the event when it got underway on Thursday night. It continued to ring all weekend, as speaker after speaker warned that increased opposition to Israel wasn’t restricted to Democrats.
Much of the Republican Jewish Coalition’s wrath rained down on Tucker Carlson, the conservative firebrand and former Fox News host who has hosted Holocaust deniers and antisemites on his show.
Speaker after speaker called on Jewish Republicans to combat the message being spread by Carlson, who just last year received a coveted prime-time speaking role at the GOP national convention in Milwaukee.
“We clearly have an antisemitism element of our party,” Sen. Dave McCormick (R-Pa.) told JNS. “I think it’s a very small minority, but we have to confront it. It’s never in my opinion appropriate to give platform, to give license, to people who are explicitly pro-Hitler, pro-Nazi, explicitly antisemitic.
“The response that you’re seeing, the backlash, is to make it clear that the majority of us do not sanction those views or presenting those views as reasonable and things to be legitimately discussed and debated,” McCormick said.
Left-wing students weren’t the only ones on college campuses who sided with Palestinians after Hamas’s terror attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
“Regarding the young generation, I think we saw it during the war—that it was very easy to incite them and to channel their energy towards anti-Israel campaigns,” Danny Danon, Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, told JNS at the RJC event.
“I think we have to invest more in education, exposing the real facts bringing youngsters to Israel,” the Israeli envoy said. “I think we should focus on college campuses and bring the next generation—the leaders, the influencers—to Israel, and once they come to Israel, it’s much easier. It changes their perspective.”
In an August Quinnipiac University poll, 74% of Republican voters 50-years-old and above said that their sympathies lay with Israel, with just 8% naming Palestinians. But among GOP voters younger than 50, 48% supported Israel, while 23% sided with the Palestinians, according to poll numbers shared with JNS.
Some 300 students attended the RJC conference, some of whom stood in front of Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) during his speech and held up signs reading, “Tucker is not MAGA,” the abbreviation for Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.
“We are very committed to providing balance and to be pushing back with students, because it’s so important given all the disinformation and what they see on social media or the podcasts that they get,” RJC chief executive Matt Brooks told JNS.
One of the pro-Israel students at the conference, Elliana Chriss, 20, a junior at Loyola University in Chicago, told JNS that “we try to spread the message of Israel and eliminate the false news out there, the groupthink ideology.”
“What I’ve seen, especially on college campuses, is people afraid of not being seen as liberal enough, so they feed into this ideology and antisemitic rhetoric to fit in,” she told JNS.
“Let’s be very clear. Nazis are evil, and antisemitism is repulsive,” Rep. David Kustoff (R-Tenn.), who is Jewish, said in his speech to the RJC that “in our party, we don’t give platforms to people who support Stalin and Hitler.”
Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) told attendees that the United States and Israel share the same values—and the same enemies.
“‘America first’ does not mean America only,” he told the attendees. “There is no question Israel is our ally in the region. We will stand with them, because the people who hate Israel, they hate America too.”
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said that Republican leaders need to explain the importance of supporting Israel.
“If you sit people down and you explain the value of having the relationship with Israel and the importance of Israel in the Middle East, I think people get it,” he said.
Ari Fleischer, a former White House press secretary under President George W. Bush, told reporters that Democrats failed to rein in their party’s anti-Israel wing until it was too late.
He singled out the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, state representative Zohan Mamdani, who is leading in the polls despite accusing Israel of genocide and initially refusing to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which many Jews see as a call to violence against them. Mamdani has also said that he would have the Israeli prime minister arrested if he comes to the city.
“Republicans have a cold, the Democrats have a fever and the Republicans are fighting the cold,” Fleischer said. “Democrats aren’t fighting their fever.”
“We’re not afraid to call it out, because you have to call it out from a moral point of view, from a jewish point of view, and I think that’s why it’s so small inside the Republican Party,” he said.
A Jewish Democratic activist from Maryland, Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, told JNS that she is concerned about Mamdani’s popularity in New York City, but “the majority of Democratic officials still support Israel’s absolute strong right to exist as a Jewish democratic nation that is free from terrorism and where people of all backgrounds can have a better future.”
At the RJC’s banquet Saturday night, Trump thanked the group for its support in a taped message greeted by loud applause. RJC and its super PAC spent $19.7 million during the 2024 elections, concentrating its efforts in the seven swing states that Trump swept en route to winning a second term in the White House.
“The RJC helped ensure that we won the highest percentage of Jewish votes” in decades, Trump said.
A post-election analysis by the Pew Research Center gave Trump 35% of the Jewish vote, while Democrat Kamala Harris got 63%. That 28-point gap was the lowest since 1984, when Democrat Walter Mondale bested Republican Ronald Reagan among Jewish voters by 26 points, 57% to 31%.
But the differences in support were within the margins of error, senior Pew researcher Hannah Hartig told JNS.
The cheers for Trump this weekend contrasted with the boos he received a decade earlier when he first appeared before the RJC as a presidential candidate. At the time, he told the audience then that it wasn’t “going to support me, because I don’t want your money” for his campaign.
At the same gathering, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who at the time was also running for the GOP presidential nomination, said that Trump’s anti-immigrant stance was “destroying the Republican Party’s chance to win an election.”
Asked about those comments now, Graham said that “he got elected” and “well, I think you gotta like it, because people wanted things to change. They saw him as being disrupted more good than bad.”
“When it comes to Israel, how can you complain? If you got a problem with Jerusalem being the capital of the State of Israel, take it up with God,” Graham said. “All I can say is: ‘President Trump’s been one of the best, if not the best president for the State of Israel.’”
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