"When Grief Turns Into Antisemitism"

A transcript from the Geneva Bible Study

Note: This is the transcript of the introduction to Naomi Wolf’s most recent Geneva Bible study (Numbers 8–9). Before beginning the scripture reading, she reflected on Charlie Kirk’s passing, the rise of antisemitic conspiracy theories on social media, comments by Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, and the broader tensions between Jews and Christians in this moment. She also offered historical context on Judaism, Jesus, and Paul to clarify common misconceptions and encourage compassion across faith traditions.

“It’s hard for me to begin. It’s been a horrible, horrible couple of days—obviously nothing compared to the real trauma and tragedy that played out in one family in our nation with the loss of Charlie Kirk—but the after-effect that I talked about yesterday, this wave of antisemitism and “the Jews did it, Israel did it, Mossad did it,” has been overwhelming. I spoke yesterday about Tucker Carlson, whom I like and respect in a lot of ways, and about his very painful comments in his eulogy speech. I don’t need to belabor that again. You all heard it. If you didn’t hear it, I posted the video on my X and on other social media feeds.

It’s just gotten worse, right? The country is not uniting. It’s not coming closer together. Vocal conservative Christians have not, for the most part, extended a hand to Jews who are feeling quite betrayed and vulnerable and scared. I’m sure a lot of Christians have their own feelings. I’m hearing about them for sure on social media. Many Christians are saying very respectful, uniting, uplifting things to heal the breach and to close the wound. But a lot of people—I just have to be honest with you guys, I’m always honest with you guys—are saying just unbelievable, hateful things. And it’s social media, so I should take that with a grain of salt.

And Brian O’Shea, my husband, thinks very interestingly and provocatively that this whole kind of whipping up—from Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson’s comments, and I guess someone named Nick Fuentes, and then all the amplification that AI can do so well, and bots and trolls can do so well these days—of anti-Israel, anti-Jewish rhetoric is deliberate. There’s plenty to criticize with Israel, as with any country, but the kind of hatefulness toward Jews, the division, and the use of Israel as a wedge issue is different.

Brian thinks it’s because the left has already largely lost credibility since they hate Israel and are often quite antisemitic, but that the real goal here is for a foreign power to drive a wedge among conservatives and independents using Israel and Jews as a cudgel. And that kind of sounds right to me, because this is not organic. It’s definitely whipped up. It’s definitely artificial.

But the problem, as I said yesterday, is the human brain—and also just where we are right now. Whether it’s the vaccine, the way we were broken by isolation during the pandemic, or just the scale of propaganda we’ve never had to evolve with before as humans, so many people are falling for it. And it’s incredibly demoralizing. I told you yesterday that when I read Tucker Carlson’s remarks at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, I just wanted to lie down. I couldn’t even get up. I was so demoralized. I keep saying that word.

I was quite triggered. It was so traumatic. Not just his comments, but Candace Owens’s and all the innuendo. Because if you are Jewish, you recognize that innuendo. You recognize that vibe of “oh, nod, nod, wink, wink.” And again, I really want to stress: I like and mostly respect Tucker Carlson. And I’m not trying to make an estrangement worse. But I guess what I am trying to say—and I’ve been talking to friends of mine who are Jewish and they’re also waiting—is that we’re waiting for some prominent Republicans to step forward and say: “Hey, we know how painful that was. We know that Candace Owens is stirring up this implication that Israel did it. We know there’s no evidence for that.”

I don’t believe Israel did it. That’s not their methodology. But maybe, God forbid, right? We don’t know. The investigation hasn’t even begun. That isn’t the point. The point is, in a fraught environment, you don’t whip up baseless suspicions and accusations and then recycle thousands of years of hostile tropes that have been connected to so many massacres and murders. And it’s just getting worse.

My friend said that she wrote a letter withdrawing from an organization that she had just joined because it was a Republican organization and no one had spoken up. And I know how she feels, right? I’m looking around and it’s crickets. And there are the Jewish organizations, predictably saying what they say—not very helpfully, because yes, Jesus was actually turned over by the Sanhedrin to Pontius Pilate. That really did happen according to the Gospels. But as I said yesterday, it happened in a very complicated context in which Jews had no power compared to Rome. They were at the mercy of Rome.

And so I’m sorry—I’m struggling. I’m really struggling to talk to you about this. I and my friends who are Jewish keep having this feeling like America was our haven. America was our safe shelter. Freedom. There is no established religion. The founders did not found a Christian country. I have every respect for Christianity. I love Jesus. The founders clearly separated church and state. They did not establish a religion. And I’ve said this before because they saw that the established religions in Britain were corrupt and led to nothing but civil war and not freedom of conscience. They wanted people to be religious. They wanted people to worship God. But they established radical freedom of conscience.

And so my friends who are Jews—we feel like maybe no one cares about this, I don’t know—but I just have to say it. This was our blessed land where we were so grateful to live, because we could have freedom of conscience. We didn’t have to look over our shoulders. The Cossacks weren’t coming to drag us out from under the bed and set fire to us and our families in a barn.

So it’s a very broken time. And why am I saying all of this? I guess because in my feed today—and again, maybe I shouldn’t pay so much attention to my social media feed—but there was so much misunderstanding and just ignorance. I’ll just say ignorance of what Jews are, what Judaism is, and what Christianity is.

[…] There was so much misunderstanding and just ignorance—I’ll just say ignorance—about what Jews are, what Judaism is, and what Christianity is. I don’t even know where people are getting it. Televangelists? Certain churches? I don’t know. But it’s a very inadequate, crude, dumbed-down version of who Jesus was and who the first Christians were. And it’s ahistorical.

I know we’re supposed to be reading Numbers, not skipping ahead 3,500 years into the future, but many people in America seem not to know that Jesus was Jewish; his mother was Jewish; his (legal) father was Jewish; the disciples were Jewish. The crowds at the Sermon on the Mount were overwhelmingly Jewish. Lazarus was Jewish. I said this yesterday: they’re all Jews. And Yeshua was preaching in a Jewish context, trying to cut through the accretion of empty, performative worship—which happens in organized religion, especially a religion so oppressed at that time—to get back to the essence of Mosaic law: love one another, be just, be good, love God.

There’s so much misinformation that Jesus was “breaking from Judaism.” That’s not true in the way many people think. The first four centuries after Jesus’s crucifixion saw a slow evolution of an institutionalized Christian Church as we understand it today—through the church fathers, the Nicene Council and other councils, and Constantine—certainly beginning with the work of Paul, who, by the way, never knew Jesus, came about 30 years after Jesus’s crucifixion, and was a completely different kind of Jew.

Paul was highly educated in a Hellenistic context. That context was anathema to Jewish institutions and to the Jewish struggle to survive. He was connected to aristocrats all over the Roman world—he writes to influential people in cities around the Mediterranean. He was well-born, highly placed, aristocratic, and highly educated—a Hellenistic Jew. And his mission was different from Yeshua’s. He built on Yeshua’s mission, of course—he had a profound experience of Yeshua that led him to stop persecuting Christians (mostly Jewish Christians)—and he changed his name from Saul to Paul. But his mission was to bring the essence of Yeshua’s teaching—which distills the essence of Mosaic law—to pagans as well as to Jewish Christians, and to create something that really didn’t exist yet: organized Christian communities.

And people get upset when I use the word “pagans,” but it’s technically correct, not insulting. The Roman world Paul addressed was a pagan empire. They worshiped many gods and even emperors. So Paul wanted to take people from that world—slaves and free, from all backgrounds—and open Jesus’s message to them, allowing them to be something new: Christians, in an organized way. Yeshua didn’t have a church; Christianity wasn’t organized yet while he was teaching. Arguably that wasn’t his mission—he was pointing to God.

Paul’s mission was to build communities and, yes, to refine or translate the very Jewish character of Yeshua’s message so that non-Jews could participate. That’s a noble, historic mission. But it is different. It’s radically different. He was building on Yeshua, but doing a different job.

That’s why there’s so much in Paul about whether Gentiles need to be circumcised or keep kosher. When Paul wrote, followers of Yeshua were overwhelmingly Jewish. Jews get circumcised, keep kosher, and study Moses’s law—which I’m reading to you every day. Paul’s innovation—really, his theological development—was to say Gentiles didn’t have to do those things. It’s not in the Gospels that Gentiles must or must not be circumcised; Yeshua, speaking to Jews, affirmed the Law of Moses (in Matthew: not a jot or tittle will pass away). Paul was working out how non-Jews could join a Jewish movement.

Circumcision was a huge barrier—painful and, at that time, medically risky. Many Gentiles drawn to the message didn’t want to keep kosher. So Paul had to solve this pastoral problem in the “churches.” And by “churches,” don’t picture cathedrals—these were small gatherings in homes, people from all walks of life meeting at real risk. There weren’t steeples and bells. It was new, fragile, and brave. Women were prominent in his letters—aristocratic Roman women, Jewish Christians like Prisca and Aquila, and also slaves and the poor.

So when Paul says you don’t have to keep kosher or follow certain Mosaic laws, he’s opening the door. Yeshua didn’t say, “You don’t have to follow the Law of Moses”—again, he was speaking to Jews. In Matthew he says nothing will pass from the Law until the world passes away. But he was radical in essentializing and purifying the Law to its distilled essence of love, service, and justice—and calling out empty public religiosity: fasting to show off, ritual for its own sake.

I want to explain the very different contexts and missions of these two men because I’m seeing a lot of Christians—certainly not all—treat Paul’s letters as if they are the Gospel itself. Paul’s letters are sacred within Christianity, yes, but they are not Yeshua’s sayings; they are later texts, in a different context, by a different author, with a different mission.

Subjectively—and you can be mad at me if you want; I have to be honest—Yeshua’s message in the Gospels is incredibly important for Jews and Christians and everyone. Paul’s work has a specific job to do for a particular audience, and he did it very successfully. Millions of pagans became Christians. He opened that door. But Yeshua was pointing to God.

And yes, Yeshua ministered beyond Israel: the Samaritan woman, the Roman centurion—radically inclusive. But he was bringing a Jewish message to everyone; he wasn’t saying the Jewish message is unimportant. Paul founded a religion in the organized sense and necessarily deemphasized Jewish ritual practice for Gentiles.

So please know where things came from. As Jews, we can engage Yeshua’s message. I do. And I think Christians can and should be welcomed into understanding the Torah’s context—which is why I stress, while reading the Five Books of Moses, that they’re not only for the children of Israel. The children of Israel have special responsibilities, yes, but these are books for everyone. The Noahide laws are for everyone—non-Jews as well—while Jews have additional commandments. Many overlap with the Ten Commandments.

I’m not trying to tell Christians what to do or feel—ever. But even Christians, in my view, would benefit from going back to what Yeshua actually said in the actual historical context in which he taught—Jewish context, to Jews. That isn’t alienating; it’s beautiful. At that point, these faiths are a Venn diagram—one stream in the first century. Then came Paul, the church fathers, the Nicene Council, Constantine, the establishment of the papacy—and Christianity as a distinct, organized religion. In parallel, in AD 70, the Second Temple was destroyed—exactly what the Sanhedrin feared. The Romans destroyed the Temple, slaughtered many, reduced Jerusalem to rubble. Jews in Judea were scattered; the long exile began, as foretold in the Five Books of Moses.

After that, Jewish Christians fade from view, partly because there was a deliberate separation: Christians moved away from Jewish practice. I think that’s interesting, because the combined message might have been too powerful for any institution to contain. In exile, rabbinic Judaism developed—the Talmudic tradition—because you could no longer go to the Temple, make sacrifices, or access the Ark of the Covenant. Jews were scattered, and over time Christianity and Judaism became distinct, shaped by separation and, too often, persecution.

I hope that makes people more compassionate. We’ve been estranged, but in the first century—before Paul, and during Jesus’s life—we were one stream. Yes, there was division within Judaism between those following Yeshua and those who saw his claims as blasphemous and destabilizing. From a Jewish perspective, certain claims are blasphemous. Yeshua knew exactly what he was doing; he spoke deliberately, and he shook people to the core—calling them back to the essence of what God wants. But from the perspective of a beleaguered people with no power under Rome, his message was threatening.

And in Jewish tradition you do not say “I am divine.” God alone is divine. Yeshua was careful; in the Gospels he doesn’t straightforwardly say “I am God”—that debate unfolded for centuries in Christian theology up to the fourth century. He implicitly acknowledges being the Messiah. Mashiach in Hebrew means “anointed”—that’s the word that becomes “Messiah,” which accrued layers of meaning over time: Son of God, redeemer, eschatological figure. Much of that development is outside the four Gospels (e.g., the Apocalypse is a separate book).

From a Jewish perspective, if someone says things that appear to set aside the Sabbath—“pick up your mat and walk” on the Sabbath—this is deeply upsetting, because in Torah God commands rest on the Sabbath. That’s real tension. If God is one and alone in the Five Books of Moses—and he is—then statements like “before Abraham, I am” sound blasphemous to observant Jews.

So this is another long response to Tucker Carlson and to many voices on social media making simplistic, hostile comments about Jews in relation to Jesus. It’s not simple. It’s heartbreakingly complex. It would be good if we took this moment to study these texts and the historical context with open minds, rather than retreat into tribes and snipe ignorantly. That is not what Jesus advised, not what Moses advised, not what Yahweh advised.

Forgive me for going on so long, but these things matter. These are important things I need to tell you, and I need you to understand.

People seem to be integrating and processing some of those tensions. It also really helped that Charlie Kirk’s close friend showed up on a podcast to address the question of Charlie’s relationship to Israel and Jews. From what I saw, it was a reasonable, salutary, sane, grown-up communication. He basically said Charlie Kirk was a great friend of Israel and a supporter of the Jewish community. He was concerned—legitimately—about restrictions on freedom of speech and wondered why he couldn’t criticize Israel, and was frustrated when criticism was labeled antisemitic by some.

I’m a free-speech absolutist; that observation makes sense to me. Restrictions on speech about Israel—or any nation—are frustrating. The way this young man communicated both Charlie’s affection for the Jewish community and his reasonable objections cooled the fever. It reminded people that Charlie was a real person with real relationships and arguments. Criticizing Israel, like everything else he took issue with, was part of his work. That seemed to shock people—in a good way—out of spinning conspiratorially (“it’s Israel, it’s Mossad”) or reacting to that spin. So thank you, friend of Charlie Kirk—and thank you, Charlie, belatedly. Loving, reasonable honesty helps. We should be able to love our friends and family and also criticize them.”