Charlie Kirk was assassinated last Wednesday, shaking the already fragile ground under the feet of Jews in the United States.
With a suspected shooter in custody, this crisis carries the potential for a dangerous backlash against an already vulnerable Jewish community. With a political climate roiled in conspiracy theories, fingers are already pointing at Israel.
One since-viral tweet, posted a month ago, claimed that the Turning Point USA co-founder and executive director was beginning to question his support for the Jewish state, but was afraid that they [the Jews?] would kill him.
In a video that was posted on the day of his murder, Kirk challenged Ben Shapiro on Israel’s military strike against the Hamas political leadership in Doha – a strike that undermined US interests in West Asia.
“Is the media telling us the whole truth about Israel?”
This mirrored another position that Kirk had taken just a month ago on Megyn Kelly’s show, where he expressed frustration over the fact that he and his colleagues are pressured by Jews to refrain from criticizing the State of Israel.
“Well, you and I believe that we’re Americans and Americans first. Period. End of story. We are citizens of this nation. Okay. And Israel, we have funded, we have supported, and they’re up against a sea of Islamic totalitarianism. And we should be cheering for them, right? Because they’re up against barbarians and monsters and we want them to win.”
The seeds of an apparent shift in Kirk’s position on Israel has prompted some to suggest dark conspiracies surrounding his assassination. As usual, these conspiracy theories have combined real reports with unverified claims to make the case that Israel is seeking to foment a new civil war in the United States, or to silence a once-friend-turned-critic, creating the conditions for a major test for US Jews.
Indeed, much of Kirk’s pro-Israel rhetoric was a point of great tension and contention in a political camp he helped build. On the America First right, Kirk was perceived to lack some ideological purity for maintaining a defense of Israel.
It’s important to take note of the fact that Kirk had begun to carefully walk a line in the last year. His natural impulses might have been to support the Jewish state (for all the America First, Islamophobic, Christian reasons he would often express). But he was smart enough to see the trajectory of the American right. In addition to not letting the Israel question sour his relationship with powerful conservative influencers like Tucker Carlson who had made anti-Jewish messaging central to their politics, he tempered his own public support in such a way that created space for criticism of Israeli policies and pro-Israel Jews in the US.
Moments after the assassination, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu (Likud) tweeted that: “Charlie Kirk was murdered for speaking truth and defending freedom. A lion-hearted friend of Israel, he fought the lies and stood tall for Judeo-Christian civilization.”
This messaging was echoed by the State of Israel’s official Twitter/X account.
Across the Jewish spectrum, condemnations came in.
While some took the position that despite their disagreements with Kirk, they’re horrified by the assassination, others presented him as a martyr for some shared “Judeo-Christian” cause and harped on his pro-Israel stances.
These statements played into a civilizational tilt. Our [Western?] civilization versus barbarism and evil. This rightist betrayal of Jewish identity, the erasure of our distinctiveness, is certainly not new. But this might prove to be one of its most overt tests.
In the 1970s and 80s, the controversial Rav Meir Kahane often accused liberal Jews in the US of confusing and conflating liberal values with Jewish values. He rightly pointed out that this was an expression of Jews assimilating into the American melting pot.
The same claim could be made today against politically conservative Jews conflating rightist MAGA values and interests with Jewish values and interests. The reactions on the Jewish right to Kirk’s assassination – which have crossed into Israel and even include a strange “getting up from shiva” ceremony on the Jerusalem Temple Mount – should be understood as expressing a deep identity crisis.
After nearly two years of war against Hamas in Gaza, combined with increasing global isolation, the Jewish impulse to embrace the tilt of the civilization least antagonistic has been greatly amplified.
But the support of ostensibly proud Jews for an open Christian nationalist showcases a deeper descent in losing our identity.
While we can say that for half a century, it was taken for granted in the United States that Jews and Christians shared a moral framework and heritage of sorts, the obsessive mourning of a Christian nationalist would have been seen as a bridge too far for most of the community.
Kirk was motivated by and extended the frameworks of his own identity onto ours. Far from an embrace of difference, he accepted and advocated for a defanged Israel, with the characteristics antagonistic to US interests stripped away. While many Jews on the right embraced him as a crusader for their cause, perhaps it would be more accurate to view him as a modern iteration of the actual crusaders of medieval Europe.
For the 31-year-old Kirk, whose political evolution still appeared to be in motion, defense of Israel was very much rooted in Christian theological underpinnings that were becoming harder to maintain as Israel grew more and more independent from Christendom and the United States.
The Israel that Kirk supported was one subservient to the West – and one that he hoped would ultimately embrace his Christian faith.
What animated the rest of his political ideology, from American exceptionalism to zero-exceptions on abortion to his explicit Islamophobia, all stemmed from the same place. His vision for the United States was that of an overtly Christian nation, with a place for those who could culturally adapt.
Kirk often spoke of what he referred to as a “spiritual battle” inside the United States between Christian and anti-Christian – or “cultural Marxist” – forces (some may not appreciate the extent to which “cultural Marxist” serves as an anti-Semitic dog whistle in certain spaces). While many rightist Jews in the US have attempted to position themselves as fighting the same fight as Kirk, it’s clear that he saw something inherently non-Christian in the Jews.
Even the way that his Christianity informed his politics seemed to be ever-changing. As Christian activists in the West began, in recent years, to shed their liberal skins for harder Christian supremacy, fundamentalist Christians began to engage in a re-evaluation of the Crusades, while ramping up their rhetoric against the Jews.
In one of the last episodes of The Charlie Kirk Show, he publicly navigated this:
“Tucker Carlson mentions that Jewish Americans have primarily been financing cultural Marxist ideas. We said this, by the way, last week, and people came after us. We actually said it in a different way. We said ‘I’m glad that Jewish Americans are reconsidering their financing of cultural Marxism.’”
The only way for Jews to be on the same side as Kirk was to embrace a “Judeo-Christian” (essentially Christian) identity and worldview that struggles against Muslims and non-believers to maintain a Christian America and US dominance in a rapidly changing world.
These foundational assumptions – reminiscent of the Crusades – showcase tenets of Christian nationalism that the Jews had resisted and rejected for much of their experience in the United States. In the aftermath of Kirk’s assassination, however, many Jews opted not only to mourn him but to celebrate him – as proud Americans.
We should of course be able to condemn murder and the silencing of political rivals without defending the political views Charlie Kirk espoused. While not a hater of Jews, he took for granted many foundational anti-Semitic tropes. And he was unapologetic in his desire to share the gospels. We can condemn the assassination without celebrating him as a martyr.
We should also be sensitive to the violent rhetoric that Kirk encouraged, and to the dangerous authoritarian tendencies of President Donald Trump, who has already signaled that he will use the assassination to clamp down on anti-fascist activities – utilizing a playbook written by our worst oppressors.
And we should of course be sensitive to the very vulnerable position Jews will find themselves in after this watershed moment.
Most importantly, we should be wary of placing ourselves on his side of the civilization tilt Kirk encouraged. By thinking of his crusade as our own, rightist Jews risk diluting and betraying our true identity.
Charlie Kirk was an American Christian man. He dedicated his life to making America all that it can be.
Although many of the opinions in this article may be valid, as a human Charlie Kirk contribution to the world were worthy of praise.
We must remember that Charlie Kirk represented the Nation of America. Charlie Kirk is not buried yet and the author has the audacity to speak Lashon Hara of a man who is not Jewish, and has numerous times supported Israel in her darkest hours.
It is sad when a man such as Charlie Kirk misses the Truth and promotes Christianity, but had he lived who is to say he may have converted to Judaism.
No matter what like the rest of us he was made in the image of Hashem and His son.