Politically Precocious

Before there were stages and cameras, before debates and applause meters, there was a boy standing on the banks of the Hudson River, gazing south at a sky filled with smoke.

When the world changed on September 11, 2001, Josh Hammer was in seventh grade in Sleepy Hollow, New York — best known as the setting for Washington Irving’s story about Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman. That morning, the town became a front-row seat to terror.

“You could actually see the smoke from the Twin Towers up the Hudson River,” Hammer recalls. “It was one of those unmistakable moments where you see evil. And if there is evil, there must also be good.”

Most 12-year-olds aren’t thinking about the moral structure of the universe. But Hammer insists that 9/11 imprinted on him not just fear, but a worldview. He started to see politics more as a stage for the age-old struggle between good and evil rather than just policy debates. Radical Islam was evil; America and its allies — the forces working to stop it — were good. The lines seemed that clear.

By the time he reached high school, Hammer had begun to develop a contrarian political streak.

“I was the kid in senior year government class defending Bush-era enhanced interrogation against 25 liberal classmates,” he says. “That was me.”

It wasn’t a fully formed ideology yet, but it was the start. The classroom became his first debate stage, though he wouldn’t have called it that at the time.

“I wasn’t super politically active. I was right of center, but it wasn’t until after college that I really started to dive into what it means to be a conservative.”

That stance positioned him far to the right compared to his peers, but it didn’t stem from synagogue sermons or Shabbos table conversations. Hammer grew up with a strong Jewish identity but deeply assimilated, with little religious practice: a menorah in the window in December, a shortened Seder for Passover (followed by a trip for pizza), but no weekly Shabbos meals, and little sense of halachic obligation.

“I genuinely don’t think I knew what a Shabbat dinner was until I was into my teenage years,” he admits.

Yet even without the formal structure of observance, his categories were already quasi-religious. He might not have used the vocabulary of Torah, but the instinct that there’s a real difference between good and evil, and that civilization hangs in the balance and required more than policy to endure, was already a religious frame.

“At the time, it just seemed obvious to me,” he says. “Al-Qaeda was evil, radical Islam was evil, and the only solution in this world of dichotomies had to be good. To me, that was the United States and our allies. I didn’t have the language for it, but that’s basically how I understood the world.”

Those categories — good and evil, chaos and tradition — would form the foundation of his later work. The intuition he initially experienced on the Hudson River would eventually be expanded into a book-length argument for revelation as civilization’s cornerstone. In Israel and Civilization, Hammer contends that just as nations cannot survive without tradition, the West itself depends on Sinai — as he details in the chapter subtitled “Jewish Morality as the Bedrock of the Western Tradition”:

Far from dismissing Jewish influence on the West as irrelevant, destabilizing, or even menacing, Westerners of all religious stripes should — if anything — feel a debt of gratitude for all that Hebrew Scripture, Judaism, the Jewish people, and the broader Jewish tradition have contributed to our collective civilization. Judaism and Jewish thought have directly affected everything from personal morality to interpersonal relations to the development of entire modern legal and political orders rooted in biblical morality, such as the English common law, the US Constitution, and the broader Anglo-American conservative political tradition.

This was the foundation. Most religious people who end up in the conservative movement come there after faith has shaped their moral compass. For Hammer, it was the other way around: his politics started laying the groundwork for faith.

The instinctive conservatism he developed from 9/11 and the Bush years would eventually lead him to ask: If tradition is the shield against chaos in politics, what does that mean for his own life as a Jew?

At the time, though, Hammer was just a teenager who found himself on the other side of the classroom from his friends, defending waterboarding and George W. Bush. It didn’t make him popular, but it made him sure of himself. That confidence — that refusal to back down, even when outnumbered  — would become a defining trait of the adult Hammer, whether he’s on a debate stage or making quiet choices that later drew him toward Torah.

Inherited Wisdom

If 9/11 turned Josh Hammer into a conservative, it would take another decade before conservatism made him a Jew. It all started, almost by chance, during a trip many Jewish college students take simply because it’s free.

Between his junior and senior years at Duke, Hammer signed up for Birthright. He had joined a Jewish fraternity, but mostly for social reasons — the bagels mattered more than the mitzvos. Still, he was “a vaguely proud Jew,” and a ten-day trip to Israel seemed like a good opportunity.

It became more than that. Standing at the Kosel on Friday night stirred him, but what stayed with him even more was a view from the south.

“Looking out toward Gaza and seeing Hamas entrenched there in 2010, I thought: This is the same fight as 9/11,” he says. “Civilization versus barbarism. Good versus evil. Different battlefield, same war.”

Politics already shaped his view of the world. Israel fit perfectly into that view. But something else started to happen too: Hammer began reading. Not just about policies or elections, but about ideas. He came across Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, and Roger Scruton — towering figures in the conservative intellectual tradition, known for championing order, moral tradition, and the importance of inherited wisdom.

Burke, the 18th-century British statesman, warned of the dangers of revolutionary upheaval. Kirk revived Burkean conservatism in postwar America, emphasizing the “moral imagination.” Scruton, the English philosopher, argued that beauty, tradition, and religion were necessary to protect civilization from decay. Hammer saw in their work a framework for order in a chaotic world. From them, he absorbed a truth that gnawed at him: Civilization only persists when people honor the weight of tradition.

For Burke, it was the “compact between the dead, the living, and the yet unborn.” For Hammer — today a research fellow at the Edmund Burke Foundation, and a frequent speaker at its National Conservatism conferences — it became a mirror.

“At some point, you have to ask: If this makes sense, why am I not doing it myself?” he recalls. “I happen to be a Jew. I’m part of the oldest nation that still exists today. So if I actually believe this is how civilizations are preserved, why am I not living the Jewish tradition?”

That realization didn’t lead to an overnight transformation. Hammer didn’t suddenly replace fraternity parties with Daf Yomi. Instead, the shift happened gradually, almost stubbornly.

“I said, okay, that’s my last shrimp or oysters. I wasn’t about to go full kosher, but I stopped mixing meat and milk. A few years later, I got my first set of tefillin. I wasn’t davening a full Shacharit, but at least an abridged five or ten minutes each day.”

One step led to another. He met his future wife — whose father had become Orthodox as an adult himself — and that strengthened his sense of possibility.

“The pieces finally started clicking,” Hammer says. “It wasn’t dramatic. It was gradual. But it kept moving forward.”

By the time he sat down to write his first book, the intellectual had caught up with the practical.

“I intellectually accepted the basic claims of Orthodox Judaism a very long time ago — that Hashem exists, that revelation happened, that the Torah is the word of G-d. The final motivating factor was writing my book. Because you can’t just talk the talk, you really do have to walk the walk. If I’m writing a book making this argument, what kind of a glaring hypocrite would I be if I didn’t do it?”

A friend once told him he’s probably the first person whose kiruv journey was due to Edmund Burke. Hammer doesn’t disagree. “You know what? I didn’t think about it like that, but it’s pretty accurate. Honestly, it’s not common — probably rare — but it’s true.”

Most people grow up religious and let their politics follow, but Josh Hammer grew up political and later turned to religion. That reversal makes him unusual — yet perhaps especially suited to argue what he now dedicates himself to: that Western civilization cannot endure without Sinai — the very point he presents in Israel and Civilization.

Revelation over Relativism

It was one thing to discover Edmund Burke and the conservative canon. They provided Josh Hammer with categories that made sense of what he had observed since 9/11: tradition as ballast, covenant as the glue of civilization. But even as he highlighted Burke’s “compact between the dead, the living, and the yet unborn,” Hammer started to sense the ground shifting beneath those arguments.

Tradition, after all, is only as strong as the culture willing to uphold it. And reason — the proud legacy of Enlightenment thought — can just as easily justify evil as defend virtue.

“I read [Princeton professor and conservative thought leader] Robert George in the New York Times saying all you have to do is use reason, and you can deduce truth,” Hammer recalls. “I have a lot of respect for him — he’s brilliant — but I don’t agree with that. Reason isn’t a guarantee. It’s not an anchor.”

The example Hammer reaches for most often is chilling. “Nazi Germany was the most advanced society in the world — philosophically, mathematically, scientifically, industrially. And they thought applying their depraved theories was the reasonable thing to do. That’s what happens when you lean only on reason. Without revelation, it’s just reason versus reason — and who wins?”

It’s a refrain he has repeated in debates and on podcasts, sparring with rationalists who insist that universal human equality can be defended by logic alone.

“I got into a recent argument with [contrarian essayist] Coleman Hughes on his Free Press podcast,” he says. “He’s a brilliant guy, but he’s convinced you can get to morality without revelation. I told him: Maybe you’ll reach noble conclusions, maybe you won’t. But what happens when someone else, just as brilliant, deduces that the opposite is ‘reasonable’? What do you answer with?

“That’s when it collapses into subjectivity.”

That conviction — that revelation is the only antidote to relativism — has become one of the central pillars of his work, and the core argument of his book. It’s also the least fashionable. Hammer knows that modern audiences, left and right, are wary of appeals to G-d at Sinai. But he insists the argument cannot be ducked.

“Without genuine biblical revelation, Western ethics goes off the rails really, really quickly,” he says. “You really do need revelation. I really think you do.”

And for Hammer, that’s not just theology — it’s history. “There’s a reason why, inscribed on the outside of the Liberty Bell, it’s not a speech of Cicero or a quote from Aristotle,” he tells me. “It’s Leviticus, chapter 25: ‘You shall proclaim liberty throughout the land.’ That’s not Greek philosophy — that’s Torah.”

The point, for Hammer, is that the Torah’s influence on the West is not incidental. It’s foundational — and forgetting that means forgetting who we are.

“The simple truth,” he writes in the opening chapter of Israel and Civilization, “is that what we today call ‘Western civilization’ is the broader Judeo-Christian order. And it all began at Mount Sinai, with G-d’s revelation to the Israelites and the formation of Israel as the particular Jewish nation.”

And that, he believes, is why Sinai still haunts the world’s conscience.

It’s not his own thought. As Chazal teach, sin’ah — hatred — was born alongside Torah at Har Sinai. Because the giving of the Law isn’t only a covenant with the Jewish People. It is a rebuke to every civilization that tries to construct morality without the Author of morality.

For Hammer himself, though, this isn’t just theology. It is lived philosophy. Conviction came first. Consistency had to follow.

Burke and Scruton had explained why tradition mattered. But they could not answer the ultimate question: why this tradition, why this covenant. For that, Hammer turned not to Burke, but to Sinai.

And so the man who once wielded Burkean phrases as a young conservative began reaching for tefillin in the morning. For him, the two were not in conflict. Burke taught him that civilization cannot live without tradition. Sinai taught him that tradition cannot live without revelation.

Stubborn Survival

If revelation is the anchor, Israel is the front line.

That’s how Josh Hammer frames it in his writing and in conversation. The State of Israel is not simply another American ally, not merely a “strategic partner in the Middle East.”

“In the book,” he says, “I argue Israel is the tip of the spear against wokeism, Islamism, and global neoliberalism.”

It’s an argument that has ruffled feathers on both sides. But Hammer insists it is borne out not only by geopolitics, but by something deeper. “For the woke neo-Marxist,” he says, “if you really want to get rid of G-d, you start with the chosen people, the original people of the book.”

This is more than a sound bite. It’s a theory of history. The Jewish People’s stubborn survival, Hammer argues, gnaws at the conscience of every ideology that has sought to erase G-d from public life.

“The Jew is the eternal nagging weight on secular people’s conscience,” he tells me. “They don’t have a good answer for why we’re still here, still clinging to mitzvos after all these millennia. That endurance is itself a rebuke.”

He points to Karl Marx’s infamous 1840s essay, “On the Jewish Question.” Marx wanted not only to overthrow capitalism but also to uproot all established religion. And he knew where to start.

“Marx understood that if you want to eradicate the West, you begin with the Jews,” Hammer says. “That’s what animates so much of the woke obsession with Israel today.”

That obsession, he believes, is not really about settlements or Gaza policy or any particular government. It’s about the fact that Israel, and by extension the Jewish People, refuse to melt into a universalist soup.

“Israel is a particularist, nationalist project,” Hammer argues. “The defiantly nationalist Jewish state refuses to be homogenized by global liberalism.”

For Hammer, the point isn’t naïveté; it’s realism that can also be seen through a Torah lens. As Chazal put it — halachah hi b’yadua she’Eisav sonei l’Yaakov — a measure of hostility endures, no matter what.

Against that backdrop, he says: “I don’t want to say I’ve become resigned to anti-Semitism, but I’ve come to a certain acceptance of its inevitability. To an extent, it does seem to be part of the broader cosmological scheme of the world — for lack of a better description. Having said that — call me naïve — despite so much evidence to the contrary, I still stubbornly cling to the notion that for at least a lot of people, the truth has to matter.”

That tension — accepting what is, while insisting on what’s true — helps explain why Israel becomes the flashpoint in his argument.

Critics might accuse Hammer of inflating Israel’s role, of exaggerating its importance to the global clash of civilizations. But he pushes back.

“Look at the alliances,” he says. “On one side, the Islamists who want to erase Israel from the map. On the other, the woke progressives who chant ‘from the river to the sea.’ They have nothing in common except their hatred of Israel — and their hatred of what Israel represents.”

He uses a familiar shorthand: the “Red–Green alliance,” the radical left (red) and Islamists (green), which isn’t as much a movement as a convergence — the two parties are aligned on the same track. They think they’re driving the train; they aren’t. The engine is their common opposition to Israel and what it stands for — the West.

But underneath the political framing lies something more foundational: Israel is more than a nation-state. It is a theological stumbling block.

He cites The Israel Test by the economist and tech investor George Gilder, in which he makes the argument that people’s view of Israel is a test of their stance on Western civilization’s core values, such as capitalism, freedom, and excellence — a theme Hammer develops at greater length throughout Israel and Civilization.

“I genuinely do believe that the eternal existence of the Jew, the particularist, defiant nature of Jew, refusing to be homogenized and assimilated into the masses,” is the necessary bulwark against those who wish to destroy the West.

And that, he believes, is why Israel is not just another policy question. It is the spearpoint. Where Israel stands, Western civilization makes its stand.

Parallel Front

If Josh Hammer’s critiques of the left sound familiar to most Mishpacha readers, his next battlefield may sound more surprising. Because while progressives may be the ones chanting “from the river to the sea” on campus lawns, Hammer is fighting on a parallel front inside the conservative movement itself.

This battle requires more than rebuttals. It demands vigilance.

In the wake of October 7, that simmering skepticism on the right boiled over. A new wave of conservative influencers began openly questioning Israel’s morality, legitimacy, and even its right to exist, often echoing language once confined to the far left. The result has been a steady trickle of anti-Israel rhetoric from platforms once considered safe ground.

“I’ve actually gotten less pushback than I expected,” he admits. “Tucker Carlson hasn’t gone after my book directly. Neither has Candace Owens. Nick Fuentes has, but that’s not surprising. They’ve all bad-mouthed me, but not the book itself.” He pauses, then adds: “Maybe that means it elevated my stature enough that I’m just an easier target.”

Still, he sees the rot spreading. Among younger conservatives who call themselves — like President Trump popularized — “America First,” Israel can no longer just be assumed to be an ally. For them — and for good reason — foreign entanglements are suspect, the conventional wisdom must be questioned, and foreign aid is a waste. Standing with Jerusalem is therefore, to them, just another reflex of an older generation.

The most toxic version comes from Nick Fuentes, a fringe livestreamer known for Holocaust mockery and open Jew-hatred. Hammer dismisses him as “unreachable,” but not irrelevant. With his hundreds of thousands of followers, “he’s too loud on social media to ignore.”

There’s Candace Owens a former Daily Wire host who once worked closely with Ben Shapiro. Since October 7, she’s veered sharply into conspiratorial territory — from simply questioning foreign aid to Israel, to “understanding” anti-Semitism, and making unhinged claims like “today’s Jews aren’t the real Jews” and that “Muslims were only allowed to live in the Muslim Quarter” of Jerusalem. She has even more followers than Fuentes.

And finally, Tucker Carlson. Of the three, Hammer considers Carlson the most dangerous, precisely because he is the most polished.

“Tucker’s slick,” Hammer says. “He doesn’t call for Israel’s destruction, but the worldview he’s promoting undermines the theological foundations that make an alliance possible.”

With millions of impressions every time he posts an episode of his independent show online (very often with guests complaining how the Israel lobby has outsized influence on American policy), Carlson’s critiques of Israel and musings about a Christianity without the Hebrew Bible carry a real threat.

“That’s far more corrosive in the long run,” Hammer warns, “because the moment Christians think they don’t need the Old Testament, the entire foundation of Jewish-Christian solidarity collapses.”

And this underscores the void left by the Charlie Kirk assassination. “He was holding back some really nasty stuff in some very young, far-right online circles. He was doing more than maybe anyone in the country to fight that. Part of me kind of worries, frankly, about what that energy does from here in his absence.”

For Hammer, the key is distinguishing between bad-faith provocateurs and those who can still be reached. “For folks who are actually attainable,” he says, “going through actual facts and history is possible.”

That’s the strategy behind Chapter Seven of Israel and Civilization, where he makes the case not through sentiment, but nationalism: Israel acts in its own interest — and when it does, America benefits.

“That’s what makes an ally,” he says.

It’s a nationalist case for Israel, crafted for an audience that distrusts sentiment.

“America doesn’t have to choose between John McCain everywhere and Ron Paul nowhere,” he argues, as though the only possible options are the late Arizona senator’s hyper-interventionism and the former Texas congressman’s allergy to any exercise of American power. “There’s a middle ground.”

That middle ground, for Hammer, is what he calls “nationalist realism”: America doesn’t go abroad in search of monsters to destroy (as John Quincy Adams famously described it), but it also doesn’t bury its head in the sand.

“And by that standard,” he says, “Israel is the ideal ally. Because when Israel takes action against Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iran, it’s not doing it as a favor to Washington. It’s doing it for its own survival. But the side effect is that America benefits too, because those same groups are sworn enemies of the US.”

This framing allows him to draw a bright line between himself and the neoconservative legacy that led America into Iraq. “I’ve got really harsh words for neoconservatism,” he says. “I think the Bush idea of exporting democracy to everyone was a disaster. But that doesn’t mean isolationism works either. It’s a false choice.”

That’s why Hammer is willing to touch a third rail that most American pro-Israel advocates strenuously avoid: foreign aid.

“Frankly, I think US–Israel aid should be wound down. Not overnight, but on a timetable. That’s in Israel’s interest too.”

It’s a counterintuitive move, but Hammer believes it disarms critics who paint Israel as a dependent client state. “A strong Israel doesn’t need perpetual American checks. And it makes our alliance look cleaner when we both stand on our own feet.”

Part of his work is also historical housekeeping. In debates, Hammer finds himself correcting what he calls “false narratives that spread like wildfire online.” Chief among them is the idea that “the Jews” pushed America into the Iraq War.

“People forget Ariel Sharon was actually opposed to the invasion,” he points out. “He warned it would create a vacuum for Iran — which turned out to be exactly right. That’s the record. But conspiracy theories are louder.”

In the end, Hammer sees this struggle inside the right every bit as important as his duels with the left. “If conservatives forget who their allies are, if they let people like Fuentes or Candace or Tucker redefine what ‘America First’ means, then the movement becomes unmoored from its moral and theological roots,” he warns.

Which is why the lawyer-turned-commentator spends as much time persuading his own side as battling the other. For Josh Hammer, defending Israel is not just about facing down the progressives. It’s about making sure the conservative family doesn’t lose its own memory.

Pragmatic Alliance

If Josh Hammer worries about fissures on the right, he also sees hope — not in libertarian podcasters or slick television hosts, but in the pews of America’s churches.

“Most religious people — whether Jews or Christians — just have respect for other religious people,” he says. “We know we’re on the same team.”

That conviction shapes one of Hammer’s boldest arguments: that religious Jews and serious Christians can and must form a common front against an encroaching secular state.

For him, the battle lines are clear. “The threat isn’t missionaries knocking on my door,” he tells me. He worries far more about state pressure on yeshivos over curriculum mandates.

It’s not the first time Jews and Christians have linked arms politically. A generation ago, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and John Hagee’s CUFI (Christians United for Israel) rallied evangelical support for Israel by citing the pasuk in Lech Lecha: “I will bless those who bless you.” That theology was called dispensationalism, and it built a powerful political base.

But Hammer argues that today’s alliance must look different. Younger evangelicals aren’t animated by 1980s-era prophecy charts and end-times timelines. Instead, Hammer sees instinctive sympathy for the Jewish People and Israel rooted in the Torah — and in a shared resistance to secular overreach.

“If a Christian wants to support the Jewish state and the Jewish People because he or she sees some innate value there, that’s great,” he says. “That’s to be welcomed. That kind of natural solidarity is more sustainable today than eschatological calculations about the end of days.”

A big part of the challenge, as Hammer acknowledges, is Jewish skepticism. Centuries of missionary targeting and cultural collision have left scars. Secular Jews, in particular, often see Christian support as suspect or even threatening. And within Orthodoxy, some still bristle at the thought of making common cause with churches.

Hammer doesn’t deny there’s a real gulf built on centuries of well-earned mistrust. But he insists that coalition-building isn’t about erasing differences. At no part of any alliance should there ever be any discussion about theology. “It’s a pragmatic alliance,” he says.

Instead, Hammer paints a different picture of the ideal partner: the pastor who teaches that Christianity depends on the Torah, the church that sees Jewish continuity not as a threat but as evidence of G-d’s faithfulness. He points to younger evangelicals at Turning Point USA who express instinctive admiration for Israel and for visibly observant Jews — the seeds of something real, he believes.

He has reason for optimism. Even in youth spaces that have grown more skeptical, support remains durable. At the Turning Point summit where he debated Smith, a post-debate poll of roughly 2,000 attendees found 73% “pro-Israel.”

For Hammer, the Jewish–Christian alliance isn’t a luxury. It’s survival. In his mind, Orthodox Jews can no longer afford to view Christians as their adversaries. The real contest is against secular ideologies that aim to banish G-d from public life entirely. And on that battlefield, he argues, Jews and Christians stand shoulder to shoulder.

And that’s the point he is really trying to make with his book. But at the same time, there is more than that. Much more.

“My number one audience is Christians. Number two is Jews — like me — who grew up more assimilated and secular. I try to lay it all out there, often in very personal terms: Here’s my journey. It didn’t happen overnight; it was a long road. I did it — you can do it too.”

He argues the single biggest thing Jews can do is simply be more Jewish. Political engagement is necessary, but the greater need is to recognize what we are — and what we have.

Truth Matters

Josh Hammer doesn’t pretend it’s easy. To argue for revelation in a world that insists reason is enough. To argue for Israel among progressives who see it as colonialism, and conservatives who increasingly see it as baggage. To argue, above all, that Jewish survival is not an accident of history but the outgrowth of covenant.

There are nights, he admits, when it feels like standing alone. The easy path would be to lean on the familiar clichés, to play to applause lines, to soften the edges of what Torah actually demands. But Hammer has never been drawn to the easy path. “Having said that — call me naïve — I still stubbornly cling to the notion that, for at least a lot of people, the truth has to matter.”

And that, in the end, is what makes his story compelling. Not only that he has moved, step by step, into an observant Jewish life — though that matters. Not only that he can spar with podcasters and politicians — though that too has its place. What makes Hammer compelling is that he insists on telling the harder truth: that without revelation, all the rest crumbles.

That insistence has cost him. He’s been attacked from the left as a reactionary, and from the right as a “neocon lite.” He has been dismissed as a throwback, caricatured as a zealot, mocked by those on the fringes for his kippah and his arguments alike. And yet he keeps speaking — appearing on television, podcasts, and speaking engagements several times a week. Because he believes that it makes a difference.

“I really do think that the median American citizen is amenable to facts and logic and reason,” he says. “We have to reach them.”

Hammer is not the first Jew to feel that tension, of course. Ours is a people that has carried unwelcome truths into unwelcome places for millennia. Hammer sees himself as standing in that tradition: carrying words that are necessary even when they are not welcome.

And perhaps that is the irony. The lawyer who once thought his legacy would be built in courtrooms or newspapers has discovered that the more lasting legacy may be something older, quieter, and harder: living the covenant he argues for.

For Josh Hammer, the debates, the columns, the speeches are all part of the same work. But the ultimate proof will not be on YouTube or in a think-tank archive. It will be in his children and grandchildren, as he begins the uninterrupted line back to Sinai anew, inheriting to them the covenant he chose to embrace.

Because in the end, the most important audience is not the crowd in the hall or even the memory bank of the internet. It is the generations yet to come, who will ask whether we defended revelation when the world turned its back on it.

Hammer wants his answer to be clear.

Telling about the Tribe

“I have a special place in my heart for observant Jews, all Jews, but especially those who dedicate their lives to the Torah.”

—Charlie Kirk, to Radio host Ari Hoffman, 2021

AS America mourns and processes the loss of Charlie Kirk, most of the coverage focuses on him being the victim of a political assassination, what that means for America moving forward, and the profound void left by his untimely death. He was killed by an apparent opponent of his politics — someone who sought to silence him and what he stood for with a bullet. Still, there is another aspect of his legacy that is equally important to consider, and perhaps even more relevant to the readers of these pages.

As the last few years have made more and more clear, we are living in a world that is ever more comfortable accepting and even normalizing hatred of Jews. In this new reality, a handful of strong and outspoken allies of the Jewish people have emerged. And while most people saw in Kirk a conservative champion, the creator of a political turnout machine, and a galvanizer of young Americans, he also stood steadfast on the side of the Jewish people. Time and again he said it plainly: Jew-hatred is “demonic,” and it has no place among right-wing youth. His impact was incredible and great; the void he leaves is real.

Running through clips of his most viral exchanges in the aftermath of the fateful day on which a madman took his life precisely because he stood for many of the things we stand for, one can’t help but notice his strident defense of the Jewish people — including Israel — but more importantly and especially the Jews in America. His steadfast allyship, as well as his ability to counter when his interlocutors took pesukim or gemaras out of context, was so incredibly valuable if only to inform this new generation of conservatives that the slop they so easily consume online is just downright wrong.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1081)