The Heritage Foundation provoked widespread outrage with the publication of their Project 2025, a policy agenda that targets immigrants and trans people, attacks abortion access, proposes to erode voting rights, censors curricula, and prohibits protest and free speech. Less public attention has been given, however, to the Heritage Foundation’s additional document titled “Project Esther.” The document outlines a strategy for dismantling the Palestine solidarity movement in the United States by deploying false claims of antisemitism and terrorism against the movement. It lays out a sweeping program of surveillance, propaganda, deportation, and criminalization. We can only imagine that after deploying these right-wing tactics on defenders of Palestinian liberation, they will target other movements of social justice with similar campaigns of violence, and the Trump administration appears to be manifesting this extremist vision now.
Project Esther appropriates the story of Queen Esther, the Jewish heroine who saved the Jewish people from extermination; Jews commemorate her story during the spring holiday of Purim. While the Heritage Foundation calls Project Esther their “National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism,” their program does precisely the opposite. Rather than protecting Jews from antisemitism, Project Esther deploys antisemitic conspiracy theories mixed with the false claim of “defending” Jews as a smokescreen to attack the Palestinian liberation movement. While this movement is diverse, we know these attacks will be used to disproportionately target Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab people, non-citizens first among them, as well as organizations representing them. Project Esther aims at nothing less than the full-scale dismantling of the Palestine solidarity movement as a crucial ingredient of the racist anti-immigrant policies unleashed simultaneously, and it invokes the defense of the Jewish people as rhetorical human shields in order to do so.
In that, the Heritage Foundation is not alone. Rather, the appropriation of Esther is the next chapter of a genocidal vision that has historically manipulated this Biblical text in an effort to tie Christian Nationalists to Jewish Zionists.
Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank have long exploited Purim to escalate violence against their Palestinian neighbors, from Baruch Goldstein’s 1994 Ibrahimi mosque massacre up to the Huwara pogrom in 2023. Jewish terrorists have reactivated exterminationist interpretations of the Book of Esther in an effort to provide religious justifications for their genocidal ideologies. It would thus be too simplistic to say “This is not Judaism.” Whether in Palestine or the United States, the far right projects fanatical religious interpretations of Esther onto Palestinians and their allies, and translates them into political projects of ethnic cleansing, expulsions, political repression, and terror in real-time. Project Esther uncovers the international entanglements and global proportions of how fascistic forces use what they call “antisemitism” for the advancement of their own antisemitic agendas.
Rather than protecting Jews from antisemitism, Project Esther deploys antisemitic conspiracy theories mixed with the false claim of ‘defending’ Jews as a smokescreen to attack the Palestinian liberation movement.
Christian Nationalists also have a long history of appropriating the figure of Esther as an ideal of womanhood, a woman who both engages in political action while remaining, in their interpretations, subservient to male authority around her. Diana Hagee—wife of notorious antisemite and founder of Christians United for Israel, Pastor John Hagee—taught teenagers to view Esther as a “bride of Christ who prepared her body and soul for total submission.” More recently, the phrase “for such a time as this,” drawn (and from Jewish perspective, decontextualized) from Esther 4:14, has become a shibboleth for Christian Nationalist calls for “spiritual warfare,” including calls to violence. Much like the report itself, the invocation of Esther in the report’s title seeks to smuggle in far-right Christian Nationalism under the guise of Jewish safety.
Resisting these apocalyptic misuses of Judaism for settler violence, anti-Zionist Jews in the United States have joined Palestinian-led coalitions to spend the past 16 months organizing our communities to recognize and resist a genocide unfolding before our eyes. Throughout this time, powerful constituencies have repeated the bald lie that this genocide in Gaza was an operation enacted to ensure Jewish safety. From Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich, and Itamar Ben-Gvir to US entities, including institutions claiming to represent American Jews and university administrations, we have heard “Jewish safety” invoked in the service of committing genocide, while those speaking against genocide have been slandered as antisemites. As writer, attorney, and analyst Dylan Saba has pointed out, the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther simply promises the increased use of defamation, criminalization, and deportation to dismantle the Palestine solidarity movement.
As Jews, we denounce Project Esther’s manipulation of our community’s experiences of oppression and our cultural identity for a racist, anti-Palestinian project that seeks to shore up the US-Israel alliance. We write now to reclaim our heritage and biblical traditions from Christian nationalists who invoke Jewish protection only to advance a White supremacist, misogynist, imperial, and anti-LGBTQIA+ agenda that further endangers Jewish peoples in the U.S. and abroad. In disingenuously speaking for Jews, the Heritage Foundation attempts to deny Jewish agency, and to install Christian Nationalists as the proper arbiters of the Jewish past and our Jewish present. The Heritage Foundation undermines Jewish voices by acting as if Jews cannot advocate for ourselves or that we speak with a single voice. It wrongly positions itself as the authority on Jewish identity, safety, and vulnerability. Moreover, it claims Jews must be separated from others for our protection, when this isolation actually serves their own agenda. While they explicitly state that they seek Jewish partners to assist in achieving their political goals of repressing dissent and mandating allegiance to Zionism and US patriotism, no collaboration with Jewish people or Jewish institutions can hide the basic White nationalism, Christian fundamentalism, and antisemitism that are the well-known provenance of the Heritage Foundation.
Against Project Esther’s efforts to marginalize and silence anti-Zionists, we insist on our presence and our voices. We insist that Jewish people in our diversity and heterogeneity, not Christian Nationalists, determine Jewish belonging and interpret how our histories of displacement, threat, and violence inflect our lived experiences and principles in this moment. And we insist that the Heritage Foundation and other far-right groups (including those self-identified as Jewish) represent the real threat to Jewish liberation and human rights writ large. Ours is a liberatory struggle that takes shape in combination and in concert with overlapping movements against White supremacy, settler colonialism, and fascism.
We begin this statement, collectively written by the Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace, with our objection to the Heritage Foundation—a Christian Nationalist organization—deciding what is best for the Jewish people and what constitutes antisemitism, especially when the definition they offer equates anti-Zionism with antisemitism. We note with alarm that the Heritage Foundation’s proposal manifests, for example, in Donald Trump’s executive order 13899, signed on January 30, 2025, with the Orwellian title “Additional Measures to Combat Antisemitism.” This executive order is already being used to criminalize not only protests in solidarity with Palestine, but even simple displays of Palestinian culture, like a flag or a keffiyeh. The Department of Justice’s sweeping “investigations” into alleged antisemitism on college campuses and the aggressive efforts to deport Mahmoud Khalil in retaliation for his political activism demonstrate how Project Esther’s blueprint for suppression is already being implemented through governmental mechanisms of surveillance and punishment. This is the eliminationist agenda of Project Esther at work, one that invokes “Jewish safety” in an effort to banish the very existence of Palestinians and Palestinian culture from the public sphere.
Our analysis exposes the Heritage Foundation’s deceptive claim to “combat” antisemitism, while emphasizing the antisemitism inherent in Christian Zionism: Project Esther repeats and fortifies antisemitic tropes which are simply transferred from Jews to the Palestine solidarity movement. The very notion of a “Hamas Support Network,” a term the authors of the document have contrived to vilify us, redeploys an antisemitic conspiracy theory whereby a hidden cabal is purported to secretly control political opposition and social justice movements; it is also a falsehood, presuming as it does that all struggles for the Palestinian people are lined up behind Hamas. Their rhetoric refuses to honor the complexity of the movement for Palestinian freedom and constitutes a slur against all those who are exercising constitutional rights of freedom, affiliation, and expression. Ominously, Project Esther proposes the criminalization and deportation of protestors, abridging rights and principles fundamental to the Constitution. It also recommends the targeting and possible firing of faculty who express viewpoints in support of Palestine. This constitutes an attack on institutions of learning, particularly higher education. Project Esther proposes a surveillance and repression of curricula, media, and non-profit organizations for any mention of “Hamas support”—its code for support for Palestinian liberation.
In disingenuously speaking for Jews, the Heritage Foundation attempts to deny Jewish agency, and to install Christian Nationalists as the proper arbiters of the Jewish past and our Jewish present.
State repression has been directed against Palestinian people and their political allies for some time. But Project Esther differs from the uneven patchwork of campus crackdowns, deportations, and visa denials in decades past. The legal architecture proposed by Project Esther would be partially executed under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) against protesters in the Palestine solidarity movement. This act was created in 1970 to combat organized crime and convict mafia bosses. It has been used historically against leftist groups, and was used recently to bring false money laundering charges against “Stop Cop City” protesters in Atlanta, Georgia. Further, in November 2024, the US House of Representatives passed the “Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act,” also known as the “Non-Profit Killer Bill,” which promises to revoke the tax-exempt status of any organization that provides “material support” to terrorism. While the bill did not become law in the 118th Congress (2023–25), we expect that it and similar bills seeking to criminalize the Palestine solidarity movement will return under the current Congress. If all support for Palestine is now branded as support for Hamas, and Hamas is considered a terrorist organization, then it follows that any and all support for Palestine could be prosecuted under this proposed implementation.
The charge of “support” for Palestine remains overbroad and vaguely defined. We have already seen the grave consequences of this logic play out across institutions of higher education. Students are being disciplined for holding silent study-ins in their campus libraries. Professors are being banned from their own classrooms and having their syllabi interrogated by administrators because of their participation in nonviolent protests. Some have even been fired for sharing the words of Palestinian poets on their personal social media pages. Minor infractions like unauthorized postering or protests are being met with expulsion and even felony charges. And schools are being investigated for allowing students to wear keffiyeh and Palestinian flags on their graduation regalia. Should Project Esther’s vision come to pass, any educational support, demonstrations, or even expressions of Palestinian identity could be construed as support for “terrorism” and punishable.
We conclude this post by noting that Project Esther misunderstands the history of Esther, whose legacy we reclaim for the living Jewish tradition of anti-Zionism. We join in a rich tradition of Jews who interpret the story as a feminist tale from which we can glean ethical precepts: rejecting demonization, opposing genocide, and standing for principles of equality among peoples.
Project Esther: A Christian Nationalist Project
Project Esther purports to be a document about ensuring Jewish safety. Despite this, few Jews were consulted in the drafting of this document. The project’s co-chairs—Pastor Mario Bramnick and Luke Moon—are self-identified Christian Nationalists whose support for Israel stems from their belief that Jewish presence in the Holy Land will precipitate the End Times. Historically, this merger of philosemitism (the professed love or admiration for Jews) and antisemitism has undermined Jewish belonging in America, as our exile to Israel is viewed as necessary for the Second Coming of Christ.
While Bramnick and Moon included participants from a handful of smaller, far-right Jewish organizations in Project Esther, they excluded larger Jewish organizations—even those on the right with strong ideological overlap with the Heritage Foundation. This exclusion is evident in both the document’s language and policy recommendations, which reflect a broad Christian Nationalist framing rather than concerns emerging from American Jewish communities.
We note with particular alarm how the embrace of Project Esther and broader claims of supporting Israel are actively being used to shield Trump’s appointment of multiple White supremacists, Christian Nationalists, and avowed antisemites in the highest offices of the land. To give just a few examples: Darren Beattie, a frequent speaker at White supremacist events, has been nominated as undersecretary of state; Trump’s FBI Director, Kash Patel, has repeatedly appeared on Holocaust denier podcasts; Trump’s Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, is on record declaring “We want our nation to be a Christian nation”; Trump has appointed Sebastian Gorka, who has been linked with Hungarian Nazi organizations, as senior director for counterterrorism; and Elon Musk infamously gave the Nazi salute twice while standing in front of the Seal of the President of the United States during Trump’s inauguration. Project Esther provides cover for these White supremacists and Christian Nationalists to advance their own antisemitic and Islamophobic agendas.
Project Esther and the Architecture of Repression
The Project Esther document begins with the accusation that the entire pro-Palestine movement is composed of direct supporters of Hamas and are therefore terrorists and should be treated as such. As they write: “The virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American groups comprising the so-called pro-Palestinian movement […] are part of a highly organized, global Hamas Support Network (HSN) and therefore effectively a terrorist support network.” The document declares this mission from the outset: “to dismantle the infrastructure that sustains the HSN and associated movements’ antisemitic violence inside the United States of America within 12 to 24 months.” Their goal is specifically to dismantle movement infrastructure on this accelerated timeline. In order to do this, the Heritage Foundation proposes assembling a broad coalition of actors and organizations across government, civil society, and academia to enact this campaign of political repression in every sector of American society. They intend to “exploit fissures” and “generate strategic dilemmas” so that pro-Palestine activists “feel extreme discomfort” and “capitulate to our pressure campaign.” They intend to pursue lawfare and political repression through “the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA); the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO); and counterterrorism, hate speech, and immigration laws.”
They declare that “an effective strategy and campaign focused on the HSN will level a decisive blow against both antisemitism and anti-Americanism.” While the report never defines anti-Americanism (and antisemitism is simply defined as any and all criticism of Israel or support for Palestinian survival), the implication throughout the document is clear that any strand of left-wing thought, any organizing against oppression or exploitation is, in true McCarthyite fashion, anti-American. Their intent is not only to limit pro-Palestine activism, but to use attacks on Palestine solidarity to also strike out at fields such as Critical Theory, Ethnic Studies, and Gender and Women’s Studies, university initiatives including but not limited to DEI, and movements like migrant justice and Black Lives Matter, all alleged to be elements of this “anti-American ideology.” The slippage between focusing on the Palestine movement and general “anti-Americanism” is one of the many indications in this document that the repression formula they develop here will eventually find its way to targeting all movements for social justice.
They articulate a set of 11 “desired end states” (ES), each more harrowing than the last. We highlight just a few here: Their number one priority (ES1) takes aim at the U.S. education system, specifically at universities. Coming on the heels of several years of attacks on so-called “Critical Race Theory,” the Heritage Foundation sees academia as a primary target. ES3 attempts to block “access to U.S. open society”; elsewhere in the document, the following rights are described as characteristics of US open society: the freedom of assembly, first amendment rights of political affiliation, the right to free movement, and an open press. By attempting to block access to these fundamental political rights, the Heritage Foundation is specifically laying out a blueprint for complete political repression. They also hope that pro-Palestine organizations will lose access to the US economy (ES4) and to any form of political representation (ES5), no matter how paltry. They then call for the US Executive Branch to adopt a strategy to pursue “legal and criminal prosecutions” (ES6) with the goal of activists’ communications being disrupted (ES7) and therefore being “unable to conduct or sustain demonstrations and protests” (ES8).
The document lays out 19 “desired effects” (DEs). The first five all concern universities: “purging” pro-Palestinian “propaganda” from curricula (DE1), getting all anti-Zionist faculty and staff “removed or fired” (DE2), removing all access of pro-Palestinian organizations to all campuses (DE3), removing access of “foreign” members of these organizations from campuses (DE4), and limiting the donations to schools from organizations with ties to Palestine (DE5). Off campus the desired outcomes include collecting and presenting evidence of the Palestine movement’s “criminal activity” (DE9), being kicked off of all social media (DE10), the loss of any means of public communication (DE11), as well as the loss of internal communications (DE12). They foresee that this will result in the inability of the movement to coordinate actions (DE13), that permits for demonstrations will be denied (DE14), and hence that people will not join them (DE15). We have already seen these aspirations shape the current administration’s thinking, with Executive Order 13899 threatening everything, from the withholding of funds to universities that tolerate pro-Palestine activism, to threats of criminal prosecution against the movement, to efforts to deport non-citizens who engage in dissent.
The document lays out 28 necessary conditions (NCs) to achieve these outcomes: discrediting Palestinian liberation both off-campus (NC1) and on-campus (NC2); requiring that all curricula provide a “both sides” approach (NC3); undermining the credibility of pro-Palestine faculty and staff (NC4) so their employment is terminated (NC5); declaring all Palestine organizing in violation of campus principles (NC6) leading to such organizations loss of campus affiliations (NC7); finding foreign students and faculty in violation of their visas (NC8 and 9) leading them to either leave the US (NC10) or get deported (NC11); and targeting their ability to use social media (NC 20, 21, 22). Their goal is to undermine trust among the organizations in the movement (NC23), and this is a crucial piece of the strategy.
Even before Trump’s inauguration, too many universities have already adopted this agenda, firing faculty for extramural speech, interfering in their syllabi, and banning organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. These are fundamental violations of academic freedom and basic Constitutional Rights. We call on universities to recognize the threat posed by Project Esther and Project 2025 and take concrete action.
Not In Our Name
The equation of Zionism and Judaism is always a heinous act of political erasure of the complexity and history of Judaism and of diverse Jewish perspectives on Zionism and Israel, but it is especially egregious coming from the Heritage Foundation, a notoriously Christian Zionist organization. The Heritage Foundation is attempting to give itself the authority to determine who is authentically Jewish and who—by embracing the Jewish traditions of tzedek (justice), tikkun olam (repairing the world), and social activism in supporting freedom and justice in Palestine, has “abandoned” their ties to Judaism. As Jewish anti-Zionists, we reject this narrow definition of Jewish people, and instead claim our place in the struggle for “a world where many worlds fit.” We believe that Jewish liberation must be a struggle waged alongside all racialized and colonized people across the globe, especially Palestinians. Constructing Israel as “the only safe place for Jews” suggests that other governments do not have an obligation to all their citizens to protect against discrimination–Jews among them. As critical scholars of Zionism have long surmised, the Zionist drive for the “ingathering of the exiles,” materialized in the Law of Return, is a strategy both for the colonization of Palestine and for Jewish assimilation into the global colonial order. The Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther directly subscribes to this vision.
In speaking back against this narrative, we cast our lot with Queen Esther—a woman who lived amongst other peoples, not apart from them, who stood for essential principles of cohabitation and equality.
We object to the Heritage Foundation’s production of this document and its effective adoption and implementation as state practice under the Trump regime. Likewise, we oppose any Jewish institutions that support this blatantly antisemitic form of Zionism. Despite its pretense to “combat antisemitism,” Project Esther never addresses antisemitism, nor the fundamental White supremacist ideologies upon which antisemitism rests. Instead, it weaponizes the notion of Jewish oppression—defined through a conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism—to promote a conspiracy theory about the grassroots Palestine solidarity movement. The Heritage Foundation claims that the “ideology and actions” of Jewish Voice for Peace, Students for Justice in Palestine, and American Muslims for Palestine—progressive grassroots organizations that oppose apartheid and genocide—“directly challenge and attempt to undermine the American values that are fundamental to our way of life, our nation’s success, and our future.” In characterizing our movement against colonial violence as a “terrorist” movement, the Heritage Foundation proposes to upend reality. It is the US-Israeli alliance, not grassroots human rights organizations advocating for an end to Israeli genocide, that are producing mass death in Gaza and across Palestine.
In the midst of the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, which many have named the “first livestreamed genocide in human history,” the Israeli state claims to act on behalf of all Jews. From afar we witness daily acts of ethnic cleansing, as the Israeli army has killed dozens and even hundreds of Palestinian adults and children each day for more than a year. The Israeli state produces conditions of deprivation and misery so profound as to comprise a textbook example of the “destruction of a society” that Jewish scholar Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide to name. Let us state what should appear obvious: this mass violence does not counter antisemitism at all; indeed it reanimates long-standing anti-Jewish sentiment and inspires new forms of antisemitic prejudice. Hiding behind the lie of “saving” Jews, Israeli violence continues and makes anew a history of settler genocide. Genocide does not and cannot make anyone safer. We are all made more unsafe in a world where the wholesale destruction of a people is rationalized. As Jews in particular, we denounce the attempt to commit genocide in the name of our safety. As Jews, we declare, “Not in our name!”
In the wake of October 7th, 2023, a renewed “War on Terror” began, with the US-Israeli alliance galvanized for further efforts to control land and resources, starting with the most intense bombing campaign of the 21st century. This mass destruction relies on a cultural strategy of White supremacy, which uses a Christian notion of antisemitism to justify the fight against it and so to run cover for US-Israeli exceptionalism. Project Esther is a right-wing offensive meant to squelch people power and democratic speech rights in order to usher in ever-more authoritarian state power in which the state perpetually renews its weaponry. Despite its purported aim of addressing antisemitism, Project Esther instead reinforces harmful antisemitic ideologies while repackaging them in contemporary language. To understand this dynamic, it’s important to examine the historical context of antisemitism and how Project Esther perpetuates these patterns.
Project Esther: Reiterating Historical Antisemitism
Project Esther’s methodology eerily mirrors the conspiracy theories it claims to combat. It constructs a narrative about a supposed network of Jewish funders orchestrating anti-Zionist organizations, baselessly linking these groups to Palestinian militant operations. This framework not only attempts to delegitimize criticism of Israeli policies but also dangerously resurrects antisemitic tropes about hidden Jewish influence, especially fiscal, and global conspiracy.
The term “antisemitism” emerged in late 19th-century Europe to describe the views of German nationalist thinkers who portrayed Jews as an alien presence fundamentally incompatible with European society. Rather than addressing the profound societal changes of the era—including the breakup of empires, the rise of nation-states, the decline of religious authorities, mass migration, and the impact of industrial capitalism—antisemitic ideologues scapegoated Jewish communities for these upheavals.
This narrative built upon centuries-old stereotypes of Jews as subversive forces within European Christian society. The widespread circulation of fraudulent documents like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the 1920s further promoted the false notion of a global Jewish conspiracy. These works portrayed Jews as an inassimilable threat to western civilization, encompassing supposed racial, economic, and cultural dangers.
Where the infamous late nineteenth-century “Protocols” fabricated an elaborate Jewish global conspiracy, Project Esther invents the equally fictional “Hamas Support Network” (HSN), already mentioned above. The document describes this purported network using language that echoes classical antisemitic stereotypes, speaking of “vast networks of activists and funders” pursuing “insidious” goals to undermine democracy and capitalism. Just as the “Protocols” depicted Jews as dedicated to the wholesale destruction of western civilization, Christianity, and capitalism, Project Esther portrays the equally fictional “HSN” as an existential threat to American values and way of life.
The document’s portrayal of the “HSN” as having penetrated and subverted major American institutions mirrors one of the most pernicious aspects of the “Protocols—the notion of hidden Jewish infiltration of society’s power centers. Where the “Protocols” claimed Jewish agents had secretly gained control of banking, media, and government to advance a global conspiracy, Project Esther similarly depicts “HSN” operatives as having covertly embedded themselves throughout Congress, universities, civil society organizations, and news outlets to promote an anti-Israel/anti-American agenda. This parallel extends beyond mere structure into rhetoric; both texts employ images of “infiltration,” “penetration,” and “subversion” to suggest that these supposed networks have compromised vital institutions from within. Just as the “Protocols” portrayed Jews as masters of deception who could appear outwardly respectable while secretly undermining society, Project Esther characterizes “HSN” members as skilled manipulators who have gained influential positions while concealing their true aims. This recycling of classic antisemitic tropes about shadowy infiltrators corrupting societal institutions is particularly troubling given how such conspiracy theories have historically been used to justify persecution against Jews. This structural similarity in conspiracy theorizing demonstrates how antisemitic frameworks can be repurposed, targeting non-Jewish “others” while maintaining their essential characteristics.
Project Esther continues this tradition of marginalization while presenting itself as a solution to antisemitism. Instead of addressing antisemitism as one form of bigotry among many, it promotes the same exceptional treatment of Jewish communities that characterized historical antisemitism. The project advocates for Jewish separation from broader society, now reframed as relocation to Israel, while defending Israel’s status as an ethno-nationalist state. This reveals the convergence and intersection of White Christian Nationalism and Christian Zionism, a movement that predated Jewish Zionism and has many more adherents. For example, Christians United for Israel (CUFI) has over 11 million members, a population greater than the entire Jewish population in the United States.
The project advances what could be termed a “double ethnic cleansing” agenda. First, it seeks to convince Jews that they are fundamentally unsafe in America, creating an atmosphere of fear designed to encourage their emigration to Israel. Second, it envisions an Israel without its indigenous Palestinian population, promoting a colonialist narrative that denies Palestinian rights and humanity. Both of these maneuvers attempt to incite Jewish people to fear, priming Jewish people to become subjects of militarized state-nationalism both in Israel and the US. Importantly, all of this once again assumes that all Jews have a historical link with European antisemitism. This homogenizing understanding of Jewishness discounts Sephardic, Mizrahi, Ethiopian,and Russian Jewish people, as well as their cultures and histories.
Instead of addressing antisemitism as one form of bigotry among many, Project Esther promotes the same exceptional treatment of Jewish communities that characterized historical antisemitism.
At its core, Project Esther represents continuity of a historic, strategic alliance between Christian Nationalists and Zionists who manipulate antisemitism for ideological purposes. By portraying diaspora Jews as perpetually endangered, these groups pressure Jewish communities to embrace an ethno-nationalist agenda that presents Israel as the only viable haven for Jewish survival. This narrative deliberately ignores the interconnected nature of various forms of oppression, including racism and Islamophobia, instead treating Jewish identity in isolation. It fails to see that no one form of racism can be fully overcome without overcoming all racisms. Indeed, Project Esther activates and thrives on Islamophobia and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism.
Equally troubling is the document’s homogenization of Jewish identity and experience. As Arab-Jewish scholars such as Ella Shohat have argued, the rich histories of non-European Jews have been elided through a Eurocentric framing that routes all forms of Jewish identity through European antisemitism. In this project “Zionist historiography” comes to “consist… of a morbidly selective ‘tracing the dots’ from pogrom to pogrom as evidence of relentless hostility toward Jews in the Arab world, reminiscent of that encountered in Europe” (6). Such erasures are deeply ahistorical; they also silence criticisms of the Israeli state’s racism and eugenic projects against its non-European Jewish subjects (See also Sahar Mandour and The Palestinian Feminist Collective). This Eurocentric homogenization of “the Jew” functions as a lynchpin of Israeli settler colonialism because, as Moshé Machover elucidates, this move consolidates a central feature of political Zionism: “that the totality of Jews the world over is a single national collectivity—a people (ethnos).” Put simply, without this homogenization, the grammar of the ethno-nationalist state would fall apart.
By presenting Jews as a monolithic entity with uniform interests and perspectives, Project Esther systematically denies the diversity of Jewish thought and practice—especially regarding Zionism and Palestine—and instead weaponizes concerns for Jewish safety in order to further its ideological agenda. This silences rich histories of Jewish resistance to Zionism, as well as histories of interwoven lives of Jews, including Mizrahi and Arab Jews, and their Muslim and Arab neighbors in the region, creating the mythology of an “eternal” Arab/Jewish conflict upon which Israeli aggression rests. This approach attempts to silence Jewish voices that dissent from its narrative, to gatekeep only that identity which serves specific political goals rather than the broader Jewish communities’ interests in living in a world dedicated to equality. This erasure not only marginalizes Jews who resist its narrow vision but also perpetuates a false dichotomy between Jewish identity and criticism of Zionist policies.
Perhaps most alarmingly, Project Esther’s emphasis on fabricated threats actively distracts us from real antisemitic violence and discrimination, which comes not from the movement for Palestinian freedom but from the very right-wing Christian Nationalist groups that are the driving force behind the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. It was Christian Nationalists and White supremacists who, after all, marched on the University of Virginia campus on August 11th, 2017 chanting “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us” before killing Heather Heyer in a car attack, beating Black bystanders, and directing a mob to burn down the town’s only synagogue in downtown Charlottesville the next day. This deflection instrumentalizes concerns over Jewish safety by failing to address the true sources of antisemitism in contemporary society while redirecting attention away from actual threats facing Jewish communities. In 2017, as so often in US history, the threat of antisemitism converged with White supremacist nationalism, naming Jewish as well as Black and Brown communities as threats to the White nation.
Project Esther’s approach to interfaith relations is similarly problematic. While claiming to promote Jewish-Christian alliance, it actually reinforces traditional Christian supersessionist narratives that have historically contributed to antisemitism, and still do. A crucial example is the Evangelical Christian vision that holds an eschatological interpretation of the Bible and sees the Jewish colonization of Palestine as a stepping stone to expedite the second coming of Christ. Organizations such as CUFI are supported by openly homophobic, racist, and antisemitic political characters such as John Hagee, Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, and Mike Pence. Not surprisingly, the same people are also known for their anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism. This dynamic reveals how the document’s supposed advocacy for Jewish interests is subordinated to broader ideological goals that actually works against Jewish and other communities’ interests and safety.
Ultimately, Project Esther exemplifies how antisemitic frameworks can persist and even thrive within ostensibly philosemitic or philo-Zionist discourse. Rather than genuinely combating antisemitism, it redirects and reconfigures antisemitic elements to serve right wing, ethno-nationalist, anti-democratic political ends. This underscores the urgent need for authentic approaches to addressing antisemitism—approaches that reject both the instrumentalization of Jewish identity and the perpetuation of exclusionary narratives.
The New Red Scare
Project Esther is not just an elevation of rhetoric nor an expressive document; it is a blueprint for a new Red Scare. We must remember that the Second Red Scare, sometimes inaccurately referred to as “McCarthyism” as it preceded and lived on far after the notorious Senator from Minnesota, was, as historian Ellen Schrecker phrased it, “the most widespread and longest wave of political repression in U.S. history” (x). The Second Red Scare ramped up in earnest in the late 1940s and continued apace until the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was politically and legally challenged by the New Left in the 1960s. In the decade plus of its existence, the Red Scare affected a vast cultural change in the U.S., turning socialism from perhaps a radical and subversive political position to one considered treasonous and dangerous. Through legal means much like the RICO Act and today’s “Non-Profit Killer Bill,” left wing labor unions, community organizations, academic organizations, anti-racist coalitions, and of course, communist organizations, were either disbanded or driven underground, with many thousands of their members serving jail time and/or deportation, to say nothing of the tens of thousands who lost their jobs and faced public harassment and violence. A vibrant, active, multi-tendency working class left was irrevocably shattered, leaving, as Joel Kovel put it, a “black hole” at the center of the American Century.
The legal architecture of the Second Red Scare consisted primarily of three laws: the Internal Security Act, the Alien Registration or Smith Act, and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, or McCarran-Walter Act. These acts each linked speech and protest to criminal conspiracy. The Internal Security Act forced communist-aligned organizations to register and then, once registered, made it a felony to support a “dictatorship” in the U.S. The second and third laws similarly criminalized belief, allowing for the jailing and deportation of those who “advocated” the “overthrow of the United States government by force and violence.” In practice this meant that supporting communism, or even advocating for the reading of Marx, could land someone in jail or disband an organization for giving—as we would say now—“material support” for the overthrow of bourgeois rule. Needless to say, such persecutions were heavily racialized, with African American and Jewish leftists suffering the most.
Project Esther is not just an elevation of rhetoric nor an expressive document; it is a blueprint for a new Red Scare.
Project Esther makes similar rhetorical and legal moves. Stating that the “HSN” is “supported by activists and funders dedicated to destroying capitalism and democracy” and has the “support and training of America’s overseas enemies,” Project Esther threatens Jewish Voice for Peace and Students of Justice in Palestine with legal disbanding, defunding, and even criminalization of individuals and organizations engaged in dissent. That there is no evidence for such claims does not matter, nor did it matter that in the 20th century, the Communist Party, the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order, the Civil Rights Congress, the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, the Council on African Affairs, and countless other organizations were not plotting to overthrow the United States—they were all either banned or harassed into near or total collapse. As historian Rachel Ida-Buff phrased it, “The Palestine solidarity movement is the new Communist Party: the shadowy and ubiquitous internal enemy that justifies the broad and brutal repression of past and current McCarthyisms.”
This may not be remembered now, but the Left resisted the policies, such as it could, during the Second Red Scare. Noncompliance was a conscious strategy on the part of HUAC defendants. As noted socialist Albert Einstein wrote in 1953, “non cooperation” with HUAC was “revolutionary,” and the defendant should be “prepared for jail and economic ruin. . . . for the sacrifice of his personal welfare in the interest of the cultural welfare of the country.” If defendants complied with HUAC, Einstein followed, then they “deserve nothing better than the slavery which is intended for them.” Such resistance did not save many of the defendants, but left the spark for the New Left a generation later. Many of the members of both Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panther Party, among an array of organizations of their era, made “anti-anti-communism” a central element in their resistance to the Cold War order. We must remember the actions of our Left forebears in resistance to such oppression, and stand in solidarity with other activists who likewise may be targeted.
Reclaiming Esther against Project Esther
For the past 400 years and more, European Christian men have produced an antisemitic, racist, and sexist image of Jewish women, known as the figure of the “Jewess” in modern literature. The paradigmatic Jewish heroines of the Torah have provided Christian-dominated European and US culture with their “stereotyped sex-object par excellence,” as Jewish feminist literary scholar Livia E. Bitton argues. Versions of Queen Esther, who won her place at the king’s side through triumph at a beauty contest that was refused by his previous wife, Vashti, have featured prominently in such antisemitic discourse. But, like so many women who survive the conflagrations of patriarchy, Esther’s knowledge and power grew over time, and she became a political and spiritual leader—and a fighter for collective Jewish survival—because of, and not in spite of, her skilled navigation of gendered and sexualized institutions.
Alongside generations of Jewish feminists, we now lovingly reclaim the figure of the beguiling Jewish seductress, whose powers of beauty and sexuality contribute to her assumption of power. We know that we are not in Esther’s moment of potential annihilation of Jewish people, as the Heritage Foundation, like Netanyahu’s cabinet, and so many contemporary forces would have us believe. Such fear-mongering is quintessential to racist statecraft, and has embedded itself into the current war on terror logic that hinges on philosemitic lies about the “protection” of Jews, among others. Against this propaganda, we offer a different recognition. We know that many Jewish people are now faced with a different threat: the threat of alienation from Jewish community and belonging. We oppose traditional institutions that purport to speak for Jewish communities, but manipulate religious texts and principles to advance genocidal statecraft and colonial conquest. We refuse this corruption of our cultural and spiritual heritage, which makes our own institutions and sometimes even our own communities unrecognizable to us as Jews.
The Heritage Foundation has no entitlement to represent the protection or salvation of Jewish people, or any people. As we have demonstrated here, their attempt to vilify and shame anti-Zionists merely exposes the antisemitism at the heart of their nationalist will to dominance. Against this Christian Zionist attempt to hijack our own struggle against our experiences of prejudice and oppression so that they can secure state power, we proclaim: the Heritage Foundation has no Project Esther. Instead, we represent the living legacy of Esther. As Jewish anti-Zionists, we will fight for the survival of a different image and a different historical role for the Jewish people. Neither colonizers nor props for state violence and repression, we are proud, anti-Zionist Jews engaged in collective struggle for justice, peace, and the survival of a plural and interdependent humanity.
The opinions expressed in this post are solely those of the individual authors and do not represent the official opinions of the Contending Modernities research initiative, the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, the Keough School of Global Affairs, the University of Notre Dame, or their faculty and staff.
