Jeremy Carl, a Trump administration nominee for a senior position at the State Department, has expressed a range of derogatory views of the Jewish community, characterizing in writings and public interviews the community as holding a victim mentality, downplaying the significance of the Holocaust to the Jewish story and experience, musing about the need to address the what he called the “Jewish Question” and characterizing Jews as religiously incorrect and in need of conversion.

Carl also rejected the argument that Israel is the United States’ strongest ally and was deeply critical of Christian Zionism. He has additionally espoused a view of the United States as a white, Christian nation, claiming that white people are undergoing a “cultural genocide” and deliberate replacement.

Carl was nominated to be the assistant secretary of state for international organizations in June, but did not move forward to a hearing in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee before the end of this year’s Senate session. Should the Trump administration still want Carl in the role, it will have to re-file his nomination in the new year. Carl said in a response on X that neither he nor the administration have decided whether to resubmit the nomination. Carl served as deputy assistant secretary of the Interior in the first Trump administration.

“Jews have often loved to play the victim rather than accept that they are participants in history. That means that at times of course they’ve been victims but they also can be perpetrators,” Carl, who was raised in a secular Jewish household but converted to Christianity, said in a 2024 interview with “The Christian Ghetto” podcast, saying that some Christians have been “understandably” resentful of Jews throughout history.

“I think it’s inevitable of course that people will always take their own side in [a] historical quarrel. The Jewish community has kind of done [that] to an unusual extent,” Carl continued. 

While he offered disclaimers that he was not speaking about all Jews, he generally painted with a broad brush, characterizing the majority of the Jewish community in largely pejorative ways.

He said that the Holocaust “kind of dominates so much of modern Jewish thinking,” adding that he believed it to be “very unhealthy.” 

“Now, when you’re getting to this next generation — everybody has traumas in their past. How much are we going to relitigate them?” Carl asked rhetorically. “There’s a level of [self]-involvement there that I kind of find a little distasteful.”

He also said that he feels that “mainline Christian[s]” do not expect as much from Jews as they could and are “very reluctant to criticize Jews or Jewish communal behavior even when, in my view, that might be very warranted.”

Carl said that Jews, meanwhile, “tend to see evangelical Christians in a very negative light … and I frankly think reflects poorly on the Jewish community.” 

He claimed that the Jewish community is afraid of Christian communal unity as a legacy of past conversion efforts.

Carl also declared that Jews have never been oppressed in the U.S. and added that “the notion that Jews are the downtrodden here just doesn’t really match with actual reality. I understand why this type of attitude can cause resentment among some Christians who observe it. … Even when I was Jewish, I found it distasteful.”

In a lengthy response on X, Carl dismissed Jewish Insider’s reporting as a misleading and agenda-driven smear.

“I have never ‘downplayed’ the Holocaust, one of the great horrors of modern history, except in the overactive imagination and perhaps bad faith portrayal of the author,” Carl said.

At the same time, in “The Christian Ghetto” interview he claimed to reject conspiracy theories about the Jewish community as a whole and the neo-Nazi Groyper movement, saying that adherents go too far in their hatred of Jews in unproductive ways.

“Nobody can just take a small sip of the drink in front of them, which is the ‘Jewish Question,’ and imbibe carefully and have a mature discussion on it,” Carl said. “[They] need to overdose massively on it, to the point that they just begin saying completely ridiculous and absurd things.”

Carl said that such activity makes him shy away from “critique” of the Jewish community “because you don’t want to be lumped in with these clowns.” He declared that Jewish activists “love the Groypers because they’re just so discrediting of anyone who would ask questions about any of this,” referring to Jewish political activism.

He also claimed that Jews are “more susceptible to political radicalisms of all types and political ultra-enthusiasms” due to a “misplaced religious impulse” of Judaism “searching for the Messiah that had actually been found.”

“I have, of course, been very critical of the political activities of much of the establishment Jewish community since most of the community is liberal and I am a conservative. This should surprise nobody, nor is it a scandal. I have also been critical of the extreme neoconservatives such as those who seem to be pushing this hit piece,” Carl said in his response.

Carl also said on “The Christian Ghetto” podcast the U.S. should have less of a relationship with Israel, and was highly critical of Christian Zionist ideology that attaches a theological dimension to support for Israel.

He said that while from a secular perspective, he feels “vaguely positively disposed to Israel,” he rejects Christian Zionism and the “theological trappings that some Christians put around Israel.”

“At a basis, I have a very pro-Israel view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in abstract, I just don’t want us involved in it that much,” Carl said. “The amount of time and energy that America spends on this question — often to the detriment of our own national interest. Nor do I accept that Israel is our greatest ally.”

He characterized himself as a “Buchananite” and a “Paul-ite” in his ideology.

Carl said in his response that he is fully supportive of the Trump administration’s foreign policy and support for Israel, including the administration’s sanctions on the International Criminal Court and the UN’s “Israel monomania.”

He said in an interview with “The Will Spencer Podcast” that conversion from Judaism is a “very fraught thing” and that, in many Jewish families, “it would be easier to convert to Satanism honestly, in some ways.” 

He said on “The Christian Ghetto” podcast that Jews have been a “particularly thorny problem” in their resistance to conversion to Christianity. He said he does not believe, from a theological perspective, in religious pluralism, and characterized Judaism as an incorrect and invalid religious practice, arguing that Christians should be trying to convert Jews “where we can.”

In his response, Carl said, “As a Christian I want everyone to embrace the Christian faith, especially my family and friends, because I believe Christianity to be true, and other religions false. Again, this is not a scandal except perhaps in the minds of the author and his editors who evidently believe that standard beliefs held by the vast majority of Christians throughout history are scandalous.”

Carl has also espoused a vision of America as a white, Christian nation, and asserted that white people in America are subject to “persecution” and a “cultural genocide.”

“American whites are victims of a cultural genocide,” Carl said at the 2024 National Conservatism conference. “I’m suggesting this partially again to troll any leftist media who might be in the room and furiously scribbling my unforgivable hate speech in their notebooks. But I’m not saying it entirely for that purpose.”

He’s the author of The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism is Tearing America Apart, which dismisses the idea of rising white supremacy and focuses on the thesis that anti-white policies are endemic in modern America.

The original title of the book, Carl revealed in a 2024 essay, was It’s Okay to Be White, which has become a slogan used by white supremacists. 

He states in that essay that demographic shifts in the country are the result of “a great replacement of whites,” referencing the conspiracy theory that a shadowy force is attempting to replace the country’s white population with immigrants. He declared that the great replacement is “a fact” and “a basic statement of the Democratic Party’s platform.”

“I can understand why [Indian President Narendra] Modi wants India to be a Hindu nation, because I want America to be a Christian nation, defined not in total but in part by its European historic identity,” he continued. 

He added in “The Christian Ghetto” podcast interview that he does not “really believe in Judeo-Christian — I think America is a Christian nation.”

He said in “The Will Spencer Podcast” interview that his book was designed to help white people “figure out a way as a white person to navigate around the issue and also understand that you’re not crazy. The sorts of things you’re experiencing in terms of discrimination or racism, etc. are very real and that you don’t need to put up with that.”

At the same time, Carl did acknowledge in that interview that America would never be an “ethnically uniform” or “racially uniform” way and “that’s okay, that’s manageable,” but that the country should have a “sense of a majority tradition … majority religious practice” and a “tolerance for other minority groups to all be within that culture.”

The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.

CNN previously reported that Carl scrubbed thousands of inflammatory posts after his nomination.

This article was updated on 12/21/2025 to include Carl’s response.

President Donald Trump came into office with a promise to make tackling antisemitism a priority of his second term. So far, the focus of that effort has been almost exclusively on addressing left-wing and Islamist antisemitism, primarily tied to anti-Israel extremism — while leaving out antisemitism emerging from the political right. 

Now, a group of staunch Trump allies from within the evangelical Christian community is urging Republicans to also focus on countering what they describe as a growing threat of antisemitism from within their own camp. They see prominent MAGA-aligned figures such as podcast hosts Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens platforming overtly antisemitic views, and worry that those voices — with massive social media followings — could play a role in shaping the direction of the Republican Party.

Last month, an organization called the Conference of Christian Presidents for Israel hosted a meeting to discuss the topic at the Family Research Council, a powerful Christian advocacy group. Billed as a “private roundtable for key Christian leaders,” according to the event invitation, it identified right-wing antisemitism as a high-stakes challenge: “It is vital that Christian leaders counter the forces on the right who are demonizing the state of Israel, its leadership and the Jewish people,” stated the invitation, which was obtained by Jewish Insider. 

“We’ve been very concerned about the progressive leftist [antisemitism],” Mario Bramnick, a pastor in South Florida who is the president of the Latino Coalition for Israel, told JI on Tuesday. He is also the founder of the Christian Conference, and he organized last month’s event with Luke Moon, the executive director of the Philos Project. “But some of the statements coming out on the right, to me, are possibly more brazen and more troubling and clearly, clearly, do not represent President Trump or his administration,” added Bramnick. 

The meeting was attended by Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, Trump’s nominee to serve as the special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, as well as Mark Walker, a former congressman from North Carolina who is Trump’s pick to serve as ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom. Yair Netanyahu, the eldest son of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, addressed the group virtually.

“Antisemitism is a bipartisan issue and needs to be condemned anytime, anyplace,” Kaploun told JI. “It is imperative that all parties educate their members about  the  dangers of antisemitism.”

The Christian group is concerned about a small but growing anti-Israel faction within the Republican Party. In a press release on Tuesday, Bramnick called out Carlson and Owens, as well as two figures who remain close to Trump: Steve Bannon and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). A Trump administration spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

“It’s almost like we have more of an onus to handle this, because it’s our own camp, our own family. Imagine something goes wrong with someone in your family, you feel more of an obligation,” Bramnick told JI. “Who better than us to be able to handle it?”

Bramnick met last week with Justice Department senior counsel Leo Terrell, the chair of the federal government’s antisemitism task force, to raise the issue of antisemitism on the right. 

“They are clearly on this and following it, from my understanding, and wanting to work with us,” Bramnick said. A spokesperson for Terrell did not respond to a request for comment.

The Conference of Christian Presidents has ties to influential conservative groups in Washington. Hours after the meeting at the Family Research Council, the Conference co-hosted an event on the Trump administration’s policies in the Middle East with the Heritage Foundation. The event featured video remarks from U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and a keynote speech by evangelical leader Rev. Johnnie Moore, executive chair of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. 

Last year, the Heritage Foundation released a policy document focused on antisemitism, called Project Esther, which identified left-wing antisemitism as the main form of antisemitism in the U.S., without mentioning any issues on the right. An inquiry to the authors of the Project Esther report did not garner a response. 

Christians United for Israel, the largest Christian pro-Israel group with more than 10 million members, is not part of the Conference of Christian Presidents for Israel. But Sandra Hagee Parker, chair of the CUFI Action Fund, told JI that the organization agrees with the need to combat antisemitism on the right.

“One cannot be a Christian and antisemitic. The two are mutually exclusive,” Parker said in a statement. “Just as liberals must condemn those who use human rights as cover for their Jew-hatred, conservatives must call out those who drape themselves in the flag or the banner of the cross while bastardizing the former and defiling the latter.”  

Republican Jewish Coalition CEO Matt Brooks said antisemitism is “percolating out there at the extreme ends of the far right, well outside of the mainstream of the Republican Party.” 

“I don’t know that it’s growing. It’s gotten a little louder,” he told JI. “Our challenge and our effort going forward is to ensure that it doesn’t take hold in the Republican Party as it did in the Democratic Party.”