Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) believes that he was sent to Congress, at least in part, to take a leading role in fighting for the Jewish community against antisemitism.

Fine, during a lengthy interview with Jewish Insider in his congressional office earlier this month, said he sees himself as having a mostly unique ability among House members to help tackle the rise of antisemitism nationwide, as one of only four Jewish Republicans in the lower chamber. 

“I think I can play that role. I’m willing to do it. Certainly happy to share the spotlight with the other three [Jewish Republicans] if they wish to do it, but, but this is deeply personal to me,” the Republican firebrand said. “This affects my children and so I understand it better than others.”

He has recently taken to wearing a kippah on the Hill at the request of one of his sons, as a symbol for those in the Jewish community for those who do not feel safe doing the same.

“I believe that God puts us where he wants us to be,” Fine said, describing his quick rise from the Florida House to the state Senate — where he served for only a few months — and then to an unexpected vacancy in Congress. “This must be why. This is what He wants me to do. … I think this is one of the reasons that I am here, to solve this problem, much like we did in Florida.”

He said that he is in Congress to fight for his district, but that he believes can also be a fighter for the entire Jewish community and “everyone who believes in the idea of Judeo-Christian values.” 

Fine sees the war in Gaza and the global rise of antisemitism as a civilizational battle against extremist groups — both Hamas and anti-Israel forces in the United States — that want to see a global Islamic caliphate and are “spiritual cousins” of the Nazi regime. His often-hardline rhetoric on these issues has frequently sparked controversy.

He argued that it “remains to be seen” if the House Republican caucus and leadership are serious about the issue, saying that there has been a “great willingness to pass strongly worded letters, but I didn’t come here to do strongly worded letters.”

Asked about Trump administration officials with a history of antisemitic rhetoric such as Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson and Office of Special Counsel nominee Paul Ingrassia, Fine demurred, saying he wasn’t familiar with the officials or their backgrounds and would want to examine them further before speaking about them.

At another point in the interview, Fine said that President Donald Trump and members of his team know that he’s not “afraid to call [antisemitism and anti-Israel attitudes] out on our side.”

“I’ve been very critical publicly of Thomas Massie, who I think is an embarrassment to the Republican Party,” Fine volunteered, referring to the libertarian-minded House member from Kentucky. “The guy makes me sick that I have to be in the same room with him at times.”

Massie did not respond to a request for comment.

He also said that, while he hasn’t had a chance to meet many of the Jewish Democrats in Congress yet, he’s willing to “work with anyone who wants to solve this problem, but I think that it helps to have someone in the majority to take the lead.”

He named Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), a former colleague in the Statehouse and his neighbor in the House offices, as a likely Democratic partner on future efforts. He said he’d also spoken on occasion with Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), whose office is across the hall from Fine’s. Goldman also co-chairs the House antisemitism task force.

​​”The fight against antisemitism is a moral one that must cross party lines and transcend political divisions,” Goldman told JI. “I am eager to work with Congressman Fine and anyone else committed to the fight against bigotry and hate towards the Jewish community and anyone else.”

Fine argued that Florida, his home state, has developed a successful strategy for dealing with antisemitism and antisemitic violence, a trend for which he believes he holds significant responsibility, pointing to multiple pieces of legislation he passed while in the Statehouse.

Antisemitic incidents in Florida dropped 24% in 2024, but were still up 277% from 2020, according to Anti-Defamation League statistics.

“This can all be done. We largely solved this problem in Florida,” Fine said in a prior interview with JI. “If you are willing to fight, if you do not let Muslim terrorists scare you, you can win. … We do not have these same problems in Florida and it is because I fought for this for eight and a half years. This is fixable, but not if we continue to be afraid to face evil and not be afraid to call it evil.”

“All the antisemites discover free speech when it comes to the Jews. You can’t call a black student the N word and go, ‘Free speech,’” Fine said. “We said, ‘You’ve got to treat antisemitism the same way. You don’t get to discriminate in how you deal with discrimination.’ We’ve identified certain behaviors, not speech, but certain behaviors that antisemites used to target Jews. We made them illegal, and we put in huge penalties for doing them. They stopped.”

He offered as one example legislation allowing people to run over demonstrators blocking roads — ”blocking roads is a form of terrorism,” Fine said — which he said had stopped that issue in Florida.

As another example, he said that antisemitism is treated “the exact same way as racism” on college campuses in Florida. He argued that free speech has been used as a cover for antisemitic activity that would be unequivocally condemned if it targeted another minority group.

“All the antisemites discover free speech when it comes to the Jews. You can’t call a black student the N word and go, ‘Free speech,’” Fine said. “We said, ‘You’ve got to treat antisemitism the same way. You don’t get to discriminate in how you deal with discrimination.’ We’ve identified certain behaviors, not speech, but certain behaviors that antisemites used to target Jews. We made them illegal, and we put in huge penalties for doing them. They stopped.”

He added that rhetoric like “globalize the intifada” constitutes a call for violence and should be an imprisonable offense.

Fine also noted that he passed legislation to provide dedicated security funding for Jewish day schools in Florida, the first state to do so.

The newly-elected congressman told JI, in the sit-down in his congressional office, that he’s entering Congress in a different position than he did in the Florida House in 2016, when antisemitism was not an issue he expected to work on.

That changed six months into his term, when a spate of bomb threats targeted Jewish day schools in Florida. He said the Orthodox Union approached him at that time to ask him to lead the security legislation for Jewish day schools. He said he was initially reluctant to do so, given that his district contained no Jewish day schools, but was told that “you’re the only one who can.”

“It was incredibly hard to get the funding,” Fine said. “I learned from that, ‘If I don’t do this, no one else will.’ And the difference in coming to Congress is I knew walking in the door that this would be part of what I came here to do.”

His work in Florida earned him the nickname “the Hebrew Hammer,” from a friend in the Florida legislature, Sen. Joe Gruters. That nickname now adorns a plaque gifted to him by the Orthodox Union’s Teach Coalition that hangs on his congressional office’s wall — next to shofar — as well as a mezuzah on his office door.

Fine said he was initially reluctant to accept the nickname, but it caught on anyway.

Looking toward the Middle East, the Florida congressman has attracted controversy for his calls for an aggressive bombing campaign in Gaza to force Hamas into an unconditional surrender. (Contrary to some reports, Fine has denied that he wants to see the territory nuked.) 

He has also argued that “Palestinians in Gaza are on a level of evil that we saw in Japan and we saw in Germany back in World War II.”

Fine’s comments about Palestinians and Muslims — he argues that support for peace and coexistence is more “radical” and unusual in the Muslim community than extremist ideologies — have elicited repeated accusations of Islamophobia.

Asked about the administration’s push for a negotiated cease-fire with Hamas, Fine described Trump as a dealmaker who believes that any deal is possible “and I hope that he’s right.” He said he believes Trump is also focused on returning the hostages. 

Fine said some interim deals with Hamas may be possible along the way, but he does not anticipate that Hamas will agree to a final and full surrender “unless the pain is sufficiently great to do that.”

Beyond the war, he said that there must be a “deprogramming” effort in Gaza, similar to that undertaken in post-World War II Germany, to counter the antisemitic hate and violence inculcated in the Palestinian population. It’s a process that he said may take a long time.

“One of the biggest problems we have in the world is there is evil in this world and people refuse to acknowledge it,” Fine said, pointing to audio that circulated following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led terrorist attacks on Israel of a Palestinian mother and her son crying with joy as the son exclaimed that he had murdered Jews in the attack. “These are not like us. This is not someone that you can sit down and break bread with and just talk it out. This is someone who must be defeated,” Fine said.

Though Fine argues that extremist antisemitic sentiments are mainstream among Muslims, he said that there are countries like the United Arab Emirates that are safe for Jews, and he’d like to see a similar change among Palestinians. 

He said he doesn’t have the answers at this point on which country our countries can organize and lead the deprogramming effort — in an “ideal world, it might be a UAE or a Saudi Arabia,” but they may not “want the headache.” 

“It might be Israel. There are 2 million Muslims who live in Israel,” Fine said. “I don’t think Israel wants the job, but that may be the only solution. I don’t know, but what you can’t do is you can’t have terrorists run the show. That much I know.”

“What I think we need to be doing is taking out Iran’s nuclear capabilities and hope that in the process of that, the Iranian people, who are a great people, will rise up and make Persia great again,” Fine said on CNN.

Asked about the future of the West Bank — which Fine refers to as Judea and Samaria — Fine said that he would prefer that Israelis and Palestinians be able to live in peace, but he is not sure that is a possibility, suggesting that the Palestinians “may have to go to the Palestinian country and live there,” referring to Jordan, which has a large Palestinian population.

“Right now, they live in the Jewish country, so I think the best outcome is they say, ‘Hey, we want to be happy, collaborative, constructive members of Israeli society,’” Fine said. “That’s what I hope happens. I don’t think there’s any reason why everyone shouldn’t be able to get along … But I think you have something broken in that society.”

Fine, who spoke to JI prior to the start of Israel’s military campaign in Iran, has repeatedly praised Israel’s strikes, backing President Donald Trump’s approach to the conflict.

“What I think we need to be doing is taking out Iran’s nuclear capabilities and hope that in the process of that, the Iranian people, who are a great people, will rise up and make Persia great again,” Fine said on CNN.

“The overwhelming majority of Republicans stand with Israel and support what I’m supporting, which is supplying Israel with the material they need to beat this genocidal Iranian regime,” Fine added.

He has criticized individuals like Tucker Carlson who have called for the U.S. to abandon Israel, characterizing opposition to the operation as fueled by “Qatar-funded troll farms.”

“The bombings will continue until morale improves,” Fine has also said, repeatedly invoking one of his catch-phrases: “bombs away.”

Prior to the strikes, Fine said he was skeptical of Iran’s willingness to abandon its pursuit of a nuclear weapon through talks, but said he was going to trust Trump to try to reach a deal, describing a deal as preferable to a war. He emphasized that Iran cannot, under any circumstances, be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.

And he said he would not support a deal with Iran that does not address its support for terrorism — which Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said was not part of the talks — arguing that funding from sanctions relief is fungible and Iran can divert it toward malign activities.

But he also said that he did not want to “judge until I see the end product,” saying he has “a lot of confidence in the president. He has been Israel’s greatest champion, American Jews’ greatest champion. And I don’t think he’s going to sell us out.”

He noted as well that he is close to Trump and members of the administration and that Trump knew he would be coming to Congress as a Jewish member and a champion for Israel.

The freshman congressman expressed deep criticisms of Qatar, saying he was “convinced” that opposition to him in his congressional special election race, totaling around $10 million in support of his opponent’s campaign, was “largely funded by Qatar.” He suggested that out-of-state volunteers for his opponent he met on the campaign trail had been paid to come to the district.

Democrats, energized by opposition to Trump, mobilized for the race, bringing it closer than most anticipated it would be.

Asked how his views of Qatar color his opinion of the Gulf state’s offer of a Boeing 747 to the administration for use as Air Force One and Trump’s dealmaking with the Qatari government, Fine said, “I think the president, to try to resolve issues, believes sometimes in offering big carrots. He’s a big guy, big carrot, big stick. I think he’s trying to embrace them into our way of thinking. Maybe it will work.”

He said that giving the jet to the United States, purported to be worth around $400 million, will, at minimum, deprive the country of $400 million it could otherwise provide to Hamas, “but I do have real reservations about Qatar. I think there’s a lot of bad that comes out of there, and it’s a concern that I have.”

He said that the kingdom must stop its donations of millions of dollars to U.S. universities and the U.S. should dig into the Muslim Brotherhood and Qatar’s relationship with it. He suggested that Qatar’s army of lobbyists in Washington might attempt to block impending efforts to designate that organization as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

“I don’t back down from a fight … I’m not here focused on what’s next or [an] election. I’m here to do the right thing,” Fine said. “I don’t engage in political calculations to do what I do. I think Qatar is a problem, and I think we’re gonna have to deal with it.”