Meet Trump’s radical new antisemitism envoy

Last week, without much fanfare, U.S. President Donald Trump announced his nominee for the position of Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism. The man he picked was Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, an ultra-orthodox member of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, a long-time friend of Miriam and the late Sheldon Adelson, and a leading Trump campaigner and fundraiser in the far-right sector of the American Jewish community.

Kaploun is certain to deepen the Trump administration’s efforts to criminalize even the most minor criticism of Israel, let alone any objection to its ongoing genocide in Gaza and escalating atrocities in the West Bank. 

He is a strong supporter of the crackdown on free speech and freedom of education by the Trump administration, and, in his new role, is certain to redouble his efforts to advocate for coercive and restrictive measures in defining antisemitism as criticism of Israel and little else.

Ironically, his nomination—which still requires confirmation in the Senate—has already gone a long way toward demonstrating the fact that antisemitism emanates not from Palestine advocates but, overwhelmingly, from the same place it always has: the extreme right, the sector of American society that, like Kaploun himself, so passionately supports Donald Trump.

Trump first announced Kaploun’s nomination on his Truth Social media outlet (to which, yes, I subscribe and wade through, so you don’t have to). The responses were highly unusual.

As you might expect, Truth Social is usually overflowing with worshipful praise for Trump and every move he makes, no matter how foolish. Not this time.

The very first response to Trump’s announcement listed when I checked was, “So you hired a demon to police a Christian nation.” There were many other replies just like it. There were also some that invoked Israel’s crimes against Palestinians, sometimes with racist language against Jews, sometimes not, but the overwhelming majority were classic, right-wing antisemitic tropes and cliches. 

There was virtually no support for Trump’s announcement on the social media site, which is otherwise a Trump temple. But the complaints against Kaploun overwhelmingly emanated from a place of hate, not justice.

Jew-hate as a Trumpian political tool

Kaploun makes little secret of his desire to use the issue of antisemitism as a political tool, and the actual safety of Jewish individuals or even the Jewish people collectively is of little importance to him.

In discussing his support for Trump in an October 2014 interview with Mishpachah magazine, a right wing, Orthodox Jewish outlet, Kaploun said, “I recently visited Abu Dhabi, where I could wear a kippah and walk around openly as a Jew without fear, while in the US there are places where that could be dangerous, such as Harvard, Columbia, and California.” 

Kaploun never addressed whether he felt differently about that statement a month later, when Zvi Kogan, an Israeli ultra-orthodox rabbi who was also an emissary of Chabad, was abducted and murdered in Dubai. One might want to ask Kaploun when the last time such a thing happened to a Jewish person at Harvard or Columbia, or in California.

Of course, this isn’t really relevant to Kaploun. Even the murder of a Jewish person is secondary, at best, to daring to oppose Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The purpose of “fighting antisemitism” is quite simply to defend Israel against any force that might oppose, obstruct, or even question its apartheid policies, colonial nature, and ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people.

Kaploun is among the minority in the American Jewish community that uses spurious allegations of antisemitism as a partisan tool in favor of the Republican Party. He claims that Democrats and Joe Biden “…won’t even make a statement about combating anti-Semitism.” Unfortunately, in fact, Biden did far too much talking about antisemitism while conflating it with criticism of Israel, and repeatedly defending Israel as an entity without whose existence “no Jew in the world would be safe.” Where Kaploun and Republicans use the insecurity of American Jews as a cudgel with which to defend Israel, Democrats use it as more of a scalpel to slice apart support for Palestinians. Kaploun dislikes the subtler approach and thus denies the similar goals.

When it comes to issues on university campuses, Kaploun expressed his goal to Mishpachah as supporting a statement Trump made at an event Kaploun organized: “I’ll remove their accreditation, and this horrible situation will end.” 

Building on the destructive work of his predecessor

Like virtually every part of Trump’s policies toward Israel, Palestine, Jews, and Muslims, Trump is building on the racist and awful policies of Joe Biden. Democrats may be able to justifiably distance themselves from Trump’s policies in other realms, but in this web of Israel, Palestine, Islamophobia, and antisemitism, all Trump and his cronies are doing is putting Democratic policies on steroids.

When Deborah Lipstadt held the position that Trump wants to put Kaploun in, she was put there by Joe Biden and was the first person to hold that role at the level of an ambassador. She responded by fanning the flames of false accusations of antisemitism around Israel, rather than lifting a finger to combat the real thing.

For example, in June 2024, in response to the ongoing confrontations at Columbia University, she indirectly accused the Washington Post of spreading antisemitism. “I’m not suggesting that they consciously spread antisemitism, but when they talk about rich New York City Jews forcing [the New York Police Department] to clear encampments…I worry.”

She was referring to a report in WaPo about a group of wealthy businessmen who had urged New York Mayor Eric Adams to send in police to violently break up the Columbia anti-genocide encampment. Many respondents in that article—including those in the chat, as well as leaders of large, legacy Jewish organizations—raised the insinuation that it was antisemitic to accuse a group of billionaires of trying to influence the mayor if they were Jewish. 

But not one disputed the fact that this was precisely what they did. The implication that they could do just what they were accused of doing but cannot be held accountable for it simply because they were Jewish is fallacious on its face, and a threadbare trick to avoid a discussion of the issue at hand by deflecting it into an argument over a spurious accusation of antisemitism. 

This is typical of how false accusations of antisemitism gain traction, and it is something that Lipstadt did on many occasions during her tenure. But now that she is out of the office, she is more open about her motivations and views. 

“We have laws. Apply those laws,” Lipstadt said in an interview cited by the Forward, regarding legal residents facing deportation for exercising their right to free speech in defense of Palestine. “And if someone broke the laws, if someone lied on their visa, if someone broke a university rule that should have gotten them expelled or was expelled, then apply the rules. We’re a nation of rules.”

The problem, as Lipstadt certainly knows very well, is that the people being expelled for having protested genocide have not broken any of the rules she is referring to, much less any laws. The students in question have not been expelled from university, which could threaten their status if they are here on student visas. They are having their visas revoked for their speech, and she knows it.

Yet, Lipstadt says, “I don’t oppose many of the things that are being done. I just wish they would be done more deftly.”

In other words, she just wishes that when the Trump administration violates the rights of Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Badar Khan Suri, Mohsen Mahdawi, and who can say how many others, they would do it in a quieter way so it would generate less controversy. 

This is the legacy upon which Yehuda Kaploun will build.

A partisan fight 

Ironically, one of the main concerns Lipstadt had when she was nominated by Biden was that Republicans would block her nomination because she was perceived as too partisan in favor of Democrats. 

Trump doesn’t seem worried about that with Kaploun, though he is far more brazenly partisan, and has already generated opposition from at least one prominent Jewish Democrat.

Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York stated on Twitter, “The irony is not lost on me that the Trump Administration— that already contains antisemites in its ranks— is seeking to add a divisive figure like Rabbi Kaploun as its antisemitism czar.”

Nadler goes on to list a number of outright false claims that Kaploun has made about Biden’s and Democrats’ alleged inaction on antisemitism.

The problem is not that Nadler is factually wrong; he’s not. But Democrats simply used a phony fight against antisemitism to quell criticism of Israel and defend its crimes against Palestinians. For the most part, they ignored the majority of antisemitism that emanates from the same place it always has: the far right. That’s the same place that vomits forth gushers of racism, Islamophobia, and every other bigotry we can name. But the far right is sharply split on Israel, while, by definition, the movement for Palestinian rights sees Israel in a negative light, with variations in just how harshly negative that might be. So, if one is really looking to protect Israel by playing this game, the right presents a more complicated target. 

In the end, Nadler and Lipstadt don’t really want to fight antisemitism, which would require linking it with all forms of hate, including anti-Palestinian hate. No, they want to use spurious accusations of antisemitism to defend Israel, with, perhaps, a more subtle and less authoritarian tone than Trump is using.

Kaploun has a different strategy. He wants to use the full force of executive authority to not only quell any opposition to Israel’s monstrous policies and actions, but to institute the very white nationalist future that he and other Jewish “leaders” like Miriam Adelson, Stephen Miller, Jared Kushner, and former Ambassador to Israel David Friedman so deeply crave and strongly support. 

These “leaders” believe one of two things. They either have learned nothing from history and naively believe that Jews will be spared from the authoritarianism they wish to usher in. Or they, like other members of marginalized groups who collaborate with authoritarians like Trump, believe they and their part of the Jewish community will remain in their privileged place while the rest of us suffer the same fate as all of our marginalized comrades. 

Either way, in the near term, Kaploun will use claims of antisemitism in even greater measure than before to fan the flames of hate against Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims and any of us who consider ourselves their allies. As Kaploun told Mishpachah, “[Trump has] repeated his view many times in meetings we’ve held, declaring that Israel is the first line of defense against Islamism. He’s said it again and again: if Israel, chalilah (God forbid), falls to terrorism, the US will be the next target.”

That tells you all you need to know.