The energy in the room was more than a bit nervous Friday night in Phoenix at a Shabbat dinner held for attendees of TPUSA's AmericaFest. About a mile away in the Convention Center, Steve Bannon was calling Ben Shapiro a cancer, underscoring a debate over Israel that is the conference's only major distraction.
The fight is getting ugly and emotional, and the underlying issue, as always, it seems, is: When does legitimate criticism of the Jewish state of Israel cross into antisemitism? It's a question nobody has ever really known the answer to.
At the Shabbat dinner, several speakers praised Shapiro's opening night Amfest speech calling out antisemitism and railed against Tucker Carlson's rebuttal. But Rabbi Pesach Wolicki, who presided over the dinner, took a somewhat different approach.
Wolicki, for the most part, stuck to religion, praying, singing and explaining the power of the sabbath, which, as it turns out, is also the subject of TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk's latest and final book.
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I asked the rabbi about Bannon's remarks as the dinner wound down, because Wolicki is a friend of his and a regular guest on his show. "I'll talk to Steve," he told me, eyes rolling a bit. But he quickly added, "Steve is not an antisemite."
Pretty much at the exact moment I was talking to Wolicki, Megyn Kelly and Jack Posobiec were on the mainstage at AmFest, where Kelly would say of Shapiro and new CBS News head honcho Bari Weiss, "It's about Israel. Those two are very pro-Israel, ardent activists, which is fine. But they don't get to dictate how the rest of us feel."
This is a debate in which both sides are talking past each other. The critics of Israel, somewhat confoundingly, claim they are not allowed to level such criticism, even as they do so in front of 25,000 attendees. The pro-Israel side, rightfully concerned over the recent rise in antisemitism, is sometimes seeing bigotry where it isn't.
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To make matters worse, people on both sides of this feud are calling for the excommunication of the other side from the conservative movement, something that, given the conservative movement has no pope, is impossible anyway.
If there is some good news in all of this, it is that among the attendees of Amfest I have been speaking to, Israel barely comes up at all, as is also my experience when I cross the country talking to voters. Stanley, a 30-something from Ohio, told me when I pressed the question, "it's like the last issue I think about."
But that doesn't mean this internal fight doesn't have real implications. President Donald Trump has been as firm an ally to Israel as possible, but it is not clear that a potential President JD Vance, who is supported by most of the Israel critics, would maintain such fidelity.
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The whole situation puts me in mind of the controversies that have always swirled around Shakespeare's play "The Merchant of Venice."
In the early 1980s, both Patrick Stewart and David Suchet played the character Shylock for the Royal Shakespeare Company under the direction of John Barton, and their brilliant performances could not differ more on the Jewish question.
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In a conversation about their approaches, Stewart, who is not a Jew, said that "Shylock is an alien who happens to be Jewish." But Suchet, who is Jewish, contradicted this, saying "Shylock is an alien because he is a Jew."
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Something similar is happening at AmFest. The Israel critics seem to believe that what they are saying has little or nothing to do with antisemitism, something that, like Suchet's take on Shylock, few Jewish people can really accept.
One number that was mentioned by several speakers at the Shabbat dinner was 0.2%, which is the percentage of the world's population that is Jewish. Perhaps more than any other group, Jews live with a literal fear of extinction.
All of the big powerful and famous voices in this dustup at AmFest would do well to take the temperature down by a lot. Right now, it looks a lot like jousting egos jostling for audience share, not an honest discussion of differences.
Conservatives win when they are united, and there is enough common ground on Israel for unity, for comity to conquer chaos. Hopefully, in the final two days of Amfest, the focus can be on what brings people together, and not on what divides them.
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