The RJC’s betrayal: Honoring JD Vance is not leadership; it is laundering.

If Piker disqualifies El-Sayed, Tucker disqualifies Vance.

By Jeffrey Lax, Special to World Israel News

There is no more critical time for the Jewish people and our future, or our non-future, in America. And just when we need them most, the Republican Jewish Coalition is failing us. This is not Jewish leadership. It is power-hungry politics that could help write our end. Vance equals Tucker. And the RJC just put a Jewish stamp on it.

Vice President JD Vance will speak at the RJC’s National Leadership Summit in Las Vegas this week. The organization calls him “a friend.” Matt Brooks and the RJC are giving him a closed-door fireside chat and a keynote-level platform while the Jewish conservatives who actually fund, staff, and populate this movement have spent two years watching Vance refuse to break with the most poisonous anti-Israel and antisemitic current on the American right.

A speech at an RJC banquet cannot reverse two years of conduct. It can only launder it.

Vance is Tucker’s project. Pretending otherwise is a lie.
Tucker Carlson helped deliver Vance the vice-presidential nomination. Buckley Carlson, Tucker’s son, served as deputy press secretary on Vance’s White House team. Vance has repeatedly called Tucker a friend and has refused to condemn even some of his most abhorrent comments and positions. Faced with criticism, Vance offers only the weakest platitude. “Do I have disagreements with Tucker Carlson? Sure. I have disagreements with most of my friends.” You can’t really say anything more meaningless than that.

That was after Tucker platformed Nick Fuentes. It was after a year of Hamas apologetics, “Christian Zionists are heretics” talk, and interviews that treated Israel as the problem and Jews as a special case requiring extra suspicion.

The Huckabee interview.
In February 2026, Tucker pressed U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee on whether today’s Jews are even Abraham’s descendants. He asked: “Why don’t we do genetic testing on everybody in the land and find out who Abram’s descendants are? It’s really simple. We’ve cracked the human genome. We can do that. Why don’t we do that?” He added that Netanyahu’s family “lived in Eastern Europe” and that “there’s no evidence they ever lived here.” That is the Khazar smear in modern lab-coat language: Jews as impostors who must prove their indigeneity with blood tests.

Vance’s response, after watching clips, was not disgust. It was endorsement of the conversation. He told The Washington Post his takeaway was that it was “a really good conversation that’s going to be necessary for the right, not just for the next couple years but for long into the future.”

He did not say Tucker crossed a line. He did not say Jews do not owe the internet a DNA kit. He called it a “really good conversation” the Republican Party has to have.

Tucker has kept praising Vance as a friend, “really smart,” and preferable to Marco Rubio. He helped make him VP. He still treats him as the vessel. That is not a casual acquaintanceship. It is a shared political project.

If Piker disqualifies El-Sayed, Tucker disqualifies Vance.
Jewish Democrats who reject Abdul El-Sayed because of Hasan Piker are not being political. They are applying a survival test. Piker has called Israel “Jewish ISIS” and warned that if American Jews keep insisting they are “singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone’s going to come around and take action … against American Jews.” El-Sayed used Piker as a surrogate, appeared with him, and only later sought awkward daylight. Jews were right to treat that alliance as disqualifying.

The same rule applies on the right. If being a close political ally of Piker is disqualifying (and it is), then being a close friend, staff-sharing ally, nomination beneficiary, and public defender of Tucker Carlson is disqualifying. Survival always comes before politics. Anyone who cannot see the symmetry does not understand antisemitism. He is picking a team.

Brooks sidelined the candidate his own Jews actually want.
While there is no perfect scientific poll that slices “Republican Jews only” on 2028, the available evidence is not subtle. Jewish MAGA activists and donors have been telling reporters for months they prefer Marco Rubio. Shabbos Kestenbaum said in conservative Jewish circles it is “Marco Rubio by a margin of 99 to 1,” later calling that an undersell.

JTA reported that “a number of Jewish Republicans and major GOP donors” would rather support Rubio than Vance, and that some of those donors will be in the room in Las Vegas. Ken Griffin has said the same. Last year’s RJC confab already featured “Tucker is not MAGA” signs. This year the RJC honors Tucker’s closest elected ally.

Among American Jews overall, Vance is radioactive. A spring 2026 Jewish Voters Research Center survey gave Vance a 20 mean thermometer score, 19 percent favorable and 79 percent unfavorable. Rubio did far better.

Rubio is also the stronger general-election horse in several head-to-heads. An August Emerson poll had Rubio beating Kamala Harris 48-43 and AOC 48-43, while Vance lost to Harris 45-49 and only narrowly beat AOC 46-44. Prediction markets still favor Vance for the nomination because of incumbency and the MAGA machine. Kalshi and related markets have had him in the 40s against Rubio in the teens to high 20s.

That is a party-insider number, not a Jewish-survival number, and not proof he is the better nominee against a Democrat or a DSA-aligned ticket. Honoring Vance while treating Rubio as an afterthought is a choice. It is a pre-endorsement.

“Israel has no friends” was not analysis. It was a pre-meditated smear.
When Vance was selling the Iran memorandum of understanding, he told Israeli critics that “Donald J. Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment,” and that if he sat in Israel’s cabinet he “might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.” He did not even include himself. Not “Trump and I.” Trump alone. Then: wake up and smell the reality.

Never mind that the claim was false. Israel is recognized by the large majority of UN members. The Abraham Accords with the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan still exist. The UAE has deepened security cooperation, including missile-defense assistance during the Iran war. India is a major strategic partner; Modi has stood with Israel in public. Greece, Cyprus, and others sit in a growing Mediterranean-to-India architecture. Isolation is a talking point, not a map.

So what was the point of saying it? Not to describe the world. To isolate Israel politically, scold Jews for having opinions, and imply that Israeli survival is a favor America might revoke. Policy disagreement is allowed. Scapegoating is not. When the deal met resistance, Vance reached for “elements” in Israel, a “well-funded” campaign, Brad Parscale, and the oldest play in the most grotesque of books: when things go wrong, find the Jews. But pro-Israel lobbying is a rounding error in comparison to the rest of lobbying in Washington. I documented the numbers and shared them on X back then. They have not become less embarrassing for him.

The “op” was the smear. The dissent was organic.
Alex Bruesewitz, a Vance-aligned operative, accused critics of a coordinated anti-Vance operation, then spent his energy attacking Jewish conservatives such as Mark Levin while Tucker, who has gone scorched-earth on Trump himself, remained a “friend.” That inversion is the tell. Americans opposed an Iran arrangement they did not trust because they have watched Tehran cheat for decades.

That is not a Tel Aviv call center. Calling Jewish and pro-Israel dissent an “op,” while a paid communications shop manufactures narratives for clients, is projection. I have said Bruesewitz should be fired for ignorance, antisemitic mockery of Jews who left Heritage over Tucker, and the fraudulent habit of labeling disagreement as a plot. The plot, such as it was, ran the other way: silence the Jews, protect Vance.

The RJC is teaching Heritage, TPUSA, and CPAC the wrong lesson.
For two years, conservative Jews have demanded that Heritage, Turning Point USA, and CPAC separate themselves from the Tucker-Kent-Owens-Massie-MTG posse. How can anyone expect those groups to do it when the Republican Jewish Coalition itself honors the posse’s top elected leader? If the RJC launders Vance, every other institution gets a permission slip. That is how normalization works. Not with a swastika. With a program and a standing ovation.

I voted for Donald Trump three times. I do not regret it. I will not vote for JD Vance. Not because of one worrisome thing here or there, but because of a clear, extended pattern of behavior: dual-loyalty insinuations, refusal to police his own coalition, genetic-testing “conversations” treated as necessary, Israel talked down as friendless, and loyalty to Tucker treated as a higher virtue than loyalty to RJC Jews sitting in the room.

Honoring Vance at a “leadership” summit while sidelining a clearly pro-Jewish secretary of state is tantamount to a 2028 endorsement. It is the ultimate betrayal of the people the RJC claims to represent, traded for access and the illusion of relevance.

But access is not leadership. A closed-door chat with JD Vance is not courage. The Jewish right needs new stewards who will tell Brooks what he will not tell himself: this is a failure, and it cannot be the model. We do not need RJC officials who confuse being in the room with being on our side. We need leadership that will walk out of the room before it launders JD Vance.

Jeffrey Lax is a professor of law at the City University of New York and chairman of the Department of Business at Kingsborough Community College. He is the founder of S.A.F.E. Campus, a 501(c)(3) organization that advocates for Zionist Jews on campus. Professor Lax is a frequent legal and political commentator on Fox News, Newsmax, and other major media outlets and is active on X at @CUNY_Prof.

JD VanceRJCTucker Carlson