on Huckabee, antisemitism, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre
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Leon Kraiem
Feb 23, 2026, 10:07:49 PMFeb 23
to Leon’s List
Hi friends,
I want to get one more email out before the supposedly-imminent war with Iran breaks out. Once that happens, it'll be all I talk about for a while.
But first let's talk about it. A few things: 1) It's taking forever, and there's an element of 'enough already, let's get a move on.' 2) I of course don't actually feel that way, not least because people are going to get killed, and every additional day is one additional day that they're alive, and 3) Some of those people, God forbid but probably, will be American servicemembers.
This will not be a war about Israel, though it will surely be seen and remembered as such. An observation I made at Shabbat lunch yesterday, while talking to a very interesting, very Catholic guest: When I started poking around the extremist internet in 2016, there were the white nationalists in one corner, and the leftist tankies in another, and the incel women-haters had one of their own too, and the Islamists took what was left. They were all different groups of people, and while individuals would occasionally defect from one party to the other, as the easily-radicalized so often do, they were hostile and paranoid and isolated by their very nature, as the part so the whole.
One thing that happened over the decade since, though, is that all those groups edged closer toward each other, little by little and then all at once; now, when it comes (((AIPAC))) and (((Epstein))), they’ve found common ground; when it comes to blame the Jews, they go on each other's podcasts without a second thought, and hail each other as truth-tellers, like French and German soldiers singing Christmas carols together in 1941.
Granted, these people aren't on your average wine mom's Instagram feed just yet -- but these once-disparate ideologies are like stars collapsing in on each other, and the entire internet is caught in their orbit. All of which is to say, I will not be surprised if the canonical version of the 2026 US-Iran War turns out to be that the perfidious Zionists tricked America into it.
—
But of course, America is an empire, of which Israel is a vassal, just as the Jewish polity has always been a vassal of a superpower centered far away. Trump's not threatening Iran because Bibi told him to, he's throwing his weight around the same way Nebuchadnezzar and Tiberius did -- though with a significantly higher-horsepower moral tailwind behind him, as so many Diaspora Iranians, contra their would-be spokespeople, have made clear.
Now, as an American, I really don't think I support the US going to war against Iran: The people did not consent to send young men and women to die in a mission that could aptly be codenamed: 'Operation What Could Possibly Go Wrong?'. But that has hardly anything to do with Israel. As a guy who lives in Jerusalem, meanwhile, I’m glad that the US is looking out for me, and I'm grateful to all the American sailors and airmen putting their lives on the line. But that's a good empire taking care of its client state -- not, as Cenk and Tucker are convinced, the other way around.
—
If it wasn't already clear, I went to the museum the other day, and I only managed to get to around the Second Temple period in the archaeology wing before they closed it down for the night. I am hardly the first to make this observation, but there is something comforting in the 'nothing new under the sun'-ness of it all (especially when that's so not true these days, given the AI thing, but let's leave that for another email.)
I'm reminded, as I write this, of my flight to Israel at the end of 2019, which followed another museum trip, that time to the Met. I'd been introduced to a potential romantic prospect there, who had told me -- on that weird, liminal floor with all the fancy silverware and colonial-era china, the location of which I could not tell you for my life, but which I imagine is sort of like the Room of Requirement, or the nineteenth floor of the Wayside School -- that her favorite book was "Constantine's Sword," by James Carroll.
A few things that book left me chewing on: 1) Israeli society today is just like Judean society circa the year zero. Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, are now religious, Haredi, secular. Cultures divided for generations over metaphysical questions that are basically religious in nature is a tale as old as time. And 2) The Catholic Church is basically as old as time, too, and it’s got lore, and antisemitism is part of it.
—
One of the best investments I ever made was a year's membership at the Jerusalem Cinematheque. I wasn't a big movie guy in the past, but when it doesn't cost you anything to go see one on any given day, it takes on a “why not?” quality rather than a “why?” one. Having a membership is also a way to fulfill the mitzvah of patronizing Jerusalem businesses that are open on Shabbat, without having to spend any money.
For those of you who've never been, the theaters lies roughly halfway down the Valley of Hinnom, so to get there from street-level Jerusalem you cross a wonky, spiral-shaped bridge, with a gorgeous, unobstructed view of the Old City. And every time I emerge from that theater, and look out at those Ottoman walls, I think some variant of: “That was a good story I just heard, definitely worth the price of admission. But check this story out — people will literally kill over it.’
In the New Atheist days, one way to get easy upvotes was to go to Barnes and Noble, take the Bible, and re-shelf it in the Fiction section. Which is a point well-taken, if it’s a point you need to make, but it’s obviously not the whole story. Now, this whole other line of thinking can feel, intellectually, like what the kids these days call “cope” — but it’s harder to dismiss the power of fiction when you still have tear-tracks down your cheek from the first ten minutes of Up.
—
One thing I think Carroll helped me understand is how the 'Holy Land' fits in, for Christians, to this relationship I'm gesturing at, between the story at the heart of the religion and the historical reality it may or may not map onto.
I want to get one more email out before the supposedly-imminent war with Iran breaks out. Once that happens, it'll be all I talk about for a while.
But first let's talk about it. A few things: 1) It's taking forever, and there's an element of 'enough already, let's get a move on.' 2) I of course don't actually feel that way, not least because people are going to get killed, and every additional day is one additional day that they're alive, and 3) Some of those people, God forbid but probably, will be American servicemembers.
This will not be a war about Israel, though it will surely be seen and remembered as such. An observation I made at Shabbat lunch yesterday, while talking to a very interesting, very Catholic guest: When I started poking around the extremist internet in 2016, there were the white nationalists in one corner, and the leftist tankies in another, and the incel women-haters had one of their own too, and the Islamists took what was left. They were all different groups of people, and while individuals would occasionally defect from one party to the other, as the easily-radicalized so often do, they were hostile and paranoid and isolated by their very nature, as the part so the whole.
One thing that happened over the decade since, though, is that all those groups edged closer toward each other, little by little and then all at once; now, when it comes (((AIPAC))) and (((Epstein))), they’ve found common ground; when it comes to blame the Jews, they go on each other's podcasts without a second thought, and hail each other as truth-tellers, like French and German soldiers singing Christmas carols together in 1941.
Granted, these people aren't on your average wine mom's Instagram feed just yet -- but these once-disparate ideologies are like stars collapsing in on each other, and the entire internet is caught in their orbit. All of which is to say, I will not be surprised if the canonical version of the 2026 US-Iran War turns out to be that the perfidious Zionists tricked America into it.
—
But of course, America is an empire, of which Israel is a vassal, just as the Jewish polity has always been a vassal of a superpower centered far away. Trump's not threatening Iran because Bibi told him to, he's throwing his weight around the same way Nebuchadnezzar and Tiberius did -- though with a significantly higher-horsepower moral tailwind behind him, as so many Diaspora Iranians, contra their would-be spokespeople, have made clear.
Now, as an American, I really don't think I support the US going to war against Iran: The people did not consent to send young men and women to die in a mission that could aptly be codenamed: 'Operation What Could Possibly Go Wrong?'. But that has hardly anything to do with Israel. As a guy who lives in Jerusalem, meanwhile, I’m glad that the US is looking out for me, and I'm grateful to all the American sailors and airmen putting their lives on the line. But that's a good empire taking care of its client state -- not, as Cenk and Tucker are convinced, the other way around.
—
If it wasn't already clear, I went to the museum the other day, and I only managed to get to around the Second Temple period in the archaeology wing before they closed it down for the night. I am hardly the first to make this observation, but there is something comforting in the 'nothing new under the sun'-ness of it all (especially when that's so not true these days, given the AI thing, but let's leave that for another email.)
I'm reminded, as I write this, of my flight to Israel at the end of 2019, which followed another museum trip, that time to the Met. I'd been introduced to a potential romantic prospect there, who had told me -- on that weird, liminal floor with all the fancy silverware and colonial-era china, the location of which I could not tell you for my life, but which I imagine is sort of like the Room of Requirement, or the nineteenth floor of the Wayside School -- that her favorite book was "Constantine's Sword," by James Carroll.
After that day, I wanted an excuse to talk to this person again, so I bought the book, and figured I’d read it on the plane.Annoyingly, however, Constantine’s Sword -- a history of the Jesus movement's split from mainstream Judaism and the genesis of antisemitism in the early Catholic church -- is 756 pages long. I got maybe 200 in before I called it a day. But those first few chapters actually made quite an impact on me.
A few things that book left me chewing on: 1) Israeli society today is just like Judean society circa the year zero. Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, are now religious, Haredi, secular. Cultures divided for generations over metaphysical questions that are basically religious in nature is a tale as old as time. And 2) The Catholic Church is basically as old as time, too, and it’s got lore, and antisemitism is part of it.
—
One of the best investments I ever made was a year's membership at the Jerusalem Cinematheque. I wasn't a big movie guy in the past, but when it doesn't cost you anything to go see one on any given day, it takes on a “why not?” quality rather than a “why?” one. Having a membership is also a way to fulfill the mitzvah of patronizing Jerusalem businesses that are open on Shabbat, without having to spend any money.
For those of you who've never been, the theaters lies roughly halfway down the Valley of Hinnom, so to get there from street-level Jerusalem you cross a wonky, spiral-shaped bridge, with a gorgeous, unobstructed view of the Old City. And every time I emerge from that theater, and look out at those Ottoman walls, I think some variant of: “That was a good story I just heard, definitely worth the price of admission. But check this story out — people will literally kill over it.’
In the New Atheist days, one way to get easy upvotes was to go to Barnes and Noble, take the Bible, and re-shelf it in the Fiction section. Which is a point well-taken, if it’s a point you need to make, but it’s obviously not the whole story. Now, this whole other line of thinking can feel, intellectually, like what the kids these days call “cope” — but it’s harder to dismiss the power of fiction when you still have tear-tracks down your cheek from the first ten minutes of Up.
—
One thing I think Carroll helped me understand is how the 'Holy Land' fits in, for Christians, to this relationship I'm gesturing at, between the story at the heart of the religion and the historical reality it may or may not map onto.
CS Lewis credited his religious awakening, in part, to a walk he took with JRR Tolkien in 1931, when the great fantasist, amid a conversation about myths, explained to him that Christianity, too, is a myth — it’s just a myth that actually happened. In “Miracles,” Lewis makes this same case: if you read the Bible as history, you’re missing the point; but you’re reading it wrong if you aren’t convinced that there really was was a virgin birth, was a crucifixion, was a resurrection, and was an ascension.
For Lewis, this has to be true; ‘compelling fiction’ won’t cut it, no matter how good the story, because the story itself is the penetration of the actual, physical world by Someone who is otherwise outside it.
One result of the Gospels’ plausibility is the psycho-spiritual power held by a place like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It’s totally imaginable that the historical Jesus was actually buried there, and it’s certainly the case that people have been making a pilgrimage to the site since not so long after his death. There are Jewish sites like that, too -- it's not a competition -- but I've been thinking about this one lately.
I think it’s that feeling of lore -- of something age-old, time- and placeless but also, essentially situated in time and place -- that explains the appeal of antisemitism for someone like Tucker Carlson — and the unattractiveness, for so many of his listeners, of the sort of Christian Zionism that Mike Huckabee professed in Tucker’s interview with him.
For Lewis, this has to be true; ‘compelling fiction’ won’t cut it, no matter how good the story, because the story itself is the penetration of the actual, physical world by Someone who is otherwise outside it.
One result of the Gospels’ plausibility is the psycho-spiritual power held by a place like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It’s totally imaginable that the historical Jesus was actually buried there, and it’s certainly the case that people have been making a pilgrimage to the site since not so long after his death. There are Jewish sites like that, too -- it's not a competition -- but I've been thinking about this one lately.
I think it’s that feeling of lore -- of something age-old, time- and placeless but also, essentially situated in time and place -- that explains the appeal of antisemitism for someone like Tucker Carlson — and the unattractiveness, for so many of his listeners, of the sort of Christian Zionism that Mike Huckabee professed in Tucker’s interview with him.
--
Going back to the world of online radicals, where I started this email: The big thing among alienated young men in America these days is going religious. But they're not getting baptized by some nondescript "preacher man down [by] the river," like Carrie Underwood did. No, they’re all joining the ancient churches — Roman Catholicism if you want something familiar, Eastern Orthodoxy if you can handle some high-caliber based.
How do I know this? Well, partly because of a good Ross Douthat episode about it; but mostly because my YouTube feed is full of videos like: “1 Hour of Chad Orthodox Chants to Redeem Your Soul,” or “That One Christian Edit You’re Looking For,” or “History PROVES Catholicism (Full Documentary),” which was uploaded eight months ago and is nine hours, twenty-two minutes long.
Now, obviously, “Chad Orthodox Chants to Redeem Your Soul” are to serious spirituality what “Ben Shapiro Destroys Blue-Haired Liberal” is to the marketplace of ideas. But, as with the college campus kabuki of the peak-SJW years, one can recognize the impurity of the supply and also recognize the need behind the surge of demand.
Going back to the world of online radicals, where I started this email: The big thing among alienated young men in America these days is going religious. But they're not getting baptized by some nondescript "preacher man down [by] the river," like Carrie Underwood did. No, they’re all joining the ancient churches — Roman Catholicism if you want something familiar, Eastern Orthodoxy if you can handle some high-caliber based.
How do I know this? Well, partly because of a good Ross Douthat episode about it; but mostly because my YouTube feed is full of videos like: “1 Hour of Chad Orthodox Chants to Redeem Your Soul,” or “That One Christian Edit You’re Looking For,” or “History PROVES Catholicism (Full Documentary),” which was uploaded eight months ago and is nine hours, twenty-two minutes long.
Now, obviously, “Chad Orthodox Chants to Redeem Your Soul” are to serious spirituality what “Ben Shapiro Destroys Blue-Haired Liberal” is to the marketplace of ideas. But, as with the college campus kabuki of the peak-SJW years, one can recognize the impurity of the supply and also recognize the need behind the surge of demand.
People are rootless, atomized, lonely. An institution that can trace its lineage all the way back to the apostles has, to use Heschel’s phrase for the resurrection of the State of Israel, an “echo of eternity.”
But that, my friends, is not Mike Huckabee's vibe. For all his charm, the US ambassador is the kind of guy who probably thinks Jesus was buried in the Garden Tomb.
—
Remember that Shabbos-lunch interlocutor of mine, the Catholic knight who has the tea on Opus Dei? I asked him how he thinks about Israel, religiously, and he directed me to an article by Simone Rizkalla. Here’s how she explains the position of Pope Benedict XVI:
There is something mysterious, even providential, about the modern return of the Jewish people to the land of Israel. This is not a political endorsement, nor a theological endorsement of every action of the modern state. It is an acknowledgment that history, theology, and prophecy sometimes converge in ways that resist easy classification.
I associate the word "mysterious," in religious contexts, with a couple passages by Pete Holmes, in his memoir ‘Comedy, Sex, God.’ Here’s his account of reading Joseph Campbell — whom he calls “Joey Cambs” — for the first time:
God had never been a mystery to me! The whole point of God was something to hold on to. Church was certainty worship — we sang songs that celebrated our in-ness as we prayed for and quietly pitied those who were out. God was something to calm the masses, to help us stop asking questions, to tick boxes so we could move on with our lives and think about other things. …[but] we’re all trying to put language to something we can’t speak about, something we can’t fully know. …These things, like my mushroom trip, weren’t meant to be labeled and sorted easily in our minds… We’re like dogs trying to understand the internet.
—
An important thing to note about the Huckabee fiasco is that most Israelis think he’s crazy, too. One exception is Betzalel Smotrich, who tweeted out, in response to the interview: “I <3 Huckabee.” But then, one must note: Israelis think Smotrich is crazy as well.
Now, as it happens, Huckabee’s religious Zionism is a lot like Smotrich’s religious Zionism, which is in turn a lot like the ‘National Conservatism’ that increasingly passes for American civil religion these days -- all of which bear a certain resemblance, I think, to the “certainty worship” that Pete Holmes recalls from his youth.
That movements take a national-historical mystery, a chain of events that aren’t adequately explainable without reference to something transcendent -- in one case, the success of Zionism, and in the other, of the American experiment -- but instead of keeping it a mystery, they assign it a neat explanation. Then, they try to bring that explanation to bear on statecraft, with more or less dangerous results.
—
So, with all that in mind, how should I think about the revving-up of the US killing machine, before I turn in for yet another maybe-it’ll-happen-tonight night?
With patience and care not to get in anyone’s way, I suppose; and with gratitude, for the people in whose way I’m trying not to get, and prayers for the people caught in the crossfire. Bottom line: this isn't about me, even if I might have to work around it for a while.
As always, I am alive, and I am well, thanks to others, not all of whom are,
I look forward to keeping you posted,
Leon
An important thing to note about the Huckabee fiasco is that most Israelis think he’s crazy, too. One exception is Betzalel Smotrich, who tweeted out, in response to the interview: “I <3 Huckabee.” But then, one must note: Israelis think Smotrich is crazy as well.
Now, as it happens, Huckabee’s religious Zionism is a lot like Smotrich’s religious Zionism, which is in turn a lot like the ‘National Conservatism’ that increasingly passes for American civil religion these days -- all of which bear a certain resemblance, I think, to the “certainty worship” that Pete Holmes recalls from his youth.
That movements take a national-historical mystery, a chain of events that aren’t adequately explainable without reference to something transcendent -- in one case, the success of Zionism, and in the other, of the American experiment -- but instead of keeping it a mystery, they assign it a neat explanation. Then, they try to bring that explanation to bear on statecraft, with more or less dangerous results.
—
So, with all that in mind, how should I think about the revving-up of the US killing machine, before I turn in for yet another maybe-it’ll-happen-tonight night?
With patience and care not to get in anyone’s way, I suppose; and with gratitude, for the people in whose way I’m trying not to get, and prayers for the people caught in the crossfire. Bottom line: this isn't about me, even if I might have to work around it for a while.
As always, I am alive, and I am well, thanks to others, not all of whom are,
I look forward to keeping you posted,
Leon
Leon Kraiem
Feb 24, 2026, 2:42:59 PMFeb 24
to Leon’s List
FYI, I've posted an abridged version of this to my Substack account.
https://open.substack.com/pub/roadkilltefillin/p/based-antisemitism-and-cringe-christian
It's an experiment; would welcome any feedback.
https://open.substack.com/pub/roadkilltefillin/p/based-antisemitism-and-cringe-christian
It's an experiment; would welcome any feedback.
--
Also, while we're here: Today is 4 years since Russia invaded Ukraine. I just made a small donation (my first since 2022, somewhat shamefully) to Nova, which does humanitarian/civil society work there. If you want to donate directly to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, you can do so here.
Leon
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