The energy in the room was more than a little nervous Friday night in Phoenix at a Shabbat dinner held for attendees of TPUSA’s AmericaFest. About a mile away, at the Convention Center, Steve Bannon called Ben Shapiro a cancer, underscoring a debate about Israel that is the conference’s one major distraction.
The battle becomes ugly and emotional, and the underlying issue is, as always, this: when does legitimate criticism of the Jewish state of Israel cross over into anti-Semitism? It’s a question no one has ever known the answer to.
At the Shabbat dinner, several speakers praised Shapiro’s opening night Amfest speech, in which they called out anti-Semitism and railed against Tucker Carlson’s rebuttal. But Rabbi Pesach Wolicki, who presided over the dinner, took a slightly different approach.
For the most part, Wolicki stuck to religion, praying, singing and explaining the power of the Sabbath, which, 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 comments as the dinner ended, because Wolicki is a friend of his and a regular on his show. “I’ll talk to Steve,” he told me, his eyes rolling a little. But he quickly added, “Steve is not an anti-Semite.”
Almost at the exact moment I spoke to Wolicki, Megyn Kelly and Jack Posobiec were on the main stage at AmFest, where Kelly would say of Shapiro and the new head of CBS News, Bari Weiss, “It’s about Israel. Those two are very pro-Israel, fiery activists, and that’s fine. But they can’t dictate how the rest of us feel.”
Ben Shapiro speaking at AmericaFest 2025. (Screenshot/TPUSA)
This is a debate in which both sides are talking past each other. Israel’s critics claim, somewhat confusingly, that they are not allowed to make such criticisms, even if they do so in front of 25,000 people in attendance. The pro-Israel side, which is rightly concerned about the recent rise in anti-Semitism, sometimes sees bigotry where it is not.
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To make matters worse, people on both sides of this feud are calling for the excommunication of the other side of the conservative movement, something that, since the conservative movement has no pope, is impossible anyway.
If there is any good news in all of this, it is that among the Amfest participants I spoke with, Israel is barely mentioned, as has been my experience when I travel around the country talking to voters. Stanley, a thirty-something from Ohio, told me when I pressed the question, “It’s about the last issue on my mind.”
Vice President JD Vance speaks at Uline Inc. on December 16, 2025 at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Allentown, Pennsylvania. (Tom Brenner-Pool/Getty Images)
But that doesn’t mean this internal struggle doesn’t have real implications. President Donald Trump has been as close an ally to Israel as possible, but it is not clear whether a potential President JD Vance, who is supported by most Israeli critics, would maintain such loyalty.
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The whole situation reminds me of the controversies that have always raged 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 have been more different on the Jewish question.
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In a conversation about their approach, Stewart, who is not Jewish, 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 happens at AmFest. Israel’s critics seem to believe that what they say has little or nothing to do with anti-Semitism, something that, like Suchet’s view of Shylock, few Jewish people can truly accept.
Charlie Kirk shakes hands with President Donald Trump as Trump speaks on stage at AmericaFest 2024 in Phoenix, Arizona, on December 22, 2024. (Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images)
One figure mentioned by several speakers at the Shabbat dinner was 0.2%, the percentage of the world’s population that is Jewish. Perhaps more than any other group, Jews live in literal fear of extinction.
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All the big, powerful and famous voices in this fuss at AmFest would do well to turn the temperature down considerably. At this point it seems a lot like jousting egos competing for audience share, rather than an honest discussion of differences.
Conservatives win when they are united, and there is enough common ground in Israel for unity, for compassion to overcome the chaos. Hopefully the focus in the last two days of Amfest can be on what brings people together, and not on what divides them.
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