From syringe swastikas to Soros-whistling, Herschel Walker, the GOP candidate for Georgia's runoff election, is more than happy for antisemites to believe that he's an antisemite – and that, to put it mildly, is not good for the Jews

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Georgia Republican U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker at a campaign rally this week.

Georgia Republican U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker at a campaign rally this week.Credit: JUSTIN SULLIVAN - Getty Images via AFP

Ethan Katz

Ethan Katz

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Nov 30, 2022 4:47 pm IST

Growing up as a small boy in Tallahassee, Florida, I acquired an acute sensibility about the challenges of Jewish life in the South. I recall my bafflement when I learned that a Jewish friend of my mother, a teacher, had been asked by a student if they could see her horns. Following my absence for the start of the High Holy Days one year, a teacher asked me with a chuckle: “So, Ethan, have you Rosh-Hashanah-ed enough?”

From a young age, I sensed that many of my non-Jewish classmates and teachers had little notion of what it meant to be Jewish, or how their own misperceptions or ignorance, however inadvertently, could prove alienating to those of us who are.

This was the beginning of my understanding of a type of antisemitism that for me, as a modern Jewish historian and the co-director of Berkeley’s Antisemitism Education Initiative, has become all too familiar. This antisemitism features willful ignorance of Jewish culture, turning Jews into representatives instead of individuals, and of course, outright demonization and scapegoating. Today, as I watch the U.S. Senate runoff in Georgia taking place a short drive north from my hometown, my expertise and personal experiences convince me that Herschel Walker has an antisemitism problem.

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Walker’s campaign has long adopted a “base election” strategy to turn out the extreme right of the Republican Party. This segment of voters includes many who have embraced white nationalism and “great replacement theory” – the idea that Jews are conspiring with other ethnic and religious majorities to carry out genocide against the white race.

For example, in October 2021, when it became publicly known that a fundraiser organizing a Walker campaign event at her home featured an image of a swastika with syringes attached to it on her Twitter profile, Walker defended her. He insisted the image was not in fact a swastika, but simply a sign of opposition to vaccine requirements. Only in the face of tremendous pressure did the campaign cancel the fundraising event.

Subsequently, in a cringeworthy performance at a candidate forum with Republican Jewish voters, Walker repeatedly invoked his devotion to Jesus Christ. In late October of this year, Kanye West – whose antisemitic comments alleging Jewish control of Hollywood finance, and other institutions have been broadly condemned – endorsed Walker’s campaign. Walker has made no attempt to reject or distance himself from the endorsement.

Now, as the runoff enters its final stages, Walker’s campaign appears to be intensifying its efforts to appeal to voters who embrace antisemitic ideas. A few days ago, journalist Jacob Kornbluh of The Forward took to Twitter to expose a series of screenshots of an email circulated by the Georgia state GOP, centered on billionaire George Soros – a Jewish bogeyman par excellence. Soros’s name appears nine times in the message, each occasioning an attack on Walker’s Democratic opponent, Senator Raphael Warnock. The email claimed that “no one does Soros’ bidding better” than Warnock, and that the senator “has been a perfect puppet for Soros’ left-wing agenda.”

That Republicans have long targeted Soros cannot provide cover for this barely-veiled effort to whip up antisemitism as a campaign strategy, nor does the fact that a Soros-funded Super PAC has provided financial support to Warnock’s campaign, alongside those of many other Democrats running in 2022. Walker’s campaign may not ask Soros to show his horns, but they similarly imply that he is a Jewish monster.

Soros’s name has become part of an antisemitic lexicon, a new word for an old trope. Robert Bowers, who carried out the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in 2018, was obsessed with Soros, who he claimed was the Jewish architect of “white genocide." And White nationalists who rallied in Charlottesville a year prior, similar to politicians who railed against a so-called migrant “caravan” making its way to the United States from south of the border, invoked Soros as the mastermind of left-wing and anti-American conspiracy.

No different from Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s absurd accusation that the Rothschild banking family was part of a cabal setting wildfires in California, the Georgia GOP’s repetition of Soros’ name is intended to direct readers who are so primed to associate Warnock with covert and manipulative Jewish power. The email winks at the extreme right, and nods at its pre-existing view that Jews are to blame for the ills of the world.

Undoubtedly, some have sharp disagreements with Walker’s opponent Senator Warnock, but those are matters of policy. Unlike Walker, Warnock, as a pastor, has a long history of deep relationships in the Jewish community that have led many of its leaders to vouch personally for his understanding of Jewish spirituality and Jewish issues. He has also been consistent in denouncing antisemitism, from the left and the right.

By contrast, at a moment of a remarkable upsurge in antisemitic expressions across the political spectrum, the message from the Walker campaign has become startlingly clear: Whether or not Herschel Walker is personally antisemitic, he is more than happy for the antisemites to believe that he is an antisemite. And that, to put it mildly, is not good for the Jews.

Dr. Ethan Katz is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at UC-Berkeley, where he is also the Co-Director of the Antisemitism Education Initiative. He has published widely on the modern Jewish experience and the history of antisemitism and other forms of exclusion. Twitter: @EthanKatz79

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