On Wednesday, Vice President J. D. Vance spoke at the University of Mississippi, as part of a tour organized by Turning Point USA, the conservative youth movement founded by the late Charlie Kirk. After his talk, in a nod to Kirk’s freewheeling campus debates, Vance fielded questions from students for nearly an hour, an impressive feat of rhetorical stamina that illustrated why he is one of the Trump right’s best communicators. But he flubbed a key question.“I’m a Christian man, and I’m just confused why there’s this notion that we might owe Israel something or that they’re our greatest ally or that we have to support this multi-hundred-billion-dollar foreign-aid package to Israel,” asked a young man in a MAGA hat. “I’m just confused why this idea has come around, considering the fact that not only does their religion not agree with ours, but also openly supports the prosecution of ours.”Although ostensibly about Israel, this question was fundamentally an attack on Jews and Judaism, segueing immediately from the Middle Eastern country to claims that the 0.2 percent of the world that is Jewish oppresses the 29 percent of the world that is Christian. The vice president was being presented with an age-old anti-Semitic inversion that remains popular among white nationalists.Vance’s response to this query included many reasonable counterpoints. He noted that “America First” doesn’t mean abandoning alliances but leveraging them for U.S. gain, and pointed out that far from being Israel’s patsy, President Trump used his leverage over Israel to achieve a Gaza cease-fire. He argued that theological differences between Christians and Jews did not preclude collaboration on matters of common concern. But the vice president’s answer was most notable for what it did not contain: any acknowledgment that the question contained an attack on Jews, let alone a rebuke of it.[Yair Rosenberg: The anti-Semitic revolution on the American right]Politicians are often unprepared to respond to explicit anti-Semitism in the moment. In this regard, the Vance incident was reminiscent of another almost a decade ago. During the Democratic presidential primary in April 2016, Bernie Sanders hosted a town hall in Harlem’s historic Apollo Theater. He, too, was ambushed by an interlocutor who shifted seamlessly between critique of Zionism and anti-Jewish conspiracism. “As you know, the Zionist Jews—and I don’t mean to offend anybody—they run the Federal Reserve, they run Wall Street, they run every campaign,” a man wearing a Black Lives Matter pin declared. “What is your affiliation to your Jewish community?” Sanders, too, failed to meet the moment and quickly pivoted to his Israel talking points rather than forthrightly address the prejudice of his questioner.But Vance should not have been surprised to face a baldly anti-Semitic assertion at a Turning Point gathering. At his own campus events, Kirk regularly fielded hostile questions from far-right acolytes of his archnemesis, the white-supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes. Among other lowlights, Fuentes has denied the Holocaust, called for the execution of non-Christians and “perfidious Jews,” and labeled interracial relationships as “degenerate.” “Oh, I’m anti-Semitic?” he said in 2022 on his web show, rhetorically addressing religious Jews. “I piss on your Talmud.” Once a fringe figure, Fuentes has moved closer and closer to the center of conservative power—dining with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, shaking hands onstage with a grinning Marjorie Taylor Greene that same year, and finally being interviewed by the most influential right-wing commentator in America, Tucker Carlson, just this past week.Carlson is a longtime ally of Vance and was reportedly influential in helping him secure the vice-presidential nod from Trump. The former FOX host spoke before the president at the 2024 Republican National Convention, and his son now serves as a press aide in Vance’s office. Carlson has also spent years mainstreaming anti-Semitic voices and ideas. He has hosted a parade of Hitler apologists on his podcast; claimed that Israel had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks but did not share the information with the U.S.; slurred the prominent Jewish conservative Ben Shapiro and those like him as foreign anti-American subversives who “don’t care about the country at all”; and, in his speech at Kirk’s funeral, blamed a cabal of people “eating hummus” (i.e., Jews) for killing Jesus. And all that was before he sat down for a cordial conversation with Fuentes.[Jonathan Chait: The intellectual vacuity of the national conservatives]Surveys show that about a quarter of young people today hold anti-Semitic views, far more than among their elders. Some see these numbers as a problem to be confronted; others see them as an opportunity to be exploited. Carlson and his allies, who include the far-right conspiracy theorist Candace Owens and the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, appear to fall into the latter camp. They have grown their platforms by appealing to such sentiments and inflaming them, rather than combatting them. Their escalating conspiracist rhetoric about Jews suggests that they hope to harness anti-Semitism as part of a push to take over the MAGA movement after Trump departs the scene.Of course, Vance also hopes to inherit that movement, so he is faced with a fateful choice: whether to accommodate the anti-Semites on the rising right or reject them. By fielding questions from all comers on a college campus, Vance sought to emulate and honor Kirk’s legacy. But in his response to his bigoted interlocutor, he fell short of Kirk’s example. A staunch supporter of Israel, Kirk had grown more critical of the Netanyahu government by the end of his life. He warned against U.S. conflict with Iran and, according to his friend and podcast producer, wanted the Gaza war to end. But Kirk sharply distinguished between such political criticism and anti-Jewish conspiracism.“I don’t align with Jew haters, sorry,” he told a questioner who asked whether he would build a “big tent” with Fuentes and those like him. “If you are blaming less than 0.2 percent of the world’s population for all of your problems, that is not going to be good for your soul; it’s not good for your psychology; it’s not good for your future in any way, shape, or form,” he said weeks before he was killed. “Any young person that goes into this hyper-online brain rot, you are serving yourself over to your own demise. You are serving yourself into a suicide mission that will not make you happier and not make you healthier.” Kirk understood that, practically speaking, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories destroy those who embrace them because such people begin chasing imaginary Jewish culprits instead of rationally addressing the true causes of their concerns.At times, Vance has tried to walk a similar line, supporting Jews and the Jewish state while critiquing the actions of Israel’s hard-right government—most recently when he justifiably slammed Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition for advancing a bill to annex the occupied West Bank. But although Vance has championed free speech and debate within the conservative tent, he has rarely used his own speech to debate the anti-Semitic elements of his party. The vice president is an exceptional communicator, and he is capable of formulating an approach to Israel on the American right that normalizes the country in conservative discourse and opens it to critique without declaring open season on Jews. The question is: Does he want to?If Vance is betting on winning the Carlson lane in the 2028 Republican presidential primary, he may not wish to alienate those voters who have become animated by overt hostility to Jews. The vice president has demonstrated no personal inclination to anti-Semitism, but he wouldn’t be the first politician to attempt to take advantage of a popular prejudice that they themselves do not share. If that is not Vance’s intention, however, he’ll need better answers to the right’s rising anti-Semites than the one he gave this week, because their questions are not going away.