Are Jews Dragging America into a War?

In strikingly similar language, prominent radical voices in Congress have been claiming that Israel is trying to “drag” the United States into war with Iran. 

“The U.S. must make it clear that we will not be dragged into another Netanyahu war,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) declared. 

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) warned: “We should not allow ourselves to be dragged into yet another conflict, against our will.” Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) said, “We cannot let [Israel’s prime minister] drag our country into a war with Iran.” And their fellow-“Squad” member Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) asserted: “We cannot allow a war criminal to drag American troops and resources into another endless war.”

The language used by these leaders of the far left is, ironically, reminiscent of what some of the most notorious figures on the far right were saying in the late 1930s and early 1940s. 

Extreme-right segregationist Congressman John Rankin (D-Miss.) declared on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives on June 4, 1941 that “a little group of our international Jewish brethren are still attempting to harass the President of the United States into plunging us into the European war.” Rep. M. Michael Edelstein (D-N.Y.) was so distraught over Rankin’s diatribe that he suffered a fatal heart attack in the lobby of the House of Representatives.

Fascist sympathizer Joseph P. Kennedy, America’s ambassador to England, asserted that “the Jews would like Germany to be punished by defeat of war” and so they wanted the United States to be “dragged into war with Germany.” Kennedy never regretted those statements. In an interview years later, recalling that period, he continued to insist that “Jewish publishers and writers” had “willingly contemplated a course leading to war, and even hoped that it might occur.”

Perhaps the best known of the blame-Jews-first crowd was the celebrity aviator Charles Lindbergh, who announced at an America First rally on Sept. 11, 1941, that “the Jews” were “pressing this country toward war” and trying to “force a free and independent people into war against its will.” The Jews sought to accomplish that goal through “their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government,” Lindbergh declared.

The similarity of language is obvious, whether it was Joseph Kennedy or Rashida Talib talking about Jews “dragging” America into war, or whether it was Bernie Sanders or Charles Lindbergh saying that Jews were imposing their agenda “against our will.” 

But it’s the similarity of thought that is the most noteworthy. In the 1930s, extremists imagined that the Jews, barely 3% of the American population, possessed some kind of sinister magical ability to control the will of the entire rest of the country and its leaders.

Today the target of the radicals is the Jewish state rather than the American Jewish community, but the idea at the heart of their allegation is equally spurious. They are saying that tiny Israel has some kind of mysterious power that enables it to hypnotize and control the government of the United States, the most powerful nation on earth.

Rep. Omar herself actually once used that very word. In a November 2012 tweet, she wrote, “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.” That was no different in spirit from her better known 2019 tweet, “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby,” which was her way of saying that Jews use their powers of financial manipulation to bring about congressional support of Israel.

Nor is Omar alone in promoting such ugly notions. In 2019, The New York Times published an editorial cartoon depicting Prime Minister Netanyahu as a dog, leading a blind President Trump. The Times subsequently acknowledged the cartoon was antisemitic, apologized and retracted it. By contrast, The Times’ foreign affairs columnist, Thomas L. Friedman, has never apologized for his 2004 article asserting that then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon “has had George Bush under house arrest in the Oval Office.”

There is a common thread to all these attacks, whether the target is Jews in general, Jewish bankers, Jewish publishers or the Jewish state — no matter who happens to be Israel’s prime minister at any given time. These accusations all ascribe to Jews mystical powers and accuse them of using those powers for evil, a slur that is not a criticism of some Israeli policy or leader, but simply antisemitism.

Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. His book “The Road to October 7: Hamas, the Holocaust, and the Eternal War Against the Jews” will be published on October 1, 2025, by The Jewish Publication Society / University of Nebraska Press.