JD Vance’s Jewish chief of staff seems unfazed by GOP antisemitism – though he’s a target

JTA — United States Vice President JD Vance has spent months drawing fire from Jewish conservatives for his refusal to confront antisemitism within the Republican coalition. Now, a new profile suggests that the Jew who is perhaps closest to him — his chief of staff, Jacob Reses — is on board with that approach.

An extensive New York magazine profile of Reses published this week reveals that the 35-year-old operative, characterized as one of the powerful figures in the Trump administration, has used his private X account to amplify voices calling on Jews to embrace, rather than resist, the Christian nationalist current reshaping the GOP.

In September 2025, according to the profile, Reses reposted Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale’s approving quote of a statement arguing that Jews should stop being uncomfortable with public expressions of Christianity.

The statement read, “To save this Nation of Kindness that has bestowed such blessing on us, we Jews can no longer be squeamish about the majority’s invocation of the Christian deity and other aspects of their faith. The neutering of Christianity has been disastrous for all of us and must end.”

A Jewish Telegraphic Agency profile published in 2024, when Vance was selected as Donald Trump’s running mate, traced Reses’s Jewish identity and his journey from a Democratic-leaning Jewish teenager in southern New Jersey, whose grandfather escaped the Holocaust in Lithuania, to one of the most influential conservatives in Washington. His trajectory included internships for Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, a political conversion at Princeton, and stints at the Heritage Foundation and in the office of Sen. Josh Hawley.

For months, Vance has faced a drumbeat of criticism from prominent Jewish conservatives, including Ben Shapiro and Commentary editor Abe Greenwald, for declining to draw a line against antisemitic figures gaining influence in the party, particularly the white nationalist livestreamer Nick Fuentes, who was platformed by Vance’s ally Tucker Carlson in an October 2025 interview. At a Turning Point USA conference in December, Vance declared that he would not subject the conservative coalition to “endless, self-defeating purity tests,” and that America has always been a “Christian nation.” He omitted any mention of Jews or Nazis from his Holocaust Remembrance Day statement in January. And he has repeatedly said he does not believe antisemitism is surging in the GOP.

New York magazine reports that Reses reposted Vance’s rejection of purity tests. One person in Vance’s orbit told the magazine that Reses’s overarching priority is Vance’s political success “at the highest possible level, up to and including US president.”

The profile also offers a window into the personal bond between the two men. In January, Vance officiated at Reses’s wedding to Rachel Altman at a synagogue in Rockville, Maryland, delivering a Jewish prayer under the chuppah. The Chabad House at Princeton, Reses’s alma mater, posted a photo of the couple with the vice president, celebrating the occasion as an expression of Jewish pride.

That closeness and Reses’s alignment with Vance’s stance on antisemitism have not spared Reses from becoming a target of antisemites: A white-nationalist website ran an article about him headlined “Another Nail in the Coffin — Jew Runs J. D. Vance.” Similar rhetoric is growing widespread on social media.

Meanwhile, the man who helped convert Reses from a liberal Democrat to a conservative appears to have gone in a different direction. Princeton professor Robert George, whom Reses has credited as an important influence, resigned from the Heritage Foundation’s board of trustees in November after Heritage president Kevin Roberts defended Carlson’s interview with Fuentes and refused to fully retract a video in which he called Carlson’s critics a “venomous coalition.”

George declared that the conservative movement “simply cannot include or accommodate white supremacists or racists of any type, antisemites, eugenicists, or others whose ideologies are incompatible with belief in” human equality. His departure was followed by additional board resignations amid an exodus of Heritage staffers.

Reses, who keeps his X account private and does not give interviews, appears to see the tradeoffs differently than his former mentor. According to the profile, his tolerance for right-wing antisemitism is rooted in a catastrophist worldview that frames American liberalism as an existential threat and Trumpism, with all its flaws, as the only viable alternative.

The magazine describes unnamed sources depicting Reses as having embraced the logic of conservative essayist Michael Anton’s infamous “Flight 93 Election” argument: that liberals, like the terrorists on the hijacked plane, are driving the country toward destruction.