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Sunday, November 2, 2025
Prominent US Jewish lawyer quits Heritage Foundation’s antisemitism task force after defense of Tucker Carlson
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Mark Goldfeder, a prominent lawyer who represents Jews and Zionists in US court, says he is quitting the Heritage Foundation’s National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism because the prominent conservative think tank’s president defended Tucker Carlson’s interview this week with the antisemitic influencer Nick Fuentes.
Goldfeder, who is also a conservative, is the head of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, a Jewish legal group that has represented Jewish and non-Jewish pro-Israel figures in discrimination cases across the US.
The National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, founded in the wake of an upsurge of antisemitic incidents following the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attack, says it is an informal volunteer coalition, supported by the Heritage Foundation, that aims to combat antisemitism.
But the Heritage Foundation has been embroiled in controversy this week after its president, Kevin Roberts, defended right-wing pundit Carlson in a video statement and said the group would not cut ties with him days after Carlson hosted a friendly interview with Fuentes. In the video, Roberts took aim at the “globalist class” and “their mouthpieces in Washington.”
In an open letter posted on social media, Goldfeder says he agreed to join the task force “because I believed that combating antisemitism must remain a nonpartisan moral imperative.”
The National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, a project of @Heritage, has done valuable work. But free speech includes the right to associate—and not to.
I cannot serve under someone who thinks Nazis are worth debating. Here is my resignation letter: pic.twitter.com/ccVHMdlDbO— Mark Goldfeder (@MarkGoldfeder) November 2, 2025
“I hoped this initiative could model something better: a principled coalition grounded in shared decency and moral clarity,” he writes.
“Unfortunately, the recent decision by Heritage leadership to defend and even celebrate Tucker Carlson’s decision to platform Nick Fuentes — a figure whose record of overt racism, sexism and antisemitism is beyond dispute — makes continued participation impossible,” Goldfeder writes.
“Elevating him, and then attacking those who object as somehow un-American or disloyal, in a video replete with antisemitic tropes and dog-whistles no less, is not the protection of free speech: It is moral collapse disguised as courage,” he says. “Free speech protects the right to speak; it does not compel anyone to provide a megaphone for a Nazi.”
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