The week Rabbi Elie Mischel’s new book Countdown: American Jews and God’s Plan for Redemption was published, a Democratic congressional candidate in Texas named Maureen Galindo finished first in her primary after proposing to imprison American Zionists for treason. Rabbi Mischel, who left America five years ago to raise his family in the biblical heartland of Judea, was not surprised. He had seen it coming. I sat down with him to talk about his book, the moment American Jews find themselves in, and why he believes the antisemites now threatening Jewish life in America are, unwittingly, doing God’s work.
Zahava Schwartz: You’re living in Judea, you have young children at home, you’re running Israel365’s education division. What made you sit down and write this particular book, right now?
Rabbi Elie Mischel: I spent the first forty years of my life in America. Eight of those years I served as rabbi of Congregation Suburban Torah in Livingston, New Jersey. Those people are my friends, my community, people I love deeply. And I watch what is happening to them — to American Jews generally — with a feeling of alarm that I simply cannot keep to myself.
What we are living through right now is genuinely unprecedented. The kind of anti-Jewish statements that ten years ago would have ended a political career in America are being spoken every single day — by politicians, by media personalities with millions of followers, and by candidates winning primaries. And what frightens me is not just the antisemitism itself. What frightens me is that Jews are getting used to it. We’re like the frog in the pot of boiling water — the temperature rises so gradually that we don’t realize we’re being boiled alive.
Everyone is decrying the antisemitism. Some people are fighting back, and I respect that. But my sense is that nobody is getting down to the core issue. Nobody is asking the question that I believe God is forcing us to ask: what is He trying to tell us? What message is He sending America? That’s what this book is about.
ZS: You spent forty years in America and then moved to Israel. How did leaving change the way you see American Jewish life?
REM: When you come to a new country as an immigrant, you see differences with a clarity that people who have lived there their whole lives simply don’t have. It’s one of the few benefits of being an immigrant!
What I see, looking back at America from here, is a profound confusion of identity. Jews in Israel have a much simpler sense of who they are — and I don’t mean that life here is simple, because it isn’t. But in terms of identity, it is clear. We are a nation. The nation of Israel. Israelis see themselves through the lens of peoplehood, of army, of government, of the Bible woven through public life.
Looking back at America, I see the opposite. There’s this constant, low-grade confusion of self. What am I? I’m an American. I’m also a Jew. Does that make me similar to a Catholic American or an evangelical American? Or is there some deeper tension here? Is being Jewish a religion? Is it being part of a nation? When you’re living inside that confusion your whole life, you don’t necessarily think about it consciously. When you move to Israel, where Jews are so clearly a nation, it hits you like a thunderbolt.
ZS: The book is called Countdown. That word implies urgency, even danger. Do you genuinely believe American Jews are running out of time?**
REM: That’s exactly why I chose the title. I did not write this as an academic book. I am not an academic, and I have no interest in being one. Academic implies detached, disconnected from what we’re actually living through. God did not give us the Bible to study it in an academic way. He gave it to us so that we can understand how to apply it right now, in our generation.
Do I think a Holocaust is coming, God forbid? No, I do not. But I do believe a different kind of countdown is underway. The day is coming — and I don’t think it’s far off — when American Jews will face a genuine choice. After President Trump leaves office, there will come a time when it will be professionally costly, socially dangerous, perhaps worse, to publicly identify with Israel. The Israeli flag on your front porch will have consequences. The donation to AIPAC will have consequences. American Jews have lived for generations in a comfortable reality where they can love America and love Israel and feel no contradiction. I believe those days are coming to an end. The countdown has begun.
ZS: The dual loyalty accusation is coming from Tucker Carlson on the right, Ilhan Omar on the left, and Maureen Galindo in the middle of a Democratic primary. Very different people, completely opposite politics, converging on the same charge. What do you make of that?
REM: It’s remarkable, isn’t it? Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Ilhan Omar, Maureen Galindo — people who agree on virtually nothing else have all arrived at the same accusation. Jews are not truly loyal Americans. The Israel lobby controls Washington. AIPAC is a foreign agent. Jews who love Israel cannot be trusted.
And notice something important: the attacks are never about Jewish religious practice. Nobody is attacking Jews for going to synagogue or keeping kosher. The attacks are always about nationhood and identity. That tells you something. The antisemites have, without realizing it, put their finger on precisely the question that American Jews most need to confront: who are you, really? Are you Americans who happen to be Jewish, or are you Jews who happen to live in America? That is the question at the heart of this book.
ZS: And yet you go much further than simply saying antisemites have identified a real question. You argue that God is behind this. That He is using these antisemites as messengers. That’s a stunning claim. Walk me through it.
REM: I know it sounds stunning. But this is exactly how God works throughout the Bible. He doesn’t always speak through prophets and burning bushes. He speaks through history, through events, through the nations of the world. The rise of Babylon was God’s message to the Jewish people of that era. Haman was God’s message to the Jews of Persia. And I believe — I genuinely believe — that Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens are God’s messengers to the Jews of America.
They are unwitting messengers. They have no idea they are serving a divine purpose. Their motives are hatred, resentment, and of course money and clicks. But God is using them to force American Jews to grapple with a question they have spent two centuries desperately avoiding. That question is not going away. God is turning the screw.
And here is what I find most striking: the accusation they have all landed on is not random. They are not accusing Jews of financial manipulation or media control or any of the other classic antisemitic tropes. They are accusing Jews specifically of divided identity, of having a heart that belongs somewhere else. And that is precisely the point God wants American Jews to examine.
ZS: You draw a sharp distinction in the book between dual loyalty and dual identity. What’s the difference, and why does it matter so much?
REM: The antisemites say Jews are not loyal to America. I think that accusation is false, and I say so clearly in the book. The Torah is explicit: the law of the land is the law. Whatever country you live in, you must be a loyal citizen. Jews in America are, with the rarest of exceptions, extraordinarily loyal Americans. They serve in the military, they pay their taxes, they love this country. So the dual loyalty charge, as a factual matter, is wrong.
But there is a different question underneath it, a deeper question, and that question is legitimate: where does your heart belong? President Trump touched on this — perhaps unintentionally — when he spoke at the Knesset and asked Miriam Adelson: “What do you love more, America or Israel?” He didn’t ask whether she is loyal to America. He knows she is. He asked what she loves more. And to that question, I believe any honest Jew has only one answer: Israel.
Because that is what God commands. Every book of prophecy, every prayer in our prayer book, all of it points in one direction — the Jewish people returning to the land of Israel, the nation of Israel rebuilt in its homeland. To say that your heart belongs to America, that America is your true home, is as a Jew to contradict everything the tradition teaches. You can be a loyal American citizen. You cannot honestly claim to be American in your bones. Abraham said it himself when he approached the Hittites: “I am a stranger and a resident among you” (Genesis 23:4). You can be a loyal resident. You cannot stop being a stranger.
ZS: Some readers — including some who are sympathetic to your argument — will say: you’re handing ammunition to the antisemites. By drawing this distinction and saying Jews’ hearts ultimately belong to Israel, aren’t you confirming exactly what Tucker Carlson claims?
REM: I understand that fear, and I take it seriously. But I think it gets things exactly backwards.
Things are already so bad that nothing I say is going to make them worse. The antisemites don’t need my book to make their argument. They’re making it every day to audiences of millions. What my book does is help Jews understand what is actually happening to them and why — and that understanding is the only thing that can produce a meaningful response.
Here is the deeper truth: our own confusion has actually fueled the antisemitism. When Jews are unclear about who they are, when they give contradictory signals — crying out “Next year in Jerusalem!” at the Passover Seder and then insisting America is their permanent home — it creates the suspicion and resentment that antisemites exploit. If we were honest and clear about who we are and what we are trying to do in the world, I believe many people would respond not with hostility but with admiration. Our confusion is part of the problem. Clarity is part of the solution.
ZS: This is clearly a book about American Jews. But you’ve also written it for a non-Jewish audience — for Christians who care about Israel and believe the Bible. Why should a Christian reader care about this internal Jewish identity crisis?
REM: Because the Bible says the fate of the Jewish people determines the fate of all nations. This is not only a Jewish claim — it is a biblical claim that every serious Bible reader, Jewish or Christian, has to reckon with. The prophet Zechariah foresaw a day when “ten men from every language of the nations shall grasp the garment of a Jewish man, saying, ‘Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you'” (Zechariah 8:23). That vision cannot be fulfilled by a Jewish people that has spent two centuries convincing itself that it is only a religion.
Christian Zionists have long understood that Israel’s restoration is central to God’s redemptive plan for the world. What this book argues is that the Jewish people’s own understanding of who they are is equally central to that plan. A confused, assimilated, identity-less American Jewish community is not going to help usher in the fulfillment of those prophecies. An awakened Jewish people that understands its national mission — that is something else entirely. Christian readers have a profound stake in whether that awakening happens.
Rabbi Elie Mischel is the Director of Education at Israel365 and the author of Countdown: American Jews and God’s Plan for Redemption, available at israel365store.com. Part 2 of this interview, in which Rabbi Mischel discusses the Book of Esther, the crisis within traditional American Jewry, and what he is actually asking American Jews to do, will appear next week.
