On two separate occasions, Fox News’ Jesse Watters recently used language with heavily anti-Jewish connotations. In the June 19, 2026, episode of “Jesse Watters Primetime,” during his scripted monologue about the ceasefire agreement with Iran, Watters said:
We seem to be right on the cusp of a major breakthrough in the agreement. And then all of a sudden, there’s a major explosion that goes off in a civilian population center in Beirut. And a lot of people who have nothing to do with Hezbollah lose their lives. That’s not acceptable. Vance sent a warning to the Jews. He said, “Watch out, Trump’s your daddy, too.”
The version posted on Fox’s social media courteously modified this to “JD Vance just sent a STARTLING WARNING to ISRAEL.”
Then, on the June 22 episode of “The Five,” he again confused Jews with Israel, using highly offensive language.
The Jewish question is gonna be a situation with this deal. The population of Israel—they want Netanyahu to go hard in Lebanon.
Despite co-panelist Jessica Tarlov challenging him, Watters was dismissive, simply modifying it to “Israeli Jews.”
It should go without saying that “the Jewish question” is a loaded phrase. But in today’s world, filled with not historically inclined talking heads, it is worth revisiting its origins.
In medieval and early modern German principalities, Jews had been a lower class. Not only did they lack equal rights, but they also had to suffer codified humiliation and were relegated to designated ghettos.
For example, there existed two gates in Berlin: the Brandenburg Gate was for humans, and the Rosenthal Gate was for cattle. Jews had to use the Rosenthal Gate and pay the cattle tax.
In the 19th century, a debate emerged over German Jews’ civil and political rights. It was called Die Judenfrage in German, meaning “the Jewish Question.” Even those most favorable to Jewish emancipation did not have a favorable view of Jews. They argued that Jews had not accepted Christianity because they had been isolated, and that allowing them to leave their ghettos would lead to their embracing Christianity.
Eventually, German intellectual Bruno Bauer penned an essay under the title “Die Judenfrage.” He made the opposite point of those who favored emancipation as a path to Christianization. Bauer, a radical atheist, argued that Christianity was the last step before atheism, and Judaism was a step before Christianity, meaning that Jews were further away from embracing the truth of atheism and undeserving of emancipation.
Karl Marx penned the most infamous essay concerning this topic, “On the Jewish Question.” He too argued against emancipation and promoted the most negative stereotypes about Jews in the essay. Its most famous line reads:
What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.
The Jewish question, therefore, was how to stop Jews from being Jews. Christians wanted them to become Christians, and atheists demanded that Jews be atheists. Nobody accepted Jews as Jews.
Jews eventually received full emancipation in Germany, but the “question” remained unresolved, as they remained Jews. In 1935, the Nazis proposed their own solution. The Gestapo issued a report that the “solution” to the “Jewish question” was bottom-up, by allowing Nazi mobs to persecute Jews with government blessing. Therefore, the Nazis enacted the Nuremberg Laws that ended protection for Jews. This policy peaked with “Kristallnacht,” a Nazi pogrom that destroyed shops belonging to Jews and killed over 1,000 Jews. Yet, the “Jewish question” remained unresolved.
Eventually, the Nazis were “forced” to adopt a “final solution,” which was the eradication of all Jews. Using modern rational thinking and science to find the most efficient way of killing Jews, the Nazis organized annihilation camps. “The Jewish Question” finally arrived at its destination: The Holocaust, which took the lives of six million Jews.
Watters deserves the benefit of the doubt. Ignorance on this topic may be at play. He has, for example, aired an interview with a leader of the Jew-hating Black Hebrew Israelites, a fringe, gentile group that claims that its members are the real Jews, and failed to challenge his guest’s absurd demand that the land of Israel belongs to them. But he has also reported on and condemned antisemitism on college campuses and from the political Left in recent years (but not from the Right).
The repeat of the offense within a few days is concerning, however. Jews are a diverse ethnic and religious group, while Israel is a political entity. As we have seen in recent years, collective attribution of guilt has led to many deadly attacks on individual Jews in the United States and around the world for the real or imagined sins of others.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of Jew-hatred, adopted by dozens of democratic governments, including the U.S. government, makes clear that treating Jews everywhere as interchangeable with Israel is anti-Jewish bigotry. It defines: “Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel” as anti-Jewish bigotry.
Anti-Jewish bias is finding its way from the fringes to the political mainstream. In these circumstances, it is imperative for prominent journalists and outlets to unequivocally condemn it, rather than joining the mob or hoping to lead it.