Serving as a linchpin of combating antisemitism around the world for the next three years is a Lubavitcher chassid from Florida; a company executive who got to know President Trump during the president’s former business life.
Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, born in Kfar Chabad, was confirmed last month by the Senate for his position as U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism. Under his mandate, he reports directly to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. It’s his second interview on these pages; the first was on the private company he founded to extract drinkable water from the air.
Along with the recently rejuvenated Holocaust Museum Board, profiled here two weeks ago, observers are optimistic that the fight against antisemitism can go on the offensive.
Adding to that optimism is a clear denunciation from Trump that there is no room for antisemites in his Make America Great Again movement or in the Republican Party. He told the New York Times in a wide-ranging two-hour interview, whose full transcript was published on Sunday, that “we don’t need” and “we don’t like” leading conservative figures who have espoused antisemitic views, such as Candace Owens and Nick Fuentas and that he “certainly” condemns them.
“If you talk about the antisemitic views, there’s been nobody better for us,” Trump said, noting that he was recently notified that he would be the next recipient of the Israel Award as its first non-Israeli awardee. “There has been no better president in the history of the world as we know it that has been stronger or better and less antisemitic, certainly, than Donald Trump. I have been the best president of the United States in the history of this country toward Israel.”
“And that’s,” he added, “by the way, acknowledged by everybody.”
Trump spoke proudly of his daughter Ivanka’s conversion to Yiddishkeit and her marriage to a Jewish husband, Jared Kushner, along with his three Jewish grandchildren. “I’m very proud of them,” he said. “I’m very proud of that whole family. I am the least antisemitic person, probably, there is anywhere in the world.”
More worrying is the position Vice President J.D. Vance, widely seen as the 2028 presidential frontrunner on the GOP ticket, has on this. He has pointedly refused to criticize antisemitic voices in the MAGA movement, at one point blasting calls for him to do so by saying that he refuses to cancel anyone.
Kaploun said that he remains optimistic that Trump wants him to lead a muscular response to Jew-hatred. He dismissed a lengthy monologue by Carlson last week, accusing him of muzzling the First Amendment; the controversial Christian-first jock also wondered why a position was needed to fight antisemitism.
Kaploun, who, along with his partner Ed Russo, founded RussKap Water, has received several prestigious prizes for their product, which creates water out of thin air, and last year was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for its potential.
First of all, mazel tov on your confirmation.
Thank you.
I did a feature in the Yated about the Holocaust Museum; I spoke to a few people there, and they feel that with you in the State Department and them in a revitalized Holocaust Museum, they’ll be able to more effectively counter antisemitism. Have you been in touch with them?
I have been working with all of them since I was nominated. I spoke about the Holocaust Museum at my confirmation hearings.
Let’s start from the beginning. What are your goals for your office?
My goals are to combat antisemitism.
Right, but that’s a very broad net.
Absolutely, it’s a very broad role. The role and the title are “Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism” with the rank of ambassador. As an ambassador, you have the ability to have the weight of speaking for the president on these issues. This is a very timely, broad role that I have. It’s a role that I wish did not exist or had to exist. And it’s to defend Yidden and to be able to protect Jews and combat antisemitism, which means to be pro-Semitic. I’m a believer that I want to accentuate the positives of what Jews are, not focus on combating the negatives.
I’m not on the defensive. We don’t have to always answer our attackers. We are the people of a nation who are the longest survivors for a reason. We are the Jewish nation. There has always been antisemitism. We say it in the Haggadah.
Shebe’chol dor vador omdim aleinu l’chaloseinu, in every generation they stand up against us to destroy us.
So that doesn’t change. At times, the levels change, but historically, there have always been people who confront and combat Yidden, to combat the Jewish nation.
My role is to protect everybody, regardless of their level of observance or level of affiliation, and to protect Americans nationwide from this scourge — antisemitism is also anti-American, which means I’m working to help protect America.
I don’t mean to start off negative after you started off with such a positive message, but I just want to, if you don’t mind, compare your position to your predecessor, Deborah Lipstadt. She was appointed by President Joe Biden, and there was this widespread feeling — and you tell me if I’m wrong — that there were certain places that she couldn’t touch. For example, antisemitism on the left; she basically avoided that. For the past few months, we have had a surge in antisemitism on the right, with Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly, and I see that the administration has not weighed in on that at all. Would you have free rein to speak out against and even take action against that?
Antisemitism is a bipartisan problem. There are people on the right and on the left. You’re asking me about my predecessors. I do not know. I was not in the office at the time, and I don’t know what her instructions were from the White House under Biden.
I can tell you that both the president and the secretary of state have made it very clear that he expects me, in the role of ambassador, to combat antisemitism to the fullest extent. We have never had a president who, on day one, issued executive orders to combat antisemitism on campus, to throw out people who are guests on visas who are here to promote hatred and promote bigotry, and the president has made it clear that that’s part of his administration.
President Trump is to be commended for being literally the most important figure in combating antisemitism today.
Your boss, Secretary Rubio, has also been excellent on this.
Secretary of State Rubio is someone whom I’ve known for fifteen years. I’ve worked with him for fifteen years.
He was your senator in Florida.
He was my senator. He is someone that I worked with to help him get elected in his first term for the Senate, and I spent a lot of time with him. It’s really an honor to have this role and work and report directly to him.
What tools do you have in your arsenal?
There are numerous tools in the arsenal because we have the administration, which is using every lever that it has. The president has mandated his cabinet to fight antisemitism. There are numerous abilities through the offices of the government, and the full weight of the government is working with me to work on combating antisemitism. That’s the directive of the president. So without getting into specifics, there are numerous agencies within the government, and the president has made them available to the secretary of state and to the offices to all combat antisemitism.
You have the Department of Justice; you have the Department of Education. You have equal rights. You have the Holocaust boards. You have the museums. You have things that are there to educate and work cohesively, which is something that the president has been able to do, which is to focus attention and have everybody working together toward the common goal of trying to combat antisemitism — worldwide.
Secretary Rubio has, in the past, revoked the visas of a few people who made antisemitic remarks or made anti-Israel comments. Now that you’re confirmed and you’re in your office, will we see an escalation of that?
The secretary has made it very clear that coming to this country is a right and a privilege. It’s not for somebody who comes and tries to promote discord or hatred in this country. That’s the given, and that’s across all segments of visas. If you’re anti-American or taking positions that are not to benefit the American people, then we don’t want you in the country. The president has made that very, very clear. So that’s number one.
Number two, it’s not an issue of escalation; it’s an issue of enforcement. And the secretary, the president, and others within the administration have made it very clear that this is one of the effective tools that they will use to make certain that we can prevent people from entering the country who want to promote discord.
I think it’s also very important to make a note that the administration is one hundred percent for free speech. Everybody has the right to speak freely and have freedom of expression — however, with the understanding that there is accuracy in that. For example, Elon Musk had X start to reveal where accounts are posting from, and the lies of people who were saying that their next-door neighbor was being attacked in Gaza and the person was from Poland or from Turkey showed the fallacy that a lot of these people who say they’re in America are not Americans and those who say they are supporting an anti-American agenda are really not Americans.
That’s something that I think we’d like to see a lot more of. That kind of exposure of those people who are promoting hate speech — let everybody know where it’s coming from originally. That is something that’s extremely important to this administration.
You mentioned social media. Would you like to have some more policing of outlets such as X and Facebook?
Policing is only as good as the people who enforce it. So when you have in Europe, for example, laws against hate speech but they are selectively enforced, that makes it meaningless and makes a mockery of what the law was put in place for. I’m a big proponent of free speech, but let’s get accuracy within the media and see who’s posting and where they’re posting it from. We’re going to find a huge decrease in antisemitic rhetoric, like we’ve seen on X, once people have to post where they’re from. That changes the dynamic tremendously.
What about people who do identify themselves? Take Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens — she openly mocks frum Yidden and “Talmudic Jews.” What could you do with these types of people?
People who want to be ignorant and hate are not going to be willing to learn the folly and their inaccuracies in how ignorant they are. We have to do a better job of educating the broader public that these people are not speaking for Americans. They would like to say that they are, but again, when you start narrowing it down, and you see the posts, and who reposts them, they’re usually from outside the country, trying to foment discord and hate and anti-American behavior.
I would go even one step further. Anybody who would like to say that the Jewish people were not massacred in the Holocaust and deny the Holocaust and give platforms to these people, it’s really a disgrace to the memories of all the American soldiers who fought in World War II to liberate the camps, and also for all the Americans throughout history who fought for religious liberty and justice.
General Eisenhower was not a prophet, but he said that we need to document this because there’s going to be a group of people who will say that these atrocities did not occur. This also ties into the importance of the Holocaust Museum. We need to learn from the past to protect the living.
What do you see as your biggest battle in combating antisemitism?
The biggest battle is to have a unified message, within the Jewish community, to confront hate. Because, unfortunately, the people who are trying to spread antisemitic behavior and anti-American behavior have one message — they don’t like the Jews, and they’re united in that approach. We have to have better messaging, a better strategy, and we all must work together as one.
If there’s anything that I wish to do is that the groups and the organizations that are out there should be asking themselves, how can we work together to combat antisemitism, without worrying about their donor list. The issue has to be: what benefits the Jewish community as a whole, and what will help protect the Jewish community as a whole worldwide. And we need to do a better job of that within ourselves to be able to fight this battle.
What about outside the country?
That’s across the globe. We as a nation aren’t together. The Jewish community needs to stand together as one. We don’t have to unite only after a tragedy; we have to unite to combat so that the tragedy should not happen. All of a sudden, everybody is out there saying, this is what we should do or shouldn’t do, everybody is giving an opinion after the facts. Let’s do this stuff and work together before the facts, not wait for a tragedy to unite us.
Do you consider it within your purview to fight Jew-hatred around the world? For example, the fear that Jews in Turkey and Iran have to go out publicly, or you have countries like Poland and Lithuania that make it hard for Holocaust survivors or their heirs to access their ancestral buildings.
My office is going to take a very strong look at what’s going on around the globe for those people. There’s a specific office within the State Department that works on the Holocaust and reparations, and I will work closely with them to improve those goals and to help them achieve them.
The secretary has also made it clear that he’s going to use whatever he can do within his arsenal to help further these things along and stop the delays for these Holocaust survivors.
In other words, outside the country, your job is to be a secretary whisperer to let him know about what’s happening.
No, the job is global. It’s to fight and combat antisemitism. Period. It’s a global job. The title is global. I’m not making a distinction where a Jew lives in order to try to protect him.
If I were to ask what a day in the life of Yehuda Kaploun looks like, what would be your answer?
A day in the life of Yehuda Kaploun is waking up every day with the goal of making the world a better place across the globe, and how to achieve that with tangible goals to try and make the world safer, so that children can grow up without hate, and people should be better humans across the globe.
