MAGA Firebrand Curt Mills Will Speak at a Jewish Left Conference. Does He Belong?

A major conference of Jewish left leaders has booked the anti-interventionist MAGA provocateur Curt Mills as a speaker for next year’s event, causing at least one participant to back out in protest, and highlighting a dilemma facing the anti-Zionist left over how it relates to right-wing critics of Israel.

Mills, the editor of The American Conservative (TAC) magazine, who was recently profiled in Jewish Currents as the intellectual leader of MAGA’s emergent anti-Israel wing, has accepted an invitation to appear at the 2027 Conference on the Jewish Left, held at Boston University. He’s also been invited to table for TAC at the event. Mills’s panel will focus “on changing US foreign policy toward Israel,” according to a June email obtained by Jewish Currents and sent by the panel’s organizer, Jeremy Menchik, a BU professor who heads the research center where the conference is housed. Mills will be featured as a “potential coalition partner for the Jewish left,” Menchik said in an interview.

But Mills’s inclusion has led another planned speaker, Rabbi Andrue Kahn, executive director of the anti-nationalist American Council for Judaism, to pledge to withdraw from the lineup if the right-wing journalist remains on the program.

“I won’t be in a conference with someone who holds the values of this man,” Kahn told Jewish Currents, citing Mills’s anti-immigrant views and the “abhorrent” material published in TAC under his editorship, including a stridently anti-trans essay and another that traffics in breezy racism and antisemitism. “The magazine calls for things that specifically create harm for people I work with and care for, and for the world I’m trying to build,” Kahn said, adding that Mills’s appearance at the conference could alienate important allies.

Menchik’s insistence on including Mills has also inflamed some of the other organizers of the conference and is causing turmoil in Jewish left circles. At the core of the debate is the question of whether and how the left should engage with MAGA figures who appear to share certain of its foreign policy goals, even as the Trump administration attacks the rights of immigrants, trans people, and other vulnerable communities at home.

A key donor to the conference, Open Society Foundations (OSF), the philanthropic vehicle of the billionaire George Soros and his family, was “interested in having Curt on the program,” Menchik said. In addition to funding progressive and left-wing Jewish organizations (including Jewish Currents), OSF partnered in 2019 with the libertarian Charles Koch Foundation to seed the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a “transpartisan” think tank that opposes US military interventions abroad and counts Mills as an ally. “Not all donor ideas become part of the conference,” Menchik said. “I agree [with OSF] that building coalitions is an important part of democratic politics.”

In a written statement, OSF spokesperson Sean Savett said, “We are proud to support the Conference on the Jewish Left. However, we leave the decisions on which speakers to invite entirely to the organizers.”

Menchik said that “there is a difference of opinion” among the members of the conference’s organizing committee over “my decision to invite Curt.” (Others involved in planning the conference, reached this week, declined to comment on the internal discussions.) As for Kahn’s objections, Menchik said, “At this point, Andy is not comfortable being on the same program as Curt Mills, and to me that means Andy gets a rain check. If Andy wants to come back in 2028, I hope they will.”

BU’s Conference on the Jewish Left was established in 2024 and has grown quickly, attracting nearly 1,000 in-person and online attendees for the gathering this past February. One of the earliest confirmed speakers for the March 2027 event, Mills is set to appear on a plenary panel specifically composed of non-Jewish non-lefties whom “the Jewish left disagrees with on 90% of the issues,” according to Menchik. In the June email, Menchik wrote that Mills could offer his own suggestions for speakers—“conservatives, evangelicals or other intellectuals who might help us build an effective coalition”—and dangled the possibility of Mills’s “tabling for The American Conservative,” i.e., promoting the magazine at a dedicated table on the conference room floor.

“I was a little surprised [to be invited], given that it’s all left-wingers,” Mills told Jewish Currents. But he said he was impressed by a list of previous speakers at the conference, including the author Molly Crabapple and the political scientist Ian Lustick. “That’s why I said yes.” In a follow-up text message, Mills said, “I really believe in foreign policy coalitions to end these wars. In fact: I think it’s the only way it happens.”

A close ally of MAGA pundit Tucker Carlson, Mills supports mass deportations of immigrants and believes that “we’re letting too many people” become citizens, as he told Jewish Currents for the April profile. (Menchik and Kahn each credited that article with informing their view of Mills, whether as a potential partner or a sworn opponent.) Mills’s forceful opposition to Israel’s “inappropriate and dangerous” influence in US politics stems from the same American nationalism that causes him to wax nostalgic for “the old republic” and argue that the inevitable transition to a white minority must be “managed.”

While left-wing criticism of Israel is “predicated upon a belief in the necessity of liberation for all people,” the ACJ’s Kahn said, “Mills is coming at it from a totally different direction,” which they described as a “supremacist mode.”

“I’m still in conversation with the organizers about it,” Kahn added. “My hope is that they’ll change their minds about inviting him.”