The Book of Randy

Randy Fine sat back in his office chair, preparing for another meeting on an April day full of them. Flanked by the American and Floridian flags, the Republican state representative and former gambling industry exec opened his laptop to discuss Brevard County’s child welfare services with a staffer from Family Partnerships of Central Florida. But before getting down to business, the two made small talk. “I always wanted to know,” the staffer said, “did you get a notification, ‘yup, it was delivered’?” “It was delivered,” Fine replied happily. “I did get notifications on it.”

The “it” in question was a 155-mm artillery shell—an unguided weapon loaded with TNT that bursts into 2,000 metal fragments upon impact, indiscriminately killing everyone within a 160-foot radius. Right after the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7th, a Fine supporter with connections to the Israeli army arranged to have the representative’s name scrawled on one such shell headed for Gaza. On October 10th, Fine posted a Facebook image of the shell, with the text “Regards from Randy Fine” written on it in black marker. “Special delivery from me to Hamas. May G-d rain this down in a hellfire to avenge the burned and beheaded Children of Israel,” he wrote in his post, referring to a false story about the Hamas attackers beheading babies, and adding the hashtag “#AvengeThem.” “I thought it was kind of a cool thing,” Fine told me in his matter-of-fact, folksy tone. He said that he had gotten two more artillery shells inscribed: one bearing the name of a lobbyist friend who canceled his wedding in Israel because of the war, and one with the name of Fine’s teenage son, who the representative said was dealing with antisemitic bullying. “I said [to my son], ‘Look, next time you get hassled, show the kids a picture of this and say, be careful.’”

Florida politics is suffused with staunch pro-Israel sentiment from Republicans and Democrats alike; it’s not uncommon for the state’s Democrats to co-sponsor hardline pro-Israel measures with Republican colleagues they sharply disagree with on other issues. But even in this landscape, Fine’s gleeful embrace of Israeli violence stands out. In June 2021, after the previous Israeli assault on Gaza, a critic posted a photo of what appears to be a dead Palestinian child and asked Fine how he slept at night. “Quite well, actually!” Fine replied, “Thanks for the pic!” “I don’t personally feel bad when human shields are killed,” Fine told me when I asked him about these remarks. Since October 7th, his prolific social media posts have been filled with calls for Israel to starve or bomb Gaza, as well as the agencies that support its people; one post claimed that “the UN is a terrorist organization,” and included the hashtag “#BombsAway.” Upon meeting Fine in his Brevard County, Florida, office in April, I regularly heard him voice such positions. “I don’t think you feed the enemy,” he said to the child welfare staffer, referring to the admission of aid into Gaza. Instead, he said, Israel should make conditions in the enclave “so miserable [that fighting back] is just not worth it.” In the same meeting, he mused aloud that the Israeli military should charge people for the privilege of getting their names on bombs that detonate in Gaza. “I gave the IDF the idea for a fundraiser: For $500, they’ll put your name on the bomb, for an extra 1,000 you can get a video of watching your bomb land,” he said. “There’s a lot of people who would have done it,” he later told me.

Fine has brought this bombastic persona—some call him “the Bully of Brevard”—to the Florida House of Representatives, where he pursues a viciously anti-LGBTQ, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant agenda with gusto. But Fine has a particular enthusiasm for what he sees as Jewish issues—an umbrella under which he seamlessly fuses anti-antisemitism and pro-Israel efforts. Though Fine told me he recognizes there is a difference between criticism of Israel and antisemitism, stating that “there’s nothing wrong with criticizing Israel the same way you criticize other countries,” this is rarely borne out in practice. Last November, for example, when the Florida legislature debated an eventually unsuccessful ceasefire resolution introduced by Democratic representative Angie Nixon, Fine argued that voting for the bill meant “putting my child and every Jewish child in this state at risk,” asserting that “if you vote for this, you’re an antisemite.” “I am the sole voice for Florida Jews at the state level in the Republican Party,” Fine told me, referring to his position as the only Jewish Republican in the 160-member state legislature. “There is no one else to do it.”

Over his eight years in office, Fine has pioneered some of the country’s most hardline pro-Israel legislation. Since 2019, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, the self-styled “most pro-Israel governor” in the country, has signed a series of bills aggressively conflating antisemitism with criticism of Israel—all of which Fine was a lead sponsor on. “Somebody used to joke, ‘DeSantis is standing up, and he’s going through the book of Randy,’ because every bill would be one that I had sponsored,” Fine told me. The representative said that each year, he reserves at least one of his seven bill slots for “something Jewish, whether it was recognizing Jerusalem as the eternal, undivided capital of Israel, or the no tolerance of BDS [Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions] bill, or reform of Holocaust education.” “I would come up with these ideas, and I’d get them through, and [DeSantis] would sign them,” Fine told me. These ideas included a 2019 measure that appended the International Holocaust Remembrance Act (IHRA) definition of antisemitism—which critics say equates anti­semitism with anti-Zionism—to the public school system’s anti-discrimination policy, a move that led free speech groups PEN America and the National Coalition Against Censorship to warn of a “serious threat to the free speech rights of Floridians” that could be used to “silence political activists.” (Fine’s bill had been championed by the Israeli–American Coalition for Action, whose executive director said that the legislation should be a model; nine other state legislatures have since written IHRA into state law.) Fine also amended an older bill in order to strengthen a state ban on contracting with any company or individual that boycotts Israel: Most states’ anti-boycott laws only apply to contracts above a certain value, but Fine’s bill applies to any contract, no matter its cost. “No amount of Jew hate is OK,” Fine told me when explaining the measure.

In the process of establishing this legislative record, Fine has become a force to be reckoned with in Florida politics—and a coveted ally for top Republicans. According to a Brandeis University analysis, 32% of Florida Jews identify as or lean Republican, a few points above the national rate. “Over the past few years, Jewish Republicans have become an important part of Florida’s emerging Republican majority,” said Aubrey Jewett, a political scientist at the University of Central Florida, adding that Fine is “one of the more important political leaders” in this community. Fine himself is eager to highlight his influence. “If you put me in front of [Jewish voters in Florida], as I have done for President Trump in 2020, and as I did for Governor DeSantis in 2018, I have the ability to convince them,” Fine boasted to me. Jewett said that Fine’s vocal support did help DeSantis “with some Jewish swing voters in 2018, when the election was very close—DeSantis only won by 0.4%.”

But as Fine’s reputation as a standout Jewish conservative voice has grown, he has also come up against the limits of Jewish right-wing politics inside Donald Trump’s tent. “Someone like Randy Fine is in a tough spot,” said Ben Lorber—a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates who focuses on white nationalism and antisemitism—because Jewish politics “is in flux for the MAGA movement. Large portions of the movement would still love to instrumentalize the fight against antisemitism to suppress criticism of Israel. At the same time, it’s by no means guaranteed that MAGA Republicans will condemn obvious antisemites in their coalition.” Fine has confronted this dynamic directly over the past few years, as DeSantis has ignored calls to condemn the rise of neo-Nazi activity in Florida. Though Fine publicly defended the governor for years, he eventually broke with DeSantis last October, at least in part due to the governor’s silence. “[DeSantis’s] actions have broken my heart,” Fine wrote in the Washington Times op-ed where he announced that he was switching his presidential endorsement from DeSantis to Trump. “There is no choice—we must return Donald Trump to the Oval Office.”

Given the prevalence of white nationalism in Trump’s own circles, Fine’s switch may represent an exceedingly subtle distinction. “Antisemitism and white Christian nationalism course through today’s right, no matter the candidate,” said Lorber. Meanwhile, an emerging current in the Trump camp is beginning to endanger the other key prong of Fine’s politics: absolute support for Israel. In recent months, neo-isolationism—a tendency critical of NATO and of US support for Ukraine and Israel (but nevertheless militarist on China)—has gained ground among conservatives, with some popular right-wing influencers and politicians questioning the US’s exorbitant spending on, and staunch support of, Israel. Trump himself has criticized Israeli military strategy as well as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a figure normally beloved in the GOP, and Trump’s selection of Ohio senator and “America First” proponent J.D. Vance as his running mate suggests that this current is now gaining a stronger foothold on the right. Facing this changing conversation in the Re­publican Party on his pet issues, Fine may eventually find himself with less room to maneuver.

For now, however, Fine’s timely endorsement of Trump—who is by far the most popular Republican politician in Brevard County and the state of Florida as a whole—has paid dividends. Fine is term-limited out of his house seat and running to become the next state senator for Florida’s 19th district, and on February 29th, he became the first Florida state legislator endorsed by Trump during the 2024 election cycle. “Randy Fine is a MAGA Warrior who will stand up to anyone to advance the America First agenda!” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social. “I need him in the Florida Senate.” Fine’s campaign materials are now emblazoned with Trump’s words and image, even if they also carry the words “America First”—a sign of the tensions Fine must navigate within an increasingly Israel-skeptical, and often antisemitic, MAGA right. Despite these challenges, the representative is confident that he will be able to continue advancing his uncompromising pro-Israel agenda in the years to come. As he is fond of saying, “I wouldn’t bet against me.”

Before I arrived in Brevard, Fine had warned me that there weren’t many Jewish things to see or do in his district. Jews in Brevard County are very much a minority, making up between one and two percent of the total population of around 605,000 people. As I drove around the Space Coast—so named because of the nearby Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station—I passed dozens of churches nestled among fast-food strip malls and car dealerships, including one just steps away from Fine’s legislative office in Palm Bay. By contrast, there are only three synagogues in Brevard County, none of which are in Fine’s district.

The Christian character of Brevard County is often striking at gatherings of Fine’s conservative political circles. One rainy spring night, I joined him and dozens of other local Republicans at a riverfront restaurant in Malabar, where they were throwing a fundraiser for Mayor Rob Medina—a politician who once explained his absence from three straight city council meetings by saying, “the Lord directed me not to come.” The evening began with a pastor delivering a prayer. “Thank you for the blessing of tonight,” the pastor said, urging God to “open up their hearts to give in to the Friends of Rob Medina,” the mayor’s election fund. All around me, local Republican officials, current and former, some of them wearing crosses around their necks, closed their eyes, bowed their heads, and lifted their hands, listening intently. I looked up at Fine, who was standing across the room from me, and caught his eye. He wasn’t praying, and he looked a little sheepish, with a half smile on his face. “I’m a Jew who lives in a non-Jewish world,” Fine said when I asked him later about the prevalence of Christian prayer in his political life. “I understand that. It doesn’t bother me at all.”

There are times when Fine believes his Jewishness has been a liability among some Christian constituents. He pointed to his 2020 Republican primary against an economist named Marcie Adkins, who referred to Fine as a “pest” who should be “exterminated.” Adkins also reportedly said that voters deserved a “good Christian” to represent them, handed out buttons with the slogan “vote your faith,” and cast the primary battle as one of “the church against the casino,” referring to Fine’s previous career in the gambling industry. That year, Fine said, a poll his campaign conducted found that 17% of voters would be less likely to vote for him if they knew he was Jewish and worked on Jewish issues. “My consultant said to me, ‘I can’t believe it’s 17%. That’s crazy.’ I said, ‘No, no, no—that’s the 17% that were honest,’” Fine said. “For every one of them, there’s one who’s not. And Adkins got 35% of the vote.” At the same time, being a Jewish Zionist may have helped Fine with some of Brevard’s hyper-conservative voters. “In years past, I’ll knock on doors and I’ll see an Israeli flag or a mezuzah on the door and think, ‘Oh, this is great. I’m going to talk to a Jewish person.’ But it’s not a Jewish person,” he said, referring to what he called Israel’s “evangelical superfans.” Christian, and in particular white, evangelicals—who make up 22% of the Brevard County electorate, according to a 2020 census conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute—are Israel’s most uniformly devout supporters in the US due to their belief that God blessed the Jewish people and gave them the land of Israel.

In this political milieu, Fine has been able to make his particular brand of Jewishness—centered on antisemitism, security threats, and Israel—a core part of his political identity. In the story he tells of his lower-middle-class Kentucky upbringing, he focuses on the antisemitism he faced, mentioning how the country club his friends’ families went to didn’t allow Jews, and how a teacher once gave him a zero because he had to miss an exam on Yom Kippur. “Randy has fought antisemitism his whole life,” said Ellyn Bogdanoff, a friend of Fine’s and a former Jewish Republican state senator in Florida. “Now he has the platform, the authority, the power to actually make something happen.” Fine’s first year in Tallahassee coincided with a wave of bomb threats targeting Jewish institutions around the country; in response, he authored a bill to fund security upgrades for Florida Jewish day schools that was signed into law by then-governor Rick Scott. Fine has since been a lead sponsor on nine other anti-antisemitism bills and resolutions that were adopted or made law, including a 2023 measure that criminalizes projecting antisemitic messages or dropping antisemitic flyers without permission.

Fine’s legislation was aimed at one of Central Florida’s most disturbing antisemitic threats. When I first talked to Fine, he texted me a photo of a piece of mail sent to his house by a small neo-Nazi street group called the Goyim Defense League (GDL), known for antisemitic banner drops over highways and for littering neighborhoods with anti-Jewish propaganda. “Google metzitzah b’peh,” the top of the envelope reads—referring to a practice in some Orthodox communities in which a Jewish ritual circumciser sucks blood from a baby’s circumcision wound—alongside an antisemitic caricature of an Orthodox Jew and a lewd description of the ritual. Fine was physically confronted by GDL members at a small convention center on October 4th, 2023, where he had arrived to speak to a Republican women’s club. When he got out of his car, a white man in a suit and tie popped out of the bushes and started running toward him, shouting. “I called him a Nazi, and he’s like, ‘I’m proud to be a Nazi,’” Fine recalled. After Fine’s speech, the man was still outside, now with others who were wearing shirts featuring the Nazi “totenkopf,” or skull, and harassing attendees leaving the venue. “I was shaken,” Fine told me, adding that he worried later that the neo-Nazi who confronted him could have been carrying a gun (Fine has been a vocal supporter of permitless concealed-carry in Florida). The GDL returned to Brevard on April 9th during a city council meeting in Melbourne, where the group’s members denounced Fine in antisemitic terms and said that “the Jews” are “here to destroy us.” Fine was particularly upset that the councilmembers didn’t immediately cut off the GDL speakers—though they did eventually denounce them—and thought that if the group had gone after other minority groups, they wouldn’t have been allowed to speak. “That’s the soft antisemitism that exists in almost all corners,” he said.

Neo-Nazi incidents are on the rise in Florida, according to a 2022 report by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL)’s Center on Extremism. The report concluded that the state had become home to “an extensive, interconnected network of white supremacists and other far-right extremists.” In January 2022, around a dozen neo-Nazis dressed in black with red swastika armbands gathered outside a shopping plaza near Orlando, Florida, waving swastika-adorned flags, shouting “heil Hitler” and “white power,” and mocking concerned passersby who stopped to videotape the brazen display. (Two of the neo-Nazis eventually physically attacked a Jewish University of Central Florida student who confronted them.) In September 2023, over 50 neo-Nazis again gathered in a suburb of Orlando, waving Nazi flags and shouting threats like “Jews get the rope.”

Both DeSantis and Trump have been slow to distance themselves from this element of the right. Trump famously refused to disavow former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke’s support of his candidacy and referred to the participants in the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, as “very fine people.” He also hosted notorious antisemite and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes for dinner in 2022 (Fuentes came as a guest of the rapper Ye, who has his own history of brazen antisemitism). DeSantis has been similarly criticized for his muted reaction to neo-Nazis and his links to the far right. After the January 2022 rally, the first reaction from the governor’s office came from Christina Pushaw, DeSantis’s spokesperson, who speculated about whether “we even know if they are Nazis,” while suggesting that the attendees might have been paid actors. DeSantis himself waited two days to respond, at which point he dismissed the protesters as “jackasses” and said that law enforcement would hold them accountable. He then stayed silent following neo-Nazi gatherings in July 2022, June 2023, and September 2023, despite persistent demands that he say more to denounce them.

As DeSantis demurred on neo-Nazi activity, he was cultivating ties with other far-right figures. He kept Pushaw on as his spokesperson despite her tweets downplaying neo-Nazi activity and seemingly endorsing an antisemitic conspiracy theory about the Rothschilds. In 2022, the governor campaigned for Doug Mastriano, the Pennsylvania guber­natorial candidate who had characterized his opponent Josh Shapiro’s decision to send his children to a Jewish day school as an expression of “disdain for people like us.” The same year, a DeSantis campaign ad featured a Christian pastor who had once shamed Jews for not converting to Christianity and said that Christians should be at “odds” with anyone who doesn’t acknowledge Jesus as “the only way to the Father.” And in July 2023, staffers for the DeSantis presidential campaign produced a video featuring a sun-like Nazi symbol called a sonnenrad, with DeSantis’s face superimposed over the image.

Some Florida Jews—including Democratic officials and the local branch of the ADL—expressed dismay at DeSantis’s proximity to far-right antisemitism. For his part, Fine told me he was “a little bit aggravated” about DeSantis’s support for Mastriano in particular, but that “my view generally was that it’s better to try to work things out behind the scenes than in public.” He stressed that in private, he repeatedly urged the governor to denounce neo-Nazi activity. Publicly, however, Fine came to DeSantis’s defense. As recently as September 2023, only seven weeks before he ultimately denounced DeSantis for his silence, Fine tweeted that Democrats in the Florida legislature who were “weaponizing the idiotic acts of these Nazis to try to blame the Governor” are “antisemite[s] themselves,” given their membership in a party with critics of Israel like representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.

Indeed, despite coming face to face with a neo-Nazi, Fine has said repeatedly that the most alarming Jew hatred comes from the left (an idea contradicted by multiple studies on American antisemitism). The representative dismissed the far-right gunmen who murdered Jews at the Tree of Life and Poway synagogues, as “fringe loser wackos who are generally not welcome [in the Republican Party],” insisting that “the problem is much, much, much worse today in the Democratic Party, where they’re actually kowtowing to antisemites, as you see Joe Biden doing every day.” And after defending DeSantis despite the governor’s closeness to the Christian-nationalist right, Fine now appears to be doing the same with Trump. Throughout the four months of my reporting, I tried to get Fine to reflect on Trump’s own problematic comments and actions, such as the former president’s remarks that the violent neo-Nazi protest in Charlottesville was a “peanut” compared to nonviolent campus protests; his decision to host Fuentes and Ye for dinner; his refusal to disavow Duke; and his use of an image of Hillary Clinton, captioned “most corrupt candidate ever,” against a backdrop of money and a Star of David. But no matter which way I asked nor the evidence marshaled, the answer came back the same: The problem in the GOP was marginal, the Republicans are the protectors of Jewish interests, and the true menace is on the left. “If Donald Trump was president, and we had a Republican House and Senate, there would be less antisemitism in the United States,” Fine told me.

But Fine’s certainty belies the fact that hardline expressions of Christian nationalism are continuing to gain steam in the Republican Party, including around Trump. Indeed, in June, former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon told The New York Times that “the future of American Jews” and “their ability to thrive and prosper” is “conditional upon . . . a hard weld with Christian nationalism.” I asked Fine what he thought of that idea. “I hear the term Christian nationalism thrown around a lot but haven’t spent the time to know what it means,” he told me. “But if you substituted MAGA or the Republican Party or Trump, I’d agree 1,000%.”

If Fine has found a way to navigate far-right antisemitism and still maintain his place in the MAGA coalition, he now finds himself facing another internal challenge to his political agenda: cracks in the Republican Party’s pro-Israel orthodoxy. The belief that US support for Israel costs too much and involves the US in unnecessary conflict has existed on the margins of the right for decades, but has recently found influential new adherents. In an April 2024 episode of his X show, former Fox News host and Trump confidante Tucker Carlson aired an interview with Palestinian pastor Munther Isaac that featured strident denunciations of Israeli policy’s impact on Palestinian Christians. “If you wake up in the morning and decide that your Christian faith requires you to support a foreign government blowing up churches and killing Christians, I think you’ve lost the thread,” Carlson said on his show. Candace Owens, another right-wing commentator who worked for the outlet The Daily Wire, repeatedly criticized Israel’s war on Gaza, characterizing it as a genocide and calling on the US to stop paying for it; she also blamed a “small ring” of Jewish people in Hollywood and Washington, DC, for quashing dissent on the issue. After prominent Jewish right-wing personality and Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro called Owens’s conduct “disgraceful,” she stopped working for the outlet.

In recent months, Trump himself has been unusually disapproving of Israel even as he has expressed support for its current “war on terror.” The former president reacted to the October 7th attack by repeatedly criticizing Netanyahu, and as Israel’s war on Gaza has dragged on, he has disparaged its optics, if not its actual execution. On March 25th, he told the newspaper Israel Hayom that Israel must “finish up your war,” warning the country that it was losing global support as images coming out of Gaza created “a very bad picture for the world.” The comments shocked one of the Israel Hayom reporters who was interviewing Trump, prompting him to say that Trump had turned his back on Israel. Jacob Heilbrunn, the author of two books on Republican foreign policy and editor of the foreign policy magazine The National Interest observed that Trump has “flabbergasted the pro-Israel hawks in his camp with his statements,” proving that he “has no emotional or intellectual commitment to Israel. It was purely transactional during his term as president.”

Fine, who has framed his decision to abandon DeSantis specifically in terms of Trump’s Israel policy—highlighting the former president’s decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem, his recognition of Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, and his orchestration of the Abraham Accords—told me that he was unbothered by Trump’s recent comments. “Trump is basically saying [to Israel], ‘stop jerking around and get it over with,’” he said. Fine also asserted that a vision of “America First” politics need not be inconsistent with a strong pro-Israel stance. “It’s in America’s interests to have a great relationship with Israel,” he told me, pointing to Israel’s technological achievements and the need to have a reliable ally in the Middle East. He emphasized that Israel was “on the front line” of the same battle the US is fighting against forces like Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah. “Standing with Israel is looking out for ourselves because they want to come for us next,” he said. Fine is not alone in making this argument; in May, Trump’s running mate Vance also argued that an “America First” foreign policy should include US backing of Israel because it serves America’s interests. But Lorber said such statements notwithstanding, an “America First” foreign policy could just as easily break the other way. “America Firsters could continue to insist that US taxpayer money should be reinvested to support Americans, and keep opposing handing off billions a year in foreign aid anywhere,” he said, adding that Israel skepticism from figures like Tucker Carlson—who held a prime-time speaking spot at the Republican National Convention—could not be easily dismissed. “They have their finger on the pulse of the MAGA base and shape their attitudes,” Lorber said.

This attitudinal shift is already affecting some conservatives’ foreign policy positions in Congress. In April, 21 House Republicans voted against sending Israel about $14 billion in emergency military assistance, prompting AIPAC to stop fundraising for the ten of them it had previously endorsed—and raising alarm among the pro-Israel right. “We are worried, and we’re working on tamping down these folks who want to withdraw America from the rest of the world, this neo-isolationist wing,” Matt Brooks, the CEO of the Republican Jewish Coalition, told JTA in February, when Republicans were blocking aid to Israel from coming up for a vote. Nachama Soloveichik, then chief spokesperson for Nikki Haley’s presidential campaign, put it more bluntly on X: “This new Republican Party will soon throw Israel under the bus.” Vance’s selection as the vice presidential nominee has further stoked such concerns, with critics pointing out that the senator voted against sending emergency military aid to Israel in April because the bill was packaged together with Ukraine assistance. Eric Levine, a Republican donor and Republican Jewish Coalition board member, told Jewish Insider in July that Vance’s larger foreign policy platform is “antithetical” to a pro-Israel agenda, while the American Enterprise Institute’s Danielle Pletka worried that one day Vance could abandon Israel.

Some Republicans are even becoming skeptical of anti-antisemitism measures seeking to tamp down criticisms of Israel. On May 1st, the House of Representatives passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would codify the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism into federal civil rights law and set a standard for Department of Education investigations into antisemitism on campus. But even as most Republicans voted for the legislation, 21 voted against it, including Florida representatives Matt Gaetz and Byron Donalds. Gaetz explained his opposition to the bill saying it would classify the Bible as antisemitic because, according to the New Testament, Jews killed Jesus. Donalds, a former state lawmaker who Fine previously considered an ally, cited concerns about its constitutionality—even though he had voted for Fine’s version at the state level. According to Lorber, these votes are an example of a growing right-wing hesitation around legislation that purports to combat antisemitic speech, especially in a moment when Republicans have fears about “imagined censorship or persecution at the hands of an aggressively liberal political establishment.”

To be sure, the vast majority of Republicans are still pro-Israel, with over 180 of them voting for both aid to Israel and the Antisemitism Awareness Act in the House. But for Fine, the recent rise in Israel-skepticism among conservatives has nevertheless been so disappointing that it has prompted him to make an uncharacteristic public statement about the difficulty of being a Jew on the right. On May 2nd, he tweeted that “Right now politically conservative Jews are getting a taste of the abandonment of people we thought were friends” as a result of “the unabashed antisemitic words and actions of both certain elected Republicans and ‘conservative pundits’ we previously respected.” However, given Fine’s political ambition, countenancing such tensions may be the cost of doing business. Though he affirmed to me that Gaetz’s claims about Jewish deicide were antisemitic, he also framed Gaetz’s inclusion on the right, and his close relationship with Trump, as a normal part of coalitional politics. And Paul Alfrey—the Republican mayor of Melbourne, in Brevard County—said that even Fine’s seemingly principled stances, such as his denunciation of DeSantis around antisemitism and Israel, are nothing more than political posturing. “He broke with Governor DeSantis early because he knew that supporting Donald Trump would come back and help him,” Alfrey told me. Indeed, at the time of Fine’s endorsement of Trump, the former president was outpolling his primary opponents by wide margins. “[Fine has an] aspiration to go higher,” Alfrey said. “And he’s going to do or say what he’s got to to get there.”