According to a report by Hillel International, 2,334 antisemitic incidents occurred on college campuses in the school year 2024-2025. This is an increase of ten times from the school year of 2022-2023, the year before the Hamas attack on Israel.
Luke Moon, executive director of the Philos Project, spoke with Tony Perkins on Washington Watch about how young people are being swayed to Jewish hate.
Moon believes this is because of a growing sense of frustration among Gen Z, part of it growing up in their formative years with Covid followed up by Black Lives Matter and the DEI push. At the same time, Gen Z was constantly being told what they are supposed to care about.
“You got to care about African-Americans because they were once slaves in America and Jim Crow and all that. And then, you have to care about the Jews because they had the Holocaust once upon a time,” Moon gives as examples.
He follows up by pointing out that this is a reaction to how they see other people being regarded as special while themselves being constantly told they are not.
“You have these kids who are grown up in this where other people are told you got to care for this special group of people. At the same time, they're told to sit back, be quiet, shut up, go back to your games. What are you doing? Nobody cares about you … there's an envy root here,” Moon explains.
However, Moon points out that even evangelical Christians are not showing that much support for Israel.
“There was just a friend of mine who put out a survey recently among Southern church-attending men. It asked should the U.S. be involved with Israel in attacking Iran? Overwhelmingly, the majority of people between the ages of 18 and 29 said we have no responsibility to Israel,” Miller revealed.
He also thinks there is a lessening of churches teaching their congregations what the Bible says about the Jewish people. He recalls a time when he was with a group of church planters from the Southern Baptist Convention in Israel in 2017.
“I remember sitting around table with them and I asked them, when was the last time you taught out of the Book of Revelation? And they said, almost all of them, I don't…” Moon says.
Moon brought up the Left Behind series as a reason why people do not touch on Revelation.
The series created by Jerry B. Jenkin and Tim LaHaya depicts a version of the apocalypse from the Book of Revelation.
Miller believes it created a chain reaction of people who did not agree with how the events played out. However, he points out that it wasn't necessarily replaced by any kind of major theology, and it was just an abdication.
“You have pastors who are not teaching out of the Book of Revelation, which is a core part of it. And they're also not offering a cohesive theology of which Israel and the Jewish people are still part of God's covenantal plan for the world,” explains Moon.
Young people are not just being influenced by leftist propaganda but even those who hold some conservative ideology. Miller believes that young men today are being catechized by the “manosphere.”
“… which is like the Andrew Tate kind of crowd, Tucker Carlson, Theo Vaughn. You have those types of voices who are who are catechizing the young men and showing them how to think about the world, how to think about foreign policy, how to think about women and family and all this formation stuff,” Moon says.
Impactful male role models
All three men, each with a massive following, have expressed anti-Israel sentiment.
Andrew Tate said he was raising money for Palestine after the October 7 Hamas attack and even went as far as to suggest that Israel lied about the Holocaust on an X post. Theo Von has accused Isreal of genocide multiple times and has even visited Qatar. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson expressed that U.S. citizenship should be revoked from those who had served in the Israeli Defense Forces.
To combat this, Miller has an alternative option for young people to follow.
“I started an organization called Generation Zion to point to why Christians should and must stand with Israel and Jewish people. It is part of God's redemptive plan for the world.”
The purpose of Generation Zion is to bring a community together of like-minded individuals to stand up against antisemitism and fight for Israel.
