JTA — In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, Jeffrey Lax, a descendant of Holocaust survivors who has lobbied against antisemitism at the college where he teaches, criticized liberals who compared Donald Trump to Hitler.

Now Lax, a law professor who defines himself as center-right and appears frequently on Newsmax and Fox News, is rethinking the idea of modern-day Hitler comparisons. In fact, he’s ringing that bell on a key Trump ally: Tucker Carlson.

“I never, ever, thought this day would come, but for the first time in my life, I am going to compare a human being to Adolph Hitler,” Lax tweeted on Friday. “Understand that I am the grandchild of 4 Holocaust survivors. I’ve spent a lifetime urging people NOT to compare anyone to Hitler. But… Tucker Carlson’s views, rhetoric, and influence remind me of Adolph Hitler.”

Lax was responding to Vice President JD Vance’s favorable comments about the interview Carlson, a far-right pundit, did last week with Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel. The interview ignited new allegations of antisemitism, but Vance did not suggest any concern. That, Lax says, is a big problem.

“This situation is as dead serious as a heart attack, and with @JDVance now expressly and abhorrently legitimizing Carlson’s views, we are in a national Antisemitism State of Emergency,” Lax continued.

It was a dramatic outlay of angst about antisemitism on the right for a figure who has campaigned against left-wing anti-Israel activism at the City University of New York, where he teaches. But Lax said in an interview that he could not remain silent.

“For me to get to this point, it had to be something that was so deeply disturbing on many levels,” he said. Carlson’s call for genetic testing for Jews, he said, crossed that line. “If anything I’ve ever heard is Hitler-esque, when you talk about Jews having to prove that they’re Jews with DNA — if DNA testing was available in the days of Hitler, do you not think that Hitler would have used it?”

Lax emphasized that he was speaking specifically of “early Hitler, the early years, before he took power, before he actually, physically caused anybody to be killed. I’m talking about the rhetoric. He could’ve been stopped at that point. People didn’t take Hitler seriously.”

While Lax has criticized Carlson before, he has in the past refrained from extending those critiques to Vance — despite a mounting record of the vice president minimizing antisemitism on the right. “I’ve had suspicions about Vance for a long time,” Lax said. “I wanted to be sure.”

Vance’s defense of Carlson’s interview provided the certainty he needed.

“Is he out of his mind?” Lax said. “By saying something like that, you are saying that what Tucker is saying is legitimate and needs to be discussed,........

© The Times of Israel