JTA — United States Vice President JD Vance has spent months drawing fire from Jewish conservatives for his refusal to confront antisemitism within the Republican coalition. Now, a new profile suggests that the Jew who is perhaps closest to him — his chief of staff, Jacob Reses — is on board with that approach.

An extensive New York magazine profile of Reses published this week reveals that the 35-year-old operative, characterized as one of the powerful figures in the Trump administration, has used his private X account to amplify voices calling on Jews to embrace, rather than resist, the Christian nationalist current reshaping the GOP.

In September 2025, according to the profile, Reses reposted Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale’s approving quote of a statement arguing that Jews should stop being uncomfortable with public expressions of Christianity.

The statement read, “To save this Nation of Kindness that has bestowed such blessing on us, we Jews can no longer be squeamish about the majority’s invocation of the Christian deity and other aspects of their faith. The neutering of Christianity has been disastrous for all of us and must end.”

A Jewish Telegraphic Agency profile published in 2024, when Vance was selected as Donald Trump’s running mate, traced Reses’s Jewish identity and his journey from a Democratic-leaning Jewish teenager in southern New Jersey, whose grandfather escaped the Holocaust in Lithuania, to one of the most influential conservatives in Washington. His trajectory included internships for Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, a political conversion at Princeton, and stints at the Heritage Foundation and in the office of Sen. Josh Hawley.

For months, Vance has faced a drumbeat of........

© The Times of Israel