JTA — When Orit Arfa read political theorist Yoram Hazony’s recent comments on antisemitism on the American right, she decided that her past admiration for him no longer justified staying silent about what she sees as a moral failure.

Arfa, who served until last month as a spokesperson for Hazony, responded Thursday with a deeply personal essay in Tablet magazine titled “Yoram Hazony’s 15 Minutes.” She wrote about her departure after four years from the Edmund Burke Foundation, the organization Hazony founded and an institutional hub of the national conservatism movement. In her essay, she accused Hazony of erasing work she and others did under his leadership and of publicly faulting Jewish institutions for failures she says he knowingly helped create.

“I have known and admired Yoram for many years,” Arfa wrote, praising his scholarship and describing his 2015 book “The Dawn: Political Teachings of the Book of Esther” as one of the most influential works in her intellectual life. “It’s with a heavy heart, then, that I feel compelled to set the record straight.”

An Israeli-American conservative intellectual, Hazony is one of the architects of national conservatism, arguing for a politics grounded in nationalism, religion and tradition. His ideas have gained influence among US Republican politicians, donors and movement strategists, particularly within the wing of the party associated with figures such as Vice President JD Vance.

Hazony’s influence has placed him at the center of a growing dispute on the Jewish right, as the movement he helped shape confronts allegations of antisemitism in its orbit. Hazony has declined requests for an interview from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in recent months.

Because of Hazony’s prominence, Arfa’s break with him has resonated well beyond their personal history, highlighting a broader debate among Jewish conservatives over how to confront antisemitism when it comes not from political opponents, but from figures embedded in the American right.

That debate was thrust into the open after Hazony’s keynote speech last week at the Second International Conference on Combating Antisemitism in Jerusalem, where he........

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