Small American flags adorn the graves of U.S. military veterans, including the grave of a Jewish veteran whose tombstone is embellished with the Star of David, buried at the Santa Fe National Cemetery. Photo by Robert Alexander/Getty Images
By Arno Rosenfeld
June 19, 2025
Prominent voices on the far-right, led by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, are campaigning hard against the United States intervening on behalf of Israel in its ongoing war with Iran.
Mixed into more mainstream criticism of the Israeli government is a pernicious claim that Jews are trying to drag American soldiers into a war they would never fight in themselves.
“How about this: If America goes to war with Iran, Jewish Americans get drafted first,” Simon Goddek, a libertarian scientist who has amassed more than one million followers on X, formerly Twitter, posted on Wednesday. “I guarantee that war disappears from the table faster than you can blink.”
Goddek had previously claimed that American Jews were “demographically, the least likely to ever send their own kids to fight.”
A series of animated videos created with artificial intelligence are also proliferating online, with one featuring a series of sobbing and shell-shocked white American soldiers complaining that they don’t want to “fight Iranians for Israel” while being scolded by authority figures for being antisemitic.
— Jake Shields (@jakeshieldsajj) June 19, 2025
In another, a Jewish man crouches down next to a distraught mother.
“I don’t want my children to die for Israel,” she says.
“Stop crying, their lives were promised to my people 2,000 years ago,” the Jewish man replies.
The posts manage to combine several antisemitic tropes into one: They suggest that Jews are not patriotic and only loyal to other Jews, here in the form of Israel. The other claims are that they are able to exert powerful influence over foreign governments — in this case compelling President Donald Trump to enter Israel’s war against Iran — and that they are cowardly and refuse to fight in wars themselves.
What is the history of the claim that Jews don’t serve in the military?
The claim that Jews evade military service has long been mixed in with other antisemitic myths that present Jews as rootless cosmopolitans set apart from the countries where they live.
Mark Twain wrote an essay in 1899 claiming that European Jews had a reputation for “unpatriotic disinclination to stand by the flag as a soldier.” (He letter told American Jewish veterans he regretted his misapprehension.)
The Nazis seized on this slander to claim that Jews were “war shirking” during World War I, despite the fact that nearly 100,000 German Jews fought in the war, and had contributed to the country’s defeat in that conflict.
But it has also persisted in more subtle ways. Anna Selman, who served as an officer in the United States Army, once had a supervisor tell her she should be proud because “most Jews do not.”
Israeli politicians have sometimes made similar claims. Tzipi Hotovely, the current Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom, once said that American Jews “never send their children to fight for their country.” After an uproar, she apologized.
Is it true that Jews don’t serve in the military?
No. The claim is especially odd in the context of Israel’s war with Iran, because almost the entire Israeli military is Jewish. But Jews also serve in the American military.
The U.S. military does not require its members to disclose their religion, but the Jewish War Veterans of the United States estimates that there are approximately 270,000 living Jewish veterans who have served since 1941 and between 15,000 and 20,000 currently enlisted.
The Aleph Institute, a Chabad affiliate, works with 47 Jewish military chaplains and contracted rabbis and says it reaches 3,500 military personnel in more than 30 countries and territories each year. They also publish the Jewish-American Warrior magazine.
As for the claim that Jews serve in the military at lower rates than other groups, demographic studies of the military have found around between 0.4 and 1 percent of those serving are Jewish, while they make up roughly 2 percent of the population.
But this doesn’t tell the full story. For example, the military studies are based on how soldiers self-identity, and religious minorities are often less comfortable disclosing their identity in surveys. And while the total count of American Jews generally includes those who identify as atheist or agnostic, the military’s surveys would likely group “Jews of no religion” under the 20 to 24 percent of service members with no religious preference.
Other religious minorities also seem to be slightly underrepresented in military service. For example, Mormons also make up around 2 percent of the U.S. population but 1 percent of the military.
A 2022 survey by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, a Muslim advocacy group, found that 5 percent of Jewish respondents said they had served in the military, compared to 9 percent of the general public, though the study did not control for other factors like geography, education level and economic background.
Jews also appear to be over-represented in at least some areas of the military. An essay written last year by Aidan Djavadi, a West Point cadet, said that 136 of the 4,400 students training to be officers — or around 3 percent — were Jewish.
