Pat Robertson: A Problematic Friend of the Jews, but a Friend Nonetheless

Last Thursday, the pastor and broadcaster Pat Robertson died at the age of ninety-three. Few individuals did more than he to shape evangelical Christianity, and the religious right, in America today. That influence can be found in his vigorous support for Israel, as well as such efforts on behalf of the Jewish people as raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to aid Jews leaving the former Soviet Union. Yet the same Robertson railed against “cosmopolitan, liberal, secular Jews” and promoted baroque conspiracy theories about Jewish freemasons, the Rothschilds, and various other renowned Jewish financiers that bore much more than a whiff of anti-Semitism.