The revolting lie that the Rebbe didn’t fight antisemites

Few Jewish leaders have shaped modern Judaism more profoundly than the Lubavitcher Rebbe, my rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson.

The Rebbe believed in the infinite value of every human being. He believed no one should ever be written off. He believed in teshuvah—the possibility that people can genuinely change. Every human being possessed an infinite spark of the divine.

But he also believed in truth. He never confused outreach with endorsement. He never suggested that moral clarity should be sacrificed for publicity.

That is why I have become increasingly troubled by the way one story involving Senator Jesse Helms has come to dominate discussions of Jewish outreach.

One of the more troubling recent developments has been the attempt by some commentators to resurrect the decades-old Jesse Helms controversy in order to draw false moral equivalencies with entirely different modern disputes. The Helms episode has been stripped of its historical context and repurposed as a rhetorical shield to deflect criticism of contemporary figures whose own conduct has generated intense public controversy.

Invoking the Helms story to dismiss legitimate concerns about present-day controversies does a disservice both to history and to honest public debate. Each case should stand or fall on its own facts. Using a decades-old political dispute as a blanket defense against criticism of current conduct is intellectually unpersuasive and risks trivializing the very issues that deserve careful moral scrutiny.

Today, whenever controversy erupts over whether Jewish leaders or influencers should engage deeply controversial public figures, someone inevitably invokes Jesse Helms.

“The Rebbe met Jesse Helms.” “The Rebbe honored Jesse Helms.” “The Rebbe believed in influencing the future.”

Case closed.

Except history is not that simple.

The modern understanding of the Jesse Helms story rests largely upon Professor Alan Dershowitz’s recollections.

In a Jewish Educational Media video released in 2025, Professor Dershowitz recounts that Jesse Helms, who started with less than great affection for Israel, was being honored, and that the Rebbe explained one should not judge a person solely by the past but should seek to influence the future.

But there’s one major problem. Years earlier, Professor Dershowitz appears to have described the same encounter entirely differently.

According to his earlier published account, the Rebbe’s very first response, in a letter Dershowitz claims the Rebbe wrote, was that Jesse Helms had not been honored at all but had simply been present at a Chabad event, as one of countless legislators attending, and was denied any special status.

One describes an intentional honor. The other does not. That distinction matters enormously.

Rather than speculate, I contacted Professor Dershowitz personally. I wrote:

“Hi Alan,

“Can you please explain the discrepancy that my son Mendy found in your statements about the Rebbe ‘honoring’ Jesse Helms. I’m writing a column on it and need an official statement please. You clearly contradict yourself.

“Please watch Mendy’s video where he quotes you directly, both in written form and transcribed from video.”

At the time I finished this article, I had not received a response.

If Professor Dershowitz offers one, I would gladly publish it.

Indeed, the real question is why for decades Dershowitz has sat on this letter and has not published it. Some are even asking if the letter even exists. Why won’t Dershowitz clarify such an important question? And where is this famous letter?

This is not about embarrassing anyone. It is about protecting the historical integrity of one of Judaism’s greatest leaders.

Even accepting the broadest interpretation of the story, there remains another point that is often overlooked. Jesse Helms, a Republican from North Carolina, was one of the most influential United States senators of his generation. He served in the Senate for decades. He became chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He was a central figure in American politics.

Many Jews strongly disagreed with his positions on Israel. But that is precisely the point. The controversy surrounding Jesse Helms centered on public policy. He was a mainstream elected official whose views on Israel were vigorously debated. Using his example as a universal template for every modern controversy strips away the historical context.

Historical analogies only work when they are historically accurate.

Now that’s a far cry from the catastrophic PR disaster in Israel last week with “Heil Hitler”-singing Clavicular, arranged by bizarre Chabad influencer Yossi Farro and disgustingly defended by amoral influencers Lizzy Savetsky and Emily Austin, who in doing so betrayed Israel as well as the sacred memory of the six million.

Leading antisemites like the streamer Clavicular and his best friend, the rabid antisemite Nick Fuentes, are receiving free public relations from Jews in Israel. This is not theory. It is happening in real time. Clavicular, who has sung “Heil Hitler” along to Kanye West’s track and boasts of treating women as disposable objects for five or 10 seconds in a bathroom stall, was brought to Israel, photographed with Jewish influencers, and given a platform that rehabilitates his image. The result is a catastrophic PR victory for a man whose ideology glorifies the murder of six million Jews.

All of this rests on the Jesse Helms lie. This is one of the greatest libels ever told about the Rebbe, and it is being told by Chabad’s own media apparatus.

Jesse Helms was not an antisemite. He was a powerful, mainstream Southern senator who opposed foreign aid to almost every country, including Israel. He did not believe Jews had no right to a state. He did not call Israelis Nazis or demand the destruction of the Jewish people. These were policy disagreements, not racial or religious hatred. Helms was never a Nick Fuentes or a Clavicular.

Helms experienced a turnaround. By the mid-1980s he became more supportive of Israel. The Dershowitz-JEM narrative credits the Rebbe with this change through a supposed letter or honor. The evidence collapses under examination.

As stated, Dershowitz has mysteriously never produced the letter he now claims the Rebbe wrote. In the 2025 JEM video he describes a “very poignant, very powerful letter” about not only honoring the past but influencing the future. In his own earlier telling, no such honor occurred. The photographs JEM shows of Helms flanked by yeshiva students are from his well-publicized August 1985 visit to Israel — more than a year after his shift toward Israel began in early 1984. The event the Rebbe discussed with Dershowitz took place in Washington, not Israel.

The story that the Rebbe honored an active antisemite to transform him is therefore false on multiple levels. It is a libel against the Rebbe’s legacy. And it is now being weaponized to justify platforming actual neo-Nazi-adjacent figures like Clavicular in the Jewish state.

Clavicular — a 20-year-old Kick streamer from the looksmaxxing scene — arrived in Israel this month amid controversy over his past content. He has sung along to “Heil Hitler.” He was involved in the “clubocaust” incident. He maintains close ties to Nick Fuentes, one of the most despicable antisemites in American public lifeHe was given the opportunity to apologize on Israeli television’s Channel 13. He refused and attacked the presenter for even asking. This is the face of the new antisemitism: young, online, unrepentant, and now physically present in Tel Aviv with Jewish enablers.

Jewish influencers facilitated this visit. Yossi Farro, who brands himself as a Chabad figure and has built a following by chasing billionaires and celebrities to put on tefillin on the world’s most “powerful Jews,” courted Clavicular. The message sent to Clavicular’s audience and to Fuentes’ circle was unmistakable: Jews will rehabilitate you if you play along. Lizzy Savetsky, another damaged Jewish influencer, has also pledged openness to hosting Nick Fuentes, an American Nazi. The result is free PR for antisemites at Israel’s expense.

Clavicular’s own words and behavior compound the disgrace. He has bragged about using girls as sexual objects for five or 10 seconds in a bathroom stall. He came to Israel, in the words of those around him, to “have sex with Jewish girls.” When confronted with the reality that he treats Jewish women as disposable, he offered no apology. Farro’s role in bringing a man with this record — and in allegedly committing on livestream to pull political levers for Clavicular to gain access to official IDF social media accounts — is indefensible.

My daughter Chana Boteach, an IDF veteran and Tel Aviv entrepreneur who created the Kosher Sex company to promote American passion and intimacy, monogamy, and faithfulness, who is named after the Rebbe’s saintly mother, confronted Clavicular directly in a kosher restaurant in Tel Aviv. She did what too many Jewish influencers refused to do: she spoke truth to a man glorifying Nazi ideology and degrading women.

In a video that went viral, she essentially told Clavicular, “There is no place in Israel for someone who’s both a neo-Nazi and a woman-trashing misogynist. Israel is a brave and moral country where men are raised to marry and respect women and build families; not to use girls as objects in a bathroom stall, as you bragged, you caveman degenerate. Respect this country of heroic men and strong IDF warrior women, you woman-hating chauvinist and cowardly man-child, or go back to the hole you crawled out of or wherever “Chabad” turncoat Yossi Farro dig you out of. My name is Chana and I’m named after the Rebbe’s saintly mother. Farro is a disgrace to the Rebbe and the light he brought to the world.”

Repentance begins with acknowledging wrongdoing.

The Jewish concept of teshuvah is powerful precisely because it recognizes that people can become different from who they once were. That process is meaningful because it requires honesty. Hope for transformation does not require pretending transformation has already occurred.

What should unite us is the understanding that outreach succeeds only when accompanied by moral clarity. The Rebbe taught us to think. He taught us to ask questions. He taught us to combine love with courage and compassion with truth. Most of all, he taught us that Judaism never asks us to choose between kindness and conviction.

The Rebbe believed people could change. So do I.

But he also believed that truth matters. So do I.

The greatest tribute we can pay his memory is not to invoke his name whenever it is convenient. It is to preserve his teachings accurately, honestly, and courageously. That, above all, is what his legacy deserves.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach of Englewood is the author of 30 books. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter @RabbiShmuley.

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