(JTA) — For decades the Chabad-Lubavitch movement has followed the teachings of its last spiritual leader, popularly known as “the Rebbe,” to bring Jewish practice and learning to every Jew across the globe through a sprawling network of emissaries and Jewish centers. That includes cyberspace, where the Hasidic movement maintains one of the most-visited Jewish websites.
But a group normally committed to spreading Jewish joy found itself on the defensive this week after the far-right commentator Candace Owens called the movement’s last leader, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, a hate-monger who believed Jews were superior to non-Jews.
On a Wednesday appearance on Piers Morgan’s YouTube channel, Owens said Schneerson, who died in 1994, “preached Jewish supremacism, the hatred of all non-Jews.” She added, “You can go through his speeches and you will see that he continually talks about how non-Jews should be treated and that, again, we are a different species.”
Owens referenced the fact that some Chabad adherents believe Schneerson was the Messiah and suggested they should be accepting Jesus instead.
“For those of you who are not familiar with Rabbi Schneerson, there are some Jews who believe he was and is the messiah, so rejecting Christ but believing that that rabbi was his messiah,” she said.
Candace Owens appeared on Piers Morgan's show, where she disrespected Chabad and the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, by falsely accusing him of preaching Jewish supremacy. @RealCandaceO pic.twitter.com/yaU9LHCeLl
— Stella Escobedo (@StellaEscoTV) September 5, 2024
It was far from the first time that Owens, who has millions of online followers, has gone after Jews and Jewish groups. She was fired from the media company of Ben Shapiro, who is an Orthodox Jew, earlier this year after criticizing Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, and since then has supported white nationalist Nick Fuentes and used her YouTube channel to defend Hitler and question historical facts about the Holocaust. A Trump fundraiser recently dropped her from its lineup following pushback from Jewish Republicans, but Owens remains a popular figure among the young online right.
By going after Schneerson, Owens prompted a response from Chabad itself. The movement and its emissaries chiefly sought to dispel her claim that Schneerson thought Jews were superior to non-Jews.
“The Rebbe saw the importance of each individual, no matter how ordinary they might seem,” Chabad’s official X account wrote as part of a long thread on his life. “His door was open to all. The Rebbe dedicated hours daily to personally responding to letters from people worldwide.”
Some Chabad defenders took aim directly at Owens.
“Never before have I felt such incredulous rage in my body than hearing Candace Owen’s [sic] mention the Rebbe’s name and her subsequent vile lies she tried to associate with him,” popular Orthodox influencer Mimi Hecht wrote on Instagram.
Menachem Feuer, a religious studies professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada, compared Owens to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. “Owens’ slander of the Lubavitcher Rebbi & Chabad, cherry picking soundbytes & quotes, citing an obscure scholar, leaving out context, puts her in company with Goebbels,” he wrote on X.
“One of the stupidest things you can do is come after one of the greatest men to ever live,” Chava Bruk, a Chabad emissary and co-CEO of Chabad of Montana, wrote on the platform under a picture of Schneerson, tagging Owens. “Do better. This is ridiculous.”
Complicating the conversation is the fact that the Tanya, the Chabad movement’s foundational text first published in 1796, does state that the souls of gentiles “contain no good at all.” Other passages, quoted by Owens during the interview, present non-Jews as different or lesser species to Jews.
A debate among Jewish scholars
These sections have promoted fierce debate among Jewish scholars as to their true meaning. In his writings, Schneerson acknowledged those passages while encouraging non-Jews to follow the Noahide laws: seven commandments intended for non-Jews to follow.
Schneerson was also famous for gaining repute among non-Jews. In one notable example, the pioneering Black politician Shirley Chisholm, who like Schneerson had her office in Crown Heights, credited him in her valedictory speech in Congress for encouraging her to pursue policies on the Agriculture Committee to ensure that children would not go hungry.
Owens’ attack on Schneerson came during during a debate with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, an adversary whose own flamboyant online presence rivals her own; Morgan served as moderator. Boteach grew up within the Chabad movement and interacted with Schneerson before parting ways with Chabad in the early 1990s.
Referencing a Facebook post in which Boteach called Schneerson a friend and mentor, Owens sought to paint Chabad as an extremist movement, noting the recent Brooklyn drama in which young fringe Chabad adherents were arrested for secretly digging a 60-foot tunnel they intended to use to “expand” the movement’s headquarters, a plan they claimed was in accordance with Schneerson’s wishes.
Her claims about Chabad and Schneerson went unaddressed by Boteach, who steered the conversation back to Israel and to other personal attacks the two have levied at each other; Morgan, too, did not push back on Owens’ claims.
But Chabad did respond. Online, the movement also quoted a Schneerson letter that, the movement said, demonstrated that Jews and non-Jews have “common human kinship.”
In the letter, which Schneerson wrote in 1991 to the president of the Council for Polish-Jewish Relations, the rabbi wrote, “It was G‑d’s design that the human race, all humans everywhere and at all times, should know that each and all descend from the one and the same single progenitor, a fully developed human being created in the image of G‑d, so that no human being could claim superior ancestral origin.”
Neither Chabad nor its spokesperson, Rabbi Motti Seligson, referenced Owens by name online.
“Last week it was the Talmud, this week it’s the Rebbe,” Seligson, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, wrote on X. He reposted a defense of Schneerson posted by another Trump-aligned source who, like Owens, is a popular online fringe figure who’s also been recently accused of antisemitism: former third-party presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“As Americans, we need to distance ourselves from the troubling rise in antisemitism. We need unity in our country, not divisiveness. That’s what Rabbi Schneerson stood for,” Kennedy, who recently bowed out of the presidential race and endorsed Donald Trump, wrote on X. He shared an official Chabad photo of his Catholic father, Bobby Kennedy, talking to Schneerson, and added that his father “considered him a spiritual mentor and sought his advice on diverse issues of morality and ethics.”
Kennedy also criticized Owens directly, saying that she was promoting “a sickening and manifestly inaccurate description of a revered holy man who was respected and beloved by people of all faiths.”
Owens continued to go after Schneerson on her own X account after drawing criticism. She posted a video of a speech by the rabbi in which he said, “It is obvious that since every Jew, (men and even women and children) brings about the existence of the entire creation, they become masters over the entire world, and thus every single creation, owes them recognition.”
Owens wrote, “I fully reject this ideology, spiritually and doctrinally.”