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Disney+ series ‘A Small Light’ tells the Anne Frank story from the perspective of the woman who hid her
(JTA) — The short life of Anne Frank has inspired generations of filmmakers and television producers. The list of past productions range from “The Diary of Anne Frank” (1959), whose director George Stevens witnessed Nazi occupation as a U.S. army officer, to the Academy Award-winning documentary “Anne Frank Remembered” — featuring the only known footage of Anne — to the Emmy Award-winning dramatized miniseries “Anne Frank: The Whole Story” (2001).
On Monday night, viewers will get another TV version. But “A Small Light,” an eight-episode series premiering on National Geographic and streaming Tuesday on Disney+, tells the story from a new perspective: through the eyes of the woman who hid the Frank family.
Miep Gies was an independent 24-year-old with a busy social calendar and a dance club membership when she began working for Anne Frank’s father Otto in 1933 at Opekta, his successful jam business in Amsterdam. As Jews were rounded up and deported from the Netherlands in 1942, her Jewish boss asked if she would be willing to hide his family in an annex above the office, and she did not hesitate.
“A Small Light” stars Bel Powley as Gies, Joe Cole as her husband Jan Gies and Liev Schreiber as Otto Frank. It’s named for a quote from the real Gies, who once said that she did not like to be called a hero because “even an ordinary secretary or a housewife or a teenager can turn on a small light in a dark room.”
That metaphor had literal meaning for the Frank family and four others in the secret annex, who spent two years in a dark 450-square-foot space behind a hinged bookcase. Gies, her husband and four other employees of Otto Frank secretly kept eight Jews alive while running his business downstairs. Gies brought them food and library books, using black market ration cards and visiting several different grocers to avoid suspicion. Anne Frank said in her diary, “Miep is just like a pack mule, she fetches and carries so much.”
In the series, the “dark room” is seen less than Gies’ frenzied bicycle trips across Amsterdam, as she tries to sustain the appearance of a normal life. Her secret pushes her away from friends and family, while her marriage strains under the weight of ever-looming disaster. The creators of “A Small Light” sought to recreate a hero as a modern, flawed, at times even annoying person.
“She’s not some kind of saint,” executive producer Joan Rater told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “She had moods, she had a new marriage, she wanted to hang out with friends. She wanted to take a day off and she couldn’t.”
“I think everyone can relate to Miep,” said Powley, an English-Jewish actress known for starring in several British shows and in American films such as “The King of Staten Island.” “She was just an ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances.”
Although “A Small Light” is rife with tense scenes and suspense, the producers fashioned it with young audiences in mind. The show conspicuously avoids the explicit violence and horror typically expected of its subject matter, leaving out concentration camps and murders. Rater and co-creator Tony Phelan wanted children like their own to watch the series. While they were writing it, their daughter was the same age as Anne was when she was writing her diary.
Some young viewers have seen Anne’s story being swept up in literary purges across U.S. school districts, as part of the debate over what should be taught in American classrooms. Earlier this month, a Florida high school removed an illustrated adaptation of her diary after determining that references to her sexuality were “not age appropriate.” The same edition was previously yanked from a Texas school district, although it was reinstituted after public outcry. Meanwhile, a Tennessee school board banned “Maus,” Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about his father’s experience in the Holocaust, after objections over curse words and nudity last year.
The name “Anne Frank” has long been synonymous with Holocaust education as her diary remains one of the world’s most-read books, with translations in over 70 languages. But the “relatable” rescuer presents another appealing way to teach children about one of the most wretched chapters in human history, said Brad Prager, a professor of German and film studies at the University of Missouri.
“It is the message that people like to hear,” Prager told the JTA. “If you ask a fourth-grader why we watch TV and movies — well, this is so that you can learn to do the right things, or you can learn that in certain circumstances anyone can be a hero.”
Liev Schreiber plays Otto Frank and Amira Casar plays Edith Frank in “A Small Light.” (National Geographic for Disney/Dusan Martincek)
A broader lens on the Netherlands during World War II is less palatable. The Germans and their Dutch collaborators implemented a highly effective system of persecution: Between 1942 and 1944, about 107,000 Dutch Jews were deported primarily to Auschwitz and Sobibor, then murdered. Only 5,200 of them survived.
Although Gies did everything she could to save the Jews in her care, the unwritten ending to Anne’s diary is well-known. Three days after her last entry in August 1944, Dutch police officers led by SS officer Karl Josef Silberbauer raided the annex. Gies escaped arrest by observing that she and Silberbauer shared a hometown.
“My luck was that the police officer in charge came from Vienna, the same town where I was born,” she said in a 1997 interview with Scholastic. “I noticed this from his accent. So, when he came to interrogate me, I jumped up and said, as cheerfully as I could, ‘You are from Vienna? I am from Vienna too.’ And, although he got very angry initially, it made him obviously decide not to arrest me.”
In a valiant last-ditch effort, Gies walked into the German police office the next day and attempted to buy her friends’ freedom. She was unsuccessful.
Gies found Anne’s notebooks and papers strewn on the annex floor. Without reading them, she gathered and tucked the writings into a drawer, hoping to return them to their owner. Germany had all but lost the war already, with Allied troops less than 250 miles from Amsterdam.
The Franks were packed on the last train ever to leave the Westerbork transit camp for the Auschwitz extermination camp. Otto was separated from his wife Edith and daughters Anne and Margot on the Auschwitz platform. In October, the girls were transported to Bergen-Belsen, and Edith succumbed to starvation in January 1945. Her daughters died of typhus a month later, when Anne was 15 years old.
Some studies have suggested that knowledge about the Holocaust is diminishing. In 2020, the Claims Conference found that 63% of Millenial and Gen Z Americans (ages 18-39) did not know that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. More than 10% did not recall ever hearing about the Holocaust, while 11% believed that Jews caused it. Another Claims Conference survey reported that despite living in the country where Anne hid from the Nazis, a majority of Dutch people did not know the Holocaust took place there.
“In a time that antisemitism is on the rise and there are more displaced people in the world than there ever have been before, it couldn’t be a better time to re-explore this part of history, but through the lens of this ordinary young woman,” said Powley.
While “A Small Light” celebrates the power of the individual, the fate of Anne Frank also represents the failure of the whole world, said Prager. By centering Gies’ perspective, he said, the series risks making Anne a peripheral character in her own brutally aborted story.
“When you decenter Anne Frank, one thing is that you lose the Jewish perspective on the persecution,” he said.
Otto Frank, the sole survivor from the annex, appeared at Jan and Miep Gies’ doorstep after the war and ended up living with them for over seven years. In July 1945, Gies watched as he received the notice that his children were dead.
“He took it in his hands and suddenly he became eerily quiet,” Gies said in an interview for the Anne Frank House. “You cannot explain it, it was a silence that speaks. I looked up. He was white as a sheet. And he handed me the letter.”
Gies read the piece of paper, stood up and opened her desk drawer. “I took all the diaries, with all the separate sheets and everything and handed them over to Mr. Frank,” she said.
She told him, “This is your daughter Anne’s legacy.”
In 2010, Gies died at 100 years old. Every year on Aug. 4 — the day the Franks were arrested — she stayed at home, drew her curtains and did not answer the phone or doorbell.
Powley believes the show’s angle gives a fresh perspective on “your mom’s dusty copy of Anne Frank’s diary.” She approached the role of Gies with a heavy sense of responsibility.
“I feel a deeper connection to this story than I have with other projects,” she said. “This offer came to me on Holocaust Memorial Day and it immediately had that special feeling to it. My grandma, the Jewish matriarch of my family, died during COVID. I feel that she would be proud.”
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Israel is revoking entry permits for U.S. activists involved in West Bank
Hannah was on her way to class on Jan. 8 when she opened her inbox and found an email from Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority. Due to a change of circumstances, it said, her authorization to enter Israel had been revoked.
“I had to read it a few times, honestly, and then I Googled it and just started crying. I was on my way to class. I was bawling,” Hannah told the Forward. Hannah asked that her last name not be published because she fears that speaking to the media could affect her ability to visit Israel in the future.
Hannah, whose boyfriend lives in Israel and who has family there, has spent almost every summer of her life in the country. She was left dumbfounded by the email. There was no explanation of the reason for the revocation, and nothing about how, or whether, she could appeal.
The closest thing to an incident she can point to came the previous July, when she joined her rabbi and a group of volunteers accompanying a Palestinian farmer during the grape harvest — a practice known as protective presence, in which foreign witnesses aim to deter settlers and soldiers from interfering. Israeli soldiers stopped the group and held them for hours. “They asked to see my passport and said they were looking to see if there was any reason to deport me,” she said. They found none, and told her she was free to go.
Hannah came up through the institutions Israel counts on to keep American Jews attached to it. In high school, Hannah was involved with hasbara fellowships, and her mother is active in her local Jewish federation. “It’s so odd that almost the more I become familiar with the place in ways that I wasn’t as a kid, and maybe less naive about it, now I don’t have the ability to be there,” she said. “I’m not welcome there anymore.”
Hannah is one of seven American Jews who told the Forward that Israel had revoked their electronic travel authorization, or ETA-IL, after they participated in protective presence activities in the West Bank.
A loose network of Jewish organizations recruits diaspora Jews for the work and frames it as an expression of Jewish values. Programs range from 10-day delegations to seasonal olive-harvest cohorts to Hineinu, Hebrew for “here we are,” a three-month placement in Palestinian communities in Masafer Yatta that the Center for Jewish Nonviolence launched in 2021.
According to figures from the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, dozens of participants in its Hineinu program and other protective presence initiatives have had their authorizations revoked since the system took effect.
Israel launched ETA-IL as a pilot in June 2024 and made it mandatory for travelers from visa-exempt countries, including the United States, on Jan. 1, 2025. The application is a brief online form, usually approved automatically within minutes, that allows visa-free entry for tourism or business. It functions as Israel’s counterpart to the U.S. ESTA system, and followed Israel’s admission to the American Visa Waiver Program in 2023.
A State Department spokesperson declined to comment on individual cases or on the department’s discussions with Israeli officials, but said the Department of Homeland Security, in consultation with State, regularly reviews whether Visa Waiver Program participants meet program requirements.
Israel was admitted to the program in 2023 only after signing a memorandum of understanding committing it to treat all American citizens equally at its borders, a longstanding program requirement that had kept Israel out for years over its treatment of Palestinian American travelers.
None of those who spoke to the Forward had been arrested or charged with a crime. Some received no notice at all, which Daniel Roth, executive director of the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, said has become increasingly common. Those who did get revocation emails received identical notices citing a change of circumstances, with no explanation of the duration of the ban.
By the letter of the law, all of those whose authorizations were revoked remain eligible to make aliyah — immigrate to Israel — unless they are deemed a security threat under a provision of the Law of Return. Neither of two immigration attorneys who spoke with the Forward could recall any applicant being blocked as a security threat.
The visitors could open a file with the group Nefesh B’Nefesh and, in theory, be Israeli citizens within months. For now, they are barred from entering.
The Forward asked the Population and Immigration Authority how many ETA-IL authorizations have been revoked and on what legal basis, and the Israel Police asking whether it recommends revocations. Neither responded.
The Jewish Agency, which facilitates immigration by Jews to Israel under the Law of Return, said in a statement: “There is no connection between the ETA process and the Aliyah process. Regardless, we cannot comment on ETA refusal because we do not handle any part of that process. The criteria for eligibility for Aliyah remain unchanged.”
Change of circumstances
That Israel’s government sees protective presence workers as an adversary and target for law enforcement is no secret.
In April 2024, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir ordered the creation of a police task force to handle foreign and Israeli left-wing activists in the West Bank, which he described as a team for dealing with “anarchists.”
The unit sits under the West Bank district police and works in coordination with the Population and Immigration Authority. Ben-Gvir publicly credited the immigration authority for its role in deporting 32 foreign activists in October 2025 following an olive harvest action in the northern West Bank.
Of the Jews the Forward interviewed, one described himself as an anti-Zionist. The others were liberal Zionists who said they are concerned about the rise of settler violence in the West Bank and the preservation of Israel as a liberal democratic state. They were day school and summer camp alumni. Most have family in Israel and visit regularly.
Sam Sherman, an actor and writer who lives in New York City, was in Masafer Yatta, a collection of hamlets in the southern West Bank, when he opened an email telling him that his ETA-IL had been revoked due to a change of circumstances.
He was about seven weeks into his stint with a Hineinu group, and he was not the only one. “It happened to me and a few others in my cohort … within the same hour,” Sherman said. “A few of us got the same email within minutes of each other.”
Sherman was never arrested. He describes one incident that he believes amounts to a detention in place, and otherwise a pattern of identification, soldiers, police and armed settlers photographing his passport during confrontations he says were initiated by settlers.
“We were just there hanging out with people, essentially,” he said. “But we were treated as if it was almost criminal for us to be there.”
His first reaction was confusion. “I was like, what does this mean?” he said. More experienced activists told him what it meant: once he left Israel, he would be unable to return unless he chose to make aliyah. “If I’m the wrong kind of Jew for Israel,” he said, “sure. Great.”
Rabbi Jill Jacobs is the CEO of T’ruah, a rabbinic human rights organization that has been sending American clergy to the West Bank for years. She said the revocations cut against Israel’s founding promise.
“The promise of Israel is that it’s going to be a refuge and a home for Jews everywhere in the world, not just for Jews with certain political opinions,” said Jacobs. “Israel should be the place in the world that is safest for Jews, no matter what your religious practices are, what country you’re coming from and what your political views are.”
Another participant in Hineinu said she never received an email at all.
Nina, who asked to be identified by her first name only, had a valid authorization when she left the country for a weekend in Cyprus to reset her tourist visa. When she tried to re-enter Israel, she said, she was held at the border and denied entry.
“I never got an email that my ETA had been revoked,” she recounted. “I never got any correspondence at all, and I never got anything written, that said that ETA had been canceled or revoked or anything.” Hours later she resubmitted the application from her phone and got an automatic rejection.
‘Nothing’s out of the question’
Critics of the volunteers say it is simply a law enforcement matter.
Naomi Kahn, director of the international division at Regavim, a right-wing Israeli legal advocacy group that campaigns against unauthorized Palestinian construction in the West Bank and lobbies for demolitions, said some of the accompaniment activity takes place in closed military zones and active IDF firing zones.
“It should not be considered unusual when a sovereign state chooses to deny entry to people whose declared intention is to break the law,” Kahn said. “It should come as no surprise when tourists are disinvited when they break the law. I don’t think this raises eyebrows anywhere else in the world.”
Closed military zones have become a point of contention between activists and the Israeli military. In late October 2025, two American Jewish women, Rachel Beth Flamholz and Leila Stillman-Utterback, were deported and banned from Israel for 10 years after entering a closed military zone imposed on the Palestinian village of Burin the same day they had arranged to pick olives there.
“In my experience, closed military zones are used as a tool to clear Palestinians and those supporting Palestinians, including us, from an area,” Roth said, “and by and large, to leave space for Israeli settlers to do whatever it is they want.”
Jacobs draws a distinction between conduct and status. A tourist who commits a crime in Israel is subject to Israeli law, she said, as a tourist would be subject to the law of any place they were visiting. That, she argues, is not what is happening here. None of the volunteers were charged with anything.
“These are the best of the best,” Jacobs said. “These are people who are devoting, in some cases, months or more of their lives, that they could be spending doing anything, to trying to make Israel a more just place for both Jews and Palestinians. And that’s exactly who Israel should want to be standing by and supporting.”
This fall, some will head to the West Bank as part of Protect the Harvest, an initiative run by an international coalition of Palestinian, American, Israeli and Jewish organizations responding to an invitation from Palestinian farmers. The campaign runs in week-long cohorts from mid-October through mid-November.
T’ruah is bringing a clergy delegation from Oct. 18 to 23, ending four days before Israel’s national elections. Jacobs expects many American rabbis on the ground, some bringing their own congregants.
“I don’t know what the Israeli government is going to do,” she said. “But I think if they decide they’re going to start deporting American rabbis, that would basically be picking a very big public fight with the American Jewish community.” Even people who haven’t been paying attention, she said, will be furious.
Asked whether she thought it was actually possible that an American rabbi could be deported during the harvest, she did not rule it out. “Nothing’s out of the question,” she said.
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A Jewish philanthropist funded this pioneering school for Black students. Now it’s getting a second life.
A small Kentucky town has saved a piece of Black history, with a little-known Jewish connection.
This summer, Sadieville, Kentucky — population 320 — opened an exhibit in a one-room schoolhouse that served Black students during segregation.
Built between 1917 and 1920, the school was partly funded by Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, an owner of Sears, Roebuck and Company who gave much of his fortune away as part of a collaboration with the influential Black educator Booker T. Washington.
The Sadieville school was one of 5,000 schools for Black students across 15 states that Rosenwald helped fund. The schools transformed Black education across the rural South during the Jim-Crow era, dramatically improving students’ literacy rates and economic mobility.
But today, many of the schoolhouses are in danger of abandonment. As preservationists seek federal recognition of Rosenwald schools in Congress through a proposed national park, the residents of Sadieville took matters into their own hands.
“It is one of our little special treasures that we have here, because there are so few of them remaining in the United States,” Laura Centers, Sadieville’s city clerk, told the Forward. “We want to protect our history.”
Recently introduced legislation in both the House and Senate would help protect that history nationally, but both bills have languished in committee. To pass, they will need Republican support — at a time when the National Park Service is already dealing with staffing shortages and a slim budget. So far, Rep. Rob Wittman of Virginia is the only Republican to sign on.
Sadieville would not be included in the proposed national park, which would initially cover three schools in Maryland, South Carolina and Virginia, along with a headquarters in Chicago. But Dorothy Canter, a retired biophysicist who leads the Rosenwald national park campaign, said local preservation efforts are still essential to the broader movement.
“It helps the campaign because it’s a part of history,” Canter said. “It’s part of Sadieville history.”
As one of more than 150 Rosenwald schools in Kentucky, the Sadieville school operated until integration in 1954 — the year of Brown v. Board of Education. Pioneering journalist Alice Allison Dunnigan, the first Black woman to receive White House press credentials, taught at a Rosenwald school in New Hope, Kentucky.
Getting the Sadieville school in shape for visitors was not easy. During a 14-year renovation of the schoolhouse, the town dealt with termite damage, replaced the pine floors, restored the building’s foundation, patched the drywall on the walls and ceiling, rehabbed windows, and replaced doors.
The town also added historically accurate furnishings, including a chalkboard, desks scattered across the room, and a coal stove for heat. Because the school lacked electricity, large windows provided natural light. The sparse decor includes a photo of Abraham Lincoln and a book about Nicodemus, Kansas, a Reconstruction-era Black farming town founded by a group of formerly enslaved people who fled Kentucky seeking land ownership.
The project was funded by a combination of community donations and national support, with a $10,000 grant from Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky, $7,000 from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and $2,000 from Friends of Sadieville, Inc.
Staffing the exhibit in such a small town is also a challenge, Centers said. The school opened to the public for only two days this summer. After the initial unveiling on June 19 — in honor of Juneteenth – it will open again on August 15.
But Centers hopes those two days will generate enough interest to justify opening for more days next summer.
The exhibit is meaningful for the entire town, she said, but especially for Rosenwald students’ descendants.
“We just want to get the word out there that we do have this,” Centers said. “It’s important to a lot of people’s history.”
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‘Time to double down’: Why AIPAC sees El Sayed’s win as a sign to spend still more
Abdul El-Sayed’s narrow victory over Rep. Haley Stevens for an open Michigan Senate seat prompted an immediate split reaction as the Democratic Party endures a historic internal fight over U.S. support for Israel.
To progressives, the result showed that even more than $60 million in outside spending — including more than $30 million by AIPAC, the largest investment it ever made in a single race — could not stop a candidate who made opposition to Israel and its U.S. lobby a defining theme of his campaign.
To AIPAC and its allies, the one-point margin proved that their spending kept what could have been a much bigger defeat within reach and prevented a broader progressive landslide.
The race was widely viewed as the clearest test yet of the Israel advocacy campaign group’s political influence after months of progressive victories by candidates who have condemned Israel and made inflammatory rhetoric — including using the terms “genocide” and “apartheid” to describe its conduct. But instead of getting to a decisive verdict, Tuesday’s primary left each camp more convinced than before they are on the right path.
For El-Sayed’s supporters, simply defeating an incumbent backed by the Democratic establishment and AIPAC was historic. Citizens Against AIPAC Corruption, known on social media as “Track AIPAC,” declared the primary season “a repudiation of the idea that our democracy is for sale” by the power of grassroots organizing.
Former Rep. Andy Levin — who lost his own primary in 2022 to Stevens because of AIPAC mass spending — said Democratic voters are increasingly frustrated with special-interest money and that El-Sayed effectively turned opposition to AIPAC into a winning political message. “It worked,” he said.
But AIPAC and its allies see no reason to rethink their strategy.
AIPAC President Bernie Kaminetsky struck a defiant tone in an email to members after the race was called on Wednesday morning. “This narrow loss stings,” he wrote, “but her defeat doesn’t change our principled opposition to the dangerous policies El-Sayed wants to bring to the U.S. Senate.”
Kaminetsky called the fight “generational,” telling supporters that the organization remains committed to defeating El-Sayed in November and defending what it contends should be a bipartisan pro-Israel consensus. “Our conviction will not be measured in a single race or a single cycle,” Kaminetsky wrote. In a fundraising email, AIPAC used the phrase, “When we get knocked down, we get right up and back in the fight,” before adding: “It’s time to double down.”
That response suggests AIPAC views Michigan less as a repudiation than as evidence that its intervention still mattered — preventing what could have been a far more decisive rejection by voters of the Democratic establishment. The group’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, is reportedly weighing additional spending in the general election to boost Republican Mike Rogers against El-Sayed. It would likely be joined by other groups, including the centrist Democratic groups Third Way and Welcome PAC, as well as the Republican Jewish Coalition.
However, backing a Republican in one of the nation’s most important swing states would also carry political risks. It would reinforce critics’ argument that AIPAC has effectively picked sides in partisan politics. The group has already become increasingly controversial among mainstream Democrats for backing pro-Israel Republicans who joined President Donald Trump’s crusade to question the 2020 election results. The Gaza war has only intensified that backlash, as Democratic voters have increasingly rejected U.S. policy supporting Israel.
If AIPAC is signaling it will double down, El-Sayed is doing the same. In media appearances Wednesday after clinching the nomination, he gave the progressive base that carried him to victory more red meat.
In a CNN interview Wednesday night, he said his opposition to U.S. military aid for Israel also extends to defensive systems such as Iron Dome, arguing there is no meaningful distinction. “I don’t believe that there’s really a difference between offensive or defensive weapons,” he said. Israel’s Iron Dome first started under the Obama administration in 2011 and is credited with saving countless lives, intercepting most of the short-range rockets and missiles fired indiscriminately at civilians by Hamas, Hezbollah and other Islamic terror groups. El-Sayed said American tax dollars should be spent on priorities in Michigan rather than “fund foreign militaries.”
CNN commentator Van Jones argued that El-Sayed’s support for a complete military embargo on Israel gave Israel’s advocates a legitimate reason to oppose his candidacy. “This guy is saying that the U.S. government can’t even sell defensive weapons to Israel, which would make Israel completely defenseless,” he said on an election night politics panel. “Now that would be a reason for a group of people who care about Israelis to say this is not our guy.”
Echoes of Mamdani, but a different electorate
The reaction to Tuesday’s results echoed the approach many Jewish organizations and moderates took after Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary for New York City mayor last June.
Mamdani’s campaign roiled the Jewish community more than any mayoral contest in recent memory. He faced the most scrutiny for refusing to outright condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada” and for saying he doesn’t recognize Israel as a Jewish state. But he didn’t back down. Mamdani’s stance on the conflict in Gaza resonated with a majority of voters. He also enjoyed support among progressive and younger Jews who saw his criticism of Israel as compatible with Jewish values of justice. Mamdani was elected in November with just over 50% of the vote and has repeatedly come under scrutiny from Jewish leaders over his handling of antisemitism and anti-Israel protests.
Like Mamdani’s rise in New York, El-Sayed’s victory demonstrates that candidates running to the left of the Democratic establishment can overcome intense opposition.
Speaking with reporters on Wednesday, Mamdani said: “I am proud to be part of a movement of politicians and candidates who are looking to put working-class Americans back at the heart of our politics.”
But the comparison has limits. New York City is overwhelmingly Democratic, where the primary is often the race that decides the election. Mamdani also benefited from a fractured opposition and an unpopular rival. El-Sayed faces a different political reality. Michigan remains a politically divided state, and Republican Mike Rogers — who narrowly lost a Senate race in 2024 — held a small lead versus El-Sayed in several polls conducted before Tuesday’s primary. El-Sayed has no guarantee of winning the general election.
Amid the uncertainty of the ultimate outcome of the Michigan Senate race, neither side is retreating.
El-Sayed’s narrow margin has set up the next phase of the fight over the direction of the Democratic primary and U.S. support for Israel with fodder to claim to speak for a majority of voters and new ammunition.
The test of who’s right won’t end in November. Progressive activists are increasingly turning their attention to toppling Democratic leadership, arguing that House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer are too closely aligned with AIPAC and out of step with the party’s base. Schumer embraced El-Sayed only after the primary and said he was looking to lead a “big-tent” party to victory. Jeffries has not publicly weighed in.
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