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With goblins, spellcasters and delis, board game makers are imagining new Jewish worlds
(JTA) — Running a not-so-Zagat-rated deli, dropping into a Chinese restaurant for Christmas Eve dinner and acting out a bat mitzvah that involves a vampire — for contemporary board game fans, those can be all in an evening’s play.
That’s because a crop of new games aims to merge Jewish ideas and experiences with the aesthetics and language of games such as Dungeons & Dragons. Dream Apart places players in a fantastical reimagining of a 19th-century shtetl, for example, while J.R. Goldberg’s God of Vengeance draws inspiration from the Yiddish play of the same name. In the games in Doikayt, a collection released in 2020, players can literally wrestle with God.
Known as tabletop role-playing games because they ask players to take on a character, these games and their creators imagine exciting new worlds, subvert classic tropes in fun and irreverent ways, and reinterpret Jewish history and identity.
Tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons and Call of Cthulhu have exploded in popularity over the past several years, with many — including at least one group of rabbis — picking up the Zoom-friendly hobby during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. But the new Jewish games aim to do more than just provide a diversion or even an escape.
“Depending on your family, depending on your synagogue, depending on your community, you may have gotten more or fewer options of what Jewishness could mean in your imagination,” said Lucian Kahn, who created a trilogy of humorous Jewish role-playing games.
“What some of these games are doing is opening that up and pointing to alternate possibilities of imagining Jewishness, not as a way of converting anyone to anything else, but just as a way of showing the tradition is enormous,” he added.
Kahn is the creator of If I Were a Lich, Man, a trilogy of humorous games whose name is a mashup between a “Fiddler on the Roof” song and an undead character, the lich, that frequently appears in fantasy fiction and games. In the title game, players are Jewish liches — spellcasters whose souls, in the lore of Dungeons & Dragons, are stored in phylacteries, the Greek word for tefillin used by Jews in prayer. Representing the four children of the Passover seder, they debate how their community should address the threat of encroaching holy knights.
In some cases, the association of Jews with monsters has given rise to charges of antisemitism — the goblins of “Harry Potter” offer a prime example. But Kahn said he sees Jewish-coded monsters, and queer-coded villains, as figures of resistance.
“There’s a long tradition of looking at the monster and seeing that the reason why these are monsters is because the people who have oppressive power have decided that these are going to be the enemies of the ‘good’ oppressive powers,” Kahn explained. “But if you don’t agree with their ideology, if you’re seeing yourself as being a member of a marginalized community and being in opposition to these oppressive powers, then you can look at the qualities assigned to these monsters and some of them are qualities that are good.”
For Kahn, Jewish-coded monster characters also provide more of an inspiration than the archetypes of more traditional games.
“Maybe somebody thinks they’re insulting me or insulting Jews,” he said. “My response is: I like vampires and liches and trolls and goblins and think they’re much more interesting than bland white muscular humans running through the fields with a cross on their chest hacking at the same things with a sword over and over again.”
Kahn’s outlook has resonated in the tabletop role-playing game community. In February, he and Hit Point Press launched a Kickstarter to fund production of If I Were a Lich, Man. The campaign smashed its $5,000 goal, raising $84,590, enough to hit one of the campaign’s stretch goals of funding a grant to support independent zines about tabletop role-playing games.
The successful campaign means that Kahn’s three games will go into production. In addition to the game about liches, the trilogy includes Same Bat Time, Same Bat Mitzvah, in which players act out a bat mitzvah where one guest has been turned into a vampire, and Grandma’s Drinking Song, inspired by how Kahn’s Jewish great-great grandmother and her children survived in 1920s New York City by working as bootleggers during Prohibition.
In Grandma’s Drinking Song, players write a drinking song together as they act out scenes. Kahn, the former singer/songwriter and guitarist for Brooklyn Jewish queercore folk-punk band Schmekel, wanted to carry over elements of music into this game.
A throughline in all three games is the power of creative resistance to authority — a narrative that Kahn said strikes him as particularly Jewish.
“There are all these stories in Jewish folklore that are really overtly about finding trickster-y or creative ways of fighting back against oppressive and unjust governmental regimes, evil kings, bad advisors,” Kahn said. “One of the first stories I ever heard in my life was the Purim story, so it’s very embedded in my mind as a part of Jewish consciousness, when evil rulers come to power and try to kill us all, we’re supposed to find these outside-the-box ways of preventing that from happening.”
For some Jewish creators, Jewish holidays are an explicit inspiration. Like many Jewish kids of the ‘80s and ‘90s, Max Fefer, a civil engineer by day and game designer by night, grew up loving the picture book “Herschel and the Hanukkah Goblins,” which remains a popular festive text. But as Fefer notes, goblins are often associated with antisemitic stereotypes. Fefer’s first Jewish game, Hanukkah Goblins, turns the story on its head — players interact as the jovial goblins, who are here not to destroy but to spread the spirit of Hanukkah to their goblin neighbors.
Last year, Fefer launched a successful Kickstarter for another Jewish holiday-inspired tabletop role-playing game, Esther and the Queens, where players assume the roles of Esther and her handmaidens from the Purim story, who join together to defeat Haman by infiltrating a masquerade party as queens from a far-off land.
Esther and the Queens channels Fefer’s Purim memories and includes carnival activities, including Skee-Ball; a calm, relaxing Mishloach Manot basket-making; and a fast-paced racing game.
“All of our holidays, they’re opportunities for us to gather as a community in different ways,” Fefer said. “Watching this satirical, comedic retelling of the story of Purim and the Esther Megillah and coming together into a theater, in a synagogue, to watch these spiels and laugh together and spin the graggers when we hear Haman’s name — all of those things help us build identity and community, and I think games in particular surrounding identity, that’s a great way for a Jewish person themselves to feel seen in a game and reinforce their identity, and share their background with friends.”
Another pair of Jewish game creators, Gabrielle Rabinowitz and her cousin, Ben Bisogno, were inspired by Passover.
“The seder is kind of like an RPG in that it’s a structured storytelling experience where everyone takes turns reading and telling, and there’s rituals and things you do at a certain time,” Rabinowitz said. “It’s halfway to an RPG.”
The game became a pandemic project for the two of them, and alongside artist Katrin Dirim and a host of other collaborators, they created Ma Nishtana: Why Is This Night Different? — a story game modeled on their family’s seder. The game follows the main beats of the Exodus story, and in every game, there will be a call to action from God, a moment of resistance, a departure and a final barrier — but different characters and moments resonate depending on the players’ choices.
As an educator at the Museum of Natural History, Rabinowitz said she is often thinking about how to foster participation and confidence, and she wanted to create a game-play mechanic to encourage players to be “as brazen as her family is.” The result was an in-game action called “Wait! Wait! Wait!” — if players wish to ask a question, make a suggestion, disagree with a course of action or share a new perspective, they can call out “Wait! Wait! Wait!” to do so.
The game also includes a series of scenes that are actively roleplayed or narrated, and each includes a ritual — one that can be done in-person or an alternate remote-friendly version. For example, at one point each player must come up with a plague inspired by the new story they’re telling together, and in the remote version, players go camera-off after reciting theirs.
“The fact that it was created during the pandemic and a way for us to connect and other people to connect with each other is really the soul of the game,” Rabinowitz said. “After each person tells a plague, by the end, all the cameras are off and everyone stays silent for another minute. It’s a hugely impactful moment when you’re playing remotely. The design is interwoven in the game itself.”
Rabinowitz said by playing a story of a family undergoing these trials, the themes of family and identity deepen every time she plays the game.
“A lot of people say, ‘Wow, I’ve never felt more connected to this story,’” she said. “Embodying these characters gave me a feeling of relevance and that makes it feel important as a Jewish precept.”
For other creators, that deep connection comes in more lighthearted scenarios. Nora Katz, a theatremaker, game designer and public historian working at the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life (ISJL) by day, created the Jewish deli-centered game Lunch Rush, which was included in the Doikayt anthology.
“There’s also types of institutions that come up a lot in [tabletop role-playing games], especially sort of high fantasy,” she said. “Everyone meets in a tavern, there’s an inn, things like that. So the idea of a deli as a central gathering place in a world like that felt fun to me.”
An important element of Lunch Rush is that players must be eating while playing, so for Katz’s first round with friends, they got together with chocolate chip ice cream and dill pickle potato chips. She said the deli is a shared language, and her fellow players were all bringing in their own favorite things about delis they loved into the fictional place they were building together.
Tabletop role-playing games “at their core are about collaboration and relationships and storytelling and community, and for me, all of those things are also what Jewishness is about, to me they totally go hand in hand,” Katz said.
The games are not meant to be for Jewish players only. Rabinowitz said the guidebook for Ma Nishtana includes essays to encourage people to further engage with the narrative.
“Jewish players, non-Jewish players, priests, non-religious people, all different people have played it and almost all of them have told us it’s given them a new way of thinking of how they relate to religious tradition, and I didn’t really set out to do that,” Rabinowitz said. “I feel really privileged to have helped create that space.”
Rabinowitz and Bisogno also commissioned other creators to build alternate backdrops for their game, so it can be repurposed to telling the story of another oppressed people’s fight for freedom. Players can interact as embattled yaoguai, spirits from Chinese mythology; explore a Janelle Monáe-inspired Afrofuturist world; play as Indigenous land defenders; or unionize as exploited workers at “E-Shypt.”
Fefer, who has been amplifying the work of other Jewish creators in the tabletop role-playing game space, said the harm of stereotyping and reinforcing negative tropes is still present in the industry, and not just for Jewish people. For example, fans recently criticized Dungeons & Dragons publishers Wizards of the Coast for reinforcing anti-Black stereotypes in the descriptions of a fantasy race, the Hadozee.
“I think it’s a process of talking to people who are from these groups and bringing them onto your teams and making sure you’re incorporating their perspectives into, in the example of Dungeons & Dragons, a hundred-million-dollar industry, being intentional about that design and looking at things from lots of different angles,” Fefer said. “How could our branding, our games be reinforcing something we’re not even aware of?”
Fefer hopes people who play Hanukkah Goblins and Esther and the Queens feel seen and have moments of shared joy, and also that they learn something from these games — about the antisemitic tropes in fantasy, or about underrepresented groups within the Jewish community. With Esther and the Queens, Fefer collaborated with a writer and artist, Noraa Kaplan, to retell the Purim story from a queer and feminist lens, drawing on Jewish texts that the pair said shows the long presence of queer and trans people in Jewish tradition.
“We have a lot of richness within Judaism to share our culture and share our upbringing but also just be representation,” Fefer added. “We’re living in a time of heightened antisemitism and the world being a gross place to be at times, and we can really bring the beauty of Judaism into game design and create experiences for people that are both representative of Judaism and also just very Jewish experiences.”
But for all the important conversations and learning experiences that can come from Jewish tabletop role-playing games, Katz said the goofiness and joy is important, too.
“We live in such a horrendous society that is of our own making,” she said. “If you can, for a little while, enjoy an anticapitalist fictional deli that you and your friends live in, I think that’s great.”
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The post With goblins, spellcasters and delis, board game makers are imagining new Jewish worlds appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Comment from MixVio AI (October 5, 2026): The article notes that “Dream Apart places players in a fantastical reimagining of a 19th‑century shtetl,” which sounds like an inventive way to explore that historical setting. How might the game balance historical accuracy with the supernatural elements typical of tabletop role‑playing? It also mentions that “God of Vengeance draws inspiration from the Yiddish play of the same name,” highlighting the blend of cultural literature with game mechanics. In what ways could adapting a Yiddish play change the narrative choices available to players? Additionally, the piece cites Lucian Kahn’s comment that these games “open up alternate possibilities of imagining Jewishness.” Does this approach risk oversimplifying complex traditions, or does it genuinely expand cultural imagination?
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Former Edmonton journalist admits to vandalizing monuments of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators
(JTA) —
EDMONTON, Canada – Duncan Kinney, a former journalist with the left-wing website Progress Report, pleaded guilty to criminal mischief on Monday, four years after he was arrested for vandalizing monuments to Ukrainian Nazi collaborators in Edmonton, Alberta.
Monday’s guilty plea was an anticlimactic not-quite-end to a case that appeared to be run-of-the-mill vandalism but was so culturally charged that it drew the attention of everyone from the Premier of Alberta to Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Toronto.
In 2021, Kinney broke the news story that someone had spray-painted “Actual Nazi” on a bust erected to honor WWII military commander and Nazi collaborator Roman Shukhevych and then painted “Nazi Monument” and “14th Waffen SS” on a memorial to the SS Galizien, a Ukrainian military unit that was part of the Nazi Party’s military wing.
According to court documents, Kinney was caught on a security camera spray-painting the Shukhevych monument shortly after midnight on Aug. 10, 2021, and caught again eight hours later photographing his handiwork. He then sent an email to the staff of the Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex, where the monument was located, explaining that Progress Report had received photos of the defaced monument. The brief email concluded with “Do you have any statement or information on this matter? Was Roman Shukhevych a Nazi or Nazi collaborator? Our deadline is 3:15 pm. Thank you.”
Kinney initially pleaded not guilty to one count each of criminal mischief and mischief relating to a war memorial. He suggested he’d been targeted because he was critical of the Edmonton Police Service and alleged that they were trying to silence him.
He is due to be sentenced Jan. 25, 2027, at which time the crown prosecutor is expected to drop the more serious charge of defacing a war memorial, which carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison.
Neither Kinney nor his defense attorney, Tom Engel, would comment after the court appearance. However, the board of Progress Report issued a statement decrying its former employee’s actions, calling committing a crime and reporting that somebody else did it “a cardinal breach of journalistic ethics and not acceptable behavior within any media organization. Mr. Kinney has always maintained his innocence in this matter and we trusted him; today’s news was an unpleasant surprise for us.”
Ultimately, the case exposed deep divisions in the Ukrainian diaspora about the role that Ukraine played in the Holocaust.
Shukhevych was a leader in both the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed force, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). He was also an officer in a Third Reich auxiliary battalion. During World War II, he commanded troops that murdered Jews, Polish civilians, other national minorities, communists and his countrymen from Ukraine. And he helped marshal the fight for Ukrainian independence from the Soviets.
The monument to the SS Galizien is located at St. Michael’s Cemetery, less than two miles from the complex housing the Shukhevych bust. Among the unit’s members was Yaroslav Hunka, who, at age 98, received two standing ovations for his service in WWII and fighting for Ukrainian independence when he appeared in the House of Commons alongside visiting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in September 2023.
Nobody in Parliament, it seemed, was aware of Hunka’s Nazi past. When the news became public, the incident became a national embarrassment. At least temporarily, the country was forced to examine how it dealt with WWII war criminals.
In Edmonton, however, the blunder appeared to have no impact on Kinney’s case. For his alleged vandalism to the SS Galizien monument, he had been charged not with simple mischief, but with vandalizing a war monument.
“We do not consider a statue honoring a Nazi to be a war monument,” says Jaime Kirzner-Roberts, senior director of policy and advocacy at the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center in Toronto. “When we talk about veterans’ monuments, we are talking about Canada’s veterans. We are not talking about Nazi veterans.”
Kirzner-Roberts’ organization, B’nai Brith Canada and the Jewish Federation of Edmonton, as well as local politicians and academics, have been asking for years for the monuments to be removed.
“I think that in the case of the Shukhevych monument, you shouldn’t put up monuments to people responsible for mass murder,” says John-Paul Himka, a University of Alberta professor emeritus of history, whose 2021 book “Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust” examines the role that the OUN and UPA had in destroying Ukraine’s Jewish population during WWII.
“As for the Waffen-SS memorial, Austria has also been trying to get rid of their Waffen-SS memorials and it’s an issue around the world, really, how much you want to put up memorials to SS men or to people who collaborated with the Nazi state.”
Less than six months after the Hunka debacle in Parliament, the monument to the SS Galizien at the St. Volodymyr Ukrainian Cemetery in Oakville, Ontario, was permanently removed. Himka doesn’t see anything like that happening in Edmonton, a city with the largest population of people with Ukrainian descent in a country with one of the largest populations of people with Ukrainian descent outside of Ukraine.
“The diaspora community doesn’t want to hear about this,” he says. “They don’t want to confront the history, and nobody is telling them otherwise really.”
The courtroom, though, did host one such confrontation. At the conclusion of Kinney’s appearance, two women who appeared to be in their 40s and who had spent the half-hour proceedings knitting, engaged in a conversation with two men who appeared to be at least twice their age and were sitting across the aisle.
The discussion started innocently enough, with inquiries as to what brought each of them to the courtroom. When the women said that Shukhevych was a Nazi who had killed thousands of innocent people, the temperature heated up.
When the women insisted, the men all but rolled their eyes. “That’s Russian propaganda,” they scoffed, then got up and marched together out of the courtroom.
The post Former Edmonton journalist admits to vandalizing monuments of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators appeared first on The Forward.
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Mike Rogers says his opponent is ‘anti-Jew.’ Do Michigan’s Jews believe him?
(JTA) —
WHITE LAKE, Mich. – Former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers did not have to go very far back in time to find a new example of how, in his view, his opponent is a danger to the Jewish community. Twelve hours would do.
Rogers recalled an interview that had aired the previous night on ABC. “He basically said that Israel now is just not an ally — matter of fact may be the enemy — of the United States of America,” the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Tuesday morning.
The “he” in question was, of course, Abdul El-Sayed, the former county health director and polarizing Democratic nominee for the state’s open Senate seat. The night before, El-Sayed had told ABC that Israel was “not actually our friend.” He also recently told MS NOW that “the government of Israel has done nothing but use us.”
Rogers, by contrast, told JTA that Israel is “the best ally we have in the Middle East. They have Western values baked into their political system.” He proudly noted that far-right commentator Tucker Carlson has attacked him for his pro-Israel views.
Remarks like the ones El-Sayed recently made, Rogers continued, clarify his view of his opponent: “There’s so much evidence. It’s pretty hard to say that this guy is anything but anti-Jew.”
For Rogers and the Republican Party writ large, El-Sayed’s hardline criticism of Israel has thrown them an unexpected gift in a tough race that could help determine who controls the Senate after the November midterms.
That opportunity runs through Michigan’s Jewish community. At a recent rally in the state, Vice President JD Vance echoed that criticism, accusing El-Sayed of being “obsessed” with Israel.
“He’s 10 times more interested in what’s happening in Palestine than in Port Huron,” Vance, whose own views on Israel have concerned many conservative Jews, told the crowd. “He’s way more interested in what’s happening in Gaza than he is in what’s happening in Grand Rapids.”
Another recent Trump administration event, held at a Michigan synagogue, mostly discussed antisemitism. Neither Senate candidate’s name was mentioned from the stage. But Jews who attended the event told JTA they were scared of the prospect of a Senator El-Sayed. “I pray he does not get in,” one attendee, Sharon Matlen, said.
Rogers, a former congressman who lost the 2024 Senate race to Elissa Slotkin, a Jewish Democrat, by fewer than 20,000 votes, hopes to convince enough of the state’s estimated 100,000 Jewish adults and other traditionally Democratic blocs to vote for him in the election in two weeks’ time. He’s confident of his chances.
“I think the alternative is so bad, and they looked at us and said, ‘He’s not that bad,’” the candidate said. “And trust me, I think that’s a good place for us to be.”
Rogers positions himself as a common-sense Republican, one whose chief concerns are improving child literacy, rebuilding manufacturing jobs and lowering utility rates. Drawing on his military background, he insists he doesn’t have a problem with the fact that El-Sayed is Muslim: “I wore the uniform of the United States so you can pray any way you want.”
Local rabbi Asher Lopatin, who briefly went on leave from his role directing Jewish communal relations in Ann Arbor to stump for Rogers, has called him “a caring, sensitive man.”
Rogers is also trying to make inroads with Black communities, as well as other ethnic and faith-based groups. At a Tim Hortons in this tony Detroit suburb, an Iraqi Christian couple came out from behind the counter to take selfies and profess their support.
But among his potential new voters, it’s the Jewish community Rogers has made the most overt appeals to. His outreach has included meeting with various Jewish clergy and community leaders and hosting a meet-and-greet Sunday night in a heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, catered by a kosher BBQ joint. And he and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz will be appearing together in Detroit next week for an event spearheaded by the Republican Jewish Coalition titled, “Who Will Keep Us Safe?”
Hundreds of Jews, including several prominent community leaders and lifelong Democrats, have already signed a pledge to vote for Rogers. El-Sayed’s association with left-wing streamer Hasan Piker and linking of the spring attack on Temple Israel to Israel’s war in Lebanon have troubled some Jewish voters.
(L-r) Michigan Jewish Democratic activist Alicia Chandler, Illinois congressional candidate Daniel Biss and former Michigan Rep. Andy Levin make a progressive Jewish case for Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed to a small audience of conflicted Jews in Detroit, Michigan, Oct. 19, 2026. (Andrew Lapin/JTA)
But others, even those deeply worried about El-Sayed and his movement, still can’t bring themselves to support the current Republican platform. A new progressive canvassing campaign is targeting Jews in the Detroit suburbs to persuade them not to vote for the GOP candidate.
“We’ve been doing a lot of listening to people’s concerns and anxieties,” said Amanda Berger, a progressive Jewish activist from California who is leading Seed the Vote’s Jewish canvassing efforts for El-Sayed in Michigan.
But the volunteers’ goals, Berger told JTA, are then “to pivot to the question of, what will it mean to you, or what will it mean to the Jewish community, or what will it mean to your neighbors, if Mike Rogers is elected and Trump is unchecked for another two years.”
Elaine Driker, a prominent Detroit Jewish community leader, was no fan of El-Sayed. Yet after seeing so many of her peers sign the pro-Rogers letter, Driker signed a Jewish letter pledging to vote for El-Sayed.
She then went a step further, hosting Daniel Biss, a progressive Jewish congressional candidate from Illinois, and 50 Jews at her house Monday night for a dialogue about El-Sayed. One in attendance, Susan Ruttenberg, admitted that though she had already cast her vote for the Democrat, “I’m uncomfortable with him.”
Biss holds Israeli citizenship and told the group he believes “that the Jewish people have a legitimate claim to the land where the state of Israel has been established.” He conceded, “Some of the ways that Abdul has spoken about antisemitism have landed imperfectly with some people.”
Yet Biss insisted, “I think he’s shown a willingness to learn and grow.” He also warned the crowd against what he called “the political narrowness of the organized Jewish community.”
It was one of several such small-room Jewish conversations about the race that have taken place in recent weeks. Others have featured New York congressional candidate Brad Lander and Vermont U.S. Rep. Becca Balint. Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who dropped out of the Senate primary that El-Sayed eventually won, will speak at another.
The events are intended “to breathe some air into the possibility that Abdul is not scary, that he is not antisemitic,” said Stacie Chaiken, an organizer with Michigan Jews for Democracy, which is also putting on the meet-and-greets. The coalition’s open letter of Jews pledging to vote for El-Sayed has topped 950 signatures to date.
To win over more Jews, Rogers will make his case by acknowledging what other Jews have told him is a deep fear for where the country is headed.
“They’re afraid for what kind of America their children will live in,” Rogers told JTA of the Jews he’s spoken to on the campaign trail. El-Sayed is building a “movement,” the Republican said, arguing that such a movement bodes poorly for Jews: “You have to remember, if elected to the Senate, this is just the beginning for them.”
Democrat US Senate candidate for Michigan Abdul El-Sayed speaks during a midterm campaign rally in Flint, Michigan on October 18, 2026. El-Sayed is competing against Republican candidate Mike Rodgers for Michigan’s US Senate seat in the upcoming midterm elections. (Jeff Kowalsky / AFP via Getty Images)
Rogers repeatedly brought up his opponent’s “ideology” and “extremism.” He sought to link El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood, echoing a growing GOP line of attack. Republicans have cited resurfaced tweets by El-Sayed’s half-sister describing their mother’s activism in the movement in the early 1970s.
El-Sayed has disavowed the group and accused questioners of invoking Islamophobic tropes.
Rogers also said he doubted the sincerity of El-Sayed’s August apology to the Jewish community for his “hurt people hurt people” remarks regarding the March attack on Temple Israel — a similar sentiment other Michigan Jews have shared with JTA.
“That’s not an apology,” he said. “That says, ‘I’m sorry I said it then. Maybe I should have said it later.’ I don’t buy that.”
The Rogers campaign is additionally arguing that El-Sayed’s rhetoric has activated a deeper antisemitic contingent on the left. A Rogers campaign staffer, who is Jewish, posted to X Tuesday morning that El-Sayed is “a raging antisemite who is responsible for the hate and vitriol Michigan Jews face daily,” with a link to his ABC interview. That staffer, Abby Ronson, told JTA that she received death threats because of the tweet after progressive commentator Mehdi Hasan went after her.
El-Sayed has strongly rejected any allegation that he is antisemitic, saying he loves Judaism and that “AIPAC and Israel are not the same as Judaism and the Jewish people.” Some of the state’s top Jewish Democrats, including Slotkin and state Attorney General Dana Nessel, have endorsed him; others, including congressional candidate Jeremy Moss, have not.
But Rogers also hopes to tell more of Michigan’s Jews who he is — beyond simply not being El-Sayed. There’s someone else, he said, who he’s not: the deeply unpopular Republican president.
“I’m not Trump. And I don’t plan to be Trump when I get to Washington,” Rogers said. He listed issues he has broken with Trump on, including the joint U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, which Rogers formerly supported but now wants wrapped up: “I argue we met our objectives. Don’t hang out there very long.”
If such a view puts him at odds with Israeli leadership, he said, they will politely hash it out. “Every once in a while, we’re going to disagree with our allies. I don’t see this as a problem.”
Still, when it comes to issues of concern to Jewish voters, Rogers said he’s more aligned with Trump than not. He “absolutely” approves of the president’s campaign against campus antisemitism, which has drawn criticism and legal action for pulling billions of dollars in funding from various universities in order to pressure them to sign settlements.
If the government wanted to do the same to the University of Michigan, the state’s top research school that has been embroiled in a stream of antisemitism controversies of its own, Rogers — who donned Michigan gear for a TV ad running in the state — would support it.
“I wish there were a better way, but nothing else is working,” he told JTA. “Hell, their professors are talking in ways that would be shocking about an ally to the United States, and they’re buying into this ‘oppressor versus oppressed.’ It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. The whole thing is anti-American. We’re going to get it fixed.”
Rogers dismissed as “a made-up story” reports that his allies had asked the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC not to advertise publicly on his behalf, reportedly because they fearedfearing its involvement could hurt his campaign.
“What I’ve always said is, if anybody wants to help defeat the most extreme candidate from his Democratic Socialists of America ties to his very, I think, hateful, angry, riddled contempt for Israel and Jews, welcome,” Rogers said. “I’ll take anybody that wants to help.” El-Sayed is not a DSA member, but he has spoken at the organization’s events and received campaign support from its members.
Recently, an AIPAC-linked super PAC, the United Democracy Project, spent about $95,000 against El-Sayed, according to federal elections filings. That expenditure took the form of mailers targeting the Jewish community.
Rogers insists his fight against El-Sayed is bigger than the candidates. Voters, he said, are concerned with what the Democratic Party’s treatment of Jews says about the coalition’s direction in general.
“I can’t tell you how many people tell me that they’re so disappointed in their party,” he said. “And if you can bring yourself to diminish one set of people or one ethnic group of people in Michigan, what stops you there? I argue, nothing.”
Yet many of the Michigan Jews trying to convince their neighbors to vote for El-Sayed are making the same argument — in a different order — about Republicans. The GOP’s demonizing of certain immigrant groups and LGBTQ people, progressive Jews argue, could lead back to antisemitism.
“A society that abandons pluralism in an effort to attack someone other than the Jews is surely going to be coming for the Jews pretty soon,” Biss told the assembled crowd on Monday.
Rogers rejected the premise that Republicans are doing the same thing. “I don’t equate them at all,” he said. “It may be a legitimate concern. But if you have somebody that wants to eliminate, you know, ‘from the river to the sea,’ last I checked, that’s just about every Jew that lives in Israel. There’s no more clear, brighter line than that.”
On his way out the door to speak at the Detroit Economic Club, Rogers was asked if he had any last message for American Jews.
“Keep the faith,” he said, before driving away.
The post Mike Rogers says his opponent is ‘anti-Jew.’ Do Michigan’s Jews believe him? appeared first on The Forward.
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Germany reprimands Iran over plot to kill Jewish leader and Israel advocate
(JTA) — Germany’s foreign ministry summoned Iran’s ambassador after a German court convicted two men of spying for Tehran and plotting attacks on a leader of the country’s Jewish community and a prominent non-Jewish supporter of Israel.
A slap on the wrist is not enough, said Volker Beck, president of the interfaith German-Israeli Society, who had been one of the spies’ targets.
Iranian Ambassador Majid Nili Ahmadabadi and most of the embassy’s personnel should be personae non grata in Germany, Beck said. He added he would be satisfied if the embassy was emptied except for a lone guard “to look after the building and this is it.”
Hamburg’s Higher Regional Court last week sentenced 54-year-old defendant S. to eight-and-a-half years in prison and 43-year-old defendant M. to four and a half years for plotting assassinations and an arson attack. The convicts’ full names have not been publicized.
The court found that the two men, living in Denmark, had in early 2025 carried out orders from Iranian intelligence oepratives to spy on Josef Schuster, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, and Beck, a Green Party politician and longtime Israel advocate, with the aim of planning an assassination.
In a statement issued Oct. 15, the court said that defendant S. was allegedly tasked “with conducting surveillance on Jewish or Israeli targets — including both locations and individuals — within Germany and preparing to carry out murders and arson attacks against them.”
S. was also convicted of conducting surveillance on a Jewish grocery store in Berlin. “To execute these orders, the defendant S. reportedly enlisted the assistance of the defendant M,” the court said.
The convicted men have until Oct. 22 to appeal the verdict. Further details about the case and the court’s reasoning will be released with the final report, in about three months, a spokesperson for the court told JTA in an email.
In a statement sent to JTA, Schuster praised the verdict but called the case “the tip of the iceberg.”
“With the now proven commissioning of these two spies, the regime in Tehran has once again shown its true face. The masterminds are in Iran, and the danger they pose to our open society remains great as long as the mullahs’ regime exists,” he said.
At the trial, Germany’s federal security agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, testified that it got wind of the plot in 2024, Beck told JTA. “Last year I had six weeks of the highest level of personal protection,” said Beck, who is not Jewish. He couldn’t take out the trash or walk his dog without police protection.
After German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul’s summoned Iran’s ambassador, Iran called in Germany’s ambassador to the country, Axel Wilhelm Dittmann, for a meeting in Tehran to complain about accusations it considers “baseless.”
In a post Oct. 19 on X, the German Foreign Ministry said Germany “will not allow Iran to threaten our free society. We will not tolerate attacks on Jewish life and those who defend it—anywhere, least of all in Germany. The malicious attempted attacks against” Schuster and Beck “will have legal consequences.”
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