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In Indiana, a vaunted Jewish studies program is upended by red-state politics over Israel and speech
A sudden change in leadership at Indiana University’s Jewish studies program has erupted into a bitter internal feud, pitting a new interim director against faculty and students who say he is undermining academic freedom and reshaping the program’s direction amid national tensions over Israel and campus speech.
The turmoil began with the abrupt replacement of the department’s longtime director, continued with a clash between the new director and an ardently pro-Palestinian graduate student, and culminated last week with a statement of support for the new director from the college’s dean.
The conflict, first reported by the student newspaper, began in August, when the longtime director of the Borns Jewish Studies Program, Mark Roseman, unexpectedly stepped down a year before his term ended. Roseman said he was told, without explanation, that IU’s newly installed chancellor, David Reingold, sought to replace him.
Günther Jikeli, a scholar of antisemitism and associate director of IU’s Center for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, stepped into the role.
Soon after taking over, Jikeli clashed with graduate student Sabina Ali, who identifies as Jewish and supports the Palestinian cause. He expelled her from a Zoom seminar for displaying a “Free Palestine” image and later denied her travel funding to present a paper critical of “Jewish indigeneity” claims related to Israel. Jikeli said her work was “political activism, not scholarship.”
Many of the Borns Jewish Studies faculty and graduate students have publicly sided against Jikeli, fearing that his actions will threaten academic freedom and damage the reputation of one of the oldest and most storied Jewish studies programs in the country.
“We used to have a Jewish studies program where we knew we had political differences, but we had really great academic working relationships,” said Sarah Imhoff, a tenured professor who has been at IU for 16 years. “And that has significantly deteriorated.”
At the same time, dozens of faculty at universities around the world, most of them in Jewish studies, have signed a letter to the dean supporting Jikeli. They wrote that he was “facing an entirely unwarranted political assault on his professional integrity and judgment.”
“What Professor Jikeli is trying to do is restore rigor and objectivity in the department,” Allon Friedman, a medical school professor on IU’s Indianapolis campus and leader of multiple pro-Israel advocacy groups in the state, told JTA.
Friedman continued, “We’ve seen over the last few decades a real deterioration — not only the quality of scholarship in Jewish Studies in particular, but also an injection of politics that is oftentimes anti-Israel, if not overtly antisemitic. That’s what we’re seeing here.”
Mark Roseman, former director of Indiana University’s Jewish Studies program, in a promotional video for the program, Oct. 28, 2015. (Screenshot via YouTube)
Jikeli, who is not Jewish, declined to comment to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency for this story. Representatives for IU and the dean’s office did not return repeated requests for comment.
Jikeli’s appointment in August came as a surprise to Roseman, who directed Jewish Studies at IU from 2013 to 2020 before reassuming the position last year. Roseman, who unlike Jikeli is Jewish, told JTA he stepped down after Jikeli told him that Reingold, who was named chancellor in June, had privately offered the director role to him.
This was considered a highly unusual arrangement for an academic program, where directors are not typically forced out before the end of their term and any replacements would typically be vetted by committee.
“I was surprised by it, obviously. It didn’t make sense to me to continue not having the confidence of the campus leadership,” Roseman said. He added that, in his eyes, “the program operated very harmoniously.” He remains affiliated with the program as a tenured faculty.
Jikeli told the Indiana Daily Student that he, too, was given no reason for the leadership change. Seemingly no one in the program was. At a meeting with Rick Van Kooten, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Jewish studies faculty asked why their director was being replaced now.
“I can’t tell you that,” the dean responded, according to multiple accounts of the meeting.
This scene was part of a broader cultural shift at IU, where around 12% of the student body is Jewish — and where new personnel and new oversight have been installed at various levels in a broader effort to comply with the nationwide campus crackdown led by President Donald Trump.
Indiana’s Republican state legislature, following Trump’s model, has wrested control of public university governance and pressured IU to curb the power of faculty decision-making, leading to a broader revolt over free speech on campus. During last year’s pro-Palestinian encampments, state police dispatched snipers to campus rooftops as a peacekeeping measure in a much-criticized move.
After the encampments, IU, like other schools, convened an antisemitism advisory board. Roseman and Jikeli served on it together, along with Dean Van Kooten and others including an Indianapolis congregational rabbi. (Unlike similar antisemitism task forces at other schools, IU’s has not produced a formal report.)
One Jewish professor who had played a leading role in the encampments was disciplined over the summer after being found in violation of an “intellectual diversity” law recently passed by the state senate. That professor, Benjamin Robinson, has since been sanctioned by the school. The complaint said that by sharing his views on Israel and Gaza in one of his Germanic studies classes, he violated a state law that forbids faculty from discussing their views in the classroom if they are unrelated to the professor’s expertise.
Many saw the recent shutdown of the student newspaper as a further attempt to quash dissent. (IU walked back its decision last week, but not before having fired the student media director.)
At the same time, not all speech has been silenced on campus. Recently Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, spoke to 3,000 IU students as part of the Turning Point USA tour days before releasing a chummy interview with avowed antisemite Nick Fuentes.
Roseman alluded to such pressures in the Jewish studies program’s most recent alumni newsletter, dated fall 2025. In a “director’s report” written before he stepped down, he warns of recent actions from the state legislature forcing public universities to close programs that enroll under a certain threshold of majors. Such actions, he told alums, could jeopardize the program’s future.
The same newsletter included an “editor’s note” stating that Roseman would no longer be serving as director — and a welcome note from Jikeli. His primary concerns were different.
Günther Jikeli, a professor of antisemitism, addresses an audience in Cleveland, Ohio, Dec. 7, 2018. In 2025 Jikeli was installed as interim director of Indiana University’s Jewish Studies program over the wishes of some of his colleagues. (Screenshot via YouTube)
“Rising antisemitism is a challenge on campuses across the country,” Jikeli wrote. “While IU is not immune, we are fortunate to have strong partnerships and resources to address these concerns, and we will continue to work together to ensure that Jewish Studies remains a place of learning, resilience, and community.”
Roseman, a renowned British scholar of the Holocaust who most recently edited a comprehensive four-volume Cambridge history of the Shoah, had tried to keep a low profile on campus in the two years since the Hamas attacks and outbreak of war in Gaza. Even as IU, like many other schools, contended with encampments and accusations that Israel was committing genocide, the resident genocide scholar sought to keep his own views out of the spotlight, colleagues said.
That has not been the case with Jikeli, whose research specialties include monitoring antisemitism among pro-Palestinian supporters on Instagram and in European Muslim communities, including Syrian refugees. Last year he helped to organize a “Rally Against Hamas Propaganda” on campus, alongside the leaders of IU’s Hillel and Chabad centers and the president of Hoosiers for Israel. At the time, Jikeli told the Indiana Daily Student that the rally was not intended as a direct counter to the encampments.
Speaking to the Combat Antisemitism Movement, an activist group, over the summer prior to his appointment as director, Jikeli warned that tensions on campuses like his own were “entering a more dangerous phase.” He painted anti-Zionist activists in stark terms.
“We’re not just dealing with protests,” he said then. “We’re facing a hardened core of ideologically driven actors, empowered by digital amplification and real-world networks, who are reshaping campus discourse — and possibly campus safety — in deeply troubling ways.”
In the two months since Jikeli took over the Jewish studies director post, he has taken a harder line against a strain of pro-Palestinian activism that had been running through some aspects of the program. In his view, expressed in emails viewed by JTA, he is protecting the program from influence or activism that could harm its mission.
Indiana University graduate student Sabina Ali holds a sign with her name on it as members of the Indiana Graduate Workers Coalition and its supporters picket while striking for union recognition in Bloomington, Indiana, April 25, 2022. (Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
His efforts soon focused on a chief adversary: Sabina Ali, a sixth-year doctoral student pursuing a Ph.D. in religious studies with a minor in Jewish studies and a former managing editor of the American Religion Journal, a scholarly publication based at IU.
Over email, Ali told JTA she identifies as “post-Soviet Jewish,” with a mixed family including Muslims. “My Jewish identity is inseparable from the struggle against all forms of oppression, including Israel’s ongoing occupation, apartheid, and genocide against Palestinians,” she wrote.
Last year Ali was one of dozens to sign an open letter from “Jewish Faculty, Staff, Students, and Alumni” protesting the university’s breaking up of a student encampment — a letter not signed by Roseman, Imhoff or any other current Jewish studies faculty save one. (An emeritus professor who is on the Jewish studies faculty advisory board also signed.) She supports a movement pressuring IU to divest from Israel, and her Zoom profile picture, visible when her camera is off, is a drawing of a woman wearing a keffiyeh accompanied by a Palestinian flag and the words “Free Palestine.”
Ali was drawn to Jewish studies, she said, “because my research engages core questions within the field while also expanding the field’s boundaries through critical approaches.” She also admired the work of the faculty, particularly Imhoff. “It matters deeply to me to be part of Jewish Studies because it is a field where I feel I can make meaningful contributions and connect it to broader interdisciplinary conversations,” she said.
When on campus she routinely wore a keffiyeh, the traditional Palestinian headscarf that has been adopted by protesters on the left, to Jewish studies events — something she said she did without incident before Jikeli’s appointment.
“I am fully aware that not everyone in the program shares my political views or my fundamental moral conviction that occupation, apartheid, and genocide are unacceptable,” Ali told JTA. “Academic freedom does not require that everyone is comfortable.”
Before the leadership change, Ali’s politics encountered little pushback within Jewish studies — although some faculty and students had expressed discomfort behind closed doors. But under Jikeli, it quickly became an issue.
Her Zoom picture became a sticking point in September when it was visible during a program event, as Imhoff prepared to present her own latest research to colleagues. According to those in attendance at the Zoom lecture, Jikeli ordered Ali to remove the pro-Palestinian image or he’d kick her off the call. When she refused, he booted her — prompting a mass exodus from nearly all of her colleagues, who reconvened in a separate Zoom meeting, sans Jikeli, to discuss the research.
The incident infuriated many on campus who viewed Jikeli’s actions as a violation of academic freedom, with one professor calling his behavior “autocratic.”
In an email obtained by JTA, Ali wrote, “The irony is not lost on me that I — a Jewish student — was excluded from a Jewish Studies event for expressing solidarity with Palestinians, while you, a ‘scholar’ of antisemitism, used your authority to decide what kinds of Jewish expression are acceptable.”
Some, however, supported Jikeli.
“I do not think it was wrong of Dr. Jikeli to ask, or to insist, that a Zoom profile with said imagery and said language be removed, given the program that we’re in, given the times that we’re in,” Joanna Martin, a second-year doctoral student with a Jewish studies minor, told JTA.
Things shortly escalated when Jikeli vetoed Ali’s request for funding to present her research paper, “Weaponizing Indigeneity,” at a conference on religious studies. According to the paper’s abstract, “claims about ‘Jewish indigeneity’ to Palestine…are appropriated to justify the existence and actions of the settler-colonial nation-state of Israel and deployed to legitimize the possession of Palestine.”
The funding request, typically pro forma, had already been approved by the faculty committee overseeing graduate studies. The program director’s decision to unilaterally override the committee was, observers said, unprecedented.
No one before Jikeli had raised a flag about her research proposal. “In fact,” Ali said, “my advisors and committee members have told me that my research is innovative for Jewish studies.”
Jikeli defended his decision to faculty in a September email, obtained by JTA, saying Ali’s research was too politicized. He suggested that the Department of Religious Studies, Ali’s primary doctoral home, could fund her travel instead.
Jikeli explained in a follow-up email that he had to act “in the best interest of Jewish Studies as a program,” and believed that funding Ali “could have harmed Jewish Studies.” He added, “I understand that reasonable people may disagree on where exactly to draw such lines.”
Many in the program weren’t persuaded.
“Many of us feel like this current arrangement is not one we would want to continue,” Imhoff said. “I would like to find a way forward where we can support all graduate students and faculty who are doing serious research, regardless of their politics.”
“She’s a graduate student. We’re all graduate students. Part of our job here is to learn how to fit within this discipline, fit within the field, and push boundaries of what that’s supposed to look like,” Daniel Reischler, a third-year doctoral student, told JTA.
Ali’s activism, long tolerated in the program, was now a flashpoint. “My sense is this is just what he was hired to do, to deny Sabina funding,” one member of the Jewish Studies faculty said of Jikeli. Some have argued it is, in fact, Jikeli who is imposing personal politics on Ali’s research.
“People are paranoid,” Claire Richters, a sixth-year Ph.D. student, told JTA. She was one of three members of the Jewish Studies graduate student executive committee, including Reischler, who signed an open letter to Jikeli protesting his decision to withhold funding to Ali. “There’s just a worry that this will start extending to any issue that the director has a political disagreement with.”
Those concerns aren’t shared by everyone. “There’s a lot of, like, ‘Will my research be denied?’ And it’s like, you’re doing Holocaust studies. I doubt it,” Martin said. Declining to share her thoughts on Ali’s research and its appropriateness for Jewish Studies, she added, “The majority don’t have reason to be worried.”
The letter from outside faculty supporting Jikeli also defends the actions he took against Ali.
“First, there was good reason, we believe, to turn down a request for travel support to deliver a programmatic indictment of Israel as a colonialist power. Nothing in the abstract demonstrates any original arguments,” the letter states. “Second, the decision to disallow a student in an online seminar to replace her face with a political slogan and an anonymized portrait in a keffiyeh was responsible and appropriate.”
Among the letter’s signatories: Alvin Rosenfeld, who founded Jewish studies at IU.
A police officer with a gun stands on a Palestinian flag during the arrest of an activist on the third day of a pro-Palestinian protest camp at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, April 27, 2024. (Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Dean Van Kooten weighed in on the disputes with Ali in an internal email on Oct. 29.
He tried to walk a fine line. “I concur with the director’s decision to not use Borns Jewish Studies Program funding, particularly an IU foundation account[,] to fund the travel of the graduate student,” Van Kooten wrote in an email viewed by JTA. However, he added, Ali’s travel to the conference would still be funded, just from a different IU piggy bank. This would be done, he wrote, in the name of “respecting academic freedom.”
When it came to Zoomgate, Van Kooten was more circumspect. “Regarding the governance of the use of Zoom in department/program seminars, colloquia, etc., the college does not have a policy on this, and we don’t recommend one,” he wrote. Any Zoom policy going forward, he added, “should be voted on by the entire core faculty, and in consultation with Indiana University’s general counsel.”
The dean added that, in absence of any clear policy, “the convenor of an event must exercise sound judgment in balancing the importance of freedom of speech and expression [following university policies] with the obligation to maintain an inclusive learning environment, and limit disruptions when they occur.”
One graduate student told JTA the email felt like a “stalemate.” The work of the program goes on: This week its contemporary antisemitism center hosted a symposium on campus antisemitism, with many of its featured speakers having also signed the letter supporting Jikeli.
Unusually, the conference was supported with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Under Trump the NEH has defunded virtually every other Jewish humanities program, with the exception of the conservative Tikvah Fund. The current acting chair of the NEH was expected to attend IU’s conference.
For some broader observers of the Jewish studies space, who’d long seen Indiana as a beacon for the field, the situation is deeply troubling.
“Indiana is more than a red state. It has an incredible history of white supremacy,” said Riv-Ellen Prell, an emeritus professor at the University of Minnesota who has studied the history of Jews on campus. “And here is IU, in the middle of this world, as this incredible magnet for Jewish students — because the Jewish studies program was so great, because they had a big Hillel.”
But with the forced changes, Prell said, the forces that shape higher education were sending a message: “‘We like these kinds of Jewish studies people. We don’t like those kinds of Jewish studies people.’”
Prell said that concerns about the appropriateness of Ali’s graduate studies were missing the point: that there were other ways the program’s director could have addressed them.
“This is where she is housed as a student, admitted as a student, and there is academic freedom, and there are faculty who wish to supervise and work with her,” Prell said. “If we are to begin saying, ‘Well, the faculty who work with these students aren’t allowed to teach or supervise people with this kind of work,’ then that is the death of academic freedom.”
Friedman sees things differently.
“It’s insane that we would even consider to pay for something like this,” he said, of Ali’s research. “What’s the point of a Jewish studies department if the students in the department are demonstrating that, not only do they know nothing about the history of the Jewish people, but they’re actively trying to undermine it? No one else would tolerate this.”
Jewish studies has increasingly been a growing lightning rod for Jewish campus politics, even before Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack and Israel’s assault in Gaza; the spike in campus antisemitism, and Trump’s college crackdown.
At other schools, donors have pulled funding for Jewish and Israel studies programs over political disagreements with faculty on Israel. Some Jewish studies faculty have been targeted or muscled out of campus antisemitism task forces because of their perceived views on Israel, while others have led protests against their own task forces. At Columbia, which reached a settlement with the Trump administration to protect its funding after becoming the epicenter of student protests, some angry Jewish donors have opted to support Jewish Studies, but not the rest of the university.
Yet Jikeli’s fear that the IU controversy “could harm Jewish Studies” seems to some a self-fulfilling prophecy. On social media, current and former IU Jewish Studies faculty were bemoaning the spiritual end of the program. And citing the interim director’s actions, some prospective graduate students have told faculty they are no longer interested in enrolling.
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When does criticizing Israel become antisemitism? Ask Mark Ruffalo
American actor Mark Ruffalo on Saturday denied that he is antisemitic, one day after Paramount accused the actor of invoking antisemitic tropes in his campaign against the studio’s $111 billion bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery.
The clash lands as Paramount is trying to clear the last major obstacle to closing the Warner Bros. Discovery deal: a lawsuit filed by California and 11 other state attorneys general seeking to block it on antitrust grounds.
“The accusation that I am antisemitic is appalling and fundamentally dishonest,” Ruffalo said on Saturday. “Criticizing the actions of the Israeli prime minister, a military technology contract, or the executives who supply it is not the same as criticizing Jewish people.”
Now, what started as a celebrity spat has turned into a stand-in for a much bigger fight: When does criticizing Israel’s government turn into hating Jews?
Ruffalo and his defenders say targeting a defense contractor’s technology and a media family’s wealth is ordinary corporate criticism. Paramount and its allies say invoking Israel in a business dispute imports old tropes about Jewish power and money into a fight that has nothing to do with Jews. The same argument has played out over campus protests, in Congress and across the globe since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel.
The dispute began Friday, when Ruffalo posted a 2024 clip of former Oracle CEO Safra Catz reportedly discussing “profoundly scary technologies” the company built for the Israeli military after Oct. 7. Along with the clip, Ruffalo wrote that the war in Gaza was “a genocide, which was built on an apartheid system of oppression powered by Oracle.”
Larry Ellison, who co-founded Oracle and has an estimated net worth of around $200 billion, has personally backstopped $40.4 billion in equity financing for his son David Ellison’s Paramount to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery.
Ruffalo called the elder Ellison a “classic Oligarch” and warned that the “most destructive and inhuman forces in the world” would soon sit inside an important media company if the merger succeeds. The deal would give the family control of CNN. It already owns CBS News.
Paramount fired back. “We are, as always, troubled when antisemitic tropes are invoked in purported service of a business dispute,” a company spokesperson told The Wrap, a Hollywood trade publication. “Words like ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid,’ applied to a corporate transaction, aren’t just wrong — they’re a bridge too far, and they cheapen the very real suffering those words are meant to describe.” The company added that the episode “exposes the true motivation of some who have advocated opposition to this transaction.”
It’s not the first time Paramount has made that argument. Axios reported in June that company executives believed antisemitism was fueling opposition to the merger more broadly, pointing to the Ellisons’ Jewish identity and Larry Ellison’s friendship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Ruffalo pushed back on social media Saturday refuting the accusation that he is antisemitic and adding: “Everything I know about acting, activism, and humanism has been profoundly shaped by the Jewish friends, colleagues, and loved ones who have been integral and family throughout every point of my life.”
An advocate and activist
Ruffalo, 58, is best known for playing the Hulk in the Marvel cinematic universe and has been nominated for four Academy Awards, for his performances in The Kids Are All Right, Foxcatcher, Spotlight and Poor Things.
He has also built a reputation as one of Hollywood’s most consistent activists, campaigning for environmental causes and protesting against the Trump administration. This fight is the latest flashpoint in the actor’s history of pro-Palestinian activism.
Since the Hamas attack on Israel, he has frequently called out Israel’s military action in Gaza, notably wearing an Artists4Ceasefire pin to the 2024 Oscars. In September 2024, he was among more than 700 SAG-AFTRA members who signed a letter demanding the actors’ union publicly call for a Gaza ceasefire and protect pro-Palestinian members from what they described as industry blacklisting.
In September 2025, he said he supported efforts to “boycott, divest, sanction, and prosecute” Israel. And just 10 days before the Oracle post, he joined Javier Bardem, Susan Sarandon and other artists in a statement arguing that despite the U.S.-brokered truce in place since October 2025, “there is no ceasefire in Gaza.”
That history is why three prominent voices in the fight against antisemitism sided with Paramount over the weekend.
“Words matter, and so does the willingness to draw a line when legitimate debate gives way to antisemitic tropes,” wrote Jim Berk, CEO of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, praising the studio for “refusing to allow prejudice to masquerade as political or corporate criticism.”
He went on: “Invoking Israel in an issue where it is completely irrelevant is a textbook case of obsession and demonization.”
Creative Community for Peace, a Hollywood group that pushes back on boycotts of Israel, went further, with executive director Ari Ingel accusing Ruffalo of fusing “hostility toward Israel and Zionism with Jewish-associated wealth, media ownership, oligarchic power and ominous warnings about concentrated control into a single narrative.”
Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, called Ruffalo’s posts “cynical and sickening.”
Antisemitism vs. anti-Zionism
The fight lands amid the worst stretch of global antisemitism in decades. Researchers at Tel Aviv University found that 20 Jews were murdered in antisemitic attacks worldwide last year, the highest toll in more than 30 years — a count that includes a gunmen who killed more than a dozen people at a Hanukkah celebration on Sydney’s Bondi Beach in December.
As incidents rise, and amidst Israel’s ongoing campaign in Gaza and its war with Iran, the country’s standing in the world has cratered.
A Pew Research Center survey of 36 countries this spring found a median of 67% hold unfavorable views of Israel, with opinion growing more negative since 2025 in most countries where Pew has trend data. Even in the U.S., Israel’s staunchest ally, Americans no longer clearly side with Israelis over Palestinians for the first time since Gallup began asking in 2001 — a reversal driven largely by independents and voters under 35.
Where the merger stands
Representatives for Paramount and California are expected to meet Monday for preliminary talks, at Paramount’s request, though people briefed on the discussions cautioned there’s no guarantee they will lead anywhere. The Writers Guild has also sued to block the deal.
The stakes of delay are real: if the deal doesn’t close by October, Paramount would owe Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders hundreds of millions of dollars in fees. If there is no resolution, a trial is set for March.
The post When does criticizing Israel become antisemitism? Ask Mark Ruffalo appeared first on The Forward.
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AIPAC wants to defeat Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan Senate race. Mike Rogers would rather it stay out.
In the race for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat, both candidates are trying to turn a narrow margin into victory.
Republican Mike Rogers is trying to win as the more moderate alternative to Democratic nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive and an outspoken critic of Israel. El-Sayed, who narrowly defeated Rep. Haley Stevens in the Democratic primary, hopes to repeat a strategy that worked for him: campaigning against AIPAC and its political influence.
The pro-Israel lobbying group’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, spent more than $30 million trying to defeat El-Sayed in the primary. Now, with $60 million in cash on hand, according to the latest FEC filings, it is eager to keep a fierce Israel critic out of the Senate. There is just one problem: Rogers would rather AIPAC stay out of the race.
Allies of the Republican nominee have reportedly asked AIPAC not to run ads to boost him, fearing that the group’s involvement would backfire and give El-Sayed the same political foil that helped him overcome its massive spending in the primary. Axios reported that AIPAC officials didn’t take that rejection easily. However, after Rogers spoke with AIPAC chair Michael Tuchin, the group shelved an ad it had already produced attacking El-Sayed.
AIPAC spokesperson Deryn Sousa told Axios that its members “are highly motivated to be involved in this race and we will be looking at every option to make the case that El-Sayed’s policies are bad for Michigan and bad for America.”
Rogers did not outright reject support from pro-Israel donors. His campaign reportedly suggested ways AIPAC could help without putting its own name front and center. The disagreement is over whether having the group attached to the campaign would help him win or make his job harder.
Michigan’s narrow margins
Recent Michigan elections leave little room for error. Trump carried the swing state in 2024 by about 80,000 votes. In the Senate race that same year, Democrat Elissa Slotkin defeated Rogers by fewer than 20,000 votes. Four years earlier, Joe Biden carried Michigan by about 2.8 points.
A recent AARP poll found El-Sayed at 48% and Rogers at 47% among 877 likely voters, well within the poll’s 3.3-point margin of error. El-Sayed leads among independents by six points. To close the gap, Rogers would need more independents and some dissatisfied Democratic primary voters.
For Rogers, that creates an important distinction: He wants to run against El-Sayed’s positions on Israel and his associations with controversial Israel critics without allowing El-Sayed to turn the election into another fight over AIPAC.
AIPAC 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 wars in Gaza and Iran have only intensified that backlash, as Democratic voters have increasingly rejected U.S. policy supporting Israel.
Michigan has one of the largest Arab American populations in the nation, and it is the birthplace of the “uncommitted” movement to protest the Biden administration’s handling of the Gaza war in the 2024 presidential primary — making the politics of Israel and Gaza particularly complicated. A recent Fox News poll showed that 55% of Michigan voters opposed continuing U.S. aid to Israel.
In addition to the Michigan primary, AIPAC had some setbacks in other midterm races across the country. Last week, progressive candidate Aisha Wahab defeated AIPAC-backed Melissa Hernandez in the closely watched California special election to replace former Rep. Eric Swalwell, who resigned after allegations of sexual assault. Earlier this year, Analilia Mejia prevailed in a New Jersey special election for a House seat, after an AIPAC-associated super PAC spent more than $2 million targeting another Democratic candidate. Many congressional candidates, including some Jewish Democrats, have promised not to take contributions from AIPAC.
AIPAC has also become increasingly controversial on the right. Prominent America First voices, including Tucker Carlson and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, have attacked AIPAC’s influence over American foreign policy.
Winning over Jewish Democrats
Last week, Rogers launched a “Democrats for Rogers” effort to target voters who are uncomfortable with El-Sayed, in particular Jewish Democrats who remain uneasy with his rhetoric on Israel — including his calling Israel “bloodthirsty.” Jewish voters make up 1.4% of the electorate in Michigan.
Rabbi Asher Lopatin, a Modern Orthodox rabbi in suburban Detroit who backed Stevens in the primary and usually votes Democratic, endorsed Rogers at that event and urged others to do the same. Lopatin focused his criticism not only on El-Sayed’s positions on Israel but on his relationship with Hasan Piker, the popular left-wing pundit who has been accused of antisemitic rhetoric and who appeared with El-Sayed on the campaign trail.
El-Sayed “has shown contempt for the Jewish community and, frankly, for American values by making Hasan Piker, a vicious antisemite and racist, his campaign surrogate and someone he buddies up with,” Lopatin said.
The Democratic nominee understands that vulnerability. Since winning the primary, El-Sayed has sought to reassure Jewish voters that his opposition to Israel is not hostility toward Jews. “I love and revere Judaism and the Jewish people,” he said in a recent TV appearance. “They are not the same as AIPAC and Israel.” In that interview, El-Sayed also disavowed some remarks by Piker, though he did not commit to ending campaign appearances with him.
That helps explain why Rogers prefers AIPAC to remain out of the spotlight. The Republican nominee would rather spend the fall forcing El-Sayed to defend his positions on Israel, his relationship with Piker and distrust among Jewish voters than spend it answering attacks over millions of dollars in AIPAC money pouring into his campaign.
The post AIPAC wants to defeat Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan Senate race. Mike Rogers would rather it stay out. appeared first on The Forward.
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The note Netanyahu would never write
George H.W. Bush left the Oval Office on January 20, 1993, after losing his bid for reelection to Bill Clinton. On the desk, he left his successor a handwritten note wishing him well with obvious sincerity and ending with an expression of democratic grace: “Your success now is our country’s success.”
It is hard to imagine a sentence further removed from Benjamin Netanyahu’s conception of political power. When Naftali Bennett replaced him as prime minister in 2021, Bennett arrived at the traditional handover expecting a serious transfer of responsibility for a country facing Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and other threats.
In an interview this weekend with Israel’s Channel 12, Bennett said he cleared his day, and was shocked when Netanyahu gave him about 30 minutes, volunteered little, asked to keep living in the prime minister’s residence and for state funding for his wife’s car, and otherwise was eager to end the encounter.
The contrast goes far beyond manners. Netanyahu treats political defeat as something closer to dispossession, and those who threaten his hold on power as enemies whose legitimacy must be destroyed. Bennett said Netanyahu had warned him before the new government was sworn in that if he went ahead with it, he would deploy “all the heavy artillery” to brand him a traitor. Bennett says Netanyahu, whom he called an “anarchist,” kept his word, via a “poison machine” – a sophisticated social media influence operation featuring mass Whatsapp groups and bot accounts amplifying talking points – such as the theory, now popular on the right, that the Shin Bet helped Hamas attack Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in order to harm Netanyahu.
Five years later, the target has changed: It is former military chief Gadi Eisenkot. The method has not.
Eisenkot is now Netanyahu’s most dangerous electoral challenger, an extraordinary target for such a campaign. Eisenkot spent four decades in the IDF and rose to its chief of staff. After the Hamas attacks, he joined Netanyahu’s war cabinet for a few months, despite their political disagreements. His son Gal was killed fighting in Gaza in December 2023, and two nephews were killed during military operations in Gaza. Yet even Israel’s increasingly brutal politics seem unable to leave room for a measure of respect.
Instead, Eisenkot is portrayed as dangerous, weak and somehow beyond the bounds of acceptable government. His military record itself becomes evidence against him. His willingness to construct a governing majority that might depend on an Arab party – something that is essential for the societal health of Israel, whose population is 20 percent Arab – is presented as something inherently disqualifying. The objective is larger than defeating his arguments. It is to make his accession to power appear intolerable.
From smear campaign to security risk
I was reminded of this Sunday while appearing on television with Jonathan Pollard, the former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst who spied for Israel, spent some 30 years in an American prison, and now hopes to enter Israeli politics. Pollard, who over the weekend endorsed a splinter right-wing party and seemingly hopes to parlay that into a Knesset seat or other position, comes at Netanyahu from the ultra-nationalist far-right, but essentially supports him. He explained that he could never support a government headed by Eisenkot because Eisenkot had weakened the IDF as chief of staff.
There is an obvious problem with that argument. Eisenkot served as the IDF chief of staff from 2015 to 2019. Netanyahu was prime minister throughout his tenure. If Eisenkot presided over the degradation of the Israeli military, Netanyahu presided over Eisenkot. It is utter nonsense, but that is how the poison machine works. Responsibility flows away from Netanyahu while culpability attaches itself to whoever threatens him. Institutions that Netanyahu himself headed somehow become the failures of his opponents.
Now this has collided with a matter of security for candidates.
Eisenkot’s campaign says threats against him – from the rabble whipped up by Netanyahu – are increasing as the election approaches, and he has requested state protection. The Shin Bet in recent days declined to provide an armed security detail, although it will provide intelligence assistance.
That decision is astonishing in a country whose domestic security service once failed catastrophically in preventing the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin – after months in which he was called a traitor, a murderer and a Nazi by a campaign of agitation presided over by the young Netanyahu.
The lesson Israel drew was supposed to be permanent: when serious political incitement converges with a credible physical threat, the state errs on the side of protecting its leaders.
The contrast becomes almost grotesque when one considers whom the state does protect. Netanyahu’s son Yair who has lived in Miami for years, receives Shin Bet protection there. Yair, who is 35, avoided military service and has made himself a regular participant in the same poisonous political media ecosystem that serves his father, especially by attacking his opponents on X. The Netanyahu family successfully pressed to have responsibility for his security transferred to the Shin Bet, over the agency’s objections.
And the entitlement extends into the future. Netanyahu, like other former prime ministers, is set to receive lifelong Shin Bet protection. But a ministerial committee has approved extraordinary post-premiership protection for the Netanyahu family: Sara Netanyahu for as long as her husband is alive, and their sons for at least five years. The state can therefore find the resources and justification to protect a prime minister’s adult son living in Miami during a devastating war, and to plan years of protection for the family after Netanyahu leaves office, while the man currently leading many polls to replace Netanyahu is told to make do without an armed state security detail.
Bennett has issued an even more chilling warning. He says the relentless campaign against Eisenkot and other opposition figures could persuade someone that these politicians are monsters who must be stopped by violence. Bennett himself receives protection as a former prime minister.
The man making the decision at the Shin Bet is David Zini, perhaps the most politically controversial director in the agency’s history. He was a senior officer whose reputation as a far-right firebrand stopped his advancement in the military, and his appointment generated fears that Netanyahu was seeking a loyalist to lead an institution that must serve the state rather than the prime minister. That distinction goes to the heart of Israel’s present crisis.
The lesson Netanyahu still hasn’t learned
A democracy depends on people in power understanding that the state and the government are different things. The Shin Bet serves Israel. The IDF serves Israel. The civil service serves Israel. The prime minister serves Israel. Political opponents remain Israelis, and an opposition leader who may soon become prime minister deserves protection based on the threat against him rather than his usefulness to the incumbent.
Of course, Netanyahu’s entire “judicial reform” effort, which tore Israeli society apart in 2023 before the Hamas attack, was animated by the illiberal and fundamentally anti-democratic proposition that the elected government should be largely unchecked.
The Bush note seems almost quaint from Israel today, but its message is anything but sentimental. Bush understood that Clinton’s safety, legitimacy and success had become matters of national interest because America was more important than George Bush. The 30-minute handover to Bennett and the security controversy surrounding Eisenkot belong to the same story because both reveal what happens when a leader has difficulty separating the interests of the country from his own political survival.
There is an irony here that Israelis should appreciate. Netanyahu has always seemed, in some ways, Israel’s most American politician. He spent his formative years in the United States, lived in the Philadelphia area, studied at MIT and speaks beautiful American English. Yet in his behavior, Netanyahu has almost become anti-American; there is nothing in him that the Founding Fathers could admire.
There is, of course, a final irony. It would be misleading in 2026 to pretend that George H.W. Bush’s conception of political succession describes the current occupant of the White House. President Donald Trump and Netanyahu have far more in common with each other on this score than either has with Bush.
Israel, like the United States, desperately needs a return to the standards and ethics of the past, when the leader’s success actually was the country’s success.
The post The note Netanyahu would never write appeared first on The Forward.
