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A Jewish-Muslim art show builds ‘little bridges’ of coexistence
Hannah Finkelshteyn and Aakef Khan spent a lot of time in the same building even before they met. Khan’s filmmaking classes at Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts often met on the same floor where Finkelshteyn, a drawing major, had her studio.
But their paths wouldn’t cross in earnest until after Oct. 7 — when they would become unlikely friends and later co-curators of an exhibition bringing together Jewish and Muslim artists. The result is “Open Archways: by the light of the same moon,” opening Thursday at the Bowery Art Collective in Metuchen, New Jersey.
Finkelshteyn, 23, was born in Brooklyn and raised in East Brunswick, New Jersey, in the Modern Orthodox community, attending Jewish schools up until college.
“Oct. 7 and the reaction to Oct. 7 completely shifted my entire experience of college and my ability to learn and my ability to be a part of the Rutgers community,” she told me at a coffee shop in Manhattan. She and Khan took the train into the city together when we met before Thanksgiving.
The first several days after the attacks went by in a haze, Finkelshteyn recalled. She scrolled through articles, and texted and called her many family members and friends in Israel, where she spent a gap year, to ask, “Are you okay?” and “Are you alive?”
“Grief was palpable” among the Jewish community on campus, she said. But as the days went by, she became increasingly aware of responses and social media posts from other classmates that left her feeling confused and isolated. She even dropped a small group course in part because of what she saw her peers saying online.
“I can’t be sitting here being terrified for my family while this person who’s sitting across from me thinks Oct. 7 was a good thing,” Finkelshteyn said.
The only one in that room who she felt she could have an actual conversation with was a Palestinian classmate. “I asked her if her family was okay, and she asked if my family was okay,” she said. “And we both talked about just not being able to focus on anything.”
Finkelshteyn, who graduated last spring, wanted to talk and to listen, to understand and be understood. But there didn’t seem to be a space for that on campus — until a friend of her then-boyfriend (now husband) suggested they start an “Open Dialogue Table” like one he’d seen elsewhere.
The three of them, along with other like-minded students, began setting up a table on campus in shifts with a sign inviting passersby to come talk about Israel and more. “Once a week, every week, we sat at this table, and we had conversations. And honestly, it made things feel a lot less foggy,” she said.
One day, Khan came over and sat down.
Becoming friends and co-curators
Raised in a religious Muslim family of Pakistani descent, Khan, 22, went to public school during the week and to Saturday school at the mosque in South Brunswick, New Jersey, where he grew up. He first heard news not about the Hamas attacks on the Gaza envelope, he said, but about Israel cutting off water and electricity to Gaza. He and Finkelshteyn were on the same campus, but ensconced in their own communities and vastly different news ecosystems. Khan’s conversations and group chats afterward were full of talk about boycotts and encampments.
“It felt like a big gray cloud was over Rutgers for months,” Khan, who is currently a senior, told me. But as someone who had always felt the urge to ask, “Why?” and challenge his own beliefs, he said he found it unsettling to be surrounded by only one slice of opinions. So he began actively searching for others. “I was looking for a place to feel like I can belong and speak without feeling like I had to censor myself,” he said.
“I need to stand somewhere where I can see both perspectives,” he said he realized, which led him through the doors of Hillel and steered him toward the Open Dialogue Table.
When Khan first sat down, he started chatting with Finkelshteyn’s boyfriend, who quickly made the connection that both Khan and Finkelshteyn were art students. And then the two artists were off, chatting about filmmakers and LiDAR camera technology.
“It started with me trying to be like, ‘All right, like, what is up with Israel?’” Khan said. “But it ended up being, ‘Wow, I just made two new friends.’ And I think once I started to look at it that way, things became a lot less scary.”
He began carving time out to go to Shabbat dinners. It was uncomfortable at first to walk into such an explicitly Jewish space, Khan recalled, but it helped to hear Finkelshteyn or her boyfriend shout his name from across the room and enthusiastically motion him over to sit with them and meet their friends.
Khan and Finkelshteyn kept talking — about art, religion, language, community and current events. “Once we can talk about other things that we’re passionate about, now we can sort of hear each other out on Israel-Palestine and all those things, and be willing to see each other’s perspectives as valid, even if ultimately we don’t align,” Khan said.
They became artistic collaborators and genuine friends. “I never expected that I would invite someone I met at the Open Dialogue Table to my wedding,” said Finkelshteyn, who got married this past summer. But she did, and Khan came out to celebrate the special day — his first Jewish wedding — with his new friends.
In the months since, Khan and Finkelshteyn have been hard at work pulling together a larger group of Jewish and Muslim artists around them from Rutgers and beyond to meet, talk, create and show their work together.
“Open Archways” is their small way of trying to lift the heavy fog of tension and misunderstanding that marked their college experiences post-Oct. 7. “I believe that starts with grassroots work like this of creating spaces where Muslim and Jewish people can intermingle and create friendships,” Khan said. “They may not agree on everything, but at least they can see the other side as human.”
Living ‘by the light of the same moon’
Khalid Khashoggi has always had Jewish friends, he said. He was born in Beirut in 1965, but hasn’t returned to Lebanon since he was 10, when the civil war broke out and his family left for Europe.
At the English and Swiss boarding schools he attended, he found it easier to bond with Jewish students than the other boys. Reflecting back decades later, he said he thinks it’s because “there is more in common between Jewish and Muslim/Arab cultures than with any Anglo-Saxon culture.” He’s remained close ever since with two of those friends, who he said treated him like a brother.
“I just want other members of my culture to experience that warmth,” Khashoggi, who moved to the U.S. for college and settled here afterward, told me on a video call. He’s been running an SAT prep school for 25 years and, more recently, working with young artists and curators as founder and director of the Bowery Art Collective. The latter began right before the pandemic, when Khashoggi noticed all the art portfolios the test prep students were carrying around and suggested they use the school’s space to have an exhibition.
When the war threatened to make connections like his boarding school friendships all the more improbable, and as he witnessed “scary” incidents of antisemitism that were more “mean and violent” than he’d ever seen before, he came up with the idea of a joint exhibition.
“I could tell that both sides were getting pushed apart,” he said, recoiling at the idea of being placed in a stance of immutable opposition against people he considered friends. As he put it: “Don’t tell us who we need to hate.”
“Let’s use the magic of art to reconnect these communities, even if it’s just 10 people,” he said. “There’s no way we can solve the world’s problems,” he added. “But at least if we can make some friends while we’re doing this — across two communities that have been told not to be friends — then that would be great.”
“There’s nothing like friendship to dispel stereotypes,” Khashoggi said.
He and Arianna Astuni, his co-CEO at the test-prep company and BAC’s executive director, quickly found Finkelshteyn, at the recommendation of another student who’d worked with BAC. She was in, without hesitation. But their first call for a Muslim co-curator was met with a lot of opinions and no applications.
“We got some backlash at first,” Astuni told me on a joint video call with Khashoggi. “People get so caught up in the largeness of political issues, and then they’re yelling large things that they really don’t know and they really couldn’t possibly feel.”
For Astuni, who said she was used to watching connections being cultivated in their small gallery and community, the response was surprising. And for her longtime test prep and art collective colleague, it was dispiriting.
“I remember having conversations with friends and saying, I don’t know. I think I’m insane,” Khashoggi said. “Everyone’s telling me that what I’m trying to do is not doable. Or they would be like, yeah, it’s a beautiful idea, but it’s just not the time to do that. It’s not the time to normalize relationships.”
Instead of giving up or waiting for some elusive right time in the distant future, they reworked the ad for a Muslim curator and tried again. This time, applications came in for them to consider. Among them was one from Khan, whom Finkelshteyn had encouraged to submit.
Ultimately, Khashoggi felt, “Aakef was the best applicant. It also helped that he had worked with Hannah before, and knew her, and they had a good dynamic,” he said. “That was really important.”
Together, Finkelshteyn and Khan came up with the exhibition’s subtitle: “by the light of the same moon.” In an environment that tends to emphasize only the differences and tensions between the Muslim and Jewish communities, they wanted to speak honestly about the difficulties while also illuminating points of intersection and understanding.
One of those intersections is the lunar calendar, which both religions follow. “The moon governs when we fast,” Khan said, and determines when Jews and Muslims celebrate holidays and perform certain rituals. More than that, Finkelshteyn added, “it’s something that Muslims and Jews have in common that general American culture does not.”
“The waxing and waning of the moon has welcomed Ramadans and Yom Kippurs, Mawlids and Passover Seders. Its cycle has determined which day we gather in the synagogue for Rosh Hashanah, and which nights we fill the mosque for Taraweeh,” reads the exhibition description they developed. The artists, it says, are exploring “the intersections between Muslim and Jewish culture that begin with the use of the moon as our clock.”
Showing up
“Open Archways” isn’t like most exhibitions, in part because it brings together supposed arch-enemies. That presented a challenge, even among artists interested in interfaith collaborations. “People get worried like, ‘Oh, is there a specific political agenda? If I sign up for this, am I signing my name next to a certain thing that I don’t want to sign my name next to?’” Finkelshteyn said.
But the project veers from a more typical format in other ways, too. Group shows often come together behind the scenes, with curators putting out a call, artists submitting pre-existing work and the selected pieces being presented side-by-side without their creators ever speaking, save for maybe a quick hello at the opening reception. Here, the goal was to facilitate artist meetups as a fundamental part of the process and for these interactions to build little bridges across communities and help inspire the work on display. In practical terms, this meant artists had to be willing to engage and able to make the time commitment.
The curators ultimately assembled a group of 15 Muslim and Jewish artists with diverse religious and geographic backgrounds. The Muslim artists have roots in Pakistan, Lebanon, Turkey, Syria, Burma and Bangladesh, and their Jewish counterparts in Poland, Austria, Romania, Russia, Azerbaijan, Yemen, Israel and more.
They met as a group twice this fall, first in October at the BAC space in Metuchen with a structured agenda — Khan and Finkelshteyn had everyone sit in a circle, introduce themselves, and share something about their culture that they love, before letting everyone mingle and explore the gallery. The second meetup, at a non-alcoholic “anti-bar” and cafe in the East Village in November, was a little more casual, and allowed the conversations about identity, religion, diaspora, gender and art to expand.
“A lot of it was really oriented around, like, what has your experience been? What is your identity to you? What does it mean?” Miki Belenkov, a participating artist, told me on a video call. One of the themes that emerged in the discussion, they recalled, was around “how do we balance our deep emotional and historical connections to these identities, while also navigating being modern people.”
Belenkov, 28, a queer Jewish artist and art therapist in New York City whose parents were refugees from the Soviet Union — their father is from Muslim-majority Azerbaijan — was raised on ideas of “coexistence and mutual respect and appreciation and sharing of traditions,” they said. “It was exciting to see that here there are people trying to build conversation and space for Muslim and Jewish artists.”
After Oct. 7, which happened while Belenkov was in grad school, “I had to make entirely new friends,” they said. “Pretty much just everyone that I had built a community with did not see me as a community member anymore, because of my identity.” They’ve since focused on attending events that “create joy” and forming “community connections with equally peace-loving people.”
Their large-scale textile work in the exhibition, a tablecloth, references both the struggles of the last couple years — including mezuzahs stolen off doorposts and formerly close friends who’ve blocked them on Instagram — but also focuses on “being able to come together in the midst of all of this and still find joy and light.”
Another Jewish artist, Micah Steinerman, 22, is a senior at Rutgers studying drawing and animation whose family’s roots are in Eastern Europe and Yemen. He created a small triptych depicting the holy sites of Jerusalem, foregrounded by a blossoming fruit tree in the center. This is flanked by smaller canvases on either side: One says shalom, as in peace, and the other adapts a quote from his namesake book in the Bible: “Every person will sit under their own fruit tree, and no one will make them afraid.”
But perhaps the highlight of his experience was a collaboration with Khashoggi that melded Arabic and Hebrew calligraphy. “I had become more closed off about my Jewish identity,” he told me on Zoom. Over the course of several sessions with Khashoggi, who taught him some Arabic and oil painting basics, he realized they both related to “having to feel hidden.”
“The painting experience with Micah reconnected me to my own religion, my own culture, my own language. It was something I’d shoved in a box” after leaving Lebanon as a kid, Khashoggi said. “Micah said, ‘Hey, no, let me look in that box, it’s cool.’” That genuine display of interest by someone from another culture, he said, was “healing.”
Building little bridges
On a recent tour to pick up everyone’s finished artwork for installation, Khashoggi was heartened to see a small sign of the project’s success. One of the Muslim artists came along to assist with pickup, and Khashoggi watched as she greeted one of her Jewish colleagues. You can see “the strength of the connection from the way they hug each other,” Khashoggi said.
“I don’t imagine all of a sudden that all Arabs and Muslims and Jews around the world will start hugging each other the way our artists are,” he said. Still, he said, “we have 15 little bridges that we built.”
Khashoggi’s hope, he said, is that “one or two of the people coming to visit will have the wherewithal, the influence, to allow us to open up another show;” he dreams of another “Open Archways” in New York or Paris or Tel Aviv that would expand the circle of Muslim and Jewish artists who are meeting, talking and collaborating.
The BAC gallery where the exhibition is currently installed is dotted with couches and chairs. On opening night, there will be tea and other refreshments and, the curators hope, an opportunity for people to start conversations — maybe a little bit like the one Finkelshteyn and Khan had at the Open Dialogue Table. The art might help.
“You’re looking at the same thing, and you can talk about that thing,” Finkelshteyn said. “I hope there are a few people who come to this exhibit, who come to this reception, or even who just hear about this reception, and think, ‘Oh, people can talk to each other.’”
That doesn’t mean they’ll always be on the same page. She and Khan aren’t, and they said that was scary at first, as they navigated their fledgling friendship. The first time they didn’t agree, Khan recalled, “it felt like the whole place was burning down.” But they soon realized they can still talk and be friends, while also disagreeing.
They, along with Khashoggi, Astuni, and the participating artists, appear clear-eyed about the scale of change this one show is likely to make. But that micro-movement in the right direction seems to be exhilarating to them all the same.
Ali Saracoglu, 30, a New York City–based Muslim artist who moved to the U.S. from Turkey, put it most poetically. “When we check the news, it doesn’t look good,” said Saracoglu, who works in Ebru art, a traditional Turkish form of paper marbling. “In those moments, I remind myself, for a room to be dark, darkness needs to surround everywhere. But if light finds a tiny crack to come in, that’s usually good enough to illuminate the whole room.”
“This exhibit,” he said, “is a step toward finding that crack, or opening that crack ourselves, for the light to come in.”
The post A Jewish-Muslim art show builds ‘little bridges’ of coexistence appeared first on The Forward.
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UK threatens sanctions after Israel opens bids for E1 settler homes
(JTA) — JERUSALEM – The United Kingdom threatened to sanction Israelis involved in West Bank settlement expansion after the Jewish state’s Lands Authority opened bids for 1,234 homes in the largely underdeveloped E1 section of the West Bank settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim.
Construction in E1 “would cut across the heart of Palestine and risks separating the West Bank from East Jerusalem, which would endanger the viability of a two-state solution,” the British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband said in a special statement he posted on X on Thursday.
Targeted sanctions, Miliband wrote, would be part of a series of measures his government would take. His office also summoned Israel’s charge d’Affaires Thursday to demand a closure of the bidding process, which first opened on Tuesday, and a withdrawal of the construction project altogether.
“Britain will not stand back and accept the destruction of the two-state solution,” he wrote. Miliband has held his position for a month and is part of the new leadership Labour Prime Minister Andy Burnham appointed when he took office in July.
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar attacked Miliband on X, stating that Britain’s “decision to damage the relationship between our countries is deeply unfortunate.”
He said that the U.K. government’s “systematic policy of blaming only Israel while ignoring Palestinian extremism has already contributed to a massive wave of antisemitic hatred and attacks against the British Jewish community.”
The Jewish people have the same right to “live throughout the Land of Israel” just as the British people have a right to live anywhere in the U.K., Sa’ar wrote.
Plans to expand the built-up area of Ma’aleh Adumim settlement by constructing some 3,400 housing units on a largely underdeveloped hilltop within the city’s boundaries have been in place since 1994 when Yitzhak Rabin was prime minister.
Israel mostly froze those plans under pressure from the international community, including the U.S., with many countries warning that building homes in E1 would harm their diplomatic ties with Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began to advance the project in earnest in 2012 to protest the United Nations General Assembly decision to grant the Palestinians the status of a non-member state and has since pushed the project forward in spurts, particularly during election seasons.
The publication of the bidding process for the homes was first announced on Tuesday and is set to close on Oct. 19, one week shy of the Israeli elections on Oct. 27. Opening the bids is a move that plays well with Netanyahu’s right-wing voter base, which opposes Palestinian statehood and believes that settlements like Ma’aleh Adumim and the E1 area should be annexed into sovereign Israel.
But the move reverberated globally, with the U.K. signing onto a joint condemnation by France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, in which they warned that settlement building in E1 distanced peace and undermined the country’s international standing.
They also reminded businesses who might bid for E1 construction that they could face legal or reputational consequences, given that such companies could be in breach of international law.
Palestinian Authority Vice President Hussein Al-Sheikh said he welcomed the condemnation, explaining on X that such a position “reflects the importance of the international role in confronting settlement activity and safeguarding the two-state solution.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Argentina removes federal judge over antisemitic remarks in historic first
(JTA) — An Argentine federal judge was removed from office Tuesday for a series of antisemitic posts on his social media accounts that constituted misconduct incompatible with his role, an impeachment panel ruled.
Alfredo Eugenio López, who headed Federal Court No. 4 in the coastal city of Mar del Plata, was removed by Argentina’s Jury of Impeachment, a special panel composed of judges, lawmakers and lawyers.
It is the first time in Argentina’s history that a judge has been removed over antisemitic remarks.
In López’s social media posts, the judge referred to the Jewish people as “a brood of vipers,” Israel as a “fictitious state” and Argentinian Jews as “foreigners.” He has also used such terms as “Zionist” and “gay” as insults.
According to the panel, the judge committed acts of “discrimination and the denial of equal rights against the Argentine Jewish community. For the purposes of these proceedings, it is particularly significant that, by acting in this manner, he shattered public confidence in his continued fitness to administer justice impartially.”The case reached the panel through Argentina’s Council of the Magistracy, based in Buenos Aires, the constitutional body responsible for the selection and discipline of federal judges.
The first complaint against López was filed in February 2025 by the Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas, which is the umbrella organization representing Argentina’s Jewish community. One month later, the Argentine Forum Against Antisemitism also filed a complaint. In July 2025, attorney Yamil Santoro from Apolo Foundation added another one.
In his defense, López argued that his messages were “ subjective and decontextualized interpretations of exchanges on social media, which in no way affect the administration of justice or his impartiality” as a judge. He added that his remarks were unrelated to any pending case and that he had never been recused or removed from any judicial case.
Neither Lopez nor his attorney were immediately available for further comment.
“He was removed because he simply would not stop engaging in hate speech,” jury member Alberto Maques said during a live interview Tuesday on the A24 news channel. “It is absolutely disgraceful for a federal judge to engage in this kind of conduct.”
Maques said there were 15 social media posts that he acknowledged, but more than 50 posts in which he said “outrageous things that are not worth repeating because they truly constituted hate speech.”
“This is not merely an issue of hate speech against the Jewish community. This is someone who lacks common sense,” he added, interviewed by A24 news channel.
Prosecutors in the impeachment proceedings argued that the messages were not isolated political comments but reflected a pattern of hostility toward Jews, Zionism, and the State of Israel.
“No position of authority can shield hatred. This is not a matter of punishing an opinion. It is about sanctioning repeated conduct involving antisemitism, hostility and dehumanization, conduct incompatible with the impartiality, dignity and public trust required of the judiciary,” DAIA said Tuesday in a statement.
“This case sets a precedent: for the first time in more than a century, DAIA initiated proceedings of this nature against a judge. No office is above democracy.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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California progressive Wahab defeats AIPAC-backed Hernandez in close race
(JTA) — California progressive Aisha Wahab defeated AIPAC-backed moderate Melissa Hernandez in a congressional runoff this week, capping off a contest that had become unexpectedly tight after the pro-Israel lobby entered the fray.
The Associated Press called the race between the Democrats — who were vying to replace a disgraced former Rep. Eric Swalwell — a full two days after polls closed, when Wahab secured 53.1% of votes to Hernandez’s 46.9%, with 95% of ballots tallied. The gap between them grew by four percentage points from Tuesday evening, when Wahab had held a narrow 51% lead to Hernandez’s 49%.
“We stayed focused on the people, and I will fight for this district that raised me,” Wahab said in a Thursday statement, noting her journey “from foster care to Congress” in her East Bay community.
Although Wahab ended up victorious, the narrow initial margin on Tuesday shocked California’s 14th District, given that she had secured a double-digit lead in preliminary races two months ago.
But in the past few weeks, an unforeseen variable appeared to influence the trajectories of the two campaigns: a massive spending push from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee aimed at turning the tides for Hernandez.
Since the beginning of August alone, AIPAC’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project, and other affiliated groups spent more than $2.5 million on both boosting Hernandez and denigrating Wahab with negative ads and mailers, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
“This was not a landslide for Wahab by any means,” local Democratic strategist Noah Finneburgh, who is not affiliated with either candidate, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“They narrowed the gap for sure,” Finneburgh added, referring to AIPAC. “They spent millions of dollars attacking Wahab very aggressively.”
These attacks, he explained, did not involve Israel and instead focused on divisive issues for the Bay Area, such as public safety and protecting kids.
“Negative advertising with a persuasive message can be very effective,” Finneburgh said.
In her Thursday night statement, Wahab declared that her “district cannot be bought,” describing the race as “one of the ugliest, most expensive elections we’ve ever seen.”
Prior to this influx of cash and related ads, neither AIPAC nor Israel had played a significant role in this short-lived race — which began in April following Swalwell’s resignation over allegations of sexual assault.
When the district held a special primary to seek Swalwell’s replacement on June 16, Wahab and Hernandez finished as the top-two candidates and moved on to this week’s special general runoff election.
California primaries are “nonpartisan” or “top-two” races, in which the two highest ranking candidates move on to the general election, irrespective of their parties. The top-two in this case were both Democrats, like Swalwell, in a district that the Cook Political Report deems solidly blue.
Even though Wahab will now finish the remainder of Swalwell’s term, she will have to compete with Hernandez again in the November general election for a full term that begins on January 3, 2027.
In a June 16 special primary that preceded this week’s runoff, there was still a massive gap between the two candidates, with Wahab accruing 42.8% of the votes, compared to Hernandez’s 16.8%. A separate primary for the November race, which occurred two weeks earlier, placed Wahab at 38.3% and Hernandez at 17.2%.
Wahab, who will be the first Afghan American in Congress, has focused on affordability, civil rights, education and climate change. Her campaign calls for an end to wars and “prolonged occupations” but only specifically calls out U.S. military activity in “Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and elsewhere.”
Though Wahab has been critical of Israel and its operations in Gaza, she has not been as vocal about the issue as many other progressive colleagues nationwide. She responded “yes” when asked if Israel was committing genocide in a primary debate, but she didn’t include Israel or Gaza in her campaign priorities.
During a recent appearance on far-right influencer Hasan Piker’s livestream, Wahab acknowledged that “it’s not a zero-sum game in the Middle East,” adding that “we can care for all people.” She also referenced a resolution she introduced last year in the California legislature, pushing for a ceasefire in Gaza but also condemning Hamas and demanding the release of the hostages.
“We talk about both Palestinians and the Israeli victims there,” Wahab told Piker. “We talk about holding the perpetrators accountable from both sides.”
Asked if she was in favor of “ending all U.S. aid to Israel,” she responded “yes,” while stressing that “humanitarian aid is important to me, too.”
Wahab has earned the backing of multiple labor unions, the California Democratic Party and Our Revolution, the group formed by Sen. Bernie Sanders to advance the progressive movement. The liberal pro-Israel group J Street also recently invested $108,000 in her campaign, according to the FEC. American Priorities, a pro-Palestinian PAC, also spent at least $200,000 on supporting her.
Hernandez has received endorsements from several police and fire unions, as well as Democratic Jewish Reps. Lois Frankel of Florida and Brad Schneider of Illinois.
Come November, Hernandez will gain one additional asset. Due to statewide redistricting, the 14th District will gain about 26,000 new voters from Dublin, where Hernandez previously served as mayor, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
But Finneburgh said he believes that Hernandez has only a minimal chance of winning that race, especially because Wahab will be heading into that election as an incumbent.
He also suggested that if “she plays her card right,” Wahab could even take some endorsements away from Hernandez.
“There’s going to be people who are going to probably move over from the Hernandez camp and back her,” Finneburgh added. “It’s going to be hard to unseat her.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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