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Rabbi arrested, banned from Cleveland universities over his anti-Palestinian activism
(JTA) – For days, students and police at Cleveland State University had been trying to figure out who stole a banner belonging to a campus Palestinian rights group.
The banner, which belonged to the student group Palestinian Human Rights Organization, read “CSU Solidarity for Palestinian Rights” and was illustrated with an outline of Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip collectively emblazoned in the Palestinian flag. A dove holding an olive branch appeared on top of the image.
Then, on Jan. 19, police charged their top suspect: a local Orthodox rabbi, whose presence on campus had become all too familiar. A few days later the man confessed to the theft on Instagram, announcing that he had stolen the banner from the school’s student center “as an act of civil disobedience.”
“This incitement to annihilation of Israel should have never been permitted at CSU,” Rabbi Alexander Popivker, a 46-year-old Cleveland Heights resident whose neighborhood is six miles from the school, wrote on social media accompanied by a picture of the flag he stole.
It was far from Popivker’s only recent run-in with local university students.
A former Chabad-Lubavitch emissary in Naples, Italy, who now works in the Cleveland area as a handyman and part-time rabbi for a Russian-speaking Jewish community, Popivker has become known around town as a vigilant and omnipresent pro-Israel advocate. He can often be spotted counter-protesting at local pro-Palestinian demonstrations, or putting on displays of his own, with his wife Sarah on hand filming every contentious encounter.
One major theme of his protests, and his worldview, as he explained to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “Palestinians and Nazis are the same thing.”
For the last year, Popivker had been making weekly trips to Cleveland State, occasionally accompanied by other students or community members, to give public demonstrations that elaborate on that idea — sometimes with the aid of swastika-emblazoned props. In the early going, the university provided him with police protection and said his visits to campus were protected by free speech laws.
But he also sought out students online and in-person whom he deemed to be “brainwashed” by anti-Zionist messaging. One such online campaign against a law student prompted the student to file an order of protection against Popivker last fall, an order supported by a prominent Jewish dean at the university. Popivker promptly violated the order by returning to campus.
Cleveland State University main campus, Cleveland, Ohio. (Getty Images)
In late January, university authorities had enough. They arrested Popivker and, following a hearing, declared him persona non grata on campus, banning him from the university grounds for at least two years. Popivker has also been banned from nearby Case Western Reserve University, where he had advocated before focusing on Cleveland State.
In the midst of a nationwide university climate in which pro-Israel advocates claim Jewish students face regular antisemitic harassment for their real or perceived Zionist beliefs, here was a documented case of the opposite: a Jew and outspoken Zionist, who has no affiliation with the schools at which he advocates, accused of harassing anyone he perceived as a threat to Israel, including students who had never sought him out directly.
The Ohio chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations has spoken out numerous times against Popivker and praised university police for arresting him; a petition the group backed, labeled “Stop harassment on campus” and mentioning Popivker by name, has garnered close to 700 signatures.
Jewish groups, including civil rights groups, have been less forthcoming about situation. Hillel International declined to comment for this story, and the directors of Cleveland’s regional American Jewish Committee and Jewish Community Relations Council offices did not return requests for comment. Jewish on Campus, a nationwide university antisemitism watchdog group that tracks what it defines as anti-Zionist social media harassment of Jewish students, also did not return a request for comment.
Jared Isaacson, the executive director of Cleveland Hillel, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the center was “not very familiar with this story.” Cleveland Hillel coordinates Jewish student life at a consortium of Jewish universities including Cleveland State and Case Western, where its student center is located, as well as at least one other school where Popivker has made his presence on campus known in some form.
But, Isaacson said, “Cleveland Hillel is deeply committed to countering antisemitism and hate in all forms, and we believe that no student — Jewish or otherwise — should ever feel threatened or intimidated because of their identity.”
Popivker says he has support from the New York-based Lawfare Project, which bills itself as an “international pro-Israel litigation fund.” He told JTA that the organization “is watching over my cases and providing guidance.”
In a statement, the Lawfare Project called Popivker “a Jewish civil rights activist” but did not confirm that it is backing him, saying only that the group is “currently reviewing the matter.”
The group, which frequently files lawsuits on behalf of students who allege antisemitism on their campuses, said in a statement to JTA that the order of protection was a “double standard” that “should be alarming to anyone who cares about the fight against Jew-hatred.”
Lawfar recently settled a multi-year lawsuit with San Francisco State University over student reports of antisemitic harassment on campus stemming from anti-Zionist activists disrupting an event featuring the mayor of Jerusalem. The settlement compelled the university to hire a coordinator of Jewish student life.
Popivker will have his work cut out for him if he fights the charges. He had exhibited “behavior detrimental to the university community” by stealing the Palestinian banner and separately affixing an Israeli flag to university property, Matthew Kibbon, Cleveland State’s associate vice president of facility services, wrote in the university’s decision declaring him persona non grata.
The rabbi “was not banned for the content of his speech, but how he chose to exercise it,” a Cleveland State spokesperson told JTA in a statement. The university also provided JTA a list of recent campus police interactions with him, including the initial Jan. 11 report of the banner’s theft; Popivker’s visit to campus on Jan. 18, during which police advised him that the student’s order of protection did not permit him to be there; and his return visit on Jan. 25, during which he was arrested.
From Popivker’s perspective, he is simply speaking out on Israel’s behalf for a campus that has a large pro-Palestinian activist presence but few Jewish students. (There are fewer than 200 Jewish undergraduates on Cleveland State’s campus out of 11,784 students, according to Hillel International.) His goal is to educate, he says, informed by his status as a Jewish refugee from the Soviet Union. And he believes he is being targeted by local pro-Palestinian activists, who, he said, have gone after his kippah and Israeli flags.
“I never attacked anyone. I never raised my hand up to anyone,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, saying that he was motivated by civil rights icons Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis. “I’m going to a public university. I’m staying in the free speech zone. And I raise awareness about what’s going on. There’s a bunch of students that have become my friends that come to study with me regularly.”
One of those students, senior Tyler Jarosz, told JTA he became friends with Popivker after seeing him visiting campus to advocate for Israel. Not knowing much about Jews or Israel himself — “I thought Israel was a very peaceful state,” Jarosz said — the student was taken with Popivker’s demonstrations and said he learned a great deal from them.
“He didn’t just lecture me like a teacher would,” Jarosz said. “He was actually very engaging. He asked questions.”
Jarosz said he never witnessed the rabbi harassing anyone on campus, and said he always tried to engage people in peaceful dialogue, despite what he described as harassment directed at him by some Muslim students. He recalled one Popivker visit to campus for Israel’s independence day, when the rabbi was offering falafel to students, and said he witnessed one student throw the falafel back at him and threaten to “rape” him.
Other students tell a different story. One campus paper, the Cauldron, reported that the rabbi has targeted visibly Muslim and Arab students on campus, demanding to know their views on Israel. Popivker “makes me wary of coming into campus,” a student member of the Palestinian Human Rights Organization group told the Cauldron. “I’m forced to be on constant edge and take the longer way to class in order to avoid him.” Another student told a different campus newspaper, “It’s almost as though he deliberately looks for Palestinian individuals just to target them.”
The chair of the law school’s National Lawyers Guild student chapter told the Cleveland Jewish News that their group’s efforts to engage Popivker in reasonable dialogue failed when he began using “racial slurs and insulting language.”
A swastika Alexander Popivker drew on a Palestinian scarf (alleged by some students to be a keffiyeh, or ritual Muslim prayer scarf) while mounting a pro-Israel demonstration on the campus of Cleveland State University. Popivker then shared the image to his Instagram, Feb. 3, 2023. (Screenshot)
In images from one Popivker demonstration, the rabbi can be seen drawing a swastika with a Sharpie marker on what the Cauldron reported was a keffiyeh, a scarf worn by Arabic men, but which Popivker told JTA was a Palestinian scarf with no spiritual significance. He has also yelled phrases including “Palestinians are Nazis” and “Palestinians are the KKK,” and constructed a stage with images further linking Palestinians to Naziism, according to reports. Popivker’s own Instagram videos show him approaching groups of students to argue about Israel as he films them, calling some of them “terrorists” when they go after his flags. One of his video captions mentions “a Middle Eastern looking student.”
Cleveland State increased its safety protocols as a result of Popivker’s activities, locking some additional entrances around campus. But much of his activities have been online, too.
Last fall Popivker trained his attention on a law student who was involved with campus Palestinian rights groups and had made some anti-Israel posts online, including sharing an image of a child whom pro-Palestinian groups claimed had been a victim of an Israeli bombing, and sharing a socialist group’s post quoting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
Documents show that Popivker emailed and called the student’s employer and law school seeking to have her disciplined for her beliefs, writing among other things that she was a “mouthpiece of terrorism and racism against Jews.” He also made Instagram posts targeting her. In response, the student filed for and received the order of protection against him, which Popivker later claimed was unwarranted because he had never met the student in person.
In its statement to JTA, the Lawfare Project homed in on this sequence of events, saying that Popivker’s decision to email the student’s school and employer about what he believed to be antisemitic social media posts was “a tool routinely used by civil rights activists to fight discrimination.”
Popivker asked Jarosz to send a letter attesting to his character for the order of protection hearing, which he did. “Alex understands and respects everyone of every background that he comes across,” the student wrote in his letter. “I have personally witnessed the demonization they have done of him.” Speaking to JTA weeks later, Jarosz said the court case was “bogus,” but said he was unaware of the emails, social media records and phone transcripts reviewed by JTA showing that Popivker had contacted the student’s employer and school.
At the order of protection hearing, a transcript of which Popivker sent to JTA, a key witness who advocated for the restriction was law school dean Lee Fisher, a former attorney general and lieutenant governor of Ohio. Fisher is Jewish.
“We share a hatred of antisemitism,” Fisher told Popivker during the hearing, according to the transcript. The dean also identified himself as “pro-Israel, very much so.” But Fisher made clear he was critical of Popivker’s activities on campus. Asked by Popivker about a specific social media post the student had made, Fisher responded, “Even if she made a mistake by posting it, it did not warrant the kind of reaction I believe that you had.”
Fisher had also met with Popivker previously, in a session mediated by a local rabbi who was a friend of Popivker. “I told him that I was concerned for the health and safety of our students,” the dean said during the hearing. He had implored Popivker to stop his campus activities, but the rabbi refused.
It’s the initial order of protection, which Popivker said had already effectively banned him from campus, that the rabbi says he truly opposes. He saw it as evidence that “they were basically working together with Palestinians” to “cover up the fact that they have an antisemitic group that openly propagates a destruction of Israel.” Popivker visited campus several times after receiving the order of protection but was permitted to stay with only a warning from campus police, Jarosz recalled.
This state of affairs lasted until the rabbi stole the Palestinian student group banner to, he said, “shine a light on this antisemitism.” Popivker described to JTA how he entered the student building, walked up to the third floor where he knew the banner was, and used scissors to remove it and take it with him: “Clip, clip, clip.” He was subsequently thrown in jail — his second such stint in Cleveland for pro-Israel activities, he said, criticizing local law enforcement for not providing him with kosher food while he was behind bars.
Outside of campus, Popivker is active in other areas. Last year, he organized a GoFundMe to support the family of a former classmate of his who was killed by an Islamic State supporter in a terrorist attack in Beersheba, Israel. He also applied to fill a January vacancy on the Cleveland Heights city council, but later withdrew his application.
After being barred from Cleveland State University, Rabbi Alex Popivker took to holding his anti-Palestinian protests on a street outside a local casino. (Courtesy Popivker)
While Popivker may preach nonviolence, his social media activity points to more radical ideologies, as well. On Instagram, he has shared an image of the flag of the Jewish Defense League, an extremist Jewish group that advocates violence against enemies of Jews, founded by convicted terrorist Rabbi Meir Kahane, as well as an image with a logo of Im Tirtzu, a right-wing Israeli group that has in the past been accused of inciting violence against Israeli human rights groups. Popivker told JTA he is not a member of either group, but that “if I think it’s aligned with what I believe in, I’ll share it.”
Popivker says that, for now, he’s done with his brand of “civil disobedience” and won’t be making his weekly visits to Cleveland State’s campus. “I do have five wonderful boys and a loving wife, and as much as Cuyahoga [County’s] jail is an educational experience in life in many ways, I do not want to go there every week,” he said.
Instead, days after his arrest and campus ban, Popivker posted a photo of himself with an Israeli flag to social media — this time outside a casino a mile away from campus.
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The post Rabbi arrested, banned from Cleveland universities over his anti-Palestinian activism appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Lawn signs for Abdul, door knocking for Haley: Michigan Jews split in Senate Democratic primary
(JTA) — OAK PARK, Michigan – Karen Bick has spent the days leading up to Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary fielding calls from Jewish friends urging her to vote for U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens.
Despite the pressure, Bick, 69, said she plans to sit out the race altogether. As much as she is compelled by the campaign of Stevens’ progressive opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, his accusations that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza have kept her from voting for him. Stevens’ campaign, she said, hasn’t given her enough reason to vote for her instead.
“I am very pro-Israel. I’m not pro-Netanyahu, which is part of the whole thing. A lot of my friends who are Jewish have been calling me, trying to get Haley, but it’s like they’re looking at one issue,” said Bick, a Jewish resident of Oak Park, a suburb of Detroit. “I don’t think that Israel should take precedence over all the other issues just because somebody’s pro-Israel.”
Bick’s ambivalence reflects a divide among Michigan Jews in a primary where Israel has emerged as one of the sharpest contrasts between the candidates. Stevens has served in the House since 2019 as a reliable supporter of Israel, while El-Sayed, a former county health official, has made opposition to U.S. support for Israel and AIPAC’s spending in the race a hallmark of his campaign.
That doesn’t mean El-Sayed is without Jewish supporters.
Barbara Weinberg Barefield, a longtime Detroit resident who helped found the city’s Jewish Voice for Peace chapter, has been campaigning for El-Sayed since the beginning of the race, including organizing fundraisers, phone banking and canvassing. She also helped organize “Jews for Abdul,” a group of Jewish supporters working to elect him.
Weinberg Barefield, 76, said that El-Sayed’s use of the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza was an essential component of her support for him.
“We are trying to let people know that there are many Jewish people that support Abdul and support his objectives and support his voice,” Weinberg Barefield said. “Justice, equality, and freedom are part of the fabric of me being a Jew and the message that we put forth for ‘Jews for Abdul:’ that he is a candidate that represents our morality, our ethics, and frankly, I think these are the things that most people in this country want.”
Suzanne Levin, an 83-year-old Jewish Michigander, initially supported Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow, whose withdrawal from the race left progressive Jews in the state facing a political dilemma.
For Levin, the choice quickly became clear. She got an El-Sayed lawn sign and “Jews for Abdul” t-shirt and threw her support behind his campaign.
In doing so, Levin has rejected accusations from Stevens and some Jewish Democratic leaders in the state that El-Sayed’s rhetoric and associations have crossed the line into antisemitism.
“They believe all this crap about El-Sayed, that he’s antisemitic, and I have listened to so many of his talks, and when they ask him ‘should there be an Israel,’ he says there should be a place where people could all be safe and and people should be okay,” Levin said.
Other Jewish Democrats have reached a starkly different conclusion about El-Sayed, who has said the Israeli government is as “evil” as Hamas and often accuses Israel of committing “genocide” in Gaza while advocating that U.S. aid to Israel be diverted to domestic priorities.
Halie Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, which has endorsed Stevens, said that she had been “concerned” by El-Sayed’s response following the March attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan.
At the time, El-Sayed sparked outcry by putting out a statement that discussed Israel’s war in Lebanon, where the attacker’s brother was killed. Soifer said she believed El-Sayed “equivocated and provided a justification for a situation, which there was no justification.”
“If he wants to be senator of a state that has such a large Jewish population, he must demonstrate an ability to stand with that community as we face the rise of antisemitism,” Soifer said. “On that issue in particular, Haley has been a leader in Congress.” The state has close to 130,000 Jews.
Soifer said her group’s volunteers had put out close to 10,000 calls to Michigan voters urging them to back Stevens.
Zach Nessel, a 23-year-old Michigan State University graduate and the secretary of the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus, shared many of Soifer’s concerns as he knocked on doors for Stevens in Oak Park Monday.
“I’m absolutely concerned about his rhetoric,” said Nessel, whose mother is Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel. “I think he’s spending more of his time trying to ostracize pro-Israel Democrats than he is looking to fight Trump, and that’s what I see amongst a lot of his allies.”
Nessel said he had been especially concerned by El-Sayed’s campaign event at his alma mater in April alongside Hasan Piker, an anti-Israel streamer whose rhetoric has been called antisemitic by many Jewish groups and leaders.
“The fact that my former Dem Club is hosting an antisemite that has positive things to say about Hezbollah, a U.S. designated terrorist organization that has killed Americans, that’s horrifying,” Nessel said. “And the fact that you know Abdul is campaigning with someone like that is insane.”
Nessel said that he had visited over 500 homes across the Detroit area to champion Stevens. During his visits, he said voters rarely brought up Israel or AIPAC on their own.
But Nessel said he worried that a potential El-Sayed victory Tuesday could encourage other candidates to adopt similar tactics, with consequences for Jewish participation in the Democratic Party.
“Most people, they want to fight Trump and they want to make things more affordable,” Nessel said. “And if this sort of commotion is successful, then they’ll keep on doing it, and that’ll make it hard for members of the Jewish community to continue to participate in our party.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Lawn signs for Abdul, door knocking for Haley: Michigan Jews split in Senate Democratic primary appeared first on The Forward.
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In a world of AI run amok, Yiddish folktales are making these theater wizards ‘cranky’
A unique theatrical performance inspired by Yiddish folk tales features dead Jews dancing at a cemetery, a prophet appearing in the form of a bunny rabbit and a stone-munching worm named Shamir. It all takes place within the confines of a 2’ X 4’ box known as a cranky and it’s coming to New York later this month as part of the International Puppet Fringe Festival.
For those unfamiliar with the decidedly low-tech medium, crankies are portable stages through which a panorama is scrolled by cranking a pair of wooden dowels. The characters and scenery on the scroll are usually accompanied by narration and music, in this case a live klezmer trio. In backlit crankies, shadow puppets can also be used for characters.
The cranky performance of Shterna and the Lost Voice was created by the Magid Ensemble, a far-flung interdisciplinary collective that includes a storyteller, a graphic artist and three former members of the Boston klezmer band Mamaliga. The members met when they were all living in Northampton, MA, which was described in one review of the ensemble as a “queer Yiddish diasporic hub.”
The decision to create a cranky grew out of the group’s frustration when they tried to keep performing a silent Yiddish film score they had composed. The score was played at a Toronto Jewish Film Festival screening in 2023. The cost for the rights to subsequent screenings of the silent film was prohibitively expensive, so the ensemble decided to create its own show. Accordion player Mattias Kaufmann said they really wanted to do a multimedia project that combined a concert, storytelling and visuals. Kaufmann had worked on some crankies years earlier and saw them as an exciting way to tell a story.
“I feel like they’re really powerful, especially the backlit crankies,” said Kaufmann, who composed the music for Shterna. “It’s not really full-fledged theater, but in many ways it is. It’s a cool in-between space of performance.”
Artist Kiah Raymond had done several crankies and violinist Rachel Leader had seen some.
“I just loved their portability,” Leader told me. “They’re quite small and we can travel with them.”
And travel they have. Shterna and the Lost Voice has been performed more than 50 times around the U.S. and Canada since April 2024. Many of the shows have been sold-out.
Into the cranky-verse
Painted moving panoramas date back many centuries but emerged as a popular form of entertainment in the 1800’s. They were constantly on tour in the U.S. and a number of European countries. The cranky is a smaller scale version of the panoramas and its revival in America is traced back to the mid-2010’s. Vermont’s Bread and Puppet Theater is widely credited with sparking the resurrection of the cranky.
Jenny Romaine, a Bread and Puppet alumnus who works with the Great Small Works theater collective in New York, praised the work of the Magid Ensemble.
“They’re taking the crafts of performance and visual theater and puppetry to new heights,” Romaine said. “I love their work.”
To consider how the cranky craze has spread in recent years, consider the Seattle-based cranky maker Sue Truman’s experience joining a Facebook group devoted to crankies in 2014. There were 30 people in the group at the time. It now has 4,500 members worldwide. Truman, who teaches people how to make crankies and runs the Crankie Factory website, estimates there are currently between 15 and 20 cranky festivals in the U.S. every year.
“It’s incredible how it has exploded,” she told me. “I get emails every week from people all over the world.”
As if to illustrate how quirky the cranky universe is, Truman is collaborating with a couple of Seattle’s old-timey musicians on a piece about a meteor storm in 1833 and its impact on quilters in the Pacific Northwest.
Or there’s Katherine Fahey, one half of the Baltimore cranky team known as The Lantern Sisters. which did a show about Baltimore’s horse-drawn street peddlers known as Arabbers.
Fahey ran into the Magid Ensemble at a cranky festival in New Jersey where each performer had ten minutes to strut their stuff. She was impressed with the excerpt of Shterna they presented.
“Their narrator was such a good storyteller,” Fahey told me in a phone interview after returning from a performance in Ohio. “And I liked how they kept the artwork simple. Just did paper cuts, all one color on the scroll. They told the story in this straightforward, beautiful way. I thought it was really lovely.”
A talent for cranking
Kiah Raymond, a Portland, Oregon-based tattoo artist and muralist, made the cranky for Shterna and the Lost Voice on a long roll of 24” wide butcher paper. It took them between four and six months to cut the characters and scenery into the paper and laminate the finished cuts with clear packing tape. Raymond pulled designs and patterns from a book about traditional Jewish paper cuts and used them as borders and backgrounds. Additional inspiration came from ketubas.
Raymond operates the cranky during the performance, which involves a lot more than just mindlessly cranking the two scrolls.
“You’re holding it taut but turning it at the same time,” Raymond explained. “You turn it faster or slower, depending on what’s happening in the story.”
There’s another quirk to cranking: At times you’ll be turning one hand considerably faster than the other, depending on where in the scroll the story is.
The lost voice in the Shterna story belongs to a man whose beautiful davening is cherished in his shtetl. After he loses the ability to daven, a woman named Shterna goes on a quest to retrieve it. Her sojourn takes her through the physical world, the underworld and the heavens.
A.C. Weaver, a scenic carpenter and Yiddish translator based in Northampton, came up with the story in collaboration with the ensemble’s members. Weaver narrates the show.
Weaver said their connection to traditional Jewish storytelling is thanks to their childhood rabbi, Steve Sager, at Beth El Synagogue in Durham, NC. Weaver said the late rabbi was an “incredible extemporaneous storyteller.”
The story line for the cranky emerged, Weaver said, during the COVID pandemic’s dark days when a lot of friends and neighbors were becoming sick or disabled.
“I felt motivated to make up a story having to do with disability and what it means to lose something around which a lot of your identity is based,” Weaver told me.
Storytellers and teachers
The word magid can mean storyteller, itinerant teacher or preacher. The role of the magid has been documented as far back as the 16th Century and there have been some major magids, including the Dubner Maggid of the late 18th Century and the Kelmer Maggid, who was a big macher in Musar, a spiritual practice focused on living a meaningful and ethical life.
The Magid Ensemble likes to define the word magid as “storyteller,” but the group also serves as a teacher and preacher to some degree.
Though not overtly political, Shterna does project values with a distinct world view: a woman as the hero and a nod to compassion for the disabled. The ensemble has also raised funds for a family from Gaza.
The production was created with start-up funding from the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Boston and local cultural councils in Massachusetts. Leader said that altogether around $15,000 came in, including a $3,000 New England States Touring grant.
Analog in a digital world
Many in the cranky scene say one of the medium’s appeals is its analog nature at a time when so much of our entertainment is digital — and increasingly AI-generated.
More than one practitioner has likened cranky performances to “telling stories around a fire.” It’s an immersive experience, said Raffi Boden, a Brooklyn-based cellist in the ensemble.
“I think that there’s something really beautiful about seeing everything happening before your eyes’” he told me. “I think people are moved by witnessing something that comes together created in front of them in this beautiful, complete way.”
The immersion that audiences experience is likely why children as young as preschoolers have sat and watched the entire 50-minute show without interruption.
“I was a little worried going in because I was wondering, what if everybody starts screaming after 10 minutes because they’re bored?” Boden said.
Despite the embrace of the crankies’ intrinsic analog nature, more and more cranky festivals are providing live video projection if the performance is taking place in a big hall. It’s counterintuitive, concedes Truman, but on the other hand, “If you can’t see it, that’s not good. In the festivals where I’ve performed, nobody is complaining about them providing live video projection.”
Shterna and the Lost Voice will be performed during the International Puppet Fringe Festival August 13, 15 and 16 at Teatro LATEA on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
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Cori Bush promised to bury AIPAC. Her rematch with Wesley Bell in Missouri tests that.
(JTA) — Missouri primary voters will travel back two years when they head to the polls on Tuesday. There they’ll confront a rematch of two candidates whose previous face-off was largely defined by an influx of AIPAC cash that helped oust one of Israel’s most ardent critics in Congress.
In 2024, AIPAC “demonstrated its clout,” in the words of The New York Times, with a massive contribution that knocked out incumbent U.S. Rep. Cori Bush in favor of challenger Wesley Bell. In her concession speech, she promised revenge.
On Tuesday, Bush is seeking to make good on the pledge. But while she is competing against the same candidate, the political landscape around them has changed dramatically.
Since Bush’s loss in the district representing the St. Louis metropolitan region, AIPAC has become a bogeyman in the Democratic Party and Israel a major campaign issue. Other anti-Zionist members of the Democratic Socialists of America have been racking up victories in blue districts across the country throughout the 2026 primary season.
The changing winds might have given Bell incentive to shift to the left instead of leaving himself vulnerable to a challenger whose background and political stances are otherwise similar. But Bell has held firm in his support for Israel, enjoying the backing of mainstream Democrats and a continued financial infusion from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to the tune of more than $1 million this cycle.
As a result, Tuesday’s rematch is one of the most striking tests of whether AIPAC still has traction in Democratic strongholds or whether Bush and other DSA candidates have subdued the once-powerful lobby.
“The war is a lot different today than it was two years ago,” Braxton Payne, a St. Louis-based Democratic strategist, told JTA, referring to the Israel-Gaza conflict that unfolded following Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing war. “Sentiment inside the Democratic Party, even among the establishment, has changed.”
In the past few years, the AIPAC has faced growing hostilities from ultra-left-wing politicians, who have denounced Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, particularly in the aftermath of Oct. 7.
“AIPAC is now a household name in Democratic politics,” Payne noted.
But heading into Tuesday’s primaries, it wasn’t clear that the anti-AIPAC activism had moved the needle for St. Louis voters. While the polymarket prediction platform has given Bell a 66% chance of winning, compared to Bush’s 34%, there’s a dearth of nonpartisan polling. Bush’s campaign commissioned one of the few publicly available survey results, an April HIT Strategies poll that declared the candidates “statistically tied,” with Bell in the lead at 44% and Bush at 40%.
On paper, the two candidates have much in common. Born in Missouri in the mid-1970s, Bell and Bush are both Black progressive Democrats who entered politics following the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in the city of Ferguson.
After protests for police reforms surged across the area for about a year, Bell won a seat on the city council and worked on enacting such changes. In a 2018 race for St. Louis County prosecutor, he defeated Bob McCulloch, a 27-year incumbent who had come under national scrutiny for failing to prosecute the officer who had killed Brown. Bell is now serving his first term in Congress.
Bush, meanwhile, first became engaged in politics as a participant in the Ferguson protests. Though she lost Democratic primaries for the U.S. Senate and House in 2016 and 2018, success in 2020 led her to serve Missouri’s 1st Congressional District for two terms. But in 2024, Bush fell short, losing in the primaries to Bell by more than 5 percentage points.
The candidates agree on most of their political platforms, both of which prioritize issues like reproductive freedom, gun violence prevention and the dismantling of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as reducing the costs of housing, utilities, healthcare and prescriptions. But they diverge when it comes to the Middle East, with Bush’s campaign promising to “stand for justice in Palestine.”
Like other DSA candidates in New York, Colorado, Wisconsin and Michigan, Bush’s campaign accuses Israel of carrying out a genocide in Gaza with the backing of “U.S. weapons and U.S. dollars.”
Following her loss to Bell in 2024, Bush threatened to tear down AIPAC’s “kingdom” after it spent nearly $9 million on her takedown, in one of the most expensive House races in U.S. history. Federal Election Commission records show that of that total, AIPAC invested about $3.4 million in support of Bell and about $5.2 million in opposition of Bush, through the lobby’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project.
“People are beginning to understand that — much like the crypto industry, AI, Big Oil, and Big Pharma — AIPAC has become yet another way for MAGA-donors to divide the Democratic base by meddling in primaries,” Bush told JTA in a written statement.
“In St. Louis and across the country, people know that our fight against antisemitism means fighting against the far-right’s effort to divide us,” Bush added.
Throughout her current rematch against Bell, Bush has gone after her opponent for his ties to AIPAC.
“Wesley Bell is a former Republican campaign manager who is bought and paid for by AIPAC,” Bush posted last month on X. Bush was referring to a 2006 period when Bell served as campaign manager for a conservative, which he has maintained was no more than a favor for a friend.
“We’re going back to DC, and we’ll do it with no corporate cash or AIPAC funded-trips,” Bush added, referencing Bell’s trip to Israel with the lobby group last year.
Yet compared to 2024, AIPAC has spent much less on the current race. Through its UDP super PAC, the lobby has invested in the neighborhood of $3 million in the rematch, with the vast majority spent opposing Bush, according to FEC data. Overall in this race, the candidates themselves have also raised fewer funds than they did two years ago, according to the FEC. Bell has secured $3.6 million and Bush $1.3 million, as opposed to $5.4 million and $4.2 million, respectively, in 2024.
Deryn Sousa, spokesperson for AIPAC, told JTA in a written statement that his group was proud to support Bell’s campaign.
“Bell is a principled fighter for the people of St. Louis, while Cori Bush spent her time in Congress missing votes and demonizing a key democratic ally,” Sousa added.
Bell did not respond to a request for comment from JTA.
However, on the campaign trail, Bell said he was “proud to stand with our Jewish brothers and sisters, and support Israel, particularly in a time that has been very tumultuous,” in a March video posted by AIPAC.
“When we see what has happened in the last few years, I think it’s even more apropos to stand with our friends and one of our greatest allies,” he continued. “Oftentimes, what gets lost is yes, we support Israel, but Israel also supports us.”
And in Congress, Bell voted last month against an amendment that aimed to cut military aid to Israel. He has also previously co-sponsored a bill to increase defense partnerships with Israel, while also voting in favor of legislation that would have sanctioned the International Criminal Court for seeking to arrest U.S. allies, including Israeli officials.
David Cohen, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of St. Louis, which does not endorse candidates, said the recent Iran war transformed “a national conversation about the Middle East into something more common.”
“The sheer number of conversations on this topic compared to the last race look different,” Cohen said. “The confluence of conspiracy theorists from the left and the right have blown out of proportion since the war started.”
Within these national conversations, which he described as “catchy” talking points and “black and white” discussions about AIPAC and Israel, Cohen warned that certain campaigns are “playing that dangerous game of demonizing Jews.”
Cohen said he believes that Bush’s campaign decided to focus on Israel because “they thought it would get her traction,” as opposed to focusing on the “many issues that people in Missouri care about.” Payne echoed Cohen’s sentiments, stressing that he “wouldn’t consider the Israeli-Hamas conflict as the top issue” at the ballot box amid higher-priority concerns like the “insane” cost of living. He noted that Bush’s “central campaign issue is AIPAC money,” a message that “motivates her base” but might not sway the everyday voter.
Jewish leaders and activists in the state have followed the race closely. Rabbi Ze’ev Smason, president of the Coalition for Jewish Values – Missouri, told JTA in an email that his organization also doesn’t endorse candidates. But the difference between Bell and Bush, he said, was obvious to his regional chapter of a national Orthodox rabbinic group.
While Bell “supports Israel’s right to self-determination” and to exist as a Jewish nation, Bush has “established an adversarial relationship with Israel abroad, as well as with the overwhelming majority of her Missouri constituents,” according to Smason.
“At home in her district, Cori Bush was a ‘no-show’ for her Jewish constituents,” Smason stated. “She regularly refused requests for interviews from the local Jewish press, and was shockingly absent from the dedication ceremony of the Holocaust Museum and Learning Center, with no explanation.”
Cohen, whose JCRC branch serves 36 Jewish groups from “liberal to Conservative to Orthodox,” said that “almost none of them believe what Cori Bush believes about Israel.” Jews made up 4.1% of the population in the district as of 2024, according to the Berman Jewish DataBank.
On the other hand, Michael Berg, a volunteer for St. Louis Jewish Voice for Peace, which is not a JCRC member, is among a minority of organized Jewish voices who oppose Bell due in large part to the candidate’s support for Israel. It was upsetting, Berg said, that Bell was “perfectly willing to take $15 million from the interests of a foreign government that’s committing a genocide.”
For Berg, the Israel-Gaza conflict is by no means a fringe concern. He praised Bush for her “unwavering advocacy” for a Gaza ceasefire and support for “multi-ethnic democracy,” as well as her refusal to accept corporate funds, her commitment to fighting climate change and her history of standing up for the interests of St. Louis’s people.
Bush has also earned the support of a second local Jewish group, Progressive Jews of St. Louis, who described her as “a champion for our St. Louis community and a brave leader in the fight for justice and peace for all people, regardless of where they call home.”
Out-of-state Jewish groups have also been vocal about their stances on this race, with the vast majority backing Bell, but some groups, like the IfNotNow movement, advocating for Bush. The Washington, D.C.-based IfNotNow, which calls for “a thriving future for all Israelis and Palestinians,” praised Bush for leading “the call for a ceasefire in Congress.”
In contrast, Jacob Spiegel, communications director of the Washington-based Jewish Democratic Council of America, recounted his organization’s grassroots action in favor of Bell. A network of volunteers, he explained in an email, is working to “elect the candidate we believe aligns with our Jewish values.”
Nonetheless, Berg maintained that even if Bell wins this race, the future “of the Democratic Party is only going in one direction,” which he said is the “direction of Democratic socialism.”
“The United States is increasingly becoming an anti-Zionist country,” Berg said. “The people understand they do not want the United States to continue to fund and support an ethno-national state in the Middle East that oppresses half of its people.”
Regardless of who is victorious, Payne predicted that the outcome would give “fodder” to the triumphant side. Payne, who noted his position as a non-Jewish “outsider,” said he believes that a fear of antisemitism will be motivating many Jewish voters as they head to the polls.
“To be frank, I think it’s a fear that it’s not ill-placed or unfounded,” he added.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Cori Bush promised to bury AIPAC. Her rematch with Wesley Bell in Missouri tests that. appeared first on The Forward.
