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A Black writer explores how Germany remembers its ‘unthinkable’ past
(JTA) — For his 2021 book “How the Word Is Passed,” winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, poet and journalist Clint Smith explored the landscape of American memory — specifically how the history of slavery is explained, commemorated, distorted and desecrated in sites across the United States.
While on tour promoting the book, he explained in an interview Tuesday, he’d often be asked if any country had gotten it right when it came to memorializing its own dark past. “I kept invoking the memorials in Germany, but I had never been to the memorials in Germany,” Smith said. “As a scholar, as a journalist, I felt like I had to do my due diligence and excavate the complexity and the nuance, and the emotional and human texture, that undergirds so many of these places and spaces.”
The result is December’s cover story in the Atlantic, “Monuments to the Unthinkable.” Smith traveled to Germany twice over the past two years, visiting Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, its Topography of Terror Museum, the museum in Wannsee where the Nazis plotted the Final Solution, and the concentration camp at Dachau, talking to historians and curators along the way. As a Black man wrestling with how America accounts for the crimes of its past, he went to learn from the experience of the Germans, who “are still trying to figure out how to tell the story of what their country did, and simultaneously trying to figure out who should tell it.”
In an interview, Smith talked about the inevitable differences between the Holocaust and the Atlantic slave trade, the similarities in how two countries — and communities — experience their histories, and how his article could serve as a bridge between African-Americans and Jews in a time of increasing tension between them.
Smith spoke to JTA from his parents’ home in his native New Orleans.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Your book is about the ways America succeeds and fails to come to terms with slavery, and your article is about the ways Germany is, in your phrase, “constructing public memory.” I was struck by someone who warned you, “Don’t go to Auschwitz.” What were they saying?
Clint Smith: It was Frederick Brenner, a Jewish man and a remarkable photographer who has photographed the Jewish Diaspora across the world for the past several decades, who said that, because people are standing [at Dachau] and they’re taking selfies, and it’s like “me in front of the crematorium” and “me in front of the barracks.” That was deeply unsettling to him, especially as someone whose family was largely killed in the Holocaust.
I don’t want to be reductive about it and say that you don’t want people to go to these spaces and take pictures. I think it’s all about the sort of disposition and sensibilities one brings to a space. If someone went to the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, I don’t necessarily want them doing puckered-lip selfies in front of a slave cabin. I can understand why people wouldn’t want those places engaged with in that way, but you do want tourists to come, right? I mean, before the pandemic, 900,000 people visited Dachau every year, and part of what brings people to Dachau is seeing and taking a picture of the crematorium, taking a picture of themselves on this land in that space where history happened, and posting it online. And maybe that serves as a catalyst for somebody else to make that journey for themselves.
You did go to Dachau, which you call a “memorial to the evil that once transpired there.”
I am a huge believer in putting your body in the place where history happened. I stood in many places that carry the history of violence: plantations, execution chambers, death row. But I’ve never experienced the feeling in my body that I felt when I stood in the gas chamber at Dachau. And you just see the way that this space was constructed, with the sort of intentional, mechanized slaughter that it was meant to enact on people. The industrialized nature of it was something unlike anything I’d ever experienced before and it made me feel so much more proximate to that history in ways that I don’t think I would have ever experienced otherwise.
Physically standing in a concentration camp and physically standing and putting my body in the gas chamber fundamentally changed my understanding of the emotional texture and the human and psychological implications of it. Because when you’re in those spaces you’re able to more fully imagine what it might have been like to be in that space. And then you can imagine these people, these families, these women, these children who were marched into camps throughout Europe. You can never fully imagine the fear, that sense of desperation that one would have felt, but in some ways, it’s the closest we can get to it if you are someone who did not have family who lived through or survived the Holocaust. It provided me with a radical sense of empathy. And that’s why I took the trip in the first place.
A tourist takes a selfie inside the Memorial to the Murdered Jews Of Europe in Berlin, Sept. 25, 2019. (Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
By contrast, there are the memorials that are not historical sites, but either sculptural or architectural, like Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, nearly five acres of concrete slabs. What do you think makes an effective memorial that isn’t necessarily the historical place itself, but a specifically memorial project?
Well, for example, the big one in Berlin. It’s just so enormous. The scale and scope of it was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. I tried to imagine what an American analog would be like. What if in the middle of downtown Manhattan there was a 200,000-square-foot memorial, with thousands of stone columns, dedicated to commemorating the lives of indigenous people who were killed in the early Americas? Or a 200,000-square-foot memorial in the middle of downtown D.C., not far from the White House, to the lives of enslaved people?
With that said, what I found really valuable were the people I spoke to, who had very different relationships to that space. Some thought of that memorial as something that was so meaningful because of its size and because of its scope, and because it was a massive state-sanctioned project. And then there were others who thought that it was too abstract, that it was too passive, even in its name, right, the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,” which sounds as if something happened to people without naming the people who enacted the harm and who committed the crime. Those are the sort of nuances and complexities that I wanted to spend more time with, and found really valuable because, in the same way, descendants of enslaved people here in the United States have many different conceptions of what the iconography of slavery should look like or what repair and reparations to slavery should be made.
You write about the “stumbling stones” or “Stolpersteine”: Those are the small brass plaques placed in the streets, inscribed with the names of Holocaust victims and placed in front of their last known residence. The stones are exactly the opposite scale of the Berlin memorial.
Right. I think that is the memorial that I was most struck by: the largest decentralized memorial in the world, with 90,000 stones across 30 different European countries. I remember the moment I was walking down the street looking for landmarks and saw my first Stolpersteine, and I only saw it because at that moment the clouds moved and the sun shone off the brass stone. You see the name, the birth date, the deportation date, the death date, the place where the person was killed. You walk past another home, you see seven; you walk past another home, you see 12. You begin to imagine entire lives based on the names and information that exist on these stones. It creates this profound sense of intimacy, this profound sense of closeness to the history and it’s so human, because it’s individual people and individual names.
One of the most valuable things about the stumbling stone project, I think, is all the work that precedes it. It’s the school students who are doing research to find out about the lives of the people who were taken from the home across the street from their school. It’s the people in the apartment complex, who come together and decide that they’re going to figure out who were the Jewish families who lived in that apartment complex before them. And sometimes it’s really remarkable, granular details about people’s lives: what their favorite food was, what their favorite flavor of ice cream was, what the child liked.
Artist Gunter Demnig lays “stumbling stones” that memorialize persecuted or murdered Jews on the streets of Frankfurt. (Boris Roessler/picture alliance via Getty Images)
As Gunter Demnig, the originator of the project, says, 6 million people is a huge abstraction, and now it becomes about one man, one woman, one child, and [people] realize that it truly was not that long ago. There are so many survivors of the Holocaust who are still with us. Gunter Demnig, his father fought for the German army. He represents this generation of people who are engaging in a sort of contrition for the acts of their parents and their grandparents.
You ask in the piece what it would look like for a similar project to be created in the United States as a memorial to enslaved people.
I’m from New Orleans, and the descendant of enslaved people in New Orleans, which was at one point the busiest slave market in the country. And as Barbara Steiner, a Jewish historian, said to me in Germany, entire streets [of New Orleans] would be covered in brass stones! That was such a striking moment for me. That helped me more fully realize the profound lack of markers and iconography and documentation that we have to enslaved people in our landscape here in the United States relative to that of Germany.
Why are physical monuments important? I have sometimes wondered why we spend so much money on the infrastructure of memory — statues, museums, memorials — and if that money could be better used for living memorials, like scholarships for the descendants of victims, say, or programs that study or archive evidence of genocide. Why is it important to see a statue or a museum or even a plaque?
First off, museums and statues and memorials and monuments are by no means a panacea. It is not the case that you put up some memorials or you lay down some Stolpersteine and suddenly antisemitism is gone. Obviously, Germany is a case study and is experiencing its own rise in antisemitism. And that’s something that’s deeply unsettling, and is not going to singularly be solved by memorials and monuments.
With that said, I think there is something to be said to regularly encounter physical markers and manifestations of the violence that has been enacted and crimes that have been done in your name, or to the people that you are the descendant of. I try to imagine Germany without any of these memorials and I think it would just be so much easier for antisemitism to become far more pervasive. Because when your landscape is ornamented by things that are outlining the history that happened there, it is much more difficult to deny its significance, it is much more difficult to deny that it happened, it is much more difficult not to have it shape the way you think about public policy. I do believe that if we had these sorts of markers in the United States, it wouldn’t solve the racial wealth gap, it wouldn’t solve racism, it wouldn’t solve discrimination. It wouldn’t eradicate white nationalism or white supremacy. But I do think it would play some role in recalibrating and reshaping our collective public consciousness, our collective sense of history in ways that would not be insignificant.
And to your point, my hope is that those things are never mutually exclusive. It’s a conversation that’s happening here in the United States with regard to how different institutions are accounting for their relationship to slavery. Universities are coming up with reports, presentations, panels and conferences that outline their relationship to the history of slavery, especially since the murder of George Floyd [in 2020]. Activists and descendants have pushed them to not just put out a report, or put up a plaque or make a monument. It’s also about, well, what are you going to do for the descendants of those people? Harvard, where I went to grad school, put $100 million aside specifically for those sorts of interventions. Places like Georgetown have made it so that people who were the descendants of those who are enslaved have specific opportunities to come to the school without paying. And people of good faith can disagree over whether those initiatives are commensurate with or enough to atone for that past, and I think the answer is almost inevitably no.
Certainly people on what we like to think of as the wrong side of history understood the importance of physical monuments in creating memory.
The origin story of my own book was that I watched the monuments come down in 2017, in my hometown in New Orleans, of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee. I was thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority Black city, and there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslaved people. What does it mean that to get to school I had to go down Robert E. Lee Boulevard? That to get to the grocery store, I had to go down Jefferson Davis Parkway? That my middle school was named after a leader of the Confederacy? And that my parents still live on a street today named after someone who owned 115 enslaved people? The names and iconography are reflective of the stories that people tell and those stories shaped the narratives that communities carry. And those narratives shape public policy and public policy is what shapes the material conditions of people’s lives.
One thing about Germany is that its national project of memory and repentance has been accompanied by a vast reparations program — for Israel, Jewish survivors, their families and programs to propagate Jewish culture. I wonder if you think Germany could have moved ahead without reparations? And can America ever fully grapple with the legacy of slavery without its own reparations?
The short answer is no. America cannot fully move forward from its past without reparations. The important thing is not to be limited and reductive in the way that we conceive of what reparations are or should look like. In some ways, I’m as interested if not more interested in what specific cities and states are doing in order to account for those histories and those crimes. For example, in Evanston, Illinois, they created a specific program to give reparations to Black families who experienced housing segregation, in a certain period of time, given how prevalent redlining was in and around Chicago in the mid-20th century. I know in Asheville, North Carolina, there’s a similar program that’s thinking about how to meaningfully engage in repair to the descendants of communities that were harmed from some of the policies that existed there. This is not to say that those programs themselves are perfect. But I think we sometimes talk about it so much on a federal level, that we forget the local opportunities that exist.
West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer signs the reparations agreement between his country and Israel, Sept. 10, 1952. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Benjamin Ferencz, from “Reckonings”)
Many people who were redlined or experienced housing covenants — all the sort of insidious manifestations of wealth extraction that were part of Jim Crow — are still alive today. So sometimes it’s not even a question of what you have to give the descendants. Sometimes it’s like, what do you give the actual people who are still here?
That’s an important distinction you make in your article, about the difference between grappling with the past in Germany and the United States. In Germany, there are so few Jews, while in the U.S. we see the living evidence of slavery, not the evidence of absence.
That’s perhaps the greatest difference that allows for both a landscape of memory to be created in Germany, and also allows for Germany to pay reparations in ways that the United States is reluctant to do: Jewish people in Germany represent less than one quarter of one percent of the population of Germany. One of the folks I spoke to told me that Jewish people in Germany are a historical abstraction. Because there’s so few Jewish people left, because of the slaughter of the Holocaust. I think about the reparations that were given to Japanese Americans who were held in incarceration camps during World War II. They got $20,000 checks, which is not commensurate with what it means to be held in a prison camp for multiple years, and cannot totally atone for that. But part of the reason that can be enacted is that there’s a limited amount of people. There are 40 million black people in this country. So the economic implications of reparations are something fundamentally different here in the United States.
So let me ask you if there’s anything else you wanted to mention that we haven’t talked about.
I want to name specifically for your readers that I’m not and would never intend to conflate slavery and the Holocaust. They are qualitatively different historical phenomena that have their own specific complexities and should be understood on their own terms. With that said, I do think it can be helpful to put the two in conversation with one another, specifically in the profound ways that these two monumental periods of world history have shaped the modern world and how they are remembered in fundamentally different ways.
And there are similarities as well, which you write about.
I did find so many parallels. The Jewish people I spent time with in Germany explained that some of the manifestations of racism and anti-Blackness in the United States are not so different from the sort of manifestations of antisemitism that exist in Germany, especially as it relates to public memory. When I was at the museum devoted to the Wannsee conference, the executive director, Deborah Hartmann, told me that she and Deidre Berger [the chair of the executive board of the Jewish Digital Cultural Recovery Project Foundation] were talking about how Jewish people did not always have a seat at the table when these monuments and memorials were being built. Jewish people were not allowed to participate beyond a certain extent, because many Germans felt that Jewish people were not objective. Jewish historians couldn’t be taken seriously because they were too close to the history.
That just echoes so much of what Black scholars and historians have been told about their ability, or the lack thereof, to study the history of Black life. The godfather of African-American scholarship, W.E.B. Du Bois, was told by white scholars that he couldn’t be taken seriously because he was too close to the history of slavery.
Meanwhile, Deborah Hartmann talked about how so many of the historians and scholars who played a role in shaping the landscape of memory in Germany were themselves “close to the history,” including former members of the Hitler Youth.
Somebody sent me a message that really meant a lot to me this past week, basically saying that my essay is an exercise in “solidarity via remembrance” — in a moment where, unfortunately, there have been a lot of public manifestations of ideas and antisemitic remarks that might threaten to rupture a relationship between Black and Jewish people. Obviously, we didn’t time it this way: I worked on this piece for a year. But it’s my hope that as someone who is a Black American, who is the descendant of enslaved people, who is not himself Jewish — that my respectful, empathic, curious, journey reflects the long history of solidarity that has existed across Black and Jewish communities and that that I hope we never lose sight of.
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‘Halloween meets Israeli chutzpah,’ as holiday grows beyond American expats in the Jewish state
Israeli cellphones have been pretty busy lately, given Tuesday’s monumental national election. There were the constant robocalls and daily text surveys leading up to Election Day. And with the scramble to form a coalition now underway, Israelis are glued to their phones, waiting for news alerts and debating every possible scenario in various group chats. But around Tel Aviv, hundreds of parents have an extra WhatsApp group to manage: the one dedicated to their neighborhood’s trick-or-treat event, set to take place this Saturday night.
“Can we change the date for Sabbath observers?” one mother asks.
“Halloween is always October 31st,” someone responds.
“I don’t think anyone here cares about the actual date,” another chimes in.
There are dozens of questions about where to buy candy in bulk, along with frantic costume emergencies. “Our order won’t make it! Does anyone have a witch costume for an 8-year-old?”
“We are so excited,” one parent writes. “This is our first time. Can someone explain how it works?”
Over the last decade, Halloween in Israel has grown from a small gathering of American immigrants into neighborhood-wide celebrations across Tel Aviv and other big cities. Bars and clubs now host annual spooky soirées, and costume shops that once depended almost entirely on Purim sales have added a second busy season in late October. And on Saturday night, thousands of children are expected to take to the streets for some classic trick-or-treating — with an Israeli twist.
The birthplace of Halloween b’Aretz remains its epicenter: Tel Aviv’s Old North neighborhood. The area has long been an enclave of both young families and English-speaking immigrants, a combination that helped transform the unfamiliar Halloween ritual into an annual local tradition.
The first trick-or-treat event was organized in 2015 by expat mothers Smadar Barak and Eliza Duenow, whose children were missing an American Halloween. It began with just 10 families spread out across the Old North. Within four years, that number had jumped to more than 100. And it was no longer just English speakers. Israeli friends and classmates had begun asking if they could join “American Purim.” Participation exploded as other neighborhoods began hosting their own Halloween-themed events.
But over time, many of the original families, including both organizers, returned to the States. The whole thing might have fizzled out completely had it not been for Noa Rudik, a young mother on extended maternity leave, who often ran Jewish holiday events for neighborhood families.
“A community candle-lighting for Chanukah. A kibbutz-style Shavuot celebration in the park. I saw that families, like mine, were hungry for opportunities to be together,” Rudik says.
Somehow, she ended up on an email list from Duenow, who was organizing a group pumpkin order and carving activity. Born and raised in Israel, Rudik had very little exposure to Halloween, but she was immediately enchanted. After taking her kids to the pumpkin carving, they eventually joined the trick-or-treaters. “In those early years, we didn’t have access to all of the Halloween supplies, so everything was very homemade — the costumes, the decorations, which I love. Plus, what kid doesn’t want to run around all night collecting candy?”
Beyond her own family’s enjoyment, Rudik understood the holiday’s potential for community building. “It doesn’t get any more communal than Halloween,” she points out. “Rosh Hashanah. Passover. You can celebrate those holidays just within your own family. Many people do. But for trick-or-treating, you literally cannot do it without your neighbors.”
Rudik and a few others eventually took over for Barak and Duenow and opened it up to the entire community. Today, the original WhatsApp group has close to 1,000 members, and nearly every Tel Aviv neighborhood hosts its own event. While the early trick-or-treaters sometimes had to endure strange looks as they traipsed from house to house in their costumes, these days you can feel the spirit of Halloween across the city, as the sidewalks fill with pint-sized ghosts and goblins.
Not everyone is on board with the Pagan-rooted holiday, though. Last year, Israeli pop star Miri Mesika sparked a public debate over Halloween and Jewish identity when she pointedly told an interviewer that her daughters would be waiting until Purim to dress in costume. Rudik has also sensed some reluctance on the part of the Tel Aviv municipality to support trick-or-treating, even though it typically helps fund her other events. Efforts to promote the activity through local schools were also met with objections from some parent representatives, leading to a compromise: each could decide whether to pass the invitation along to their class.
Occasionally, Rudik hears from more traditional families who are hesitant or have decided not to participate. “But otherwise, the response has been overwhelmingly positive,” she reports. “Most people do not even think about the religious aspect or the fact that it’s not ‘our holiday.’ They just see it as an opportunity to be creative, to spend time with friends, and to come together as a community.”
All of which involves some pretty complicated logistics. Even with the holiday’s growth in popularity, most residents don’t hand out treats, so America’s door-to-door model won’t work. In the early years, participants shared addresses, apartment numbers and even door codes with each other. But as the group grew, the prospect of giving hundreds of strangers access to their buildings became less appealing. Some families moved their candy stations downstairs; others divided up, with one parent taking the children around while the other stayed home to distribute candy, as they often do in the States. For years, families navigated with a Google map of participating homes. Last year, a tech-savvy neighborhood parent designed a custom trick-or-treating app that will now be available across the city.
“Start-up Nation does Halloween,” Rudik jokes.
The guiding principle is that anyone collecting candy should also help provide it. Some families put up elaborate decorations and stick around to distribute treats; others leave a simple help-yourself bowl by the door. Those who can’t host typically arrange to buy candy for someone else’s house, which gets coordinated through the Whatsapp group the week before.
“We go by the honor system,” Rudik says. “We trust people to figure out a way to contribute. And there is always plenty of candy for everyone.”
But just in case, Rudik spends much of the night manning a centrally located emergency candy station, dispatching reinforcements to households that are running low.
After more than a decade, the festivities usually run pretty smoothly, though the growing number of Israelis has brought with it a learning curve.
“I really love that this started with Americans,” Rudik says. “I think it lends a legitimacy that would not necessarily be there if a bunch of Israelis just decided to start trick-or-treating. But it has definitely changed shape over the years.”
“Halloween meets Israeli chutzpah,” she calls it. Like any cultural tradition, trick-or-treating comes with its own etiquette that isn’t necessarily obvious to newcomers.
“Usually parents would be responsible for making sure their kids follow the rules. But we realized parents themselves didn’t necessarily know the ins and outs. Most of us didn’t grow up on this,” she points out.
One year, after families complained that older children had emptied their unattended candy bowls, Rudik and her fellow organizers visited neighborhood schools to talk to the kids and sent parents reminders on WhatsApp.
“In the days before Halloween, we really urge everyone to review the rules with their children: just take one candy, leave enough for others. Be good neighbors.”
This year’s turnout is expected to be their biggest yet, Rudik says, with several hundred families registered in the Old North alone. It follows a string of quieter celebrations, beginning in 2020, when the pandemic kept everyone inside.
“I think we did something over Zoom,” Rudik says, rolling her eyes.
Then came the quietest year of all: 2023. Less than three weeks before Halloween, on Oct. 7, Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel’s southern border, killing more than 1,200 people and taking another 251 hostage.
“It wasn’t even a question,” Rudik recalls. “It was just obvious to everyone it would be cancelled. Nor was it specific to Halloween. No one was in the mood to celebrate anything. We were just engulfed in grief.”
The following year, the organizers went ahead with a toned-down version.
“The war wasn’t over, there were still hostages in Gaza,” she says, “but we also felt like we wanted to give the children some sense of normalcy. We asked people not to do anything too gory or scary — no blood or body parts or skeletons — and everyone really respected that. It was a pretty muted night.”
Last year, Israeli Halloween was back in full force, with one new addition: an adults only party, which Rudik also co-organized and will be bringing back this year as well. “Most of us didn’t get to celebrate Halloween as kids,” she says, with a smile. “So we are just making up for lost time.”
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Jewish Democrats head to the polls frustrated with their party. Will they still help flip control of Congress?
For decades, Jewish voters have been among the Democratic Party’s most loyal supporters, though Republicans have made some inroads in recent elections. Now, with early voting underway and the midterms just days away, Jewish voters could help decide control of Congress in what may signal a broader change.
After a heated primary season, Republicans see an opportunity and signs of a potential shift their way. They hope growing Jewish frustration with Democrats over antisemitism and support for Israel will translate into votes in closely contested races.
Democrats need a net gain of four House seats and four Senate seats to take control of both chambers. But the Democratic Party’s advantage among Jewish voters on the generic congressional ballot has fallen from 49 points to 13.
CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten recently highlighted a sharp decline, for example, in Democratic support among Jewish voters in New York. Gov. Kathy Hochul’s lead among Jewish voters has narrowed from 51 percentage points in 2022 to just 13 points this year.
In Michigan, Jewish Democrats remain divided over their party’s Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, who has intensified his criticism of Israel in recent weeks. Last weekend, a PAC supporting the El-Sayed campaign faced online backlash for a TV ad that showed a couple blaming Israel aid for the high price of groceries.
But whether that frustration will lead Jewish voters to stop supporting Democratic candidates is another question.
Two national surveys conducted this year show Jewish voters remain firmly in the Democratic camp despite the declines. A September poll by the Jewish Electorate Institute found that 71% of Jewish voters planned to support Democrats for Congress, compared with 23% who planned to support Republicans. Another survey, conducted by GBAO Strategies, found Democrats with a 67%-26% lead among Jewish voters.
The Jewish Electorate Institute poll also found that Jewish voters were nearly equally concerned about rising antisemitism within both parties.
Still, with control of the House and Senate at stake and several close races, even a small shift among Jewish voters could make a difference.
Republicans see an opening in Michigan
Michigan offers perhaps the clearest test of the battle over the Jewish vote.
The Republican Jewish Coalition is spending $2 million to target approximately 50,000 Jewish voters, primarily in Oakland County, home to some of Michigan’s largest Jewish communities.
Sam Markstein, RJC’s spokesperson, said in an interview with the Forward that the campaign includes digital advertising, direct mail, text messages, phone calls and door-to-door canvassing in communities such as Bloomfield Hills, West Bloomfield and Southfield, where former Rep. Haley Stevens performed strongly in the Democratic Senate primary.
It’s the group’s largest general-election investment, after its super PAC, the RJC Victory Fund, spent $3.9 million against Kentucky Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, an Israel critic, in the GOP primary earlier this year. Massie lost by nine points.
El-Sayed’s nomination has divided Jewish Democrats because of his criticism of Israel and his response to the March attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield that some Jewish voters interpreted as justifying the attack. He later apologized for the remarks. Some Jewish Democrats are publicly supporting former Rep. Mike Rogers, saying El-Sayed has to assuage concerns in his outreach and in public comments.
Jewish voters make up just 1.4% of the electorate in Michigan. But the stakes are high, with polls showing a dead heat between El-Sayed and Rogers. In 2024, Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin defeated Rogers by fewer than 20,000 votes. A relatively small shift among Jewish voters could prove crucial.
In his closing statement during the last Michigan Senate debate, Rogers appealed directly to Jewish Democrats “who are afraid for their children, when their daughters can’t wear their Star of David walking across Michigan’s campus” to support him. “You’ll have a home with us,” Rogers said. At a rally last Sunday, Trump once again accused Democrats of disloyalty, saying that Jewish voters backing El-Sayed “should be ashamed of themselves.”
Markstein predicted that “you could see a Republican carry the Jewish community in Michigan for the first time in decades.” He suggested there’s an “acceleration of Jewish voters” out of the Democratic Party after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack and the subsequent rise in antisemitism. But Markstein also acknowledged that the change may be gradual.
“I don’t think that’s going to happen overnight,” he said. “I do think they’re going to be much more open-minded and be a lot more ticket-splitting in the future.”
The RJC plans to examine precinct-level election results rather than relying solely on exit polls, Markstein said, to measure whether Jewish voters are moving toward Republicans.
Jewish Democrats fight to hold their voters
The Jewish Democratic Council of America is also mounting its largest midterm voter outreach effort, hoping to prevent Jewish dissatisfaction with Democrats from turning into Republican votes.
While its advertising budget is significantly smaller than the RJC’s, JDCA is relying heavily on direct voter outreach.
JDCA said it is spending more than $300,000 on digital advertising specifically targeting Jewish voters, aiming for more than 4 million ad impressions by Election Day.
Its advertisements include campaigns against Rep. Mike Lawler in New York, Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton in Texas and Republican Sen. Jon Husted in Ohio. Other ads target younger Jewish voters in six states and 20 competitive House districts.
The organization has also mobilized more than 715 volunteers, who have made over 640,000 direct Jewish voter contacts through phone banks and canvassing; they’ve also recruited 32 campus fellows to help organize voters.
Halie Soifer, JDCA’s CEO, accused Republicans of exploiting Jewish fears about antisemitism.
“In the closing weeks of this election, Republicans are invoking fear as a political tactic, tapping into Donald Trump’s culture war,” Soifer wrote in an email to supporters. She accused Republicans of using antisemitism and Islamophobia to divide voters rather than addressing economic concerns. “It’s going to backfire,” she said.
“Democrats aren’t perfect, but Republicans under Trump aren’t the answer,” Soifer added.
The battle beyond Michigan
Beyond Michigan, Republicans are also trying to persuade Jewish voters to reject mainstream, pro-Israel Democrats, arguing that the party has moved too far to the left in an effort to satisfy the progressive wing.
One major test is New York’s 17th Congressional District, where Jewish voters make up an estimated 20% of the population. Although the RJC is not making a major investment there, other groups are spending heavily in one of the country’s most competitive House races.
The incumbent Republican congressman, Mike Lawler, has maintained close relationships with the growing Hasidic and Orthodox communities in Rockland County and parts of Westchester County and made Israel and antisemitism central issues in his campaign. The Democratic candidate, Cait Conley, an Army veteran and former national security official, is also a strong supporter of Israel. She has condemned antisemitism and publicly criticized New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s statement marking the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack.
In Georgia, Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, who is Jewish, faces Republican Rep. Mike Collins in another competitive race.
Ossoff has faced criticism from some Jewish supporters over his votes to block certain weapons sales to Israel. In a recent debate, Collins criticized Ossoff for supporting El-Sayed, describing the Michigan Senate candidate as “the guy that hates Israel.” Ossoff has accused his opponent of ties to white nationalism, a charge Collins rejected.
But that dissatisfaction with Ossoff has not necessarily translated into support for his Republican opponent. Georgia state Rep. Esther Panitch, a Jewish Democrat who has criticized Ossoff’s Israel positions, is supporting his reelection.
J Street, the liberal pro-Israel organization, is spending nearly $500,000 to support Ossoff as part of a $3 million digital advertising campaign across five competitive races. Unlike JDCA and the RJC’s Michigan campaign, J Street’s advertisements target the general electorate, not specifically Jewish voters.
Tali deGroot, J Street’s vice president of political and digital strategy, said J Street is working to elect a “pro-Israel, pro-peace, and pro-democracy majority.”
Florida offers another test of the Jewish vote.
In the newly drawn 25th Congressional District, Jewish Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz, an outspoken supporter of Israel, is facing Republican Scott Singer, the former mayor of Boca Raton who is also Jewish. The district’s new boundaries favor Republicans, with Trump carrying the area by nine percentage points in 2024.
Moskowitz has frequently criticized antisemitism within his party and clashed with progressives over Israel. The outcome of this close race could show whether a Jewish Democrat with strong pro-Israel bona fides can win a Republican-leaning district. The GOP’s leading House super PAC recently canceled a planned $6 million advertising campaign in the district after major political forecasters shifted the race to “Lean Democratic.”
Florida’s Senate race between Republican incumbent Ashley Moody and progressive Democrat Angie Nixon offers a broader, though less competitive, test of the Jewish vote in a state where Jews make up an estimated 3% to 5% of the population.
Together, these races could show whether Jewish voters are judging Democratic candidates by their own positions on Israel and antisemitism or by the direction of the party as a whole.
The post Jewish Democrats head to the polls frustrated with their party. Will they still help flip control of Congress? appeared first on The Forward.
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Two years after a judge’s order, a Spanish dictionary still defines ‘Jewish’ as ‘miserly’
(JTA) — BUENOS AIRES — Two years after an Argentine judge ordered a Spanish dictionary to drop a definition of “Jewish” as “miserly or usurious,” the institution responsible for the dictionary has yet to comply — frustrating the Jewish groups that brought the case.
The definition reflects a long history of associating Jews with greed and moneylending, a stereotype reinforced by literary figures such as Shakespeare’s Shylock and by centuries of anti-Jewish prejudice. The Royal Spanish Academy, the Madrid-based language-standardization institution that is ignoring a September 2024 order by a federal judge here, has defended its dictionary as a record of how words are used, including pejorative meanings.
Jewish groups argue that preserving the definition perpetuates an antisemitic trope.
“We understand that the dictionary reflects how some people use language, but it is also true that many people learn through the dictionary,” Ariel Siedler, a member of the Latin American Jewish Congress (CJL) who monitors online discrimination, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency last month. “That is why adding that definition seems negative. The aim was to avoid reinforcing discrimination, which would be perpetuated through the dictionary.”
The 2024 order came a month after CJL and DAIA, Argentina’s Jewish political umbrella organization, filed a criminal complaint against Santiago Muñoz Machado, the academy’s director, and other officials. It accused them of “inciting hatred against the Jewish community through the discriminatory definition of the term ‘Jew’.”
When the ruling came down, Muñoz Machado told EFE, the Spanish state-run news agency, that he would examine the ruling even though it is unenforceable in Spain, out of respect for the Argentine courts and the CJL’s parent body, the World Jewish Congress.
“It is a judge’s ruling; therefore, we receive it with the utmost respect — all the more so given that the petitioners behind it include the World Jewish Congress,” he told EFE. Nonetheless, he said then, he still held to what he had told the CJL in 2023, when he responded to the Jewish body’s direct request to remove the definition.
“If the [academy] defines ‘Jew’ as ‘miserly,’ it is because that’s how people use the word,” he said. He emphasized that dictionaries document language rather than invent it, and that deleting a definition would not necessarily prevent people from using the expression.
The academy’s online Dictionary of the Spanish Language lists five meanings for “judío” (Jew/Jewish). The first definitions are “Hebrew,” a person “who professes Judaism,” a “native of Judea, a country of ancient Asia” and “belonging or relating to Judea or the Jews.”
The fifth describes it as a person who is “miserly or usurious.”
In 2021 — the year the CJL first complained to the academy — it began to add that this usage is “offensive or discriminatory,” according to IEDRA, a website that tracks Spanish language usage.
English-language dictionaries routinely include antisemitic meanings of “Jew” while also noting that such usage is offensive.
Defenders of the Spanish academy’s dictionary said the work’s educational role should prevail. “The dictionary serves to explain and understand. Without collecting the various meanings that a word can have, it would be impossible to properly read ancient or modern texts,” Arturo Pérez-Reverte, an academy member and a Spanish novelist, told El Pais in 2024, when the Argentine court issued its ruling. “The RAE dictionary is not the normative police of the language, but the notary that draws up a record of how the language was used and how it is used now.”
There is a precedent for the academy removing an offensive definition. Spanish lawyer Borja Luján Lago in 2023 got the academy to modify the entry for the word “lawyer,” which included the definitions “talkative” and “chatty.” Panama’s Jewish community, hearing of his success, tapped Luján Lago to persuade the academy to remove the offensive “Jewish” definition. More than 20 Jewish groups in the United States and Latin America signed onto the effort.
Based in Madrid and founded in 1713, the academy is the leading authority on the Spanish language, coordinating linguistic standards with 22 other academies, mostly in Latin America.
Approximately 636 million people worldwide are Spanish speakers, according to the Instituto Cervantes’ 2025 report. The countries with the largest Spanish-speaking populations include Mexico (138 million), the United States (65.5 million), Colombia (53.1 million), Spain (48.9 million) and Argentina (47.5 million).
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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