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A history of Mel Brooks as a ‘disobedient Jew’
(JTA) — Jeremy Dauber subtitles his new biography of Mel Brooks “Disobedient Jew.” It’s a phrase that captures two indivisible aspects of the 96-year-old director, actor, producer and songwriter.
The “Jew” is obvious. Born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn in 1926, Brooks channeled the Yiddish accents and Jewish sensibilities of his old neighborhoods into characters like the 2000 Year Old Man — a comedy routine he worked up with his friend, the writer and director Carl Reiner. He worked Jewish obsessions into films like 1967’s “The Producers,” which features two scheming Jewish characters who stage a sympathetic Broadway musical about Hitler in order to bilk their investors.
Brooks’ signature move is to inject Jews into every aspect of human history and culture, which can be seen in the forthcoming Hulu series “History of the World, Part II.” A sequel to his 1981 film, “History of the World, Part I,” it parodies historical episodes in a style he honed as a writer on 1950s television programs such as “Your Show of Shows,” whose writers’ rooms were stocked with a galaxy of striving Jewish comedy writers just like him.
The “Disobedient” part describes Brooks’ relationship to a movie industry that he conquered starting in the early 1970s. In a series of parodies of classic movie genres — the Western in “Blazing Saddles,” the horror movie in “Young Frankenstein,” Alfred Hitchcock in “High Anxiety — he would gently, sometimes crudely and always lovingly bite the hand that was feeding him quite nicely: In 1976, he was fifth on the list of top 10 box office attractions, just behind Clint Eastwood.
Dauber describes the parody Brooks mastered as “nothing less than the essential statement of American Jewish tension between them and us, culturally speaking; between affection for the mainstream and alienation from it.”
Dauber is professor of Jewish literature and American studies at Columbia University, whose previous books include “Jewish Comedy” and “American Comics: A History.” “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” is part of the Jewish Lives series of brief interpretative biographies from Yale University Press.
Dauber and I spoke about why America fell for a self-described “spectacular Jew” from Brooklyn, Brooks’ lifelong engagement with the Holocaust, and why “Young Frankenstein” may be Brooks’ most Jewish movie.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “History of the World, Part II” comes out March 6. “History of the World, Part I” may not be in the top tier of Brooks films, but it seems to touch on so many aspects of his career that you trace in your book: the parody of classic movie forms, the musical comedy, injecting Jews into every aspect of human civilization, and the anything-for-a-laugh sensibility.
Jeremy Dauber: I agree. There’s the one thing that really brings it home, and it’s probably the most famous or infamous scene from the film. That’s the Spanish Inquisition scene. You have Brooks sort of probing the limits of bad taste. He had done that most famously in “The Producers” with its Nazi kickline, but here he takes the same idea — that one of the ways that you attack antisemitism is through ridicule — and turns the persecution of the Jews into a big musical number. It’s his love of music and dance. But the thing that’s almost the most interesting about this is that he takes on the role of the Torquemada character.
As his henchman sing and dance and the Jews face torture, the Brooklyn-born Jew plays the Catholic friar who tormented the Jews.
That’s right. And what’s the crime that he accuses the Jews of? “Don‘t be boring! Don‘t be dull!” That’s the worst thing that you can be. It’s his way of saying, “If I have a religion, you know, it is show business.”
His fascination with showbiz seems inseparable from his Jewishness, as if being a showbiz Jew is a denomination in its own right.
One of my favorite lines of his is when he marries [actress] Anne Bancroft, who of course is not Jewish. And he says, “She doesn’t have to convert: She’s a star.” If you’re a star, if you’re a celebrity, you’re kind of in your own firmament faith-wise, and so it’s okay. Showbiz is this faith. But it is very Jewish, because show business is a way to acceptance. It’s a way that America can love him as a Jew, as Mel Brooks, as a kid from the outer boroughs who can grow up to marry Anne Bancroft.
Jeremy Dauber is the author of “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” (Yale University Press)
You write early on that “Mel Brooks, more than any other single figure, symbolizes the Jewish perspective on and contribution to American mass entertainment.” On one foot, can you expand on that?
Jews understand that there’s a path to success and that being embraced by a culture means learning about it, immersing yourself in it, being so deeply involved in it that you understand it and master it. But simultaneously, you’re doing that as a kind of outsider. You’re always not quite in it, even though you’re of it in some deep way. In some ways, it’s the apotheosis of what Brooks does, which is being a parodist. In order to be the kind of parodist that Mel Brooks is, you have to be acutely attuned to every aspect of the cultural medium that you’re parodying. You have to know it inside and outside and backwards and forwards. And Brooks certainly does, but at the same time you have to be able to sort of step outside of it and say, you know, “Well, I’m watching a Western, but come on, what’s going on with these guys? Like why doesn’t anyone ever, you know, pass gas after eating so many beans?”
You have this great phrase, that to be an American Jew is to be part of the “loyal opposition.”
That’s right. Brooks at his best is always kind of poking and prodding at convention, but loyally. He’s not like the countercultural figures of his day. He’s a studio guy. He’s really within the system, but is poking at the system as well.
You wrote in that vein about his 1963 short film, “The Critic,” which won him an Oscar. Brooks plays an old Jewish man making fun of an art film.
On the one hand, he’s doing it in the voice of one of his older Jewish relatives, the Jewish generation with an Eastern European accent, to make fun of these kinds of intellectuals. He’s trying to channel the everyman’s response to high art. “What is this I’m watching? I don’t understand this at all.” On the other hand, Brooks is much more intellectual than he’s often given credit for.
For me the paradox of Brooks’ career is conveyed in a phrase that appears a couple of times in the book: “too Jewish.” The irony is that the more he leaned into his Jewishness, the more successful he got, starting with the “2000 Year Old Man” character, in which he channels Yiddish dialect in a series of wildly successful comedy albums with his friend Carl Reiner. How do you explain America’s embrace of these extremely ethnic tropes?
Brooks’ great motion pictures of the late 1960s and 1970s sort of track with America’s embrace of Jewishness. You have “The Graduate,” which came out at around the same time as “The Producers,” and which showed that someone like Dustin Hoffman can be a leading man. It doesn’t have to be a Robert Redford. You have Allan Sherman and all these popular Jewish comedians. You have “Fiddler on the Roof” becoming one of Broadway’s biggest hits. That gives Brooks license to kind of jump in with both feet. In the 1950s, writing on “The Show of Shows” for Sid Caesar, the Jewishness was there but in a very kind of hidden way. Whereas, it’s very hard to watch the 2000 Year Old Man and say, well, that’s not a Jewish product.
What he also avoided — and here I will contrast him with the novelist Philip Roth — were accusations that he was “bad for the Jews.” Philip Roth was told that his negative portrayals of Jewish characters was embarrassing the Jews in front of the gentiles, but for some reason, I don’t remember anyone complaining even though the Max Bialystock character in “The Producers” can be fairly described as a conniving Jew. What made Brooks’ ethnic comedy more palatable to other Jews?
“The Producers” had a lot of pushback, but for a lot of other reasons.
I guess people had enough to deal with when he staged a musical comedy about Hitler.
Exactly. But the other part is that his biggest films are not as explicitly Jewish as something like Roth’s novel “Portnoy’s Complaint.” I actually think “Young Frankenstein” is one of the most Jewish movies that Mel Brooks ever made, but you’re not going to watch “Young Frankenstein” and say, wow, there are Jews all over the place here.
What about “Young Frankenstein,” a parody of classic horror movies, seems quintessentially Jewish?
The script, which is a lot of Gene Wilder and not just Mel Brooks, is really about someone saying, “You know, I don’t have this heritage — I’m trying to fit in with everybody else. My name is Dr. FRAHNK-en-shteen.” And then people say, “No, this is your heritage. You are Dr. Frankenstein.” [Wilder’s character realizes] “it is my heritage, and I’m embracing it. And I’m Frankenstein. And you may find that monstrous but that’s your business.” It’s about assimilation and embracing who you are.
And of course, Wilder as Dr. Frankenstein is unmistakably Jewish, even when he plays a cowboy in “Blazing Saddles.”
Right. Again, by the mid-’70s, you know, you have Gene Wilder and Elliot Gould and Dustin Hoffman, all Jews, in leading roles. “Young Frankenstein” ends up being a movie about coming home and embracing identity, which is playing itself out a lot in American Jewish culture in the 1970s.
I guess I have to go back and watch it for the 14th time with a different point of view.
That’s the fun part of my job.
You talk about what’s happening at the same time as Brooks’ huge success, which is, although he’s a little younger, the emergence of Woody Allen. You describe Brooks and Woody Allen as the voice of American Jewish comedy, but in very different ways. What are the major differences?
Gene Wilder, who worked with both of them, says that working with Allen is like lighting these tiny little candles, and with Brooks, you’re making big atom bombs. The critical knock against Brooks was that he was much more interested in the joke than the story. And I think with the exception maybe of “Young Frankenstein” there’s a lot of truth to that. The jokes are phenomenal, so that’s fine. Allen pretty quickly moved towards a much more narrative kind of film, and so began to be seen as this incredibly intellectual figure. In real life, Allen always claimed that he wasn’t nearly as intellectual as everyone thought, while Brooks had many more kinds of intellectual ambitions than the movie career that he had. There is a counterfactual world in which “The 12 Chairs,” his 1970 movie based on a novel by two Russian Jewish novelists and which nobody talks about, makes a ton of money.
Instead, it bombs, and he makes “Blazing Saddles,” which works out very well for everybody.
Although he does create Brooksfilms, and produces more narrative, serious-minded films like “The Elephant Man” and “84 Charing Cross Road.”
Right, and decides that if he puts his name on these as a director, they’re going to be rejected out of hand. There is a shelf of scholarship on Woody Allen, but if you look at who had influence on America in terms of box office and popularity, it’s Brooks winning in a walk.
You also mention Brooks and Steven Spielberg in the same sentence. Why do they belong together?
Partly because they had huge popular success in the mid-’70s. Brooks is a generation older, but they are hitting their cinematic success at the same time. And they are both movie fans.
Which comes out in their work — Brooks in his film parodies and Spielberg in the films that echo the films he loved as kid.
Until maybe his remake of “West Side Story,” Spielberg is not really a theater guy in the way that Brooks is, when success meant to make it on Broadway. When Brooks was winning all those Tonys in 2001 for the Broadway musical version of “The Producers,” it may have been almost more meaningful for his 5-year-old, or 7- or 8-year-old self than making his incredibly popular pictures.
You also write about Brooks being a small “c” conservative, a bit of a square. Which I think will surprise people who think about the fart jokes and the peepee jokes and all that stuff. And by square, I mean, kind of old showbizzy, even a little prudish sometimes.
I think that’s right. There’s a great moment that I quote at the end of the book where they are trying out the musical version of “The Producers,” and they want to put the word “f–k” in and Brooks is like, “I don’t know if we can do that on Broadway,” and Nathan Lane is like, “Have we met? You’re Mel Brooks!” He’s a 1950s guy.
Another place where this kind of conservatism comes in is when you compare him to other comedians of the 1950s and ’60s — the so-called “sick comics” like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl who were pushing the envelope in terms of subject matter and politics. He wasn’t part of that. He was part of Hollywood. He was trying to make it in network television.
There is an interview in that era when he complained that people who are writing for television are not “dangerous.” Meanwhile, he himself was writing for television. But I think it’s fair to say that “The Producers” was really something different. You didn’t have to be Jewish to be offended by “The Producers.” But as we were saying before, he is more of the loyal opposition, rather than sort of truly out there. He’s not making “Easy Rider.”
An exhibit space at the Museum of Broadway evokes the scenery from the Mel Brooks musical “The Producers.” (NYJW)
“The Producers” is part of Brooks’ lifelong gambit of mocking the Nazis, I think starting when he would sing anti-Hitler songs as a GI in Europe at the tail end of World War II. Later he would remake Jack Benny’s World War II-era anti-Nazi comedy, “To Be or Not to Be.” And then there is the quick “Hitler on Ice” gag in “History of the World, Part I.” Brooks always maintains that mocking Nazis is the ultimate revenge on them, while you note that Woody Allen in “Manhattan” makes almost the opposite argument: that the way to fight white supremacists is with bricks and baseball bats. Did you come down on one side or the other?
To add just a twinge of complication is the fact that Brooks actually fought Nazis, and also had a brother who was shot down in combat. So for me to sit in moral judgment on anybody who fought in World War II is not a place that I want to be. What’s interesting is that Brooks makes a lot of these statements over the course of a career in which Nazism is done, in the past, defeated. Tragically, the events of the last number of years made white supremacy and neo-Nazism a live question again. When “The Producers” was staged as a musical in the early 21st century, people could say, “Okay, Nazism’s time has passed.” It’s not clear to me that we would restage “The Producers” now as a musical on Broadway, when just last week you had actual neo-Nazis handing out their literature outside a Broadway show. It would certainly be a lot more laden than it was in 2001.
Time also caught up with Brooks in his depiction of LGBT characters. Gay characters are the punchlines in “The Producers” and “Blazing Saddles” in ways that have not aged well. But you also note how both movies are about two men who love each other, to the exclusion of women.
There’s an emotive component to him about these male relationships. Bialystok and Bloom [the protagonists in “The Producers”] is a kind of love story. One of the interesting things is that as it became comparatively more comfortable for gay men to live their truth in society and in Hollywood, there was an evolution. In that remake of “To Be or Not to Be,” there is a much more sympathetic gay character who’s not stereotypical.
What other aspects of Brooks’ Jewishness have we not touched upon? For instance, he’s not particularly interested in Judaism as a religion, and ritual and theology rarely come up in his films, even to be mocked.
It’s not something that he’s particularly interested in. To him, being Jewish is a voice and a language. From the beginning of his career the voice is there. What he’s saying in these accents is that this is Jewish history working through me. It is, admittedly, a very narrow slice of Jewish history.
The first- and second-generation children of Jewish immigrants growing up in Brooklyn neighborhoods that were overwhelmingly Jewish.
It was a Jewishness that was aspirational. It was intellectual. It was a musical Jewishness. It was not in the way we use this phrase now, but it was a cultural Jewishness. It was not a synagogue Jewishness or a theological Jewishness. But of course he is Jewish, deeply Jewish. He couldn’t be anything else. And so he didn’t, and thank God for that.
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Christian lawmakers want Trump to fast-track Jewish Canadians to the U.S. Tulsa says it’s ready.
Eitan Israelov, 34, was noshing on bagels and coffee at a co-working space in downtown Tulsa, when he met the city’s mayor, Monroe Nichols.
Israelov and his family — wife, Nicole, 31, and their two children, Liam, 10, and Melody, 8 — were among nearly 50 Canadian Jews who traveled to Oklahoma in February, part of an audacious recruitment trip to lure Jews worried about rising and often violent antisemitism north of the border, to leave Canada and move to the U.S.
Nichols greeted the group like a host welcoming guests into his home. “As a Black man in America,” Nichols said, “I can identify with some of the hate that you all have felt.” Then he used a word that landed differently in a room full of people who’d begun to wonder whether they still belonged where they came from.
“Tulsa,” he said, “is a refuge.”
For Israelov, the words spoke volumes. “For us,” he said, “it’s a piece of heaven.”
Six months later, it sounds prescient.
Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt sent a letter to Trump in July, pledging that “Oklahoma would proudly welcome” any Jewish families who “lawfully come to the United States in search of safety and opportunity.”
Now a group of Christian lawmakers are appealing to President Donald Trump to fast-track immigration for Jewish Canadians, touting Tulsa as a destination of choice. “These individuals and families should not be viewed merely as people fleeing hatred,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter last week. “They are prospective neighbors.”
Trump shared the letter in a social media post on Sunday, signaling his support, but did not commit his administration to anything specific — no order, no directive, no timeline. But for Canadian Jewish communities that have spent three years watching antisemitism intensify with little response from Ottawa, the presidential spotlight was still notable.
Since the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, Jewish schools, synagogues and businesses across Canada have faced harassment, vandalism, bomb threats and violence. B’nai Brith Canada counted 27 violent antisemitic incidents in just the first six months of 2026, nearly triple all of 2025.
In early August, an arsonist gutted Nöam, a kosher restaurant in Montreal. Even Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has acknowledged the scale. Jews, he’s noted, are roughly 1% of Canada’s population but the target of two-thirds of its religiously motivated hate crimes.
“Canada’s civic compact,” he said, “is failing Jewish Canadians.”
The letter Trump shared was drafted by Jason Rapert, founder of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, asking Trump to “establish an appropriate lawful immigration and humanitarian pathway for Jewish Canadians who are experiencing persecution.”
Fifty-four people signed it including sitting state legislators from across the country, as well as Sam Brownback, the former U.S. ambassador for international religious freedom.
The letter cited Tulsa as an example of where a “willingness already exists,” and which has spent the better part of a decade building exactly the kind of pipeline that letter is describing.
Tulsa Tomorrow is a Jewish community-run recruitment program that started in 2017. It flies prospective transplants in for a weekend of house tours, meet-and-greets and a pitch for why they should relocate. So far, 144 people have come through, and 113 have stayed.
Lately, more of them have been Canadian. Of 52 people on a trip in February, 41 came from Canada, and organizers expect the roughly 50 people signed up for another trip in October to skew just as heavily north of the border.
Two people helping with that pitch are Canadian transplants themselves. Joe Roberts, who leads Jewish Tulsa — the umbrella organization overseeing the city’s federation, JCC and Jewish museum — moved there in 2024 from Ontario. Michael Sachs, senior director of the Jewish Federation of Tulsa, moved from Vancouver last year.
“Oklahoma is a state where these people can feel openly Jewish, and feel that as a Jew they’re valued,” Sachs said.
The families waiting
Getting there is another story. Israelov works in IT for a mining company headquartered in Canada, and he said the company won’t let him work remotely from the U.S. — closing off the route that would let an employer sponsor his visa. Another route, a visa that would require Israelov to invest $800,000 in a U.S. business, is out of reach financially.
Fear compounds the financial obstacles. In January 2024, someone was caught on the Israelovs’ home security camera cutting an Israeli flag off their front porch and fleeing into the night.
Later, a neighbor told Israelov, “I heard you’re Jewish,” and that “your kind is in the wrong place.” He belonged in Israel, the neighbor said, “but not here.”
Not everyone watching this unfold from inside the Canadian Jewish community is rooting for the exodus. Jesse Brown, a Canadian Jewish journalist who has spent years documenting the country’s rising antisemitism, says he fears “the next Bondi Beach massacre,” the December 2025 Hanukkah attack in Australia that killed 15 people, “is going to take place in Canada.”
But watching fellow Jews plan their departure unsettles him in a different way. “There’s a sadness,” he said. “I’m not enthused or compelled by what I see as a re-shtetling.”
A murkier picture
It’s hard not to notice the echo of last year’s program resettling white South Africans as refugees, which critics called selective and its architects called a response to persecution. Roberts sees Canadian Jews less as refugees than as candidates for what he calls “a legal humanitarian pathway that’s expedited.”
The timing also invites skepticism. The NACL letter and Trump’s post came in the middle of a trade war between the U.S. and Canada. Fifty percent tariffs on roughly $20 billion of Canadian goods took effect Aug. 22. Canada has announced a matching retaliation.
Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, visited Ottawa in early August and said: “You need to do better,” citing 788 antisemitic hate crimes reported to Canadian police in 2025, up from 492 in 2021.
Carney’s office said new laws and funding show the government is responding. A spokeswoman said officials want “a country where our differences are honored and where Jewish Canadians can live visibly, fully, and joyfully in public life.”
But Rapert, who is based in Arkansas, sees things differently. When Trump shared the letter on Sunday, Rapert was leading a delegation of U.S. elected officials on a tour of Israel. They had just visited the Ghetto Fighters’ House Holocaust museum, which has on display the glass booth used in the trial of Adolf Eichmann for his role in the Holocaust.
Canada’s climate, he said, is “not unlike what you were beginning to hear in the early days of Germany, that led to government decisions that brought forward what we now all know is the Holocaust.”
Rapert’s letter is far from his final push. He hopes to persuade U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and U.S. Rep. Marlin Stutzman of Indiana to hold congressional hearings on the issue. And he’s working on setting up a meeting with Trump.
“My prayer is that Donald Trump paves the way for the people that want to come, to come,” he said. “But what would be even better is if Prime Minister Carney apologized and repented.”
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California lawmakers pass bills to address antisemitism, deem ‘Jewish’ an ethnicity, and protect religious observance
(JTA) — California is poised to become the first state to deem “Jewish” an ethnic and racial identity, after lawmakers gave final approval to the groundbreaking legislation on Monday.
The SB 1387 bill, which would expand the definition of ethnicity “to include Jewish identity” in demographic data collection, will now head to the governor’s desk. If the legislation becomes law, state agency forms that allow for voluntary disclosures of ethnicity or race would also need to offer a “Jewish” option.
Both the State Assembly and Senate granted final approval to the bill in the last few hours of California’s 2026 legislative session, which concludes at the end of the day on Monday. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, has until Sept. 30 to sign bills into laws or veto them.
The SB 1387 ethnicity legislation has been a priority among many California Jewish organizations, who argue that Jewish peoplehood should be connected to much more than just religion — and that the law should reflect that understanding.
This bill, which would take effect in 2030, would affect forms issued by agencies ranging from public schools to unemployment offices to prisons. Data collected would serve to inform research initiatives, identify disparities and guide policy decisions, while banning the disclosure of personal information, per the bill.
Joining SB 1387 in heading to the governor’s desk are five other bills that are relevant to the state’s 1.2 million Jews and that had the support of the Jewish California coalition.
On Sunday, the legislature passed AB 1853, a bill that bars threatening false and misleading information from California voter guides. Jewish California, which represents 43 organizations, praised the legislation’s advancement, stressing that 54 Jewish groups voiced their support for the bill within 48 hours of its introduction.
“Hate speech does not belong in a state-approved document paid by tax dollars,” David Bocarsly, CEO of Jewish California, said in a statement.
“AB 1853 boldly declares that our state’s official election documents can’t be used to spread conspiracy theories and bigotry,” added Bocarsly, whose coalition was not only a sponsor of this bill but also of SB 1387.
Also on Sunday, lawmakers approved AB 2664, the Safe Worship Zone Act, which would create a 100-foot zone around the entrances of houses of worship, where no one would be able to come within 8 feet of a congregant without their consent.
The bill, which received the backing of a wide-ranging interfaith coalition, is modeled after Colorado’s bubble zone law that offers patients protection around reproductive health clinics.
“The rise of antisemitism is undeniable, and our communities must be protected,” Democratic Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, the bill’s author, said in a statement.
“AB 2664 gives communities an important tool to push back against harassment and intimidation and protect the sanctity of our houses of worship,” Bauer-Kahan added.
Meanwhile, on Thursday, the legislature approved AB 395, which would require government agencies, K-12 schools and public universities to avoid scheduling major events or meetings on days “that members of the public would be unable to participate or be present due to the ritual observance of a religious, cultural, or ancestral holiday.”
Among the Jewish observances that would be codified on a list of such holidays are Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and the first and last two days of Passover.
“For too long and in too many communities, religious minorities and other people of faith have been asked to make difficult choices on the days that matter most to them,” Democratic Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel, the bill’s author, said in a statement.
“This legislation would help to prevent that injustice and ensure that Californians of all backgrounds can fully participate, particularly when important decisions are being made,” added Gabriel, who chairs the California Legislative Jewish Caucus.
Lawmakers on Thursday also approved another Gabriel bill, AB 1836, which seeks to close a gap in the current structure of the California State Nonprofit Security Grant Program. Because the program allocates security funds only for a nonprofit’s physical building, off-site events like menorah lightings on Chanukah were not eligible.
A fifth bill relevant to the Jewish community, AB 1763, is also heading to Newsom’s desk, after passing in the legislature last Tuesday. This bill would include religious holiday observance as a type of excused absence in schools, without requiring a written request from a parent or guardian.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Massachusetts progressive Markey, a longtime Israel critic, expected to rout centrist challenger
(JTA) — Massachusetts incumbent and Israel critic Sen. Ed Markey, 80, is expected to handily fend off the more moderate 47-year-old Rep. Seth Moulton on Tuesday, in the state’s Democratic Senate primary.
Although polls project that Markey, a progressive stalwart, will retain his seat, this race began as a neck-and-neck battle between the old and new guard. Yet in contrast to many recent primaries, the junior candidate in this case is the more centrist of the two.
If current numbers hold, Markey could go from leading Moulton by just single digits two months ago, to trouncing him by 30 percentage points. The incumbent recently “opened a large lead,” with the University of New Hampshire’s Bay State Poll projecting a 63% to 28% victory. That’s a dramatic shift from June, when the survey estimated a 41% to 35% margin. Since then, according to Bay State, Moulton lost moderate support while Markey consolidated socialist and progressive backing.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst offered similar predictions, placing Markey far ahead of his competitor, 60% to 32%. Emerson College Polling, meanwhile, showed a comparable lead for Markey, with the incumbent at 60% and Moulton at 33%.
“At the end of the day, one of the reasons for Moulton’s flame-out is that he had no case to make other than ‘I’m younger than Ed Markey,’” Jeff Robbins, a Boston-based attorney and former Senate investigative counsel, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“He wasn’t able to obscure that very well,” added Robbins, who also served as delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission under President Bill Clinton. He also began organizing rallies in support of Israel in 2012, during his time serving as chairman of the New England Board of the Anti-Defamation League.
Markey began serving in the U.S. House of Representatives 50 years ago, staying in that role until he was elected to the Senate in 2013. During his time in the House, he was a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and in the Senate, he has voted for multiple resolutions aimed at cutting military aid and munitions sales to Israel.
Moulton, meanwhile, was born two years after Markey arrived on Capitol Hill. He has been serving in the U.S. House since 2015 and has been critical of both the Democratic socialist agenda and the aging establishment, instead calling for “new energy, new ideas and leaders willing to put people over politics.”
He established the Serve America PAC in 2017 to support the campaigns of “military veterans, other service-driven candidates and next generation leaders” in the 2020 election cycle. The Boston Globe recently threw its support behind Moulton, calling for “new vision and vigor” in “an aging, ailing and deeply unpopular Democratic Party.”
Yet a recent New York Times piece described Moulton as a “rebel without a cause,” who has “tried to drift where he thinks the political winds are blowing.” One such drift relates to his breakup with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee last October, when he announced that he would be “returning AIPAC donations and refusing to accept any donations or support from them.”
“In recent years AIPAC has aligned itself too closely with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government,” Moulton said. “I’m a friend of Israel, but not of its current government.”
Track AIPAC, a group that documents political spending by pro-Israel lobbies, declared in response that “returning AIPAC’s blood money is better late than never.” The group demanded that Moulton call the war in Gaza a genocide and “stop writing blank checks” to Israel’s “tyrannical regime.”
Citing Federal Election Commission records, Track AIPAC found that pro-Israel PACs have spent about $101,500 on Moulton over his career — a relatively modest amount for a six-term congressman..
“It is clearly the safe thing to do, if you are running for a nomination in the Democratic Party, to aggressively distance yourself from Israel,” said Robbins.
He described the situation as “reflective of the reality that we have seen play out in spades over the last year,” in which Democratic candidates are “running for the hills about AIPAC and treating it as a boogeyman.”
Not only was Moulton’s decision insufficient to recruit AIPAC detractors to his campaign, but it also rattled many members of the Jewish community.
Political scientist Samuel Abrams at the time described the decision as “the moment when an ambitious, mainstream Democrat concluded that distancing himself from the organized Jewish community is a political asset, not a liability.”
“In today’s Democratic ecosystem, the act of rejecting traditional Jewish institutions has become a badge of progressive credibility,” wrote Abrams, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right public policy think tank.
David Frum, a writer for The Atlantic and former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, suggested that Moulton was “opening the door *just a little* to anti-Jewish feeling,” In other words, Moulton would seek to win his primary by borrowing some “Mamdani energy,” Frum added, referring to the popular progressive mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani.
“If you want to have a prayer of being elected in a Democratic primary in this country, you had better be able to say, ‘I don’t take money from AIPAC. In fact, I never heard of it before,’” Robbins said.
But he stressed Moulton’s 30-point lag in the polls has nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with his opponent’s political shrewdness and refusal to allow anyone “to run to the left of him.”
Markey is not new to staving off a younger, center-left candidate. In 2020, at 74, he defeated the then-39-year-old Rep. Joe Kennedy III — marking the first loss for a Kennedy in a Massachusetts election, according to the Cook Political Report.
If the current polls prove accurate, Tuesday’s race could “mirror Markey’s successful ‘peak-late’ approach to winning in 2020,” Spencer Kimball, executive director of Emerson College Polling, said in a statement. “Younger voters appear more likely than older voters to support Markey, suggesting the campaign did not create the generational divide Moulton may have anticipated.”
As for Moulton’s relationship toward American Jews, he has historically denounced hate crimes and voted for resolutions on antisemitism. He also condemned Claudine Gay, former president of his alma mater, Harvard University, when she refused to say that calling for the genocide of Jews would violate the institution’s code of conduct.
Prior to his rejection of AIPAC money, Moulton’s stance on Israel was fairly balanced, with consistent messages on Israel’s right to defend itself, alongside criticisms of the country’s military operations in Gaza and calls for expansions of humanitarian aid.
Moulton’s objections have paled in comparison to Markey’s stance, which has ranged from demanding an end to arms sales to accusing the country of committing war crimes.
Markey did condemn Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel as terrorism, continuing to deplore the “dark day” as “heinous” in a statement two years later. But in that same statement, he also stressed that “more than 65,000 Palestinians have lost their lives in the brutality of the war in Gaza” and called “to stop the bloodshed.”
However, the senator didn’t always disapprove of Israel.
“For a long time he was right there with the Jewish community,” Barry Shrage, a professor of practice at Brandeis University and the longtime former president of the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston, told JTA.
In fact, Shrage and Robbins recalled in a recent Boston Herald column that during a November 2012 Hamas-Israel conflict, Markey asked them to help him organize a pro-Israel rally. The event, they wrote, was “full of appreciation for the fundamental fact that Israel is surrounded by non-state and state actors committed to annihilating it.”
But less than two years later, the tides had turned. After winning a 2013 special election to serve out the remainder of John Kerry’s Senate term, Markey then faced a general election in 2014 for a full Senate term. That summer, Hamas rockets rained down on Israel again, and the military responded to the attacks, as it did in November 2012.
Robbins said that when he and his colleagues decided to organize another rally in support of Israel at the time, he reached out to Markey.
“He ducks. He dodges. He doesn’t return the phone calls. He doesn’t return the emails,” Robbins recalled. “He had calculated correctly that it was not in his interest to have anything to do with Israel anymore.”
Shrage echoed these sentiments, observing that “it turned out to be at least from a political standpoint, if not from a moral standpoint, the right path.”
“It’s not a surprise that Markey is separating himself from Israel in every way that he can,” he added.
Looking toward the future, Shrage said that he had some hope for a turnaround on Israel in the Democratic party if, perhaps, a recent progressive primary winner lost against a Republican in the general election. Some possible examples could include Senate candidates Angie Nixon in Florida or Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan.
While Robbins agreed that a loss for El-Sayed could give a slight bump to Democratic supporters of Israel, he was pessimistic about the long-term ability to reverse the party’s increasing hostility toward the Jewish state.
“The only conceivable trigger for a walking back of this trend would be some massacre of Israelis so terrible that even the left would have to concede that Israel had the right to do what it did,” Robbins said.
“The problem with that is, it’s already occurred,” he added.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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