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American Jews created historic summer camps. Or did summer camps create American Jews?
(JTA) — Among Sandra Fox’s most memorable finds during her years mining American archives for materials about Jewish summer camps was a series of letters about the hours before lights-out.
The letters were by counselors who were documenting an unusual window in the day when they stopped supervising campers, leaving the teens instead to their own devices, which sometimes included romance and sexual exploration.
“It was each division talking about how they dealt with that free time before bed in ‘age-appropriate ways,’” Fox recalled about the letters written by counselors at Camp Ramah in Wisconsin, the original iteration of the Conservative movement’s network of summer camps.
“I’ve spoken to Christian people who work at Christian camps and have researched Christian camps. There is no free time before bed,” Fox told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “That’s not a thing if you don’t want kids to hook up. So it was just amazing to find these documents of Camp Ramah leaders really having the conversation explicitly. Most of the romance and sexuality stuff is implicit in the archives.”
The letters are quoted extensively in Fox’s new book, “The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America.” Fox, who earned a PhD in history from New York University in 2018 and now teaches and directs the Archive of the American Jewish Left there, tells the story of American Judaism’s most immersive laboratory for constructing identity and contesting values.
Next week, Fox is launching the book with an event at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn. (Tickets for the Feb. 23 event are available here.) Attendees will be able to tour adult versions of some of the most durable elements of Jewish summer camps, from Israeli dance to Yiddish and Hebrew instruction to Color Wars to Tisha B’Av, the mournful holiday that always falls over the summer.
“I never considered doing a normal book party,” Fox said. “It was always really obvious to me that a book about experiential Jewish education and role play should be celebrated and launched out into the world through experiential education and role play.”
Sandra Fox’s 2023 book “The Jews of Summer,” looks at the history of American Jewish summer camps. (Courtesy of Fox)
We spoke to Fox about her party plans, how Jewish summer camps have changed over time and how they’ve stayed the same, and the cultural history of that before-bed free time.
This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. We’ll be continuing the conversation in a virtual chat through the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research Feb. 27 at 1 p.m.; register here.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Given how much Jews like to talk about camp, were you surprised that this book hadn’t already been written?
Sandra Fox: There’s been a lot of fruitful research on the history of various camps, but it’s usually been focused on one camping movement or one camp type. So there are articles about Zionist camps. There are certainly articles out there about the Ramah camps. A lot of camps have produced books — either their alumni associations or a scholar who went to let’s say, Reform movement camps have created essay collections about those camps. And there are also books about Habonim and other Zionist youth movements.
I don’t really know why this is the first stab at this kind of cross-comparison. It might be that people didn’t think there would be so much to compare. I think the overwhelming feeling I get from readers so far, people who preordered and gotten their books early, is that they’re very surprised to hear how similar these camps are. So perhaps it’s that scholars weren’t thinking about Jewish summer camps that came from such diverse standpoints as having something enough in common to write about them all at once.
Also distance from the time period really helps. You can write a book about — and people do write a book about — the ’60s and ’70s and have been for decades, but there’s a certain amount of distance from the period that has allowed me to do this, I think, and maybe it also helps that I’m generationally removed. A lot of the scholars who’ve worked on camps in the postwar period went to camps in the postwar period. It makes a lot of sense that it would be harder to write this sort of sweeping thing perhaps. The fact that I’m a millennial meant that I could write about the postwar period — and also write kind of an epilogue-style chapter that catches us up to the present.
What’s clear is that there’s something amazing about studying summer camp, a completely immersive 24/7 experience that parents send children away for. There’s no better setting for thinking about how adults project their anxieties and desires about the future onto children. There’s also no place better to think about power dynamics and age and generational tension.
I was definitely struck by the “sameyness” of Jewish camps in your accounting. What do you think we can learn from that, either about camps or about us as Jews?
I do want to say that while there’s a lot of sameyness, whenever you do a comparative study, there’s a risk of kind of collapsing all these things and making them seem too similar. What I’m trying to convey is that the camp leaders from a variety of movements took the basic structure of the summer camp as we know it — its daily schedule, its environment, its activities — and it did look similar from camp to camp, at least on that surface level.
If you look at the daily schedules in comparison, they might have a lot of the same features but they’ll be called slightly different things depending on if the camp leans more heavily towards Hebrew, or Yiddish, or English. But the content within those schedules would be rather different. It’s more that the skeletal structure of camp life has a lot of similarities across the board and then the details within each section of the day or the month had a lot of differences.
But I think what it says is that in the postwar period, the anxieties that Jewish leaders had about the future of Judaism are really, really similar and the solution that they found within the summer camp, they were pretty unanimous about. They just then took the model and inserted within it their particular nationalistic, linguistic or religious perspectives. So I think more so than saying anything about American Jewry, it shows kind of how flexible camping is. And that’s not just the Jewish story. Lots of different Americans have embraced summer camping in different ways.
So many people who have gone to camp have a fixed memory of what camp is like, where it’s caught in time, but you argue that camps have actually undergone lots of change. What are the most striking changes you documented, perhaps ones that might have been hard for even insiders to discern as they happened?
First of all, the Israel-centeredness of American Jewish education as we know it today didn’t happen overnight in 1948, for instance. It was a slower process, beyond the Zionist movements where that was already going on, for decades before 1948. Ramah and the Reform camps for instance took their time towards getting to the heavily Zionist-imbued curricula that we know.
There was considerable confusion and ambivalence at first about what to do with Israel: whether to raise an Israeli flag, not because they were anti-Zionist, but because American Jews had been thinking about proving their loyalty to America for many generations. There were some sources that would talk about — what kind of right do American Jews have to raise the Israeli flag when they’re not Israeli? So that kind of Israel-centeredness that is really a feature of camp life today was a slower process than we might think.
It fit camp life really well because broader American camps used Native American symbols, in some ways that are problematic today, to create what we know of as an iconography of camp life. So for Jews, Israel and its iconography, or Palestine and iconography before ’48, provided an alternative set of options that were read as Jewish, but it still took some time to get to where we are now in terms of the Israel focus.
One of the reasons I place emphasis on the Yiddish summer camps is to show that in the early 20th century and the mid-20th century there was more ideological diversity in the Jewish camping sphere, including various forms of Yiddishist groups and socialist groups and communist groups that operated summer camps. Most of them have closed, and their decline is obviously a change that tells a story of how American Jewry changed over the course of the postwar period. Their legacy is important, too: I have made the argument that these camps in a lot of ways modeled the idea of Yiddish as having a future in America.
What about hookup culture? Contemporary discourse about Jewish camps have focused on sex and sexuality there. What did you observe about this in the archives?
I think people think of the hookup culture of Jewish camps today and certainly in my time in the ’90s and 2000s as a permanent feature, and in some ways I found through my research and oral history interviews that that was the case, but it was really interesting to zoom out a little bit and think about how Jewish summer camps changed in terms of sexual romantic culture, in relationship to how America changed with the sexual revolution and the youth culture.
It’s not it’s not useful to think about Jewish hookup culture in a vacuum. It’s happening within America more broadly. And so of course, it’s changed dramatically over time. And one of the things I learned that was so fascinating is that Jewish summer camps were actually their leaders were less concerned in a lot of ways about sexuality at camp in the ’40s and ’50s, than they were in the late ’60s and ’70s. Because earlier premarital sex was pretty rare, at least in the teenage years, so they were not that concerned about what happened after lights out because they kind of assumed whatever was going on was fairly innocent.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, that’s when camps have to actually think about how to balance allowance and control. They want to allow campers to have these relationships, to have their first sexual experiences, and part of that is related to rising rates of intermarriage and wanting to encourage love between Jews, but they also want to control it because there’s a broader societal moment in which the sexuality of teenagers is problematized and their and their sexual culture is more public.
There’s been a real wave of sustained criticism by former campers about the cultures that they experienced, arguing that the camps created an inappropriately sexualized and unsafe space. There’s been a lot of reaction to that and the broader #MeToo moment. I’m curious about what you can speculate about a future where that space is cleaned up, based on your historical research — what is gained and what, potentially, could be lost?
Without being involved in camping today — and I want to really make that disclaimer because I know a lot of change is happening and lot of organizations are involved to talk about this issue better, to train camps and camp leaders and their counselors to not create a pressured environment for camper — I think what the history shows is that this hookup culture did not come about out of nowhere. It was partly related to the broader changes in America and the sexual revolution.
But it was also partly created because camps really needed to have campers’ buy-in, in order to be “successful.” A huge argument of my book is that we think about the power of camps as if camp directors have campers as, like, puppets on strings, and that what they do is what happens in camp life. But actually, campers have changed the everyday texture of life at camp over the course of the decades in so many different ways by resisting various ideas or just not being interested.
So hookup culture is also part of making campers feel like they have freedom at camp and that’s essential. That’s not a side project — that is essential to their ability to get campers to come back. It’s a financial need, and it’s an ideological need. If you make campers feel like they have freedom, then they will feel like they freely took on the ideologies your camp is promoting in a really natural way.
The last part of it is rising rates of intermarriage. As rates of intermarriage rose in the second half of the 20th century, there’s no doubt in my mind from doing the research that the preexisting culture around sexuality at camp and romance at camp got turbo-boosted [to facilitate relationships that could potentially lead to marriage between two Jews]. At that point, the allowance and control that camp leaders were trying to create for many decades leans maybe more heavily towards allowance.
There are positives to camp environments being a place where campers can explore their sexualities. There’s definitely a lot of conversation about the negative effects and those are all very, very real. I know people who went through horrible things at a camp and I also know people who experienced it as a very sex-positive atmosphere. I know people in my age range who were able to discover that they were gay or lesbian at camp in safety in comparison to home, so it’s not black and white at all. I hope that my chapter on romance and sexuality can maybe add some historical nuance to the conversation and give people a sense of how this actually happened. Because it happened for a whole bunch of reasons.
I think there’s a consensus view that camp is one of the most “successful” things the Jews do. But it’s hard to see where lessons from camp or camp culture are being imported to the rest of Jewish life. I’m curious what you see as kind of the lessons that Jewish institutions or Jewish communities have taken from camp — or have they not done that?
Every single public engagement I do about my work has boiled down to the question of, well, does it work? Does camp work? Is it successful? And that’s been a question that a lot of social scientists have been interested in. I don’t want to oversimplify that research, but a lot of the ways that they’ve measured success have been things that are not necessarily a given to all Jews as obviously the right way to be a Jew. So, for instance, in the ’90s and early 2000s, at the very least, a lot of research was about how, you know, “XYZ” camp and youth movement were successfully curbing intermarriage. A lot of them also asked campers and former campers how they feel about Israel, and it’s always if they are supportive of Israel in very normative ways, right, giving money visiting, supporting Israel or lobbying for its behalf — then camps have been successful.
I’m not interested in whether camps were successful by those metrics. I’m interested in how we got to the idea that camp should be successful in those ways in the first place. How did we get to those kinds of normative assumptions of like, this is a good Jew; a good Jew marries a Jew; a good Jew supports Israel, no matter what. So what I wanted to do is zoom out from that question of success and show how camp actually functions.
And then the question of “does it work” is really up to the reader. To people who believe that curbing intermarriage is the most important thing, then camps have been somewhat successful in the sense that people who go to these heavily educational camps are less likely to marry out of the faith.
But I am more interested in what actually happened at camp. And in terms of their legacies, I wanted to show how they changed various aspects of American Jewish life, and religion and politics. So I was really able to find how camping was essential in making kind of an Israel-centered Jewish education the norm. I was also able to draw a line between these Yiddish camps over the ’60s and ’70s that closed in the ’80s and contemporary Yiddish. The question of success is a real tricky and political one in a way that a lot of people have not talked about.
And is camp also fun? Because you’re creating a camp experience for your book launch next week.
Camp is fun — for a lot of people. Camp was not fun for everyone. And so I do want to play with that ambivalence at the party, and acknowledge that and also acknowledge that some people loved camp when they were younger and have mixed feelings about it now.
The party is not really a celebration of Jewish summer camp. People will be drinking and having fun and dancing — but I want them to be thinking while also about what is going on and why. How is Tisha B’Av [the fast day that commemorates the destruction of the ancient Jewish temple in Jerusalem that falls at the height of summer] commemorated at camp, for example?
Or what songs are we singing and what do they mean? I think a lot of people when they’re little kids, they learn songs in these Jewish summer camps that they can’t understand and later they maybe learn Hebrew and go, whoa, we were singing what?! My example from Zionist summer camp is singing “Ein Li Eretz Acheret,” or “I Have No Other Country.” We were in America and we obviously have another country! I don’t think anyone in my youth movement actually believes the words “Ein Li Eretz Acheret” because we live in America and people tend to kind of like living in America and most of them do not move to Israel.
So at the party we’ll be working through the fun of it, and at the same time the confusion of it and the ambivalence of it. I want it to be fun, and I also want it to be something that causes people to think.
—
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Ceasefire and political pressure test U.S.-Israel Iran war pact
Israel is now in a precarious position following President Donald Trump’s sudden declaration of a ceasefire in the Iran war, say experts on security and the Middle East.
On Tuesday evening, President Trump announced in a Truth Social post that he would declare a two-week pause to the war that began on February 28, just an hour and a half before his ultimatum to Iran was set to expire. He had demanded that Tehran reopen the Strait of Hormuz — which had been closed for weeks, choking global energy markets — or face a catastrophic military assault, warning that “a whole civilization will die tonight.”
The Pakistani Prime Minister, who had mediated between the U.S. and Iran, announced that the truce was “effective immediately” and would apply not only to the U.S. and Iran, but also to “their allies” — namely Israel and Lebanon, both of which had been involved in recent exchanges of fire.
But Israel had other ideas. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — while stating that the U.S. had coordinated with Israel before agreeing to the ceasefire — disputed the Pakistani claim that the ceasefire included Lebanon. Israel has continued to strike its northern neighbor hard in the wake of the announcement.
Netanyahu maintains the U.S. had assured him it would continue to press on issues critical to Israeli security — namely seeking to ensure that “Iran no longer poses a nuclear, missile and terror threat to America, Israel, Iran’s Arab neighbors and the world.” So far, Iran has resisted such demands.
Despite the ceasefire announcement, Iran struck Israel and Gulf countries well into the evening, and Israel, too, carried out several strikes in the immediate aftermath of the announcement.
Split support
The ceasefire has underscored growing differences between Washington and Jerusalem over both the conduct and goals of the war.
According to Jonathan Panikoff, the director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council and a former U.S. intelligence official, Israeli and U.S. objectives were misaligned from the outset. Israel sought not only to degrade Iran’s military capabilities but also to pursue regime change.
For the U.S., “it was always less clear … the regime change question was always much more up in the air, and even on the nuclear program, you haven’t seen nearly as much effort against it in the same way as obviously happened during June,” said Panikoff, referring to the 12-Day-War during which the U.S. targeting Iranian nuclear infrastructure with unprecedented force.
Panikoff also said that coordination between Israel and the U.S. on the ceasefire agreement itself was somewhat dubious. “The U.S. almost certainly talked to Israel about the potential ceasefire, but it’s unlikely that Israel played a meaningful role in the decision,” said Panikoff, who believes Israel would have preferred to continue the war to “get through the remainder of the target list.”
Misaligned public opinion in the two countries regarding the war is likely driving the divergence. While the majority of Americans do not support the war, with 61% saying they do not approve of Trump’s handling of the conflict, Israeli support has remained broad across the political spectrum, even amid sustained missile attacks. For Israelis, confronting Iran is viewed as existential. “Iran is a fundamental thing. On the American side, it just is not the same threat,” Panikoff said.
According to Dana Stroul, the Director of Research at the Washington Institute and a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East in the Pentagon, Israel’s actions in the immediate aftermath of the ceasefire reflect that gap. She noted that Israel carried out additional strikes in Iran, “which indicates that they still had more targets on their strike list that they wanted to work through, and they were willing to risk, for a brief moment in time, not complying with the ceasefire to do more.”
Stroul said the U.S.-Iran peace talks scheduled to take place on Friday in Islamabad have exposed further tensions. Disputes over whether Israeli operations in Lebanon should halt have already complicated talks between Washington and Tehran. “The Iranians are saying, ‘if Israel doesn’t stop in Lebanon, we won’t go to Islamabad.’”
As a result, she said, “the issue of Israeli behavior and Israeli military action will become a hinge of whether these negotiations proceed on the ceasefire.”
“Within less than 24 hours, the debate shifted from whether or not the parameters for the talks on Friday in Islamabad are acceptable for U.S. national security interests, to where Israel is within this framework,” said Stroul.
Stroul said that this could also create a moment of “peak vulnerability for Netanyahu,” who tied his political future to his alignment with Trump.
Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid has already taken a swing at Netanyahu in a post on X, stating: “Netanyahu led us to a strategic collapse. There was here a disgraceful combination of arrogance, irresponsibility, negligent staff work, lies sold to the Americans that damaged the trust between the countries. A military success that turned into a diplomatic disaster.”
He added, “Israel had no influence whatsoever on the agreement signed tonight between the United States and Iran. Netanyahu turned us into a protectorate state that receives instructions over the phone on matters concerning the core of our national security.”
Finger-pointing at Israel
The ceasefire coincided with revelations published in the New York Times on internal White House deliberations as Trump weighed military intervention in Iran earlier this year. According to the Times, Netanyahu used a private meeting with Trump and key U.S. officials at White House to present a plan outlining how the U.S. and Israel could work together to bring down the Islamic Republic, including a montage featuring potential alternative leaders for Iran.
While the presentation appeared to have impressed Trump, the report indicates that the President did not completely buy Netanyahu’s argument that regime change was a viable outcome. Instead, he relied on U.S. intelligence assessments that concluded the U.S. had the capacity to decapitate Iran’s leadership and dismantle its military capabilities, but that hopes for regime change were “detached from reality.”
Based on those assessments, Trump moved forward with a strategy focused on more limited and easily achievable objectives, though working in lockstep with Israel.
The report is unlikely to quell criticism from those who argue that Israel pushed the U.S. toward confrontation with Iran at the expense of U.S. interests.
Panikoff warned of potentially broad political consequences for the longtime allies depending on the outcome of the peace talks and any future fighting. “If this war ends with Iran being in a stronger strategic position regionally.… I think you’re going to get a lot of Republicans, especially in the MAGA wing of the Republican Party, who are going to start to question how this relationship has gone forth. When you combine that with where the Democratic Party is and with Democratic bases right now, I think it portends some real future challenges for the U.S.-Israel relationship.”
The post Ceasefire and political pressure test U.S.-Israel Iran war pact appeared first on The Forward.
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Why I interviewed Mahmoud Khalil
Since he was targeted for deportation by the Trump administration, Mahmoud Khalil has become both a celebrity among those who supported the campus protests against Israel and a villain for Jews who thought the demonstrations fueled antisemitism and sought Israel’s violent destruction.
While Khalil had addressed general allegations that the protests had created a hostile climate on campus in previous interviews — arguing that they may have made students uncomfortable but not unsafe — he had not spoken in detail about some of the most pressing questions for Jews who may have been alarmed by his arrest but were unsure about his actual beliefs.
What did a “free Palestine” — a core demand of the protesters — mean to Khalil?
What did he think about Oct. 7 and Hamas?
And how did he think the protest movement should relate to Jews who don’t share their views?
When a representative for Khalil reached out last month asking whether I wanted to interview him, it presented an opportunity to present his answers to these questions to the Forward’s audience.
I had no illusion that Khalil was going to assuage the concerns of every reader who believe he is antisemitic or otherwise misguided, but I saw my job as trying to understand where he was situated within a protest movement that is gaining political power and influence but remains more fractious than many people outside the movement are aware.
These divisions include divergent views over what the acceptable forms of Palestinian resistance are, what the ultimate objective of anti-Zionism should be, and how the movement should treat Americans — and especially American Jews — who disagree with it.
I know that such distinctions may not matter for those who think that any failure to recognize Israel’s right to maintain a Jewish majority, or opposition to Zionism, period, crosses a red line.
But even those who find anti-Zionism unacceptable may appreciate the opportunity to grapple with how and why a growing number of Americans, including Jews, are turning away from support for Israel in the wake of the wars in Gaza and now Iran. The question of who is going to harness that political sentiment and what they plan to do with it is becoming more important.
I wanted to know where Khalil stood on looming questions.
***
His answers, corroborated through conversations with others who knew and worked with him during the encampments at Columbia as well as his past public statements, were revealing.
Overall, they situated Khalil as a leader of the more conciliatory wing of the protest movement when it came to how it should engage with Israel’s supporters. He has read about and seriously engaged with liberal Zionism, and expressed sympathy for Jews who support Israel; he said Hamas was not a true representative of the Palestinian people, and that it was unacceptable for them to target and kidnap Israeli civilians; and he said that Israeli Jews should remain in a “free Palestine” with full rights.
He supported the statement from protest leaders that condemned a Columbia student who had said “Zionists don’t have a right to live,” opposed the ultimately violent takeover of Hamilton Hall and avoided the slogan “globalize the intifada.”
But his answers also underscored the gulf between even the more moderate protesters and the position of many liberal American Jews, who believe Israel committed war crimes or genocide in Gaza but remain horrified by the atrocities committed by Hamas on Oct. 7 and think that a two-state solution is the only way to preserve Jewish safety while respecting Palestinian rights.
Khalil wanted to assuage Jewish fears that he believed were at least partly responsible for the appeal of Zionism, and yet he did not acknowledge the full extent of violence on Oct. 7 — that Palestinian militants intentionally killed Israeli civilians — which perfectly epitomized a major source of these fears.
Whatever you may think of Khalil or his political views, I’m glad that the Forward can serve as a forum for people both inside and outside the Jewish community to speak with American Jews and I hope you’re able to learn something about Khalil and the movement he helped lead from our conversation.
The post Why I interviewed Mahmoud Khalil appeared first on The Forward.
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In rallies taking on Israel, a defiant Hasan Piker boosts Michigan Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed
(JTA) — ANN ARBOR, Michigan — Outside, in a line that stretched around the block, the hundreds of people who turned out for Abdul el-Sayed’s campaign rally with Hasan Piker gave a range of reasons for showing up.
Some said they liked el-Sayed’s message of Medicare for All, a key plank of the former county health executive’s bid for an open Senate seat. Some were furious about the war in Iran, which the candidate has angrily denounced.
Others just liked the guy. “He’s a really great speaker and a really passionate person,” Natalie Gould, a master’s candidate in public health who had worked with el-Sayed in Detroit, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Inside, though, one issue made the crowd roar louder than any other: any time a speaker, from el-Sayed to Piker to the newly elected student body president, accused Israel of genocide. The progressive movement in which Piker has styled himself a kingmaker, one that is ardently pro-Palestinian while largely dismissive of any claims of antisemitism, was coalescing.
“In the beginning it was a lot lonelier when we spoke out. They used the same exact heinous smear: They said, ‘You’re antisemitic,’” Piker told the crowd. “And back then I felt a lot lonelier. But I don’t feel lonely anymore.”
Piker, the leftist Twitch streamer with millions of followers, was the evening’s biggest draw — and its biggest lightning rod. After el-Sayed announced the two would hold a pair of campaign stops together Tuesday, the streamer’s past clips and comments about Jews and Israel led numerous Jewish leaders and both of el-Sayed’s opponents to denounce the events. Some compared Piker to Nick Fuentes, the openly antisemitic far-right streamer who has divided Republicans. Leading Democrats called for the party to distance itself from Piker altogether.
Hasan Piker looks on as U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed delivers a stump speech in Ann Arbor, Michigan, April 7, 2026. Piker, a popular Twitch streamer accused of antisemitism, prompted controversy for campaigning with El-Sayed. (Andrew Lapin/JTA)
Pushback continued until just before the events started. An hour before the first rally, at Michigan State University, that school’s president and governing board issued a joint statement affirming their campus free speech principles while also condemning antisemitism. The school’s Hillel chapter had already called Piker a “known antisemite,” expressing concern about his appearance.
At the next stop at the University of Michigan, el-Sayed told the crowd that the campus pro-Israel club Students Supporting Israel had planned to protest the event. But the group wasn’t visible outside the building, and the club’s Instagram page announced that its “March Against Extremism” had been “postponed,” which the group attributed to “extenuating circumstances” that it did not explain.
El-Sayed leaned into the energy, embracing Piker onstage and mocking the negative attention the rally had received. The rally overlapped with President Donald Trump’s deadline for Iran to make concessions or “a whole civilization will die,” which led to a temporary ceasefire in the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.
“Apparently, the most important thing happening on Twitter was whether or not we were going to campaign with Hasan,” he told the crowd. “Somehow Fox News found it fit to cover this rally six f–king times and not talk about the fact the president wants to commit a genocide in Iran.”
Also leaning in were the night’s other speakers, who were all being showcased on Piker’s livestream — where, during downtime in-between speeches, he bemoaned what he described as a bad-faith campaign to paint him as antisemitic. (He also said he’d been hoping to eat at Zingerman’s, a famous Jewish-style gourmet deli in Ann Arbor.)
“I told Piker just now, I was like, ‘You’re never going to be canceled up in Michigan,’” Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the House’s fiercest critic of Israel, said during her own stump speech.
Rep. Summer Lee, of Pennsylvania, also delivered a speech, and Rep. Debbie Dingell, of Michigan, attended but did not speak.
Candidates for local office also stood next to Piker, including Amir Makled, a candidate for the university’s Board of Regents who was the legal defense for the school’s student pro-Palestinian encampment movement.
The crowd was young and diverse in age and race. While Piker received cheers when he shouted out his fans, some of the attendees told JTA they were more mixed on him, while others had little familiarity with his streams. But they all agreed he had juiced El-Sayed’s campaign.
“I mean, there’s tons of people here,” Ann Arbor resident Joey Ryan said while queuing up for the over-capacity rally outside, gesturing behind him. “I remember the Joe Biden Michigan stuff, and it was not like this. I remember the Bernie Sanders rally in early 2020, and it was more like this.”
Ryan said that Piker, like other streamers, operated in the “attention economy” space, where “saying inflammatory things sometimes can get you attention.” But, he said, “I also think it’s been blown completely out of proportion when you have the president of the United States calling Iranians non-human, as an example, to bomb them, and that includes the synagogue that was blown up in Iran today. Like, there are Jews in Iran as well. Is that not antisemitism?”
“Some of the stuff he says is kind of crazy. I’m not going to lie, there’s some stuff he said that I disagree with,” another attendee, a current University of Michigan student who declined to give her name, said of Piker. Content creators, the student said, can “get out over their skis.”
If anything, Piker and el-Sayed became more honed in on Israel as the day went on. At their first East Lansing stop, both made only a handful of comments about Israel and AIPAC. By the time they reached Ann Arbor that evening, the headliners had amped up their broadsides, with Piker referencing a new Pew Research Center study showing that 84% of Democrats under 49 have a somewhat or very unfavorable view of Israel.
“There’s only a handful of Democrats that are actually outspoken on this atrocity, outspoken on the relationship that we have with a foreign country that we simply always have to send unlimited billions of dollars to — a country that has health care, mind you,” Piker said. “You do not, but Israel has free health care.” The crowd booed at this line.
(L-r) U.S. Rep. Summer Lee, Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, and Twitch streamer Hasan Piker pose during a rally for El-Sayed, April 7, 2026. (Andrew Lapin/JTA)
As another rallying cry, he told them, “When you feel really sad, when you feel really angry, remind yourself of the worst fascist that you know. It could be Donald Trump, it could be Rabbi Shmuley. They’re going to be very excited if you stop fighting.” (Piker later told JTA that he was referring to Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, a pro-Israel Twitter gadfly who Piker said was “pro-genocide.”)
The candidate, too, amped up his criticisms of AIPAC in particular. The pro-Israel lobby, which has poured millions of dollars into congressional elections, is facing a resolution of opposition from the Democratic National Committee this week.
“AIPAC tells us that the number one goal of our foreign policy is to align with a foreign government,” el-Sayed said, to boos. “You know, when I talk about AIPAC, everybody says, ‘Well, it’s because you’re Arab Muslim.’ No it’s not. It’s because I’m f–king from Michigan, and I want my tax dollars back in Michigan.”
He also joked that AIPAC ads against him might finally give him something he’s dreamed about. “The one thing you’re supposed to have, as an American Muslim, is a nice beard,” he said. “And I was never gifted with that. But for three months this summer, AIPAC’s going to give me the beard of my dreams.”
At both campaign stops, El-Sayed, who grew up in a heavily Jewish Detroit suburb not far from Temple Israel, the synagogue that was attacked last month, also said he welcomed Jews to his movement.
“All of us love and revere Jewish folk, our Jewish neighbors, the faith of Judaism,” he said in Ann Arbor, to applause. “Trust me, nobody will fight harder against antisemitism than somebody who intimately understands what it’s like to be discriminated against because of how I look.”
He reiterated the point in an interview after the event.
Supporters of Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed cheer Rep. Rashida Tlaib as she denounces Israel during a rally in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that also featured Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, April 7, 2026. (Andrew Lapin/JTA)
“I am so grateful I’ve grown up in a community with a large proportion of Jewish Americans. I learned a lot from the Jewish tradition. I’m grateful to have been invited to bar and bat mitzvahs and to be invited to Seders and to be invited to spend time at shul,” el-Sayed told JTA.
“I stand deeply and profoundly against antisemitism in the same way that I stand deeply and profoundly against Islamophobia,” he added. “Those two things always run together. It is not antisemitic to criticize a foreign government, and it’s not antisemitic to criticize a super PAC that is intent on aligning our interests with the foreign government.”
In the interview, the candidate also reiterated the sentiment behind his own statement on the Temple Israel attack, in which he had referenced the Israeli war in Lebanon. “I also think it’s just critical for us to understand that hurt people do hurt people, and the circumstances happening 6000 miles away can affect the lives that we live here,” el-Sayed said Tuesday.
At the end of the rally, Piker climbed back onto the stage with El-Sayed to a standing ovation. The two men embraced, then posed for a selfie with the crowd behind them.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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