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Bosnian Jews mourn Moris Albahari, one of Sarajevo’s last Ladino speakers
(JTA) — Moris Albahari, a Holocaust survivor, former partisan fighter and one of the last Ladino speakers in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s dwindling Jewish community, passed away at the age of 93 last month.
It is believed that he was one of four native Ladino speakers remaining in a country where the Judeo-Spanish language once flourished and was spoken by luminaries like Flory Jagoda, the grande dame of Ladino song, and Laura Bohoretta, the founder of a uniquely Sephardic feminist movement in Bosnia.
Bosnia’s small Jewish community — with barely 900 members throughout the country, 500 of whom live in Sarajevo — are mourning the loss of a living link to communal memory as well as a dear friend.
“From you, uncle Moco, I learned a lot about Judaism, about life, about nature and especially about people. About both the good and the evil,” Igor Kožemjakin, the cantor of the Sarajevo Jewish community, wrote in a memorial post on Facebook, referring to Moris as “Čika,” or uncle, a term of endearment in Bosnian.
“It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevo. Our community is very small, especially after the Holocaust,” Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino language and literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members. Everyone is like a family member.”
When Albahari was growing up in the 1930s, the Jewish community of his native Sarajevo numbered over 12,000. Jews made up more than a fifth of the city and it was one of the most important centers of Jewish life in the western Balkans.
In his youth, the city was part of what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Formed out of the borderlands between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, it was a multiethnic state composed of Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, Slovenians, Macedonians, Hungarians, Albanians and more. Among them were many Jewish communities both Ashkenazi and Sephardic.
The unique mix of of Muslim, Jewish, Catholic and Orthodox Christian communities, with their mosques, synagogues and churches defining Sarajevo’s skyline, earned the city the nickname “Little Jerusalem.”
Speaking in a 2015 documentary made by American researchers, “Saved by Language,” Albahari explained that his family traced their roots back to Cordoba before the Spanish Inquisition, and through Venice, before settling in what would become Bosnia when it was part of the Ottoman Empire.
“We didn’t want to ‘just’ write an article about Moris or Sarajevo; we wanted [the audience] to see what we saw and hear what we heard,” Brian Kirschen, professor of Ladino at Binghamton University, who worked on the documentary with author Susanna Zaraysky, told JTA. “This resulted in a grassroots initiative to create the documentary.”
In the film, Albahari takes the researchers and their viewers on a tour through what was Jewish Sarajevo, giving glimpses of the thriving Ladino speaking community in which he was raised and explaining how ithe language would save him many times, when the Nazis and their Croat allies, the Ustaša, came to shatter it.
“In sharing your story of survival during the Holocaust, you opened doors that remained closed for decades,” Kirschen said in a memorial post on Facebook. “Some of your stories were even new to members of your family, but each survivor has their own timeline. While you experienced great pain during your life, from your story, we also learn about moments of kindness and heroism. Through your story, you also taught us about the power of language.”
Albahari wasn’t yet a teenager when, in 1941, Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy invaded Yugoslavia. The Nazis occupied the eastern portion of the country, including what is now Serbia, while they raised up a Croat fascist party, known as the Ustaša, to administer the newly formed “Independent State of Croatia” — often known by its Serbo-Croatian initials, NDH — in the western regions that included the modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Ustaša collaborated in the Nazis’ genocidal plans for Europe’s Jewish and Roma comunities, and they had genocidal designs of their own for the Orthodox Serb communities living in the NDH.
To that end they established the Jasenovac concentration camp, which would become known as the Auschwitz of the Balkans. By the war’s end it had become the third largest concentration camp in Europe, and behind its walls the overwhelming majority of Sarajevo’s Jews — at least 10,000 — were massacred. Including Serbs, Jews, Roma and political dissidents of Croat or Muslim Bosniak background, as many as 100,000 people were killed in Jasenovac.
Albahari was 11 years old when the Ustaša came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and he was able to help his son escape from the train.
The teacher helped guide the young Moris to an Italian soldier named Lino Marchione who was secretly helping Jews.
This was the first case when Albahari’s Ladino came in handy. Ladino is largely based on medieval Spanish, with a mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages mixed in. For speakers of Serbo-Croatian, a Slavic language, it’s entirely incomprehensible. But for a speaker of another Romance language such as Italian, it’s not such a stretch to understand, and Moris was able to converse with his Italian savior.
With his family gone, he was taken in by a Serb family, and changed his name to Milan Adamovic to hide his Jewish identity. Still, by 1942, it became clear that neither as Adamovic nor Albahari would he be safe in the town. So he fled to the mountains.
“If there was [a battle] I took clothes from a dead soldier to wear, I lived like a wolf in the mountains, you know. Visiting villages [asking for something] to give me for eating, it was a terrible time,” Albahari recalled in “Saved By Language.”
He would only feel safe in villages under the control of partisan forces. Yugoslavia was the only country in Europe to be liberated from Nazi rule by its own grassroots resistance.
During his time in the mountains, Albahari joined up with a partisan unit aligned with the movement of Josip Broz Tito, who would lead Communist Yugoslavia after the war. By the war’s end, Tito’s partisans numbered over 80,000 and included more than 6,000 Jews, many in prominent positions, such as Moša Pijade, who would go on to serve as vice president of the Yugoslav parliament after the war.
Moris was out on patrol as a partisan when he came upon a group of American and British paratroopers. They raised their weapons at him, thinking he was an enemy. Moris tried to communicate, but he spoke no English.
When he asked the soldiers if they spoke German or Italian, they shook their heads. When he asked about Spanish, one perked up: a Hispanic-American soldier by the name of David Garijo.
In Ladino, Alabahari was able to explain that he was not an enemy but could lead them to a nearby partisan camp where they would be safe.
“Ladino saved my life in the war,” Albahari recalled in the documentary.
At the partisan camp, Morris received even bigger news: The family that he had assumed had all perished after he left the train were in fact alive. The former school teacher and Ustaša guard who had warned his father had met them at the next train junction to help them escape. Furthermore, around half of the Jews in the train car were able to escape using the same hole Moris used during his initial escape.
Ultimately the family all survived the war, unlike so many other Jews of Sarajevo.
“Where is Samuel, where is Dudo, where is Gedala? They never came back,” Albahari lamented, listing missing neighbors while walking through Sarajevo’s old Jewish neighborhood in the documentary. “Maybe we are happy because we are alive after the Second World War, but also unlikely because every day we must cry for these dead people.”
When Moris returned to Sarajevo, it was an entirely different place from the bustling Jewish community he had once known.
Gone was the sound of Ladino in the streets and alleyways of Bascarsija, the market district where so many of Sarajevo’s Jews had once lived. Gone were the synagogues — only one of the many synagogues that had existed before WWII still functions. Gone was the robust Jewish life that was once a central part of Sarajevo.
Moris was still only 14 by the war’s end, so he returned to school and ultimately graduated at the top of his class. He became a pilot and later director of the Sarajevo Airport.
In this new world, Ladino was spoken, if at all, only in the home.
“Always, when I hear Spanish, I hear my father and mother, and all the synagogues, prayers in Ladino and rabbis who spoke Ladino. But that is in the past,” Albahari says in “Saved by Language.”
Eliezer Papo, who is a generation younger than Albahari, recalled that in his youth Ladino had long been reduced to a language of secrets.
“Mostly, Ladino was used when the elders didn’t want youngsters to understand,” Papo said.
Only later, in the 1980s, did community members realize what was being lost and begin to gather to maintain their language, recount what Jewish Sarajevo had been like and share their wartime stories of survival.
“He never took his story to the places of revenge, but he took it and his life experience to a place of ‘Never again,’ not just ‘Never again for Jews’, but never again for anybody,” said Papo.
Like many Sarajevans, World War II would not be the last major conflict Albahari would see. Less than 40 years later, war would once again come to Sarajevo with the break-up of Yugoslavia.
From 1992-1995 the city remained under constant siege by Bosnian Serb forces looking to break away from what would become Bosnia and Herzegovina. Moris joined with other Jews of Sarajevo in working to provide aid to their fellow Sarajevans during the harsh period.
Sarajevo’s synagogue was turned into a shelter and a soup kitchen. The community ran a network of underground pharmacies and a message service allowing Sarajevans to get word to family and friends outside of the city during what became the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare.
“Moris was an inspirational persona to many members of Jewish community and La Benevolencija,” Vlado Anderle, the current president of that local Jewish humanitarian organization told JTA. “He was a man with such inviting spirit and energy.”
When the dust settled on the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the new Bosnian state rose from its ashes, Moris found himself once again in a new role.
During the communist era in Yugoslavia, religious activity was discouraged. Sarajevo’s Jews emphasized the ethnic character of Jewish culture rather than the religious one. In the new Bosnia and Herzegovina, that was no longer true. So the community worked to reconnect with their religious identity as well.
“Everybody looked up to the people who had Jewish upbringing before the Second World War,” Papo recalled. “This doesn’t mean that they were rabbis. Just that they knew it better than anyone else.”
Moris, whose formal Jewish education ended in his preteen years, was appointed president of the community’s religious committee.
As such it often fell on him to represent Judaism to the Bosnian society at large, often in a very creative way, according to Papo, who in addition to being a scholar of Ladino is ordained as a rabbi and serves the Sarajevo community as a rabbi-at-large from Israel.
In one case, while being interviewed on a major Bosnian television station, Moris was asked why Jews cover their head with a kippah or other hat during prayer. Moris’ response, or rather creative interpretation, as Papo called it, was made up on the spot.
Moris’ interpretation began with the ancient temple in Jerusalem where Jews once had to fully immerse in a ritual bath before entering.
“Since the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed it was reduced to washing the uncovered parts of the body only, before entering a synagogue, similarly to Muslims: the feet, the head, the hands…” Papo recalled him saying. But in Europe, as Moris’ answer went, they began to cover more and more of their body. “In Europe they started wearing shoes, so the feet were not uncovered anymore, and then they started wearing a hat, not to have to wash their head… you know it’s Europe, one could catch a cold if going out with wet hair…”
“A few months later, I came to Sarajevo, and found that everyone has heard this explanation and is talking about it, not just people in the community, but in the street,” Papo said. “And you know, I let it pass, I couldn’t correct them, it was just so beautiful. That was his genius.”
“Identity is all about telling stories. And Moris was one of the great storytellers of the community,” Papo added. And through his stories he expressed an identity which was “made of the same contradictions that Sephardic Judaism is made of, that Sarajevo is made of, that Bosnia and Herzegovina is made and that Yugoslavia was and is made of and that the Balkans are made of.”
Albahari is survived by his wife and a son.
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El-Sayed’s Senate election has divided Michigan Jews. What will bring them together?
(JTA) — DETROIT – The “Jews For Abdul” in the room at the Michigan Democratic Party’s election night watch party were beaming as vote tallies rolled in, pushing Abdul El-Sayed closer to his eventual victory in Michigan’s U.S. Senate race.
“It’s actually hard to put into words what this night, and this moment, means to our movement,” Eli Newell, the Midwest field organizer for left-wing Jewish group IfNotNow, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency shortly before El-Sayed’s victory speech.
Newell added, “We see our agenda of shared safety, equality, justice and a brighter future for all represented in Abdul’s candidacy.”
IfNotNow had mobilized heavily for El-Sayed, bringing a sizable Jewish cohort in from out of state to canvass in Jewish neighborhoods. Newell himself lives in Chicago.
But he and many of the other Jews at the watch party — who almost exclusively tacked left, particularly on Israel — offered a markedly different outlook from the state’s more traditionally pro-Israel Jewish institutions.
Many of the leaders from the latter camp had publicly mobilized against El-Sayed to various degrees during the campaign, objecting not just to his hard-line criticism of Israel, but also to his initial reaction to the state’s Temple Israel attack and his associations with Hasan Piker, the far-left streamer. For those Jews, the candidate’s victory was a more challenging story.
“Personally, I’m not sure I’m on his most favored list,” Rabbi Asher Lopatin, community relations director at the Jewish Federation of Greater Ann Arbor, told JTA the day after El-Sayed’s win.
Shortly after El-Sayed won the Democratic primary, Lopatin took a brief leave of absence from his job to campaign with the Republican nominee, former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers. He was one of the first Jewish figures in the state to do so publicly.
The week before the election, he also appeared at a Republican Jewish Coalition event boosting Rogers, where he and another rabbi in attendance received shout-outs from the stage.
Now Lopatin and other Michigan Jewish leaders who similarly backed Rogers face a new question: How can they build relationships with a senator they have gone on record as opposing on deeply personal grounds?
“I’m not taking anything back. But I think we have to work with what we have,” Lopatin said. “We have to build relationships with him. We have to build relationships with his supporters.”
Broadening the Jewish tent to include El-Sayed supporters was also on the mind of Decky Alexander, who chairs the Michigan Jewish Democratic Caucus. The caucus had refrained from endorsing the senator-elect during the campaign, and several members of its leadership had openly pledged to vote for Rogers.
Into that void, progressive Jews in the state organized Michigan Jews for Democracy, a grassroots movement to offer an alternative Jewish voice backing El-Sayed.
Now, Alexander said things were shifting. “We need to make sure that we are inclusive in our caucus,” she told JTA, naming Michigan Jews For Democracy as well as Bend the Arc, a progressive Jewish group that had endorsed El-Sayed, as potential new partners she’d like to work with. “I think we need to have those voices at the table.”
The senator-elect’s campaign, on Thursday, pointed to a progressive PAC analysis of voting by ZIP code to argue that El-Sayed had “virtually matched” the 2024 Jewish vote for Michigan’s Jewish senior senator, Democrat Elissa Slotkin. The PAC, Millions of Michiganians, claimed that El-Sayed lost only 1.3% of votes across 72 heavily Jewish precincts that had gone to Slotkin.
Yet uniting such disparate Jewish voices could be easier said than done. In one reliably Democratic, heavily Jewish Detroit suburb in the days leading up to the election, homes could be seen repurposing their old “Haley Stevens for U.S. Senate” yard signs after the pro-Israel congresswoman endorsed Rogers in the race’s final days. El-Sayed beat Stevens in the Democratic primary in August.
Those yard signs went back up after Stevens’ endorsement and were still up after El-Sayed’s victory on Tuesday. Some had new handwritten additions addressed to Stevens: “Proud of you! Stand tall!!”
Prior to Election Day, more than 560 Jews in the state had signed a petition, titled “Michigan Jews Against Extremism,” that pledged to vote for Rogers explicitly because of concerns over El-Sayed’s rhetoric.
While ultimately numbering slightly more than half of the total Jews to sign the open letter supporting El-Sayed, the signatories were influential. They included the president of Detroit’s Jewish federation; the head of the local flagship Holocaust center; and Mark Davidoff, who heads the Michigan-Israel Business Accelerator.
Post-election, Davidoff told JTA that his pro-Israel business group “is prepared to work with all newly elected and returning leaders across Michigan.”
A representative for the “Against Extremism” letter, Kalamazoo-based Troy Zukowski-Serlin, told JTA after the fact that the letter may have been too strongly worded.
“You could just as easily point a finger at the Mike Rogers campaign, with extremism,” Zukowski-Serlin, who had been listed as a Michigan Jewish Democratic Caucus board member until he declared his intent to vote for Rogers, reflected. “That probably got the group off to a bad start.”
Even as the Rogers campaign had courted Jews, it also employed messaging many outside observers pegged as Islamophobic. Some of El-Sayed’s campaign surrogates who liaised with the Jewish community, including Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, also pointed to Rogers’ associations with Christian nationalist donors.
Today, Zukowski-Serlin said, “I can understand why somebody would vote for El-Sayed.” His own daughter did, for one — and they were far from the only Jewish household in the state to have split their votes.
Echoing a line El-Sayed himself often employed when addressing Jews on the campaign trail, he suggested that, apart from Israel, they were likely aligned on most policy positions.
“There’s plenty of other issues that I think we can find common ground on,” he said. “I think we can get along.”
Other Jewish groups in the state didn’t mince words, even after the race was called and some early-voting exit polls suggested that a majority of Jews in the state may have voted for El-Sayed despite any reservations.
Michigan’s chapter of the Anti-Defamation League was among those to signal what it called “serious concerns” with El-Sayed’s “history of minimizing the fears of the Jewish community and demonizing Israel.”
The ADL’s statement included an olive branch of sorts.
“As we move forward, Senator-elect El-Sayed has an opportunity and a responsibility to demonstrate that he will hear Jewish Michiganders, reject efforts to blame or marginalize them because of their connection to Israel and confront antisemitism with the moral clarity this moment requires,” the organization noted.
Detroit’s chapter of the American Jewish Committee raised similar flags. While recognizing what it called the “historic significance” of El-Sayed becoming the first Muslim elected to the Senate, the AJC statement continued, “Unfortunately this historic moment has been tarnished by the Senator-elect’s continued anti-Israel rhetoric that alienates countless Jewish Michiganders and other supporters of the State of Israel, and endangers American Jews.”
Detroit’s Jewish federation, meanwhile, congratulated “all those elected to federal, state, and local office in Michigan” and offered a veiled plea for restraint without naming the senator-elect.
“Together, we look to those elected to act with wisdom, lead with compassion, and uphold the civic and social values that ensure the safety and inclusion of our community and of all Americans,” the nonpartisan organization’s communal relations arm said in a statement.
Gary Torgow, the Michigan-based chair of the Jewish Federations of North America, told Rogers during the campaign, “We need you to get elected.” On Thursday, Torgow released a post-election statement calling on the local Jewish community to “move forward with optimism, dignity, and pride in who we are.”
Now the work of mending fences begins — not just between El-Sayed and Jewish leaders, but between Michigan’s Jews themselves. Across the state, rabbis offered reassuring messages to their communities, and some were eager to put the divisiveness of the campaign season behind them.
“I think the election divided the Jewish community,” Lopatin said. “I’m excited to get back to uniting them.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Three lessons for American Jews from the failed GOP attacks on the trans community
There are many reasons for the majority of American Jews — proudly American, politically liberal or centrist, supportive of Israel but opposed to nationalist extremism — to celebrate this week’s election, or at least heave a sigh of relief.
But I want to focus on what might seem to be an unusual aspect of this historic moment: the failure of Republican attacks on transgender people. If you live in a deep blue state, you might not have noticed these attacks at all, but if you live in a battleground state, you were likely inundated by them: relentless television ads, millions of phony “Trans & LGBTQ+ Student Resource Guides” mailed to Texas voters from a fake organization, and puerile, false claims about Senator-elect James Talarico.
And what did the Republicans get from this multi-hundred-million-dollar campaign of misinformation?
Bupkis.
Now, this was an unusual election. It’s possible that nothing would have made a difference, given the terrible economy, the pointless Iran war, and the unprecedented corruption of Donald Trump. These were, polls tell us, the core issues motivating mainstream American voters, and they voted, as the saying goes, to throw the bastards out. As The New York Times reported, Republicans vastly outspent Democrats in every competitive Senate race, but still lost nearly all of them. So maybe, in a closer election, the anti-trans attacks might have worked.
But they didn’t, and as I see it, the failure of this massive campaign offers three encouraging lessons for the Jewish community.
First, anyone who knows Jewish history should be grateful for the failure of a vicious attempt to vilify and scapegoat a small, vulnerable minority. Obviously, Jewish people are often that minority — and we were again this year, targeted by both the Far Right and Far Left. Anti-trans activists lied relentlessly about science, Democratic policies, trans people’s lives, sports (and the alleged advantages trans women possess, which have been disproven countless times), and most devastatingly, about the nature of transgender care, which never involves surgery on minors.
All of this was harrowing for me to watch, especially as someone with several trans friends whose lives were being so brutally misrepresented — and directly impacted by rollbacks in healthcare access (including by hospital chains who caved to blackmail by the Trump administration). And as a scholar of Jewish history and theology, and as a queer person myself, it also felt eerily, darkly familiar. Perhaps it’s a cliché to say that when one group is attacked, we are all attacked, but in this case, I felt it viscerally. I am relieved it didn’t work.
Second, despite all the rhetoric and rage-baiting, fundamentally there is a core congruence between what LGBTQ advocates say and what ordinary Americans, including Jewish ones, believe: not the finer points of gender identity, but “live and let live.” Most Americans still do not understand transgender as a phenomenon (yet), and they still have significant concerns, particularly about kids (and sports). But Democrats have finally learned how to talk about this issue, and it’s by appealing to common sense, American values, and even ‘Judeo-Christian’ teachings like loving your neighbor.
For example, Senator-elect Dr. Abdul El-Sayed did a great job framing the issue as about private medical decisions that should be left between families and their doctors. Comedian and influencer Suzanne Lambert framed the issue around love and respect, even when we don’t understand ‘the other.’ James Talarico made light of his opponent’s pathetic attempts to impugn his masculinity, while also refusing to throw trans people under the bus.
No Democrat ran on trans rights as a signature issue. But the best Democrats didn’t run away from it either.
Which brings me to my third point: Moderate Americans can agree to disagree, and still unite on core concerns. The middle 40% of America is not made up of culture warriors or Christian Nationalists. And it seems (I would love to see exit polling data on this) that they saw the endless ads and attacks for what they were: an attempt to distract from the core issues. Despite Elon Musk’s massive investments in hysteria — perhaps motivated by his inability to accept his own trans daughter — most centrist Americans are more focused on stuff that actually impacts them. It’s not that they agree with, or even understand, transgender issues. It’s that they don’t need to agree on everything in order to vote for a political candidate.
The same is true, of course, for issues bitterly dividing the American Jewish community today. Both right and left seem to have adopted the worst aspects of so-called “cancel culture,” in which any deviation from ideological purity on a single issue is grounds for exclusion. Thus we have seen progressives like Scott Wiener be bullied by the Far Left and critical-of-Israel politicians like El-Sayed demonized by the Center and Right.
In the High-Intensity-Jewish bubble, it can seem as though Israel, Palestine, and the relationship between Anti-Zionism and antisemitism is all-consuming. I’ve felt that way myself. But outside the bubble, in fact most American Jews understand that there are more important issues. 62% of Jewish Michiganders voted for El-Sayed, for example. And in exit polls conducted over the last several elections, American Jews have not ranked Israel among their top concerns (we don’t yet know if that was true this year), despite what they hear from lobbyists and mainstream organizations.
Indeed, many leaders, particularly in the New York metro area, have alienated their own communities by insisting that some views are “beyond the pale,” or that Jews are physically unsafe, or that contact with this or that media figure renders one untouchable, as if a podcast interview is a contagious disease like the Biblical tzaraat.
Successful politics doesn’t work that way. As the cliches go, politics is the art of the possible, and it makes for strange bedfellows. We don’t agree on every issue with everyone we vote for, or are interviewed by. That is how we win — and, in this case, rescue the democracy that has made the American dream possible for generations of Jews.
I’m not suggesting that everything is now rosy for trans people in America. That is far from the case. Even as the nationwide anti-trans attacks failed, state level initiatives passed that seriously harm trans populations. Trans activists are regarded by our own government as domestic terrorists. And misinformation continues to run rampant. The work remains ahead to re-introduce actual trans people, lives, medicine, and science to middle America. And that will take a long time.
But that’s the long-term work. In the short term, elections are about making compromises, and I’m encouraged that this attempt to scapegoat a tiny and vulnerable minority, which happens to include several friends of mine, ended in failure. There is much that we in the Jewish community can learn from it.
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Liberal Jews hail wave of Democratic victories a day after the election
(JTA) — While liberal Jewish Americans reveled in a blue wave of victories after Tuesday’s pivotal midterm elections, centrist and conservative voices issued words of caution about the increasing fragility of the country’s relationship with Israel.
The pro-Israel liberal group J Street hailed the results as a “resounding victory for new politics on Israel and Palestine,” celebrating that 98% of J Street-backed candidates were projected to win their races.
“We are proud to have supported a record number of candidates who share our commitment to Israel’s future, democracy and a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, said in a statement that lists all the successful politicians that had the lobby’s support.
Voters, he argued, rejected the president’s policies and “made clear they want a different direction for America and a different approach in the Middle East.” He pointed to the losses of Republican stalwarts Susan Collins in Maine and Mike Lawler in New York, calling them “prominent champions of the old approach to Israel politics.”
The day before, J Street had said it “ran the largest super PAC investment in organizational history,” raising $10 million for more than 200 candidates. The lobby warned, however, that “AIPAC and its supporters will continue to influence American foreign policy, finding creative ways to override the will of voters with dark money.” AIPAC didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Halie Soifer, CEO of the liberal Jewish Democratic Council of America, likewise lauded the Democratic victories as a referendum on Trump, quipping that the president asked voters to “pretend he was on the ballot in the midterms, and Jewish Americans did just that.”
“Jewish voters are not a monolith, but they widely disapprove of Donald Trump,” she said in a statement, describing the administration’s agenda as “antithetical to core Jewish values.”
Soifer added, “Jewish Americans want leaders who will lower costs, defend our freedoms, stand against antisemitism, support Israel’s security, and hold the Trump administration accountable for its corruption, cruelty, and lawlessness.”
This cycle was JDCA’s largest-ever midterm Jewish voter engagement, involving a seven-figure investment in vast mobilization efforts, the group said in a statement.
JDCA noted that its political action committee ran many targeted ads, including in Ohio and Texas, where Democratic Senate candidates Sherrod Brown and James Talarico defeated their Republican rivals. The group also said its PAC funded ads for successful House candidates Cait Collins in New York, Piya Dandiya and Jared Moskowitz in Florida and Christina Hines in Michigan.
But not all Jewish Democrats were thrilled by the outcome.
Jeff Robbins, a Boston-based attorney and former Democratic Senate staffer, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, said the “obvious” bad news coming out of the election was the normalization of “a vitriolic, occasionally untethered, and all too often fact-less attack on Israel and its bona fides.”
A registered Democrat, Robins said, “it’s painful to hear the enemies of Israel celebrating as they have today, and claiming that this is their referendum on Israel.”
Robbins said that such habituation was already clear in last year’s election of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, an outspoken critic of Israel. This cycle’s shift, he added, was apparent in the success of Abdul El-Sayed in his Michigan Senate race and the primary loss of Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman to former city comptroller Brad Lander.
Robbins also expressed concern about “the push among anybody wanting a career in the Democratic Party” to distance themselves from Israel, which in many cases amounts to antisemitism, he said.
He particularly called out the House wins of Christopher Rabb in Philadelphia, Claire Valdez and Darializa Chevalier in New York City, Melat Kiros in Denver and Troy Jackson in Maine. Jackson, Robbins added, ended up repeating anti-Israel diatribes that have become popular among many members of the progressive left.
“The fact that he defeats somebody who was a stalwart and very knowledgeable friend of Israel, Susan Collins, is more bad news,” he said.
Robbins stressed that the Jewish community must take the results as a “warning sign” and stop assuming that “raising money and honoring people and dinners” is sufficient, without “making the case in the public square.” Members of the pro-Israel Jewish community cannot “just assume that people will realize that, of course, the victims of a genocidal attack are not the perpetrators of a genocide,” he added.
At the same time, Robbins, who also served in the United Nations Commission on Human Rights under former president Bill Clinton, pointed to other results he was happy with. “The good news is that the Democrats elected a number of people who are moderate and therefore sensible when it comes to the realities of the Middle East, and those people’s voices in Congress may be a blessing.”
He acknowledged that the voices of these moderates who support Israel could be consequential in the Democratic caucuses in both the House and the Senate.
Jonathan Greenberg, director for combatting antisemitism at Defending Education and a former AIPAC staffer, called the election as “a disastrous night for the Republican Party.”
“I really don’t think there’s any way for a conservative to look at what happened last night and say that there’s a silver lining,” added Greenberg, who ran for state office in Illinois as a Republican in 2012 but now is unaffiliated.
He called upon Republicans to seize the opportunity to rebuild a stronger foundation, after “years of bad rhetoric and a cycle full of bad candidates.” He slammed Democrats for failing “to police their own side,” while also recognizing that some moderate Israel supporters were successful in this election.
“If the the more blue dog-type Democrats who got elected last night are willing to stand up to the crazies in their party and say, ‘This isn’t us, and you’re not welcome to say things like that in our party,’ then, yeah, that would be great,” he said.
Greenberg credited Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a Florida Democrat, for his outspokenness on this issue, while stressing that “he can’t be the only one.” In Moskowitz’s primary race, he was a staunch defender of Israel against progressive challenger Oliver Larkin.
“You have to have a critical mass of passionate people – the ascendant far left has that right now,” Greenberg added. “If the center doesn’t organize itself and forcefully push back, then they’ll lose.”
For Robbins, this tumultuous period for American Jews has been a long time in the making and is hardly a surprise. He said he has warned Israelis for the past 10 to 15 years about an anti-Zionist shift in the Democratic Party, but he has repeatedly received the response, “Hakol b’seder,” the Hebrew phrase for “everything is OK.”
“I would say, ‘No, kol is not b’seder,’” Robbins concluded.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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