A democratic socialist once fired from a law job for pro-Palestinian comments is hoping to unseat a longtime member of Congress in Colorado’s primary election Tuesday, following primary victories for allies in New York.

Attorney Melat Kiros is a viable contender, according to polls, which show her about even with Rep. Diana DeGette in the race for Colorado’s 1st congressional district, which DeGette has held since 1997. One other candidate, University of Colorado Regent Wandy James, is polling a distant third for the seat, which includes almost all of the city and county of Denver.

Kiros, who was born the year DeGette took office, has used Israel policy as a wedge throughout the campaign — calling for an arms embargo against Israel, including funding for defensive weapons like the Iron Dome.

Last week, Kiros drew criticism for declining to call a firebombing attack at a vigil for Israeli hostages in Boulder last year antisemitic.

But some Jews are supporting her, saying that Kiros’ harsh criticism of Israel is necessary and warranted. DeGette has outfundraised Kiros at a 3-to-1 ratio, while Kiros has picked up endorsements from Sen. Bernie Sanders, Justice Democrats and the Sunrise Movement.

Kiros’ candidacy in the deep-blue district, where DeGette won three-quarters of the vote in 2024, will test the momentum of recent congressional primary victories by Democratic Socialists of America–backed candidates Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez in New York. Avila Chevalier personally campaigned for Kiros on Monday on X.

The race also comes during a tenuous month for Jews in the state. Students in Boulder issued a statement June 3 praising the Boulder attack as an act of “resistance.” Denver Jewish Day School, the largest Jewish school in the state, sent kids home early from summer camp June 11 after receiving threats. And last week the ADL filed a civil rights complaint alleging severe antisemitic harassment in Boulder schools.

Colorado voters will also go to the polls Tuesday to choose their nominees to succeed Gov. Jared Polis. Leading the Democratic candidates in polls is Attorney General Phil Weiser, who is the son and grandson of Holocaust survivors. (His top opponent, Sen. Michael Bennet, has a Jewish mother but does not identify as Jewish.)

Here’s 4 things to know about the congressional race ahead of the election.

1. Kiros entered politics after a pro-Palestinian blog post got her fired.

Kiros, whose family immigrated to the U.S. from Ethiopia when she was a baby, was working as an associate for law firm Sidley Austin in November 2023 when it signed onto a letter to law schools instructing them to take an “unequivocal stance” against antisemitism and Islamophobia, including protests that call for the elimination of Israel, which the letter called antisemitic.

In a Medium post responding to the letter, Kiros wrote that she agreed with the stance against antisemitism and that “there is no justification for the attacks on Israel on Oct. 7.” But she added that she did not believe that calling for the elimination of Israel qualified as antisemitism, partly because that perspective foreclosed on the possibility of a one-state solution where Israelis and Palestinians enjoyed equal rights.

“By chilling future lawyers’ employment prospects for criticism of the Israeli government’s actions and its legitimacy,” Kiros wrote, “you are complicit in Israel’s weaponization of anti-Semitism.”

The post received some traction online, and Sidley asked Kiros to take it down. She refused, reportedly leading to her firing. She then worked as communications director for 2024 congressional candidate John Padora, who placed third in that year’s Democratic primary in Colorado’s fourth congressional district.

2. She repeatedly declined to call the Boulder attack antisemitic 

Kiros was grilled on her stances about Israel in a June 22 interview with a Denver news channel.

She said weapons that defend Israeli citizens against attacks from Iran and Hezbollah “give Israel the cover to continue the genocide that’s taking place in Palestine and now the ethnic cleansing that’s taking place in Lebanon.” (Genocide scholars have debated whether the war in Gaza rises to the level of genocide.)

Some of Kiros’ comments on Israel appeared to take a more centrist position than some of her far-left allies. Though she has campaigned with controversial streamer Hasan Piker, she said she disagreed with his statement that Hamas is a lesser evil than Israel.

And asked whether Israel “had it coming” on Oct. 7, Kiros said “no, not at all — it’s about understanding the conditions in which violence and war happens.” She said Israel had resisted change despite decades of international frustration with its policies; her job as a politician, she said, was to change those conditions.

But the remark that drew the most attention was her response to a question about the Boulder attack, which took place at an event calling for the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas. The attacker, Mohammed Soliman, was heard saying “Free Palestine” as he threw molotov cocktails and used an improvised flamethrower to burn his victims.

Soliman left behind writings in which he declared that “Zionism is our enemies until Jerusalem is liberated and they are expelled from our land,” and further described Israel as a “cancer entity,” according to law enforcement.

He injured 13 people in the ambush, including an 82-year-old woman who later died of her wounds.

“I don’t know what was in the heart of the perpetrator,” Kiros said. “All I know is that he attacked innocent people because of what they might have believed. And I don’t even know what the people that were at that protest believed, too. In fact most of them were probably just there to ask that the people who were kidnapped on Oct. 7 be returned to their families.”

Asked to confirm that she thought the attack was not antisemitic, Kiros said, “I don’t know. I don’t know what his intentions were.”

In a statement to the Forward, DeGette said, “It’s never okay to rationalize antisemitism or excuse an act of terrorism. Those aren’t Denver values and we deserve better.”

The Kiros campaign did not respond to an inquiry.

3. DeGette, the incumbent, has a mixed record on Israel

DeGette, 68, has also pitched herself as a progressive. She was an early supporter of Medicare for All and includes abolishing ICE in her campaign positions. Her supporters highlight her efforts to secure abortion rights and her role in managing Trump’s first impeachment in 2019.

But unlike Kiros, DeGette has supported a two-state solution. DeGette voted for an April 2024 foreign aid package that included $5.2 billion to replenish Israeli air defenses.

“I believe Israel should have a nation, and I believe Palestine should have a nation, and I believe we need to move towards that solution,” DeGette told Colorado Public Radio. “I believe Israel has a right to defend itself.”

Her support for the war in Gaza flagged as it dragged on. In December 2025, DeGette voted against the National Defense Authorization Act that included provisions for funding additional weapons to Israel — and calling for a permanent ceasefire along with a surge in humanitarian aid.

But some constituents remained unsatisfied. DeGette’s heated exchange with one at a campaign event earlier this year went viral on social media. Someone asked “why she kept sending money for bombs,” and DeGette replied she was only funding defensive arms. When the constituent stormed off, saying DeGette didn’t care about Palestinians, the congresswoman followed her to correct her.

Finally, DeGette said, “If the only issue that you care about is this issue, then you should not vote for me.”

4. Some Jews in her district support Kiros. Others are worried.

Rabbi Rachel Kobrin, the spiritual leader of Congregation Rodef Shalom, wrote in the Denver Post last week that Kiros’ candidacy scared her as a liberal Jewish woman because it reflected a coarsened public discourse around Israel and ruled out a two-state solution.

“I do not believe Milat Kiros has shown the curiosity, humility, and empathy necessary to represent my community as a political leader,” Kobrin wrote.

One Jewish reader responded to Kobrin’s column by coming to her defense.

“We fought the state of South Africa as an apartheid state that was violently and legally separating and killing its black native citizens,” wrote Vivian Weinstein, a Denver resident critical of the war. “In the same way, Israel cannot continue to exist as an apartheid state according to its own law.”

The post Colorado voters weigh candidate for Congress who declined to call Boulder firebombing antisemitic appeared first on The Forward.

The videos of local activists in San Francisco accosting Scott Wiener, the state senator running to replace Nancy Pelosi in the U.S. House, are hard to watch.

“Say ‘Free Palestine’ for the camera, dog,” Jesus Coba, who runs a popular Instagram account, tells Wiener as he’s trying to watch the World Cup at a bar. “Say ‘Free Palestine’!”

Coba is holding the camera close to Wiener’s face as the politician stares at him in silence.

A few days later Wiener was surrounded and screamed at as he made his way through Dolores Park, where he had come to participate in a Shabbat service as part of the Trans March.

“F— you and your Zionist handlers,” one person shouted at Wiener, who is both Jewish and gay, and has championed legislation protecting trans rights. “F— you and your Israeli masters.”

What happened to Wiener can be seen as part of a national trend. Jack Schlossberg, a Jewish heir to the Kennedy dynasty, face-planted in his attempt to replace Rep. Jerry Nadler in the U.S. House. He ran a poor campaign, but it wasn’t helped by the fact that he tried to trade on his status as a Millennial social media influencer while refusing to embrace the TikTok generation’s skepticism of Israel.

“Can you say ‘F— Israel,’ Jack?” an erratic fellow influencer who goes by the name Crackhead Barney asked visibly stressed Schlossberg during a street interview.

“No way, dude, I’m Jewish,” Schlossberg responds.

And other Democrats have spoken about the extent to which a candidate’s willingness to accuse Israel of committing genocide in Gaza has become a litmus test in primary contests.

But, at the same time, the people hounding Wiener in public are part of a radical but fringe minority — one with deep roots in San Francisco — that has struggled to gain political power even as its members excel at generating viral clips.

***

San Francisco is home to loud and often obnoxious activism fueled by the very real sense of alienation that comes when a region known for its radical politics is subjected to repeated rounds of displacement by the tech industry. I grew up in the city during the first dot-com boom, when the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project plastered the neighborhood with calls to vandalize luxury cars and sushi restaurants. The man behind the group was eventually arrested and police found instructions in his apartment for how to build acid bombs.

Gay Shame, an anonymous protest collective, carried on this style of activism with a promise to “instigate, irritate, and agitate” and graffiti insisting that “Queers Hate Techies,” while locals blockaded the private buses that ferried tech workers to their jobs south of the city.

When Google Glass — an early precursor to Meta Ray-Bans that embed a livestreaming camera in your glasses — became a symbol of gentrification, a woman was punched in the face for wearing the device into a local dive bar.

It’s not shocking that Jews have not always fared well among this set, for whom strident opposition to symbols of power reigns supreme. A disturbing precursor to the protests against Wiener came in 2018 when activists began weekly protests outside Manny’s, a cafe and “civic event space” in the Mission.

The business replaced a sushi restaurant, but it still somehow became the target of neighborhood activists who demanded a host of concessions from Manny Yekutiel, the cafe’s Jewish owner. Yekutiel agreed to many of the asks: bilingual signage and staff, affordable drip coffee and free event bookings for community groups.

But Yekutiel still found himself facing weekly protests, including by Gay Shame, accusing him of promoting a “pro-elite, pro-Zionist and pro-gentrification agenda.” Someone spray-painted a Star of David and “F— Zionism” on the exterior, and a window was smashed.

His sole crime was apparently a Facebook post from a few years before he opened the business asking for recommendations on “some good Zionist organizations in the Bay.”

The people who thought protesting Yekutiel was a good use of their Wednesday nights for several years are the same folks — sometimes literally — who are now harassing Wiener.

Coba, who was kicked out of the bar for yelling at Wiener, and whom Wiener said had previously accosted him at the airport and accused him of having a “tainted bloodline,” recently posted footage of someone chasing Yekutiel through a street fair.

Yekutiel is now running for the Board of Supervisors, which is San Francisco’s city council, and the man quizzing him was mad that Manny’s had once hosted pro-Israel activist Hen Mazzig. Coba claimed Mazzig was an Israeli commando, which I could find no evidence for, and Yekutiel said all he knew was that Mazzig had served in the Israeli military as most Israeli Jews are required to do.

“Well maybe having Israelis at the cafe isn’t a good idea,” the man, who does not identify himself, tells Yekutiel.

***

It could be difficult to summon much sympathy for tech workers whose commute was delayed by nudists trying to board their buses as a form of protest. But it’s much easier to see how corrosive the “Zionist” litmus tests being applied to Jews in San Francisco and elsewhere are.

As a longtime politician, Wiener’s record of support for Israel is deeper than Yekutiel’s. But not by much. He joined a solidarity trip to Israel in 2024, but had also called for a ceasefire in Gaza in November 2023, opposes U.S. military aid to Israel at least until a new government is in place, and — after an awkward delay — he joined the other candidates in the race for Pelosi’s seat in accusing Israel of genocide.

Wiener is a relative moderate in a city where progressives sometimes treat that as akin to being MAGA, and both Coba and the people yelling at Wiener during Pride make allusions to disagreement with his preferred housing policy. Mayor Daniel Lurie, another moderate, was chased out of the Trans March last year, though without as much vitriol.

But it seems clear that the obsession with Wiener supposedly supporting genocide is tied to the fact that he’s Jewish.

His opponent, Connie Chan, is backed by labor unions and has staked out a position to Wiener’s left on Israel, though she has faced no backlash for being endorsed by Pelosi, who embodies moderate San Francisco politics and has been a stalwart supporter of Israel.

At the same time, it’s important to keep in mind that the people leading the charge against Wiener have failed time and again to move the political needle.

They didn’t stop gentrification or slow the mass arrival of tech workers to the city and luxury buses still ferry them to work. Google Glass flopped, but now every other influencer on TikTok is wearing Meta Ray-Bans to film content. Manny’s continues to thrive with support from prominent progressives in the city, and Yekutiel appears to be leading in his race to join the city council.

Wiener rose from the Board of Supervisors to the State Senate, and despite his extremely vocal detractors he remains the favorite to win in November. Local media has not framed Israel as a key issue.

(Schlossberg, for his part, ultimately lost to another pro-Israel Jewish candidate who was to his right on Gaza.)

When Joe Eskenazi, one of the most astute journalists covering local politics in the city, wrote about the Manny’s protests years ago he aptly described the demonstrators as “a diminutive group of attention-seekers.”

That certainly seemed to be the case at the time. Whether the rising tide of animosity toward Israel will afford these hecklers a veto over Jewish politicians ascending the political ladder is now an open question.

The post How seriously should we take San Francisco’s anti-Zionist hecklers? appeared first on The Forward.

The most important traffic reports these days usually come from the Strait of Hormuz.

“Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz dropped significantly over the weekend, The New York Times reported, “as a four-day exchange of attacks between Iran and the United States left some shipowners deciding it was too risky to transit.”

What’s going on with the Strait of Hormuz affects gas prices, stock prices, Americans’ moods — and the world economy.

But what does “strait” mean, anyway?

The word has been with us for a long time, and intriguingly, it appears in many famous translations of the Torah. It also pops up in translations of the New Testament.

“Strait” comes from the Latin for “strict.” It first appeared in English in the 14th century, when, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it referred to clothing — “a garment, etc.: Tight-fitting, narrow.”

Over time, the meaning changed a bit, but it always had something to do with narrowness. From 1561 to 1725, it meant: “Of bonds, a knot: Tightly drawn.”

As the centuries passed, it attracted the attention of poets.

”It matters not how strait the gate,” wrote William Ernest Henley in his poem “Invictus.”  “How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.”

It turns out that Henley was kind of into the subject of what words meant.

“The poet, who was one of the leading slang lexicographers of his day, saw the gates of heaven as strait — tight, narrow, difficult to get through,” the late great language columnist William Safire observed in 1984, when he wrote a column on “strait” and “straits.”

Maybe Henley had the New Testament in mind, too.

Matthew 7:13 in The King James Bible advises: “Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat.”

Today, according to Merriam-Webster, “strait” means “a comparatively narrow passageway connecting two large bodies of water — often used in plural but singular in construction.”

Henley, the poet, was using an archaic meaning — a narrow passage, without water.

In contemporary English, “strait” also has a secondary meaning — “a situation of perplexity or distress — often used in plural,” according to Merriam-Webster, but also according to anyone who has used the phrase “dire straits,” including, one would presume, the band Dire Straits.

Both physical and emotional space

“Strait” describes both a physical space — for example, a body of water — and an emotional space, like “dire straits.”

Perhaps that dual meaning is why the word “strait” appears in translations of the Torah. In the 1917 Jewish Publication Society translation, the Hebrew word tzar, or “narrow,” is translated as “strait.”

Consider 1 Samuel, 13:6, in the JPS translation from 1917:

“When the men of Israel saw that they were in a strait — for the people were distressed — then the people did hide themselves in caves, and in thickets, and in rocks, and in holds, and in pits.”

Tzar has both a literal descriptive meaning and a figurative emotional meaning. Sure, as an adjective, it means narrow, such as in the famous song about the entire world being “a narrow bridge” — gesher tzar me’od. 

But as ki tzar lo in Samuel 1 6:13 demonstrates, it can also refer to a tough circumstance, a strait. Similarly, perhaps, in contemporary Hebrew, someone might say, tzar li, or “I am saddened.”

These multiple meanings might lead a person to the hazardous question of whether one should say the “Strait of Hormuz” in the singular, or “Straits of Hormuz” in the plural.

That was what fascinated Safire in 1984. Today, his take feels like a postcard from another time — but it’s also soothing in this moment of, well, dire straits:

“My advice,”Safire wrote. “Go with the familiar; follow your ear. If you’re happy with the Straits of Gibraltar or Magellan, use the final s; if the place name is new to you, let the gazetteer crowd have its way.”

“Hormuz is unfamiliar to most Americans, and the Strait of Hormuz is therefore the name I would use, going along with Gary Hart and the stylebooks,” Safire continued. “But retain the singular sense: ‘The Straits of Gibraltar’ is a passage.’ ‘’The Strait of Hormuz’ is the next Quemoy and Matsu.”

I liked being distracted for a moment from Iran and Trump with the mention of “Gary Hart.”

That nostalgia reminded me that today’s Strait of Hormuz news cycle, about a traffic jam for the fuel and food we need to live, is about both a location and a feeling.

Sure, the waterway may be physically open, or, at least of this writing, effectively closed because of fear, but its status has other meanings too — like whether the Iranian regime actually won this war, and whether that narrow space is also a symbol of future peril.

And in those multiple meanings, strait echoes the Biblical tzar —narrow, yes, but also dangerous.

In Hebrew and in English, narrowness, perilousness and sadness frequently go together, indicating a world or a situation that must be navigated carefully. Perhaps a word like strait — a little bit singular, a little bit plural — captures it all.

The post As the Bible and the news from the Strait of Hormuz tells us, our world is in dire straits appeared first on The Forward.