Jewish leaders across the political spectrum nationally were reeling — some in celebration, others suffering through elevated anxiety — after a trio of Congressional candidates endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani swept their primary contests Tuesday by taking out establishment favorites with track records of supporting Israel.

“We’re disappointed in the losses,” said Halie Soifer, chief of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, who argued that two of the losing incumbents, New York City Reps. Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat, “represent the views of the vast majority of Jewish voters.”

But close observers of the outcomes, which also included the loss of Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso in the contest for an open seat, were struggling to divine the broader meaning of the results.

Did the victories for progressive Brad Lander against Goldman, Claire Valdez against Reynoso and Darializa Avila Chevalier against Espaillat — after all three charged their opponents with enabling genocide by Israel against Palestinians — mark the end for Democratic politicians who hold traditional pro-Israel views?

Or did they represent something more narrow: New York City’s extremely liberal Democratic voting base flexing its muscle, Mamdani’s enduring popularity following his election last November or generalized anger toward a Democratic establishment that has been viewed by many of the party’s voters as too weak against President Donald Trump?

Sophie Ellman-Golan, a spokesperson for Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, a local group that is closely aligned with Mamdani, called Tuesday’s results a “sweeping left victory” but acknowledged it was hard to extrapolate beyond New York City.

“Voters are absolutely not having it for establishment Democrats who refuse to stand up and fight fascism,” Ellman-Golan said .

Some more moderate candidates did score wins outside of New York City. State delegate Adrian Boafo won a crowded race to replace retiring Rep. Steny Hoyer in Maryland with the support of AIPAC and other pro-Israel Democrats.

And even in New York, not every election went to candidates who endorsed Mamdani’s brand of politics. In the Bronx, Rep. Ritchie Torres — one of the Democratic party’s staunchest supporters of Israel — handily defeated Michael Blake, a former state assemblyman who threw his support to Mamdani during the mayoral primary last year but did not obtain Mamdani’s endorsement for Congress. Blake had repeatedly attacked Torres as purportedly beholden to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee but received just 22% of the vote to 72% for Torres.

For state comptroller, incumbent Thomas DiNapoli — who made additional purchases of Israel bonds in the aftermath of Oct. 7 — beat Jewish challenger Drew Warshaw, who promised to divest New York State from Israel Bonds and argued DiNapoli was helping to “finance Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wars.”

State Assemblymember Micah Lasher won the race to succeed Rep. Jerry Nadler, who is retiring after 33 years in the House and served as one of Congress’ leading voices for liberal Jews. In that race, the leading candidates Lasher and Alex Bores both supported Israel.

“I don’t think it is transferable elsewhere in New York or throughout the country,” Soifer said, pointing to the power of the Democratic Socialists of America in the city. “While DSA candidates can win in some places, they cannot win everywhere.”

When it comes to Israel, the DSA’s case against establishment Democrats includes on the premise that funds the U.S. is spending on military aid to Israel should be spent on social programs to benefit working Americans. As Mamdani put it at Avila Chevalier’s primary night party, she ran a campaign that “called for a foreign policy of investing in babies and not bombs.”

With other key races still to be decided — including the U.S. Senate primary in Michigan, where Israel has emerged as a major fault line — there is no sign that Israel is losing its potency in Democratic contests.

That has left some liberal Jews despairing.

Rabbi Jonah Pesner, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, released a statement decrying “the false choice between Jewish safety and Palestinian dignity” and condemning politicians who “demonize supporters of Israel, or deny Israel’s right to exist.”

Some observers also sought to draw contrasts between Tuesday’s insurgent victors. Lander, for example, considers himself a liberal Zionist and has close ties to center-left Jewish organizations in New York City. He partnered with Mamdani during the mayoral race, and Mamdani encouraged him to challenge Goldman despite their differences over Israel.

Lander’s support for a two-state solution — meaning the preservation of a Jewish state in Israel, rather than its elimination in favor of a binational country — also earned him an endorsement from J Street and a warm reception from the New York Jewish Agenda, a liberal pro-Israel group that has expressed concern over Mamdani’s policy positions on Israel.

Margo Hughes-Robinson, director of NYJA, said she was celebrating Lander and Lasher’s victories as “wins for friends of the family.”

There was less cheering among Jewish establishment leaders for the victory of Avila Chevalier, who went from helping to lead the pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia University two years ago to likely representing the Congressional district that includes the campus.

Avila Chevalier was perhaps the most outspoken opponent of Israel in Tuesday’s races and has staked out positions to Mamdani’s left on the conflict. Avila Chevalier defended her decision to attend a rally held in Times Square on Oct. 8, 2023, which many Jewish leaders — and some outside the community, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — condemned for condoning Hamas violence. She has also called Zionism “an ideology that is looking to create a political system where one group of people has more standing before the law than another group of people.”

Tuesday’s contest also followed the victory of Janeese Lewis George, another candidate endorsed by the DSA, in the Democratic primary for Washington, D.C. mayor last week.

Ron Halber, chief of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, said he thought the anti-Zionist left’s success would be relatively short-lived but acknowledged that Israel has an image problem and to fix that they needed to “rehabilitate their behavior.”

“People don’t like the product that pro-Israel Democrats are selling,” Halber said.

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Yesterday, Paris experienced two record-breaking events. The first was that the city’s temperature hit 104 degrees Fahrenheit, forcing tourist sites like the Eiffel Tower and Louvre to close early. The second occurred at the Panthéon, which remained open to welcome the coffin of Marc Bloch, the first historian to enter this hallowed site.

The event was literally momentous. The massive 18th century structure, dedicated as the Church of Saint Geneviève, was rebranded by French revolutionaries in 1791 as the Panthéon, the monument for those “grands hommes” who devoted their lives to the French Republic. But in a time of relentless racist and antisemitic rhetoric, it was symbolically momentous, as well.

Bloch was born into a French Jewish family that chose to leave Strasbourg for Paris when Germany annexed their native Alsace in 1871. An adolescent during the Dreyfus Affair, Bloch interrupted a promising academic career in 1914, volunteering to serve in World War I. He spent four years in the infantry, then served as an intelligence officer; by war’s end, he had earned two wounds as well as four citations for bravery along with France’s most prestigious medal, the Croix de guerre.

Between the two world wars, Bloch and his friend Lucien Febvre founded Annales d’histoire et économique, a history journal that revolutionized the practice of history, turning away from the focus on great figures and events and towards the mundane and material lives of peoples. Bloch developed the influential, though elusive notion of mentalités: the term he gave to the intellectual and emotional structures that, no less certainly than was the case with material factors, shaped how past generations experienced their world. This theme informed his early book, Les Rois thaumaturges, or The Royal Touch, which examined the relationship between the myth of the king’s healing touch and the powers he was thought to embody.

The persistence of this myth was revealed in the wake of Nazi Germany’s defeat of France in 1940 and the nearly divine prestige bestowed on the nation’s new leader Philippe Pétain. The elderly hero of Verdun led a collaborationist regime whose first order of business was to pass a salvo of antisemitic legislation in late 1940 that stripped French Jews of their legal and civil rights. These laws forced Bloch out of his teaching position at the Sorbonne, despite the fact that, though 54 years old, hobbled by arthritis and father of six children, he insisted on rejoining the army in 1938.

Forced to abandon the family apartment in Paris, along with his library of 5,000 books, Bloch and his wife Simonne settled in the southern “Free Zone.” Stripped of his post, he nevertheless continued to practice the metier of historian. But he turned his critical gaze to the present rather than the past, holding fast to his claim—one as relevant now as then — that “when a widely held opinion is glaringly at odds with the truth, we are bound in honesty, I think, to attack it.”

The result was L’Étrange Défaite, or Strange Defeat, a searing account of how France’s military and political leaders managed to lose this war in a matter of weeks. Written in what Bloch described as a “white heat of rage,” he applied the same approach to these events as he did to those in medieval France, one “concerned with the task of seeking the solid and concrete behind the empty and abstract.” The principal reason for the debacle, he wrote, was that while the German strategists were fighting the present war, their French counterparts were fighting the last one. With poetic insight, Bloch observed that “thoughts of the last war clung to them because they were the thoughts of their youth. Those days long past had all the brilliance of things seen.”

By 1942, Bloch had come to see that, as a French patriot, he was duty-bound, despite his age, to join the Resistance where he assumed code names ranging from the majestic Narbonne to the mundane Monsieur Blanchard. His good fortune lasted nearly two years when, in the late spring of 1944, he was captured in Lyon, then imprisoned and tortured in its notorious prison Mount Luc. On June 16, he was taken in a truck with two dozen other résistants to an empty field outside the city and summarily shot to death. His buried remains were discovered shortly after the war, as was the manuscript for Strange Defeat.

Inevitably and rightfully, Strange Defeat provided much of the script for the evening ceremony at the Panthéon, which somehow managed to be both severe and stylish. Actors read passages from the book while military guards carried Marc and his wife Simonne’s empty caskets . (Bloch’s family did not want his remains to be removed from the cemetery where he is buried, while Simonne’s remains were never found.) Tellingly, when the caskets were set down inside the vast hall of the monument, an army officer recited, according to Bloch’s wishes, the several military citations for bravery he had received.

In his address, given while standing in front of a column which carried Bloch’s epitaph— dilexit veritatem (“He loved the truth”) — President Emmanuel Macron underscored the tragic relevance of the historian’s life to our own era. Referring to recent efforts made by figures on the extreme rightwing to reclaim Bloch as one of their own, Macron warned against “those who declare themselves more French than you…and yet are always the first to sell out France to hostile powers.” (Among the conditions Bloch’s descendants insisted upon was that representatives from the extreme-rightwing National Rally party could not attend the ceremony.)

But the words written by Bloch, in the introduction to Strange Defeat, are the most powerful evocation of who he was and what he represents. “By birth I am a Jew, though not by religion, for I have never professed any creed, whether Hebrew or Christian. I feel neither pride nor shame in my origins. I am, I hope, a sufficiently good historian to know that racial qualities are a myth, and that the whole notion of Race is an absurdity.” “I try never to stress my heredity save when I find myself in the presence of an antisemite.” Bloch concludes, simply and beautifully, “I was born in France. I have drunk of the waters of her culture. I have made her past my own. I breathe freely only in her climate, and I have done my best, with others, to defend her interests.”

In the other book he wrote during this period, The Historian’s Craft, Bloch quotes one of his sons who, when still a child, asked him what historians do. (The good historian, Bloch writes, “is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.”)

As Bloch would have wished, he will always stand as an exemplar of what, in fact, historians do. And in the life he lived and values he died for, Marc Bloch will always stand as a reminder of what true patriots do.

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(JTA) — TEL AVIV — More than five decades after Israel’s only World Cup appearance, the Israel Football Association says it has no intention of trying to leave Europe for the Asian regional qualifying system that once took the country to the tournament, before Arab-led boycotts helped force it out.

The launch this month of the tournament hosted by the United States has renewed attention to Israel’s absence from the World Cup. Despite a thriving local soccer scene and success in competition abroad, the only time the country appeared in the tournament was in Mexico in 1970.

That’s because Israel seeks to qualify through the Union of European Football Associations, whose ranks are so strong that even a solid campaign can become a long shot for the World Cup. Even titans like four-time World Cup winner Italy failed to qualify this year.

Israel is the only non-European country trying to reach the tournament through UEFA, while most of its neighbors seek places through the Asian Football Confederation. Israel was ousted from the Asian soccer body in 1974. It bounced around the qualifying zones for a few years — it played in the Oceania qualifiers ahead of the 1986 and 1990 World Cups — before settling in the European grouping in 1991.

Shlomi Barzel, head of communications for the Israel Football Association, said a return to Asia is not on the table, both because Israel does not want to leave European soccer, where it has built a standing, and because he does not believe the Asian confederation would accept it back.

The only upside to such a move, he joked, would be if Israel’s opponents boycotted matches against it: “Israel would automatically qualify.”

A boycott of Israel did affect the team’s path to the 1970 World Cup. North Korea was ejected from the Asian qualifying tournament after refusing to play in Israel. As a result, Israel advanced to the final round after winning only two games against New Zealand. In the finals, Israel faced an Australian team already exhausted after fending off South Korea, Japan and Rhodesia (itself in the Asian tournament after being banned in Africa over its white governing regime).

In the tournament in Mexico, Israel’s all-amateur team defied expectations, losing 0-2 to Uruguay but notching draws against Sweden and Italy before being eliminated.

Four years later, Israel was effectively ejected from the Asian Football Confederation following a resolution introduced by Kuwait that passed 17 to 13, with six abstentions. The vote came a day before a high-profile Israel-Iran game in Tehran that Iran won 1-0 on an Israeli own goal.

Today, Barzel rejects the premise that rejoining the AFC would guarantee Israel a place in the World Cup going forward.

“It would be a little patronizing and arrogant for me to say that,” he said, adding that he was not sure Israel would beat teams such as Jordan or Qatar.

Barzel also cited Israel’s place inside UEFA’s institutions as a benefit for sticking with the current arrangement. Current IFA chairman Moshe “Shino” Zuaretz was elected to UEFA’s Executive Committee in April 2025, despite the war in Gaza and growing calls to sanction Israeli soccer, while former IFA chairman Avi Luzon previously served in a senior role on the same body.

Institutional backing has extended beyond Europe, Barzel said, pointing to the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, where Israeli fans were allowed to attend despite the absence of diplomatic ties. He also cited the global soccer body FIFA’s decision to move the 2023 under-20s World Cup from Indonesia to Argentina after Indonesia objected to hosting Israel’s team. Israel went on to finish third.

Still, Israel’s formal place in international soccer has done little to shield its teams and supporters from hostility. Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were attacked in Amsterdam after a match against Ajax in November 2024, and the club’s supporters were later barred from attending an Aston Villa match in a decision that became a political and policing scandal in Britain.

Despite its absence from the World Cup, Israel has remained a political flashpoint around the event, which U.S. President Donald Trump vowed to make “an unprecedented success.” Speculation that Trump’s hopes for a World Cup untainted by war spurred his push for a ceasefire with Iran prompted a denial from the  top White House official dealing with the World Cup.

That didn’t keep the conflict from seeping into the events.

In Boston on June 19, kilt-clad Scotland fans waiting in blocks-long lines to board shuttles to the stadium where their team would face Morocco accepted Palestinian flags from activists lining the route.

Hours before Canada’s opening match on June 12, activists draped a “Kick Israel out of FIFA” banner over a World Cup logo near one of Toronto’s busiest highways.

Days later, a viral video from Iran’s match against New Zealand in Los Angeles showed security guards confiscating an Israeli flag from a fan — who was told they were acting on orders from their superiors — while other spectators behind him held Palestinian flags.

Trump’s special envoy for global partnerships, Paolo Zampolli, told Israel’s Kan public broadcaster he was “very disturbed” by the incident in Los Angeles, adding that there was “no place for antisemitism or double standards in sports.” Zampolli, who had previously urged FIFA to replace Iran with Italy at the World Cup, called on the soccer body to treat the episode seriously.

Barzel drew a distinction between the flag incident, which he said was likely a poor decision by stadium staff, and any official FIFA policy against Israel, noting that Israel’s flag is displayed alongside those of other member associations at official FIFA and UEFA events. FIFA generally discourages flags of teams not playing in a given match, he said, and added that Israeli teams have grown used to seeing Palestinian flags in soccer stadiums.

“Personally, I don’t get worked up by flags — they don’t scare me,” he said.

Yoav Borowitz, head of sports at Kan, said FIFA appeared wary of flags being used as protest symbols, pointing to the Iranian lion-and-sun flag, the country’s flag before the 1979 revolution installed the current theocratic regime, which some fans waved at the same match. FIFA’s failure to clarify whether Israeli flags were allowed in stadiums in the days after the incident, he said, “shows where Israel stands at the moment.”

“There were official FIFA stewards there,” he said, “and if the fan was effectively forced to remove the flag, then I would have expected FIFA to have issued a response by now and said that Israeli flags are allowed into stadiums, just as Palestinian flags are allowed into stadiums, just as the flag of any country is allowed into stadiums.”

Any limits placed on Israel’s soccer association have been imposed solely on security grounds, Barzel said, though in October UEFA came close to holding an emergency vote on whether to suspend Israel over the war in Gaza.

At FIFA’s congress in Vancouver in April, when Palestinian Football Association president Jibril Rajoub refused to shake hands with Israel FA Vice President Basim Sheikh Suliman despite repeated appeals from FIFA President Gianni Infantino, who called on the sides to “give hope to the children.”

Despite such gestures, Israel continues to compete as usual — almost. It has been unable to host matches at home for close to three years because of war and has had to play its home World Cup qualifiers in neutral third countries. It is hosting several contests this fall in Moldova, which last year gained an Israeli embassy, and direct El Al routes, for the first time. (Russia, by contrast, has had its national teams and clubs suspended from FIFA and UEFA competitions since its invasion of Ukraine.)

Despite the controversies, FIFA has kept pressing ahead with its vision of soccer as “a force for unity, peace and hope,” including reported discussions about opening a new under-15’s tournament in the United States in September with a symbolic match between Israeli and Palestinian youth teams.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

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