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The battle for Jewish hearts and minds returns to the printed page
(JTA) — The last 20 years haven’t been kind to Jewish journalism, with local weeklies shrinking or folding and even big city papers suspending their print publications and going completely digital. Publishing online has allowed these papers to cut costs and given them the potential for a wide reach — albeit a potential undermined by an increasingly siloed and ideologically polarized market for news and ideas.
Yet still there are those who aren’t giving up on print — at least in small, carefully targeted batches. This spring has seen the launch of two Jewish journals — Masorti, a reboot of the former Conservative Judaism, and Fragments, a product of the left-leaning Jewish human rights group T’ruah. The two magazines join a small but scrappy fraternity of journals aiming to steer the Jewish conversation.
“We’re the people of the book. I think print is having a moment,” said Rabbi Lev Meirowitz Nelson, who as director of Emor, T’ruah’s affiliated think tank, edits Fragments. “In the midst of all the [digital] bombardment people experience, there’s something very grounding about picking up a hard copy and being able to mark it up or carry it with you.”
Of course, Fragments and its more established cousins — from a legacy Modern Orthodox quarterly like Tradition to the interdisciplinary journal Modern Judaism — are all available online, and few print more than 1,000 copies at a time. The goal, the editors and publishers of some of the newer publications told me, is to establish a brand and repair what each one said was a broken communal discussion about Israel, domestic politics and religion.
“I hate what’s become of discourse in Jewish life, which largely goes on on Twitter and other places like that,” said Mark Charendoff. “I think Jews like longform discussions, and we’ve become very, very impatient. I wanted to carve out a space for that long type of writing and reading.”
Charendoff is president of the Maimonides Fund, which publishes Sapir, perhaps the best known of the newish journals. It has a high-profile editor — Bret Stephens, the conservative columnist on the New York Times opinion page — and a penchant for hot-button topics that rally conservatives and enrage liberals. Recent issues of the two-year-old journal have focused on “cancel culture” and a campus environment that most of its contributors consider hostile to conservatism and Jewish life.
“I think society and the Jewish community has become so polarized that people are afraid of articulating controversial views. We need to take a breath and say, ‘You’re not going to be harmed by reading something you disagree with,’” said Charendoff.
T’ruah believes there are plenty of controversial views being aired, but mostly on the right: It has explicitly positioned its new journal as a “necessary alternative to well-funded right-wing Jewish publications.” The news release announcing Fragments did not name those publications but presumably they include Sapir; Mosaic, supported by the right-leaning Tikvah Fund; and Tablet, which is published by Nextbook, Inc., whose president, Mem Bernstein, is on the board of Tikvah and is the widow of its founder. Tablet has published writers from across the political spectrum, but has drawn howls from the left for its frequent articles denouncing “wokeness” and cancel culture and a recent piece questioning the motives of donors who support gender-affirming care for trans people.
(Another journal, The Jewish Review of Books, was initially backed by Tikvah, but recently spun off under its own foundation.)
The premiere issue of Fragments includes essays on concepts of freedom by Laynie Soloman, a director at SVARA, an LGBTQ yeshiva based in Chicago, and Joelle Novey, the director of an interfaith environmental group in the Washington, D.C. area.
Nelson sees two audiences for Fragments: “It’s definitely speaking to the left and offering a deepening of language and of conversation around Jewish sources and Jewish ideas,” he said. “And it’s an effort to speak to the center, which often shares our values and can be spooked by the language they see coming from the right.”
Fittingly for a magazine published by a group formerly known as Rabbis for Human Rights, Fragments leans into Jewish text and religious perspectives. That sets it apart from Jewish Currents, a legacy journal of the Jewish left that, after a relaunch in 2018, now aims for an audience of young, left-wing, mostly secular Jews who, when not anti-Zionist, are deeply critical of Israel. Arielle Angel, editor in chief of Jewish Currents, has said that the magazine has become “a reliable and essential space for challenging, rigorous, surprising work that has shifted the discourse even beyond the American Jewish left.”
The aspiration that the “discourse can be shifted” by gladiators writing for small magazines harkens back to the post-World War II period, a sort of golden age of Jewish thought journals. Jewish and Jewish-adjacent publications like the Menorah Journal, Partisan Review, Commentary and Dissent provided a launching pad for an ideologically fluid cohort of “New York intellectuals” that over the years included Sidney Hook, Hannah Arendt, Lionel Trilling, Saul Bellow, Irving Howe, Delmore Schwartz, Norman Podhoretz, Paul Goodman, Midge Dector, Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Alfred Kazin.
Partisan Review was among a spate of magazines that offered a platform for Jewish intellectuals in the years immediately after World War II. (Open Culture)
While writers like these tackled Jewish issues, or general issues through a Jewish lens, many of them influenced the wider national conversation. Angel has said she has drawn inspiration from Commentary: Founded in 1945 by the American Jewish Committee, the magazine became hugely influential in promoting neoconservative ideas and thinkers in the 1980s and ’90s.
The “golden age” was an explosion of Jewish creativity, and political influence, that would be difficult to replicate today. Benjamin Balint, a former editor at Commentary and author of a history of the magazine, says the flowering of Jewish journals in the mid-20th century was the result of “terrific pent-up pressure among the children of immigrants who were pushed down for so long and were able to explode into the mainstream.” Small magazines “provided that release — pushing critics and writers into the larger culture,” said Balint, who previously edited Sources, the journal of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.
A long piece in Tablet recently argued that such Jewish influence is in steep decline “anywhere where American Jews once made their mark,” from academia to Hollywood to government. Author Jacob Savage doesn’t blame the loss of the immigrant work ethic, however, but rather “American liberalism” for marginalizing Jews.
Whatever the cause, few of the newer journals aspire to that kind of influence on the larger culture, and acknowledge that they are trying to shape the conversation within the Jewish community.
“We believe that Jewish leaders need great ideas to do their work well,” said Rabbi Justus Baird, senior vice president for national programs at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and publisher of its journal Sources, launched in 2021. “The way we invest in ideas is by cultivating a large group of Jewish thinkers and scholars who are doing not just the scholarship for its own sake, but really trying to work collaboratively on how Jewish thought can apply to the challenges facing the Jewish people.”
The Hartman Institute (which also counts the Maimonides Fund among its long list of major donors) is a religiously pluralistic, liberal Zionist think tank with outposts in New York and Jerusalem. Recent essays in Sources include lengthy essays by Yale religious studies professor Christine Hayes on the ethics of shaming and Hartman scholar Mijal Bitton on how relationships can heal the breach between the Diaspora and Israel.
Part of Hartman’s goal in publishing the journal is to provide a space for such long-form articles, filling what Baird calls “a gap between the quick, super-responsive, news-oriented Jewish publication landscape, the hot takes about what is going on, and the academic Jewish work.”
“It’s a space where ideas can really percolate,” said Claire Sufrin, who now edits Sources. “The written word, the printed word is there and can be shared in that way and people can engage with it over and over again.”
Masorti, the relaunched journal of Conservative Judaism, is also trying to bridge a gap, in this case between Jewish scholarship and the synagogue.
“Rabbis have responsibilities to serve as congregational leaders, and also the obligation to engage in Jewish learning and scholarship,” said Rabbi Joseph Prouser, the editor of Masorti.
The original Conservative Judaism was published from 1945 through 2014. The reboot is sponsored by the movement’s Rabbinical Assembly and its five seminaries, including the Jewish Theological Seminary, the New York flagship. Its readership base is rabbis and cantors affiliated with the movement.
Masorti arrives at a critical time for the Conservative movement: In an essay in the first issue, its associate editor, Rabbi Jonathan Rosenbaum, says what was once America’s largest Jewish denomination is at a “precipice.”
“At its summit, the plurality of [North American] Jews identified with the Conservative movement, something like 40%,” Rosenbaum said in an interview. “There was something like 1.6 million Jews who were thought to be part of the Conservative movement up to maybe the late ‘80s, early ‘90s. Today, there are about 500,000.
“Part of the goal of the journal,” he said, is to “look at the problems and the means of solving them.”
In the past the Conservative Judaism journal had been a forum for debate within the movement. It published dueling papers, for example, on the decision to ordain women and what is and isn’t permissible on Shabbat. Prouser says he’ll uphold that tradition of dissent: The current issue features an essay by Michal Raucher, a Jewish studies professor at Rutgers University, who criticizes the movement’s establishment for embracing a justification for abortion that doesn’t go far enough in recognizing the bodily autonomy of women (an argument she also advanced in a JTA oped).
And Prouser does hope these arguments are heard beyond the movement, positioned between traditionalist Orthodoxy and liberal Reform. “One of the beauties of the Conservative movement is that we can talk to people to our right to our left right, we can talk to the entire spectrum of the Jewish community,” he said.
The editors of the new journals agree that there are fewer and fewer spaces for civil conversation among Jews, blaming the filter bubble of the internet and the take-no-prisoners style of current political debate. And each said they would like to be part of the solution.
Sufrin, the editor of Hartman’s journal, calls it a “bridge, because people can talk about it together, they can engage with the ideas together, and it’s in that conversation that they can develop a relationship and ultimately, talk together more productively.”
The question is whether it is too late: At a time when algorithms reward readers with the kind of material they are likely to agree with, will even an elite reach across ideological divides and listen to what the other side is saying? When institutions — from government to religion — regard compromise as surrender, who dares to concede that your ideological opponent might have a point?
“Difference and disagreement are productive when we engage with the best versions of those with whom we disagree,” Hayes writes in Sources. That sounds like a call to action. Or is it an epitaph?
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The post The battle for Jewish hearts and minds returns to the printed page appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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A craven attempt to undermine the IDF — from one of Netanyahu’s top allies
For your weekly reminder of what is wrong in Israel, consider the bizarre spectacle that unfolded this weekend as Defense Minister Israel Katz announced during a Sunday television interview that he was replacing Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth, commander of the IDF’s Central Command, which in effect controls the combustible West Bank.
What was remarkable is: Katz does not have the authority to fire Bluth. The government can fire the military chief, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, but he appoints his senior staff, including Bluth.
Zamir immediately said he had not been consulted and that no such decision had been made. Within hours, the Israel Defense Forces issued an extraordinary statement confirming that Bluth was not, in fact, being replaced, and reminding the defense minister that he has no authority to replace him in the manner he had described. Zamir later added that no senior generals would be replaced until 2027, after the October election.
It was an embarrassing spectacle. And it affirmed that, amid an escalating crisis in the West Bank and fears among Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition of defeat in forthcoming elections, the Israeli government is flailing.
Katz is running in the imminent Likud Party primary, hoping to secure a good shot at a Knesset seat in the Oct. 27 election. Bluth is unpopular in the party for being perceived as even mildly critical of Jewish terrorists in the West Bank. Bluth said recently that violent settlers, in addition to doing “damage to Israel’s good name and legitimacy,” are also harming “our fundamental mission, which is thwarting terror and protecting residents.”
Katz, in claiming to be firing Bluth, told Channel 14 — which functions primarily as an echo chamber for the governing coalition — that Bluth had acted contrary to his “explicit policy” regarding a particular violent Jewish settler. His real message was to coalition voters, a suggestion that he will fight for settlers in the West Bank to have even more impunity than they already do.
After all, no one familiar with the situation in the West Bank would accuse the Israeli military of conducting an especially vigorous campaign against Jewish extremist violence there. If anything, the opposite criticism has dominated for years.
Especially since the latest Netanyahu government took office, in late 2022, attacks by radical settlers against Palestinian civilians and their property have risen sharply.
Palestinian civilians have died at the hands of extremist settlers during this period, while many more have suffered injuries, intimidation and repeated attacks on their livelihoods. At least 18 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank so far this year — more than the entire number killed in all of 2025. Entire communities have abandoned grazing areas and farmland after years of relentless harassment.
Villages have been assaulted; homes and vehicles torched; olive groves destroyed; and livestock stolen or killed. No settlers have been convicted in the deaths. The overwhelming majority of investigations are quietly closed. Whatever one thinks about the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and even factoring in the continued reality of Palestinian terrorism, this is a profound failure of the rule of law that weakens Israel’s moral standing and hands its enemies an endless supply of propaganda.
Despite Bluth’s recent criticism, the army has clearly failed to intervene decisively when attacks unfold before its soldiers. It’s allowed civilian lawlessness to become normalized in the occupied areas. Whatever operational constraints commanders may face, the cumulative impression has been one of insufficient urgency and insufficient enforcement. It is therefore difficult to argue that the IDF has somehow been excessively harsh toward violent settlers.
Unless you’re a Likud voter.
Katz’s behavior is a reflection of the fact that the party’s activist base has changed profoundly over the past decade. Now, political advancement within the party depends not upon demonstrating administrative competence or strategic judgment, but rather upon proving one’s willingness to confront the institutions that many on the Israeli right now regard as enemies from within.
Those include the courts, civil service gatekeepers, the media, the Shin Bet and, increasingly, the senior command of the IDF, all of which the Israeli right has recast as components of an entrenched liberal establishment supposedly working to frustrate the “will of the people” and the political fortunes of Netanyahu.
That’s an extraordinary transformation, aligned with the rise of the anti-establishment populist right in the United States and Europe. Former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Likud’s founder, spent decades battling institutions he believed had treated him unjustly, yet once in office he displayed a reverential respect for the state’s legal and constitutional framework. This, apparently, is a thing of the past.
The post A craven attempt to undermine the IDF — from one of Netanyahu’s top allies appeared first on The Forward.
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Archaeologists uncover treasures of Vilnius’ Great Synagogue as Jews dispute its future
(JTA) — VILNIUS, Lithuania — Archaeologists have uncovered the full floor of Lithuania’s historic Great Synagogue, revealing treasures nearly erased by Nazi and Soviet occupations — and exposing rifts between Lithuanian Jews over how to preserve and interpret what survived.
Locals walking through the center of Vilnius now pass a hole in the ground, a portal to the rich Jewish past of a city once called the “Jerusalem of the North.” For the first time since 1940, they can see the polished, colorful floor and entire prayer platform of the Great Synagogue of Vilna, built in the 17th century, which became one the most important religious, cultural and intellectual hubs for Diaspora Jews.
In Lithuania’s small remaining Jewish community, who number less than 3,000, there is no debate that the site must be preserved. But discussions about how to protect the past — and what to build over it — have triggered pain over one of the last pillars of identity left standing for Lithuanian Jews.
The community’s main representative body plans to build a new Jewish community center over the excavation, where visitors could view the Great Synagogue floor through a glass layer or a basement-level exhibit. Above, the center would celebrate current-day Jewish life through cultural, social and educational events.
Some Orthodox Jews and their supporters oppose that project, saying the synagogue should be rebuilt as a house of worship or preserved as a purely archaeological exhibit. Other residents say the mission of a new building should be broadened beyond Lithuanian Jews, offering a center that promotes tolerance, human rights and understanding of Jewish history among all Lithuanians.
On the eve of World War II, the massive Great Synagogue stood among more than 100 synagogues and Jewish prayer houses in Vilnius, where about 40% of people were Jewish. Over 90% of Lithuanian Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and from 1944 until 1990, Vilnius was remade as the capital of the Soviet Lithuanian Republic. The synagogue was burned and largely destroyed by the Nazis, then razed by the Soviets to build a school in its place.
“This is the place that half the population would have identified their city with,” Jon Seligman, the archaeologist leading the excavation, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “So this city at the moment is missing half its identity, and because it’s such a long time since it happened, they don’t even know they’re missing half their identity.”
The excavation is over a decade in the making. Seligman, an Israel-based archaeologist whose Jewish grandparents lived in Lithuania before World War II, first proposed unearthing the synagogue’s remains in 2013 after a visit to discover his family roots. His team of archaeologists have worked there since 2015, and last year, the former Soviet school building over the site was demolished.
In an accident of history, the synagogue’s main floor was constructed below ground and spared from total erasure.
“When the building was built in the 17th century, part of the restrictions that were placed on the Jewish community was that they were not allowed to build their synagogue higher than any of the churches in the surroundings,” said Seligman. “So to create the internal majesty, if you don’t want to have a low, two-story building, what you do is you drop the floor level one story below ground surface — and that’s what they did.”
The latest installment of Seligman’s project, completed in July, fully exposed this main hall and the bimah, or prayer platform, covered in red, white, green and black geometric designs. Archaeologists also found traces of the Shulhoyf, a busy complex that formed the heartbeat of Jewish life.
Vilnius was a major center of Jewish thought, famed for both its religious tradition and modern secular Jewish culture. It was home to the 18th-century Vilna Gaon, one of the most influential Jewish sages — and also the birthplace of the Jewish Labour Bund, a secular, socialist and anti-Zionist organization. Schools taught literature and the sciences in Yiddish and Hebrew, and Zionists shared ideas alongside anti-Zionists.
Before World War II, the Shulhoyf hosted 12 prayer houses, a bathhouse, kosher butcher stalls, the first public toilets in Vilnius, the prestigious Strashun Library and the first headquarters of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, or YIVO. That institute, now in New York City, continues to preserve the Yiddish language and cultural heritage of Eastern European Jews.
Faina Kukliansky, who has since 2013 chaired the umbrella organization known as the Lithuanian Jewish Community, spearheaded the initiative to construct a community center over the synagogue.
Kukliansky grew up as the child of Holocaust survivors in Lithuania under the Soviets. She said the new space will replace the community’s current headquarters, hosted in a nearby building that is more than a century old and struggles with heating and water system issues.
Kukliansky said the new center will honor both the past and the present of Lithuanian Jews, featuring a YIVO exhibition alongside concerts, social clubs and Jewish learning events. After the Holocaust and decades of Soviet restrictions on Jewish life, those who remain are mostly secular and distant from Jewish traditions. Kukliansky said the center’s construction over the remains of the Great Synagogue will inspire Jews to trace the threads of their heritage.
“It’s very meaningful that in the place where the synagogue rose, Jewish life will be intensive because our Jewish community center is there,” said Kukliansky.
But Kukliansky’s plans have met sharp opponents from other corners of Lithuania’s Jewish world. Among the most vocal is Rabbi Sholom Ber Krinsky, an emissary for the Chabad-Lubavitch Orthodox movement who was born in Boston and has lived in Vilnius since 1994.
Krinsky said that according to Jewish tradition, the Great Synagogue site should not be covered by a building for secular cultural activities, but remain a “living Jewish religious center that continues the learning and the prayer.”
“If a site was used as a synagogue — for centuries, in this case — the holiness retains its holiness, and it’s proper to respect that holiness,” said Krinsky. “A Jewish community center might be nice, but it certainly doesn’t represent the holiness of that site.”
Krinsky has for years demanded more money for Chabad projects, which he says would be used for religious services, Jewish education and social welfare programs. He accuses Kukliansky of monopolizing funds granted to Jews by the Lithuanian government as compensation for property stolen during the Holocaust. The Good Will Foundation, an international body created through the World Jewish Restitution Organization and the Lithuanian Jewish Community, has been authorized to distribute this restitution money.
Since legislation passed by the Lithuanian parliament in 2022, the Good Will Foundation has disbursed about $9 million to compensate individual Holocaust survivors and their heirs for private property claims. Given that most Jewish property was left without any heirs, another $40 million is being allocated to support Jewish communal life — including projects like the new community center.
Krinsky said these funds have not been sufficiently used to nourish religious life. Kukliansky countered that her organization supports the Choral Synagogue, the only synagogue still active in Lithuania, where Krinsky leads the small group of Jews who usually scrape together a minyan — the minimum of 10 people required for public prayers. Compared with other Eastern European communities, Chabad’s footprint is small in Vilnius, where the Vilna Gaon led a tradition of opposing Hasidism that became central to the identity of many Lithuanian Jews.
Kukliansky also claims that Krinsky has refused to provide her with financial reports. His wife, Nechama Dina Krinsky, was indicted for tax fraud in 2023.
Kukliansky faces further criticism from Dovid Katz, an American-born, Vilnius-based scholar of Yiddish and the Holocaust. Katz advocated for rebuilding the Great Synagogue or preserving its remnants as a religious site, which he said would draw Orthodox pilgrims from around the world.
“A synagogue is a religious place, and religious leaders today — and everyday religious Jews — need to be consulted on what’s going to replace the Great Synagogue,” said Katz. “It is a place either for a replacement synagogue or for archeological remains.”
Still other critics say the Jewish representative body has split the site from a broader mission that would attract non-Jewish Lithuanians and Jews from around the world. Anna Avidan, who founded a nonprofit called Jerusalem of the North to celebrate Jewish history in Lithuania, led a conference in 2017 that invited historians, architects and students to discuss the future of a space commemorating the Great Synagogue.
Fragments of a gefilte fish dish and a Passover plate that were found at the Great Synagogue excavation site. (Shira Li Bartov)
Avidan said attendees proposed a cultural center that would host forums about tolerance, drawing international visitors and educating Lithuanians about the Jewish past of their country. She argued it would be “selfish” to build a center exclusively for the Lithuanian Jewish community, since such spaces are closed to the public, partly for security reasons. The proposals emerging from Avidan’s conference were shut down after Kukliansky’s opposition.
“We are still working on how to include Jewish history in Lithuanian history,” said Avidan. “Approaching the site as a site of Lithuanian history, that would promote this harmony and understanding.”
At the excavation site, Seligman’s team has dug up pieces of life in the synagogue, which seated about 500 people, with some 500 more squeezing in for High Holidays. The latest artifacts to emerge from the ground include a Passover plate, a dish for gefilte fish, a plaque engraved with the Ten Commandments and several seating plaques with the names of people who donated to the synagogue, assuring their spots inside.
These name plaques left clues about families who vanished from Vilnius. One marked a seat for Gitel Klachek, identified as the “wife of the late Yechezkel, Shamash d’Mata” — the city sexton. Their wealthy, influential family owned several businesses around the Great Synagogue.
On the uncovered synagogue floor and the surrounding Jewish neighborhoods, there walked people who disputed religion, Jewish identity, Zionism and other ideas. “There would have been a large contingent who would have been ultra-Orthodox. There also would have been a large contingent who were completely secular,” said Seligman. “So the city was very, very much a very mixed community.”
The fights over the memory of these ghosts — and over Lithuania’s Jewish identity — echo the disagreements that animated the Jews who once thrived there.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Archaeologists uncover treasures of Vilnius’ Great Synagogue as Jews dispute its future appeared first on The Forward.
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AIPAC-backed Wesley Bell defeats Cori Bush in Missouri Democratic primary
(JTA) — Missouri incumbent Rep. Wesley Bell registered a resounding victory in Tuesday’s Democratic primary against Cori Bush, a prominent Democratic socialist and ardent critic of Israel.
The Associated Press called the race just an hour after polls closed, at 8:02pm local time. By the time 99% of the vote was counted, Bell had garnered 59.2% to Bush’s 36.9%.
The primary is a déjà vu moment for St. Louis. The same pair of candidates vied just two years ago to represent the state’s 1st Congressional District.
Bell prevailed in 2024 to oust Bush in a clash that was largely defined by a $9 million influx of AIPAC cash in support of Bell. In this rematch, Bush made the American Israel Public Affairs Committee a central issue in her campaign, similar to other Democratic Socialists of America candidates.
“AIPAC has become yet another way for MAGA-donors to divide the Democratic base by meddling in primaries,” Bush told JTA in a written statement prior to the primary. “In St. Louis and across the country, people know that our fight against antisemitism means fighting against the far-right’s effort to divide us.”
Federal Election Commission records show that this time around, AIPAC has invested far less in the race. Through its United Democracy Project super PAC, the pro-Israel lobby has spent in the neighborhood of $3 million on the rematch, with the vast majority targeted at opposing Bush.
In response to Bell’s decisive win on Tuesday, AIPAC posted its congratulations on X: “Our community was proud to support a strong, principled Democratic leader,” the lobby stated.
The Washington, D.C.-based Jewish Democratic Council of America, which had mobilized networks of voters to make phone calls in support of Bell, added their congratulations to the congressman following his victory.
“Rep. Bell is a leader in taking on Trump’s corruption,” the group posted on X. “We look forward to seeing him continue to fight for our Jewish and Democratic values.”
Aside from their conflicting perspectives on Israel, Bell and Bush have much in common. Born in Missouri in the mid-1970s, they are both Black progressive Democrats who entered politics after the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in the city of Ferguson.
Amid protests across Ferguson for police reforms, Bell won a seat on the city council and focused on passing such changes. He went on to become St. Louis County prosecutor in 2018, defeating a 27-year incumbent who had failed to prosecute the officer who had killed Brown.
Bush, meanwhile, became involved in politics by participating in the Ferguson protests. She lost Democratic primaries for the U.S. Senate and House in 2016 and 2018, but then won congressional races in 2020 and 2022. In 2024, however, she lost to Bell by more than 5 percentage points.
The candidates have similar stances on most political issues, prioritizing concerns like reproductive rights, gun violence prevention and the dismantling of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as lowering costs of housing, utilities, healthcare and prescriptions. But they have sharp differences when it comes to Israel, with Bush’s campaign pledging to “stand for justice in Palestine.” Bell, in contrast, has stood steadfast in his support of Israel.
The post AIPAC-backed Wesley Bell defeats Cori Bush in Missouri Democratic primary appeared first on The Forward.
