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The historian who uncovered the ADL’s secret plot against the far-right John Birch Society
(JTA) — A historian leafing through files in an archive discovered how a Jewish organization helped bring down an influential far-right extremist movement in the United States in the 1960s and ’70s by going undercover and acting as self-appointed spies.
The discovery of the Anti-Defamation League’s covert operation targeting the John Birch Society is the basis of a chapter in a new book by political historian Matthew Dallek of George Washington University. Published in March, “Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right” is Dallek’s fourth book. It examines the roots of today’s emboldened conservative movement in the United States.
“Birchers” is a history of a group that at its height numbered as many as 100,000 members and “mobilized a loyal army of activists” in a campaign against what it saw as a vast communist conspiracy. He also examines how the Birchers’ mission to defend Christianity and capitalism morphed into a radical anti-civil rights agenda that groups like the ADL saw as an existential threat.
Dallek, who grew up in a Reform Jewish household in Los Angeles, recently sat with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency to discuss the rise of the Birchers, how the ADL infiltrated their ranks and whether such tactics are justified in the name of fighting extremism.
The conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
JTA: Before we get into the Jewish aspect of the book, meaning the chapter on the Anti-Defamation League’s relationship with the John Birch Society, let’s take a step back. Who are so-called Birchers? Why do they matter?
Mathew Dallek: The John Birch Society was a household name in the 1960s, becoming the emblem of far-right extremism. It didn’t have huge numbers, but it did penetrate the culture and the national consciousness. Its leader, Robert Welch, had argued at one point that President Dwight Eisenhower was a dedicated agent of a communist conspiracy taking over the United States. Welch formed the John Birch Society to educate the American people about the nature of the communist threat.
In its heyday, the group had about 60,000 to 100,000 members, organized into small chapters. They sent out literature trying to give members roadmaps or ideas for what they could do. They believed a mass education of the public was needed because traditional two-party politics was not going to be very effective at exposing the communist threat. They would form front groups such as Impeach Earl Warren [the Supreme Court’s chief justice] or Support Your Local Police. They tried to ban certain books that they viewed as socialistic from being used in schools. Some Birchers ran for school board seats and protested at libraries.
Critics feared that the Birchers were a growing fascist or authoritarian group and that if they were not sidelined politically and culturally then the country could be overrun. The Nation magazine wrote that Birchers essentially had given their followers an invitation to engage in civil war, guerrilla-style. Those fears sparked a big debate about democracy. How does one sustain democracy and, at the height of the Cold War and in the shadow of World War II, Nazi fascist Germany, and the Holocaust?
As you were researching, you came across a trove of historical internal documents from the ADL in the archives of the American Jewish Historical Society in New York. Why did you devote a chapter to what you found in those documents? What did those files reveal to you about the John Birch Society?
These papers are a goldmine. They’re this incredible and often detailed window into the far-right and, in particular, the John Birch Society. They show the ADL had an extensive, multi-dimensional counterintelligence operation that they were running against the Birch Society.
People knew at the time that the ADL was attending events where Birchers were speaking. But the ADL also had undercover agents with code names, who were able to infiltrate the society’s headquarters in Belmont, Massachusetts, and various chapter officers. They dug up financial and employment information about individual Birchers. And they not only used the material for their own newsletters and press releases, but they also fed information to the media.
Another layer is about a debate that’s been going on: Were the Birchers racist and antisemitic? The Birch Society always insisted that they did not tolerate white supremacy and didn’t want any KKK members. They said they accepted people of all faiths and races. And it’s true that they did have a handful of Jewish and Black members.
But what the ADL found was that a lot of hate was bubbling up from the grassroots and also leaking out from the top. The ADL was able to document this in a systematic way.
Some critics of the ADL today say the organization has strayed from its mission by focusing not just on antisemitism but on a wider array of causes. But from reading your work, it sounds like the ADL even then took an expansive view of its role, examining not just direct attacks on Jews but also how the political environment can jeopardize Jews. Am I getting that right, and why did the ADL devote so many resources to a group like the John Birch Society?
So, a few things: It’s the late ’50s and ’60s, and a civil rights coalition is emerging. Benjamin Epstein, the national director of the ADL, was friendly with Thurgood Marshall, the Supreme Court justice, and Martin Luther King. John F. Kennedy went to an ADL event and praised the ADL for speaking out very strongly in defense of democracy and pushing for the equal treatment of all Americans.
Isadore Zack, who helped lead the spy operation, at one point wrote to his colleagues that it was only in a democracy that the Jewish community has been allowed to flourish and so, if you want to defend Jewish Americans, you also have to defend democracy.
There certainly were other threats at the time, but the Birch Society was seen by liberal critics, including the ADL, as a very secretive group that promoted conspiracy theories about communists who often became conflated with Jews.
Would you consider the ADL successful in its campaign against the Birchers?
They were successful. They used surreptitious and in some cases underhanded means to expose the antisemitism and the racism and also interest in violence or the violent rhetoric of the Birch Society in the 1960s.
The ADL was at the tip of the spear of a liberal coalition that included the White House, sometimes the Department of Justice, depending on the issue, the NAACP, Americans for Democratic Action, labor unions, the union-backed Group Research Inc., which was tracking the far-right as well. The ADL was one of the most, if not the most effective at constraining and discrediting the society.
Clearly, however, the Birchers’ ideas never died. They lived on and made a comeback.
It’s somewhat ironic that you reveal the existence of this spying apparatus devoted to targeting an extremist and antisemitic group in the 1960s given the infamy the ADL would earn in a later era, the 1990s, for allegations that they colluded with police agencies in San Francisco to spy on and harass political activists. They eventually settled with the Arab American, Black and American Indian groups that brought a federal civil suit. I know you didn’t study these revelations, which are outside the scope of your book, but could you perhaps reflect on why undercover tactics were seen as necessary or justified?
It’s important to remember that in the mid-20th century, law enforcement in the United States was often led by antisemites or people who were much more concerned with alleged internal communist threats — the threat from the left.
From the ADL’s vantage point, one could not rely on the government entities that were by law and by design supposed to protect Jewish Americans. There was a sense that this work had to be done, at least in part, outside of the parameters of the government.
When I first discovered the ADL’s spying, I didn’t quite know what to make of it. But I realized they weren’t just spying to spy, they exposed a lot of scary things, with echoes in our own times — like easy access to firearms, a hatred of the government, a denigration and defamation of minority groups. And this was all happening in the shadow of the Holocaust and World War II. I became much more sympathetic; they were very effective, and they had a vision of equality of treatment for all Americans.
It’s obviously controversial. I try not to shy away from it. But they had a lot of good reasons to fight back right and to fight back in this nonviolent way.
That last thought brings to mind another, right-wing Jewish group that existed in this era of taking things into our own hands, that did use violence, explosives even.
You mean the Jewish Defense League, led by Meir Kahane.
Yes, exactly.
He was a Bircher. Toward the end of my book, I mention that he was a member for a while, under his alias Michael King.
Antisemitism is on the rise, and lots of initiatives are being organized to address it, both by existing groups like the ADL and new ones. The ADL’s budget has almost doubled over the past seven years. I am seeing Jews talk of fighting back and taking things into their own hands. And we are in this politically precarious movement in American history, all of which suggests parallels to the era you examined. What kind of wisdom can we glean from examining the ADL’s secret and public fight against the John Birch Society as people who care about the issues affecting Jews today?
A lot of liberals in the 1960s and a lot of the leadership at the ADL grasped the axiom that things can always get worse.
In 2015-2016, you’ll recall, there was Trump’s demonization of Mexican immigrants, and the so-called “alt-right” around him and his campaign and expressions of vitriol by people like Steve Bannon.
There was an assumption among a lot of Americans and among a lot of Jewish Americans that the fringe right — the antisemites, the explicit racists, the white supremacists — that there’s not a majority for them and they can never achieve power.
If you go back and you look at Trump’s closing 2016 campaign ad, it’s textbook antisemitism. He flashes on screen these wealthy Jewish international bankers, and he argues that basically, there’s a conspiracy of these global elites who are stealing the wealth of honest Americans. There’s also 2017, the white supremacists in Charlottesville, who said “Jews will not replace us” and Trump saying there are fine people on both sides.
The sense that democracy is incredibly fragile is not just a theory or a concept: It’s an actuality, the sense as well, that the United States has only been a multiracial democracy for not very long and a haven for Jews for not that long either.
The work that the ADL and the NAACP and other groups did to try to constrain and discredit as fringe and extremist still goes on today. It’s harder to do for all sorts of reasons today including social media and the loss of faith in institutions. But it still goes on. You see the importance of institutional guardrails including the Department of Justice that is prosecuting 1,000 Jan. 6 insurrectionists.
The last thing I’ll say is that one of the admirable things in the 1960s about the ADL and the liberal coalition it belonged to is that it built support for landmark legislation like the Immigration Act of 1965, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of ’65. And a coalition eventually fell apart, but it was powerful, reminding us why Jewish American groups should care about or focus on issues that don’t directly affect Jewish people.
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Man charged in a Jewish journalist’s death vandalized a Jewish business days before
The unsolved murder of a Jewish man in a public park, a synagogue desecrated with motor oil and feces, a bagel shop splattered with dirt, and the sudden and tragic death of a Jewish journalist.
Those incidents within a few miles of each other in a heavily Jewish neighborhood of Queens have put the Jewish community in that borough on alert since May. Ronnie Perry, who works at Benny’s Brick Oven Kosher Pizza in the neighborhood, said he can’t help but see a pattern.
“You know what the common denominator is, right?” Perry said.
Though investigators have not determined the motives in each case, prosecutors on Monday charged the same man who allegedly caused the death of the journalist with a hate crime for allegedly vandalizing the bagel shop.
“I was beyond horrified,” said Rachel Sales, daughter of the killed journalist, Cara Trager. “The fact that this guy did a hate crime … days before means that he could have been apprehended before my mom was killed.”
Perry, whose pizzeria is just a block from the vandalized bagel shop, told the Forward that the string of troubling incidents have rattled the community, and there’s not a lot visibly Jewish businesses like his can do to bolster security.
Nily Rozic, the Jewish state Assembly member who represents the Queens district where many of those attacks took place, said the incidents are more than just property damage or isolated violence.
“It really makes people feel like they’re being targeted as a community,” she said.
Last week, prosecutors charged Dawood Faisal, 22, with a hate crime for destroying property at Bagels & Co, a bagel shop on the corner of a major thoroughfare in Fresh Meadows that advertises itself as kosher in neon lights and displays Israeli flags. On two separate occasions in May, Faisal allegedly knocked over multiple plant stands outside the shop and, in one instance, hurled dirt at the outside wall of the store.
In May, Faisal was arraigned on charges of manslaughter for the death of Trager, a Queens-based journalist who was also active in her Jewish community. Faisal allegedly sped over 75 mph through two red lights and collided with two cars, propelling one into a crosswalk where it struck Trager and her husband, Michael, who survived.
Prosecutors have not presented any evidence that Trager was specifically targeted by Faisal, and authorities are not investigating the crash as a hate crime, according to a spokesperson for District Attorney Melinda Katz.
But even before the vandalism charge, Michael Trager told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he believed that Faisal had been “looking to do damage in a heavily Jewish area.”
Sales told the Forward her mom was passionate about fighting antisemitism, and the two often discussed the uptick in anti-Jewish hate crimes — including the bagel shop’s vandalism days before Cara Trager’s death on May 29.
“This is a tragedy for the entire Jewish community to understand, and beyond the Jewish community, this is a tragedy for New Yorkers, for Americans, to see that hate crimes don’t end at vandalism. People could die,” Sales said. “My mom died.”
Just a week before the car crash, Albert Itzkowitz, a local rabbi and former kosher bakery owner, was shot and killed while visiting Kissena Park in Queens. Police are investigating the incident as a murder but have not identified any suspects.
His family is calling for the killing to be investigated as a hate crime.
“Daddy was visibly Jewish. He was targeted in broad daylight. He was killed in a public park where he should have been safe,” his daughter, Leah Livshitz, said at a press conference in June. “His family deserves answers. The Jewish community deserves answers.”
Then in July, two Orthodox congregations in Queens were desecrated with feces and motor oil. Police are also investigating that vandalism as a hate crime.
Rozic, the first and only Israeli-born New York state Assembly member, said even as investigations are ongoing, she understands the incidents as “interconnected” and has heard from Jewish constituents who feel afraid.
“Context is important,” Rozic said. “When incidents like this are followed by additional violence, it compounds the fear and the trauma of the community.”
Anti-Jewish hate crimes have increased by 8.5% in New York City this year — with 205 reported versus 189 for the same period last year, according to data from the NYPD.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who previously represented a Queens district in the statehouse, has noted his administration’s 800% increased investment in the office of hate crime prevention. But in recent weeks, he has faced backlash from some Jewish New Yorkers after he released a video referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “war criminal” and calling on New Yorkers to protest the Israeli leader’s planned visit to the United Nations in September. Mamdani has defended his comments on Netanyahu as “critiques of a political leader, not of people of a specific faith.”
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He stumbled upon Leonard Bernstein’s stubble on his way to finding a ‘Lost Mozart’
David Israel needed an electric razor, so he borrowed Leonard Bernstein’s.
It was the early ‘90s and Israel was about to make his first trip overseas as a representative of the Bernstein estate at the London Symphony Orchestra. He knew that European outlets had a different voltage and so he phoned up the maestro’s daughter Jamie to ask if he could use the one at the Dakota, where Israel worked as an editor, preparing the definitive scores for Mass, West Side Story and On the Town after Bernstein’s death in 1990.
“I took a red eye, so I’m there in the morning, and I was going to shave,” Israel told me in a video call from his home in Malibu. “All of Lenny’s gray stubble comes falling out into the sink. And I thought, ‘Well, if I get a piece of Scotch tape, I could save this, and we could clone him at some point.’ And so I did.”
Israel, who has composed music for Paul Taylor and Twyla Tharp, knew he had a story to tell about his picaresque early days in the world of classical music. His second novel, The Lost Mozart is a kunstleroman that borrows quite a bit from life and, like the stubbly attempt to revive Leonard Bernstein, is about an effort to bring genius back to life.
The story follows Noah Wideman, like Israel a graduate of the Hartt School of Music in Hartford, Connecticut, who stumbles on a fragment of an unfinished Mozart string quartet. An unprecedented 627th composition from a life that lasted only 35 years.
Together with a crew of older men — a legendary classical music radio announcer, his partner and their collector friend in possession of the titular sketch — Noah works to finish what Amadeus started.
Noah, a gifted pasticheur, is primed for the task and, due to an early job at ASCAP, where he surreptitiously recorded the music playing at strip clubs that failed to pay their annual licensing fee, his skills as a detective.
Completing the work of one of the greatest musical geniuses is an act of chutzpah, something Israel knows something about. His own lost Mozart moment came shortly after college, when he made a play for the legacy of another great.
He knew Bernstein socially through the dean of the Hartt School, and chose the college in part because he knew the maestro often came to visit. Israel was scheduled to have dinner with him in 1990, but Bernstein died a month earlier. Israel produced a memorial concert and, on March 13, 1991, was at a party where he ran into Bernstein’s former assistant, who ran the publishing arm of his estate.
“We were just chit-chatting in the kitchen after this concert at this party, and he said, ‘What are you going to do when you graduate?’” Israel recalled. “And I said, ‘ I’m going to work for you,’ and that’s how the job came to be.”
Israel immersed himself in Bernstein’s scores and correspondence, in much the same way Noah dives into the Mozart archive. Bernstein was an idol, but Israel reveres Mozart, and picked him as a subject over Bach or Beethoven in part because of how prolific he was.
“The reason why I felt like this was good material for a novel is because by 2023, which is when I was writing the book, it seemed like the only way you could experience new Mozart was through fiction,” Israel said.
Not anymore. In June, just a couple of months before Israel’s pub date, a curator at France’s National Library found a notebook with sketches from the 22-year-old Mozart, who was in Paris to audition as a court musician at Versailles.
There’s more to the story, Israel said, including Wolfgang’s oft-overlooked older sister Maria Anna, a composer and musician in her own right who got top billing in the siblings’ early tours through the courts of Europe.
The sequel, Israel tells me, will feature her as another “lost Mozart,” and draw from Israel’s own time working on Bernstein’s archive, including his impromptu jam session with Yo-Yo Ma.
“It’s one of the funniest scenes in the first few chapters,” Israel promises. He can’t yet say more about what happens at the Dakota. Readers will have to discover those lost movements for themselves.
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Michigan’s Senate race has become a referendum on Israel — and the future of the Democratic Party
Tuesday’s primary contest for an open U.S. Senate seat in Michigan has become a proxy fight over the Gaza war and a referendum on Israel supporters’ influence in Democratic politics. Democratic voters will decide whether to nominate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who is leading in the polls after assailing his opponent as beholden to the campaign fundraising group AIPAC, or Rep. Haley Stevens, a reliable supporter of Israel who has condemned what she called “inflammatory rhetoric” from El-Sayed.
Following a string of primary victories by insurgent Democrats who made condemning Israel central to their campaigns — from New York to New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Colorado — the outcome will become the clearest test yet of whether the vocally anti-Israel progressive movement may come to define the Democratic Party.
Recent polls show El-Sayed with growing momentum, leading Stevens by as much as 16 points.
Michigan, home to one of the country’s largest Arab-American communities, was already a national hot spot for voter pushback on pro-Israel politics as the birthplace of the 2024 “uncommitted” movement that protested President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza by submitting blank ballots in the presidential primary.
It also has an influential Jewish community that has become deeply invested in the race — and with some El-Sayed supporters among them.
Tuesday’s winner will have to prevail in the November general election, and success is not guaranteed: While Democrats are a majority of registered voters in Michigan, Republican President Donald Trump won the state in 2016 and 2024.
With Democrats counting on winning Michigan as they aim to retake the Senate, the questions looming over Tuesday’s primary aren’t just about the party’s direction on Israel — they’re also about whether running against Israel is a winning message in a swing state.
Democrats are facing a difficult path to winning Senate control even as polls show growing dissatisfaction with the Republican agenda.
A look at three possible scenarios shows the high stakes of the race for the Democratic Party and the place of Israel in U.S. politics:
An El-Sayed victory
An Emerson College survey of 700 voters shows El-Sayed leading Stevens by 16 points, despite more than $60 million of outside spending attacking him. AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, has spent $30.6 million backing Stevens, according to recent FEC filings. AIPAC also raised several million dollars for Stevens by directing its donors to online portals that funnel money directly to the candidate’s campaign. All in all, the Michigan contest is AIPAC’s largest investment this election cycle.
If El-Sayed wins, he would become the first Muslim nominated by a major party for the U.S. Senate and would immediately become one of the most prominent figures on the Democratic left. It would echo the victory of Zohran Mamdani in last year’s mayoral race as the city’s first Muslim mayor and the most prominent democratic socialist in office, with Jews divided between fierce opposition and fiery support.
But the immediate political meaning would be about AIPAC.
The progressive frontrunner has transformed AIPAC’s investment in the race into a centerpiece of his campaign message. Backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, El-Sayed used AIPAC as a political foil and a symbol of everything he says is wrong with Democratic politics: super PAC money, billionaire influence and demands for unconditional support for Israel. A poll of Michigan voters conducted by Data for Progress in April found that 64% of likely Democratic primary voters would be less inclined to support a candidate backed by AIPAC.
At a recent virtual town hall hosted by Progressive Democrats of America, El-Sayed compared his possible victory to David defeating Goliath. “AIPAC, if you’re listening, burn your money, come back and burn it again in the general,” he said. “I’m happy to burn your money for you, and then we can get onto the business of governing and asking whether or not our foreign policy ought to be dictated to us by the interests of a foreign government.”
An El-Sayed win would mark a reversal from AIPAC’s last confrontation with Stevens’ opponents in Michigan. In 2022, Stevens defeated Jewish Rep. Andy Levin by 20 points in a rare incumbent-versus-incumbent House primary after redistricting. Levin argued that the group was trying to punish him for criticizing Israeli policy and supporting Palestinian rights. AIPAC celebrated Levin’s defeat as proof that even a Jewish incumbent could not survive after crossing the organization. (Levin is supporting El-Sayed.)
It would also create immediate questions about how El-Sayed would operate in Washington.
Would he support Sen. Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in American history and one of Stevens’ most powerful allies, as Democratic leader if Democrats win the majority? And would he give Senate progressives new leverage over key votes on Israel?
What if El-Sayed loses the general election?
For Democrats worried about electability, the primary is only the first test.
The winner will face former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, who narrowly lost Michigan’s 2024 Senate election and is now running with a largely unified Republican Party behind him.
Michigan remains one of the country’s key battlegrounds. President Donald Trump carried it in 2016, lost it in 2020 and won it again in 2024. Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a moderate Democrat who was an intelligence analyst in the CIA and served three tours in Iraq, won her race even as Trump carried the state.
Recent polls found Rogers leading El-Sayed by single digits.
Some Michigan Jewish Democrats are already considering whether they could support El-Sayed, vote for the Republican, or leave their ballot blank in November. Jewish voters make up just 1.4% of the electorate in the state.
Stevens has sharpened those concerns in the final days of the campaign. She accused El-Sayed of blaming “all of your problems on Jewish Americans,” warning that his rhetoric would lead to defeat in the face-off with Rogers. El-Sayed, who has courted Jewish voters without moderating his views on Israel, rejected accusations of antisemitism.
“I love and revere Judaism and the Jewish people,” he said.
A November loss would have consequences far beyond Michigan.
Democrats are already facing an uphill battle for Senate control after the collapse of Graham Platner in the competitive Maine Senate race.
Losing the seat being vacated by Sen. Gary Peters would further divide Democrats. Party leaders would almost certainly blame El-Sayed’s ideology, his vocal opposition to Israel and the progressive groups that elevated him for losing a swing state. AIPAC, meanwhile, would claim vindication despite losing the primary.
Speaking with reporters on Sunday, El-Sayed said he’s confident Democratic voters will rally behind his candidacy as they reckon with what is at stake.
What if Stevens survives?
A Stevens victory would offer a very different lesson.
It would show that experience, establishment support and a strong general-election argument can still overcome anger about AIPAC, even in the state where the uncommitted movement began. Even a narrow victory would preserve AIPAC’s reputation as one of the most effective forces in Democratic primaries.
But it would say more about Stevens and her personality. She first entered Congress in the 2018 Democratic wave, capturing a Republican-held suburban district. She then survived redistricting and defeated Levin in the bruising 2022 primary.
Stevens has the backing of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Schumer and much of Michigan’s Democratic establishment. And she leads Rogers in a November matchup.
By Wednesday morning, Democrats will know who won Michigan. It may take until November or even longer to know whether Tuesday’s vote marked the beginning of a new era in Democratic politics or another chapter in the party’s divide over Israel. Nonetheless, Democratic leaders still have to reunite a coalition fractured over Gaza and manage a growing progressive wing in the House.
The fight extends down the ballot
The Senate contest is not the only Michigan race testing the strength of the progressive left.
In Detroit’s 13th Congressional District, state Rep. Donavan McKinney, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, is challenging incumbent Rep. Shri Thanedar with the support of Justice Democrats. The group, which helped launch Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other members of the Squad, made McKinney its first congressional endorsement in four years.
In Michigan’s 7th District, former climate activist William Lawrence is running against two centrist Democrats in the primary, making an end to all U.S. military aid to Israel a key part of his campaign. The seat was previously held by Slotkin.
On a state level, Abbas Alawieh, one of the leaders of the uncommitted movement in Michigan, is running for a seat in the state legislature in a Dearborn-area district with a large Arab and Muslim population. In a sign of his growing profile, Alawieh recently met with former Vice President Kamala Harris.
AIPAC and the debate over Israel is also spilling into a neighboring state Senate race. Pro-Israel donors are spending heavily to back Justin Onwenu against former State Rep. Abraham Aiyash, an outspoken critic of Israel’s war in Gaza.
It has also reached the University of Michigan’s Board of Regents. Michigan Democrats nominated Amir Makled, an attorney who represented pro-Palestinian protesters, after he defeated incumbent Regent Jordan Acker at the party convention. Makled faces scrutiny for past Hezbollah praise and antisemitic posts. Republican regent candidates Lena Epstein and Michael Schostak, both Jewish, have campaigned on antisemitism and campus safety. That race will be decided in November.
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