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The real Jewish history behind Netflix’s ‘Transatlantic’ and the WWII rescue mission that inspired it
(JTA) — While the United States swung its door shut to most refugees during World War II, a young American in France saved thousands, including some of the 20th century’s defining artists and thinkers — such as Marc Chagall and Hannah Arendt — from the Nazis.
The rescue mission of Varian Fry, which went largely unrecognized during his life, is the subject of Netflix’s new drama “Transatlantic,” launching Friday from “Unorthodox” creator Anna Winger.
Starring Cory Michael Smith as Fry, the seven-episode “Transatlantic” aims to recreate his operation in Marseille after the Nazis defeated France and before the United States entered the war. Winger has injected several imagined romances, war efforts and characters into the fictionalized series, including one posed as Fry’s lover, named Thomas Lovegrove (played by Israeli Amit Rahav). Although Fry’s son has said that he was a “closeted homosexual,” no such person is known to have existed.
Winger believes these inventions will invite Netflix viewers to learn more about the true story.
“The people who lived through these stories are dying out,” she told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “My job is to bring this to a wide audience, to people who don’t know anything about it.”
The story behind the series
The real Varian Fry, a 32-year-old journalist and suit-clad Harvard graduate, showed up in Marseille with $3,000 taped to his leg and a list of 200 names in August 1940.
After France surrendered to Germany, Fry was among 200 Americans — including journalists, artists, museum curators, university presidents and Jewish refugees — to create the Emergency Rescue Committee at the Hotel Commodore in New York. This group was concerned with Article 19 in France’s armistice with Germany, which required French authorities to surrender any individuals demanded by the Germans.
The private relief organization drew up frenzied lists of anti-Nazi intellectuals who were trapped in France. With the help of first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, the ERC obtained some emergency visas and sent Fry to lead the rescue efforts in Marseille, a port city in the southern, unoccupied part of France.
What he found there was impossible to manage alone. His mission began in his room at the Hotel Splendide, where long lines of refugees waited in the morning before he woke up and at night after he went to bed. They sometimes walked straight into his bedroom without knocking, Fry wrote in a letter to his wife shortly after he arrived.
Gathering a small devoted staff, including Frenchmen, refugees and American expatriates, Fry moved his office to Rue Grignan and later Boulevard Garibaldi. Outside of Marseille he rented the Villa Air-Bel — colorfully recreated in “Transatlantic” — to house eminent writers and eccentric Surrealist artists waiting for visas.
The group developed legal and illegal branches, with the cover organization offering humanitarian relief while a behind-the-scenes operation flouted the law to help refugees escape. Using Marseille’s lively black market, the staff found hiding places, forged documents and bribed officials. Bil Spira, a Jewish Austrian-born cartoonist, forged passports for the ERC. (He was caught and deported to Auschwitz, but survived.) Resistance fighters Hans and Lisa Fittko devised an escape route to Spain, guiding refugees across the Pyrenees mountains on foot.
By the time he was forced out in October 1941, Fry’s shoestring operation had enabled 2,000 Jewish and other anti-Nazi refugees to flee Europe, including such towering artists as Chagall, Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp, and intellects such as Arendt, Heinrich Mann and André Breton. It has been estimated that 20,000 refugees made contact with the rescue center in Marseille.
Fry’s illegal efforts made him plenty of enemies from his own country, who accused him of interfering with American neutrality in the war. He angered the state department, officials at the American consulate in Marseille and ERC members in New York. In August 1941, he was arrested by Vichy police and sent back to New York.
Fry died in 1967 at the age of 59. Only a few months earlier, he had received the Croix de Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur, France’s highest decoration of merit — and the only official recognition in his lifetime. In 1994, he became the first American honored by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and history authority, as Righteous Among the Nations.
The Emergency Rescue Committee merged with another relief organization and became the International Rescue Committee in 1942. It is still in operation today and currently led by a Jewish CEO, former British politician David Miliband.
What’s in the show, and why some are against it
Some of Fry’s colleagues are fictionalized in “Transatlantic,” including the Jewish Berliner Albert Hirschman (Lucas Englander), who would become an economist in the United States; the Chicago heiress Mary Jayne Gold (Gillian Jacobs); and the Jewish Austro-Hungarian activist Lisa Fittko (Deleila Piasko). American diplomat Hiram Bigham, who gave Fry crucial help and even hid writer Lion Feuchtwanger in his home, is also a character in the show.
Throughout the seven episodes, rescue missions swirl around a series of fictional love affairs. In addition to Fry’s relationship, a triangle unfolds between Hirschman, Gold and the fictional American Consul Graham Patterson. (There is no evidence that Gold romanced either with her comrade or with any American consul in Marseille.) Lisa Fittko has an affair with the fictional character Paul Kandjo, who organizes armed resistance to Vichy.
Gillian Jacobs as heiress Mary Jayne Gold. (Anika Molnar/Netflix)
Several wartime plot points are also invented, including a prison break at Camp de Mille and Gold’s collaboration with British intelligence.
The degree of fictionalization has angered some people close to the real history. Pierre Sauvage, president of the Varian Fry Institute, called the show’s trailer “shocking.” Born in 1944, Sauvage survived the end of the Holocaust in the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, although his Jewish parents were turned down by Fry’s overwhelmed committee. He became close friends with some of Fry’s fellow rescuers in their later years, including the late Gold, Hirschman and Fittko.
“Are there any red lines?” he said. “Can one fictionalize at will, with no concern for the reality of the story, for the false impression that people will get — and for the way it affects the private lives of the families of people portrayed?”
Sheila Isenberg, who documented Fry’s operation in her book “A Hero of Our Own,” has described the series as a “travesty.” Thomas Fischer Weiss, a child survivor who attempted Fry’s escape route through the Pyrenees at 5 years old, also said the historical events needed no embellishment.
“I think you should tell it straight,” he told the JTA.
The legacy of the ‘troublemakers’
Sauvage believes that if Fry and his associates were alive today, they would like to be remembered for their convictions.
“These were people who were sort of in your face,” he said. “People who knew clearly what they felt and expressed it. They would often describe themselves as troublemakers. Mary Jayne [Gold] said about Varian that he was an ‘ornery cuss’ — it took orneriness to stick to your guns.”
That orneriness was critical at a time when many Americans were apathetic to the plight of European Jews — a 1938 poll in Fortune magazine found that fewer than 5% believed the United States should raise its immigration quotas for refugees. By the summer of 1941, it was too late to open the doors. The German policy of expelling Jews had changed into extermination.
According to Sauvage, America’s refusal to accept more refugees had something to do with that shift.
“The Nazis could legitimately come to the conclusion that the world wouldn’t do anything about the murders and wouldn’t really care all that much,” he said. “What the Varian Fry mission symbolizes is people who cared.”
Varian Fry with Miriam Davenport in the first offices of the Centre Américain de Secours in Marseille in 1940. Davenport, a friend of Mary Jayne Gold, also worked in the rescue effort but is omitted from “Transatlantic.” (Varian Fry Institute)
After their year in Marseille, the rescuers settled into more ordinary lives. Hirschman became an economist with appointments at Yale, Columbia and Harvard. Lisa Fittko ended up in Chicago, where she worked hard in import-export, translation and clerical jobs to earn money, eventually joining protests against the Vietnam War. Gold divided her time between New York City and a villa on the French Riviera.
They all remembered the rescue mission as their finest hour. Speaking with Sauvage, Gold called that year “the only one in her life that really mattered.”
A refugee story for troubled times
Fry’s rescue mission inspired Julie Orringer to write “The Flight Portfolio,” a 2019 novel that became the basis for “Transatlantic.” Orringer was captivated by the image of a young man arriving in Marseille, idealistic and unprepared for the depth of anguish he would find.
“The task was way too big,” she told the JTA. “He realized quite early on that he was going to ask for help, that he was going to have to turn to others who had deeper experience. And in collecting this group of incredible individuals around him, he assembled a kind of collective mind that really could make a difference under the very difficult circumstances that he faced.”
She believed that Fry left an example for the inexperienced. “If you‘re the kind of person who wants to take action on behalf of refugees, but doesn’t know how to do it, ask for help,” she said.
Winger, a Jewish Massachusetts native who has lived in Berlin for two decades, conceived of making a series about Fry in 2015. Germany saw an influx of more than a million migrants that year, most of them fleeing Syria’s horrific civil war. She optioned Orringer’s book in 2020.
“I thought a lot about the fact that people like us — artists, Jews, both — had to leave Berlin as refugees, but now there were so many people coming to Berlin as refugees,” said Winger.
Then, just as she started filming “Transatlantic” on location in Marseille, a new war broke out in Europe.
“The war in Ukraine started three days into the production and there was a whole other wave of refugees coming to Berlin,” she said. “Suddenly we were making it in another refugee crisis.”
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine hit close to the show, whose cast and crew hail from across the continent. Winger’s cinematographer is married to a Ukrainian woman. In Berlin, she saw thousands of refugees crowding into the central train station, some without shoes, food or plans for shelter.
“I think it gave us all a strong sense of purpose,” said Winger.
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The post The real Jewish history behind Netflix’s ‘Transatlantic’ and the WWII rescue mission that inspired it appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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How a monument to a Jewish Confederate ended up in a storage unit, next to a vacuum cleaner
Behind an orange roll-up door at a self-storage facility in New Orleans, sits a vacuum cleaner, some lighting gear and a cardboard box.
Inside the box is a Confederate monument, one of the strangest Jewish heirlooms in America.
It is granite, four and a half feet tall, 1,600 pounds and shaped like a thick tombstone. It lies on its side on a crushed wooden pallet because it can no longer stand up. A third of it once sat underground, and when Charlotte, North Carolina, chipped it out of a sidewalk in the summer of 2020, the buried end came out ragged. It carries a few gouges where a protester swung a hammer. Until the city scrubbed it, it also carried three letters in black spray paint: BLM.
“There it sits to this day,” said Kenneth Hoffman, executive director of the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience, half a mile away in New Orleans, “and possibly will sit forever.”
The stone is one of the last left standing — or, more precisely, lying down — from a century-long campaign in which American Jews built monuments across the South to Judah P. Benjamin, the Confederacy’s Jewish secretary of state, because, for a time, he represented their own acceptance in the South. The monument’s fall tells the story of what changed — not just about Benjamin, but about the Jews who once celebrated him.
Its journey from a Charlotte sidewalk to a New Orleans storage unit involves a Yiddish-speaking ex-convict, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an antisemitic banker, two Polish-born rabbis, a dollar bill pulled from a stranger’s wallet, and a retired lawyer whose wife descends from the man who once hid Benjamin from the Union Army.
What nobody has figured out is what to do with it.
The brains of the Confederacy
Benjamin was a New Orleans lawyer, a sugar planter who owned 140 enslaved people, and a U.S. senator from Louisiana. When the South seceded, Confederate President Jefferson Davis made Benjamin attorney general, then secretary of war, then secretary of state. The two men worked side by side as much as 10 hours a day. Benjamin’s face was engraved on the Confederate $2 bill, likely the only paper money issued in America to feature a Jewish person.
He was known as “the brains of the Confederacy” — a phrase that started as an insult, the old canard of the Jewish puppet master, a way of pinning the Civil War’s loss on the one Jew in the cabinet. He married a Catholic woman, never joined a synagogue and was not a practicing Jew, but none of that mattered. A senator from Ohio sneered that Benjamin was an “Israelite with Egyptian principles.”
When the Confederacy collapsed, Benjamin ran. He disguised himself as a Frenchman who spoke no English, hid in a Florida swamp and slipped out to sea. He made it to London, reinvented himself as a barrister, and died wealthy and free in Paris in 1884, never having answered for any of his past.
That flight is why there are so few monuments to him. Davis went to prison. The generals surrendered and lived out their lives in the South. Benjamin escaped and never came back.
“Some considered Judah Benjamin a kind of traitor,” said Jonathan Sarna, the noted Brandeis University historian of American Jewry.
So the Lost Cause never fully claimed him. Southern Jews claimed him instead.
‘Judah P. Benjamin Nite’
The commemoration campaign that followed has been reconstructed largely by David Weinfeld, an assistant professor at Rowan University who is working on a book called Southern Jews and the Lost Cause. It was indifferent to geography.
Jewish war veterans presented a Benjamin portrait to Atlanta Mayor William Hartsfield in 1954 for the city’s collection of “Confederate Heroes and Statesmen.” Weinfeld found that Alabama’s B’nai B’rith opened its 1962 state convention with a dinner-dance called “Judah P. Benjamin Nite,” and offered to fund a monument at the state capitol honoring him as “a son of the Jewish people.”
Alabama didn’t have a strong connection to Benjamin, which was precisely the appeal there. He “provided a means for southern Jews to prove their southernness regardless of what former Confederate state they resided in,” writes Weinfeld.
Sarna puts the calculation more starkly. Jewish safety in the South depended on being counted as white, and Southern Jews understood the alternative.
“Why did they want to be white?” he asked. “Because the alternative was to be Black.”
The stakes weren’t abstract. In the years around those celebrations, synagogues across the South were bombed and set on fire, and rabbis who backed integration were punished for it. “There were people whose response was, ‘If we want to continue to be here in the South, this is the price we have to pay,’” Sarna said.
It was a bargain, mostly unspoken: stay loyal to the white South and you will be well treated. Many Southern Jews upheld their end of it. Plenty, Sarna said, “had prejudices not different from those of their non-Jewish counterparts.”
The United Daughters of the Confederacy embraced Benjamin right back. “They understood that celebrating a Jew made the Confederacy look tolerant,” Weinfeld told a room of scholars at the American Jewish Historical Society’s conference this June in Cleveland.
The Daughters chartered a Judah P. Benjamin chapter in Bradenton, Florida, in 1914, and after World War I began sponsoring Benjamin markers across the South.
In 1924, the Daughters bought Belle Chasse, Benjamin’s old Louisiana plantation, and a New Orleans rabbi spoke at the dedication, consecrating the house to “the impulse of patriotism.” The next year they bought the Gamble Plantation in Ellenton, Florida, where Benjamin is said to have hidden from Union troops, and gave it to the state. It remains a state park officially named the Judah P. Benjamin Confederate Memorial. With B’nai B’rith’s support, the UDC raised a monument in Sarasota in 1942 — pink Georgia marble, crowned with a bronze sundial — and another in Fayetteville in 1944.
The Sarasota dedication came six weeks after Pearl Harbor, and the Birmingham News found in it a wartime moral. Honoring Benjamin was fitting “especially so right now, when the United States is at war with totalitarian forces whose ringleader, Nazi Germany, proclaims and practices racial and religious intolerance,” the paper wrote. The monument was “in a way a part of the answer of the South, the land of the Confederacy, to Adolf Hitler’s assault upon those freedoms which Southerners and all Americans hold dear.”
It was a memorial to a slaveholding Confederate, offered as the South’s rebuttal to Hitler.
The Charlotte fiasco
In Charlotte, the arrangement broke down in public.
According to Weinfeld’s extensive research, the local UDC chapter was preparing to host the 1948 state convention and wanted a marker for the spot where Benjamin sheltered for a week in April 1865, in the home of a Jewish merchant named Abraham Weill. The chapter’s historian, Josephine Yarbrough, needed money. She wrote to Harry Golden.
Weinfeld has traced what happened next through Golden’s own account and contemporaneous records.
Golden was about the least Confederate man in North Carolina. Born in what is now Ukraine, raised on the Lower East Side, he had served federal prison time for mail fraud before reinventing himself in Charlotte as publisher of the one-man newspaper the Carolina Israelite.
Golden would go on to become a best-selling humorist and an ally of Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement. But in 1948, he called Benjamin “one of the greatest Jews America has ever produced.” He signed up the city’s two synagogues, Temple Israel and Temple Beth El, which agreed to buy the granite and present it to the Daughters as a gift.
Then came the letter.
A non-Jewish New York banker with Charlotte in-laws warned UDC members across the state that the Daughters were being used for Jewish propaganda. Charlotte’s so-called good Jews, he wrote, were “good only because they are as yet unrevealed.”
That was all it took. The local Daughters voted to yank their name off the stone, then went to the city council to stop the marker from being erected. They argued it would block passengers boarding city buses. The state and national organizations overruled them, and both synagogues voted to press on.
On Oct. 1, 1948, police blocked off South Tryon Street for the unveiling. The mayor came. A Presbyterian minister delivered the keynote. And the Jewish blessings came from two rabbis — Aaron Tofield of Temple Israel and Philip Frankel of Temple Beth El — both born in Poland. Three years after the Holocaust ended, two immigrant rabbis from the old country stood on a Southern sidewalk and consecrated a monument to the Confederacy.
Hidden in plain sight
The stone did what stones do. It stood there.
Charlotte changed around it — the streetcars, then the skyscrapers, then the FedEx store it eventually fronted. The inscription was right there for anyone who bothered to crouch down and read it. You could ship a package, grab a coffee and walk right past a monument to the Confederate secretary of state.
Charlotte’s Jewish community never forgot, exactly. During her years in Beth El’s pulpit, which ran from 1998 to 2016, Rabbi Judith Schindler used the marker to teach the congregation’s teenagers about Jews in the Confederacy.
In August 2017, white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the planned removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, and a counterprotester was killed. Soon after, Beth El’s board voted unanimously to push Charlotte to move the marker somewhere else — or find some other use for it. The answer was the same every time: North Carolina law barred removing Confederate monuments unless they were relocated somewhere equally prominent.
Then, in June 2020, artists painted a “Black Lives Matter” street mural along South Tryon, directly in front of the stone. The monument looked out over the M in “Matter.”
Days later, somebody spray-painted “BLM” across most of the granite and went at it with a hammer. The granite mostly won. “They probably whacked at it several times,” Hoffman said, “and it really only took out a few chips.”
On June 17 of that year, Temple Israel and Temple Beth El — the same two congregations that had paid for the stone in 1948 — wrote to Charlotte’s mayor, city council and city manager. This time, they demanded the monument be removed.
“We should neither celebrate the Confederacy nor honor the legacy of white supremacy,” they wrote. “The monument does not belong in a place of prominence within our city, just like German cities do not memorialize or erect statues to Nazis.”
A week later, Schindler and Mike Wirth, an artist in her congregation, placed a vinyl wraparound banner over the monument. On it was a quote from Emma Lazarus: “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.”
City workers then pried the monument out of the sidewalk, “sort of to the relief of everyone,” Hoffman said. The city scrubbed off the spray paint, declared the marker damaged and put it in municipal storage.
Then, hundreds of miles away and north of the Mason-Dixon line, a retired lawyer read a book.
The dollar
Barrett Freedlander was reading a biography of Judah Benjamin when he hit a half-page passage about a monument in Charlotte. He was shocked. He was also, he realized, related to the story.
Freedlander, 84, is a retired Baltimore attorney. His wife, Laura, is the great-great-granddaughter of Abraham Weill — the merchant who sheltered Benjamin, and whose name is misspelled “Abram Weil” on the stone.
“The only reason I cared about it,” he said, “is because of the family connection.”
That connection runs deeper than Benjamin. Richmond was days from falling. Confederate President Davis, worried about the “disorganized bands of troops roving about the country,” put his wife and their four children on a southbound train — and handed her a pistol and “showed me how to load, aim and fire it,” Varina Davis wrote.
When they arrived in Charlotte, the rented house was packed up and nobody in town would help a family everyone assumed would be arrested.
Except one man.
“The agent, Mr. A. Weill, an Israelite, came to meet us there and gave us every assistance in his power,” Varina wrote in her memoir, “and when he found there were no conveniences for cooking, he sent our meals from his own house for several days, refusing, with many cordial words, any offer to reimburse him.”
Freedlander thinks he knows why the Confederate first lady reached for the word “Israelite,” and why a Jewish merchant was the only person in Charlotte willing to take in a family the rest of the city was shunning. “Only the persecuted would appreciate her issues,” he said.
The Weills prospered. Weill helped found the synagogue in Wilmington, North Carolina, where relatives still belong. His granddaughter Laura married Julius Cone, a Greensboro textile tycoon. The family fortune allowed sisters Claribel and Etta Cone to buy the Matisses and Picassos that are the crown of the Baltimore Museum of Art.
So when Freedlander learned the marker had disappeared into municipal storage, he started making calls. A staffer in the mayor’s office said the city had no use for it and was willing to let it go. But the manager of the warehouse where it sat called Freedlander back with a complication: the city couldn’t simply hand over public property. He was obligated to charge for it.
“How much?” Freedlander asked. One dollar. Freedlander offered to send a check. The man said not to bother and paid it himself, out of his own wallet.
Freedlander’s original idea was to put the monument in his own backyard. “My wife didn’t want it,” he said.
A friend mentioned the new Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience in New Orleans. Another friend of Freedlander’s, a Baltimore executive whose company hauls computer equipment around the country, priced out the job, got into four figures, then called back and said he’d do it for free. It was history, he said.
Monument vs. museum
The stone arrived in New Orleans via truck in November 2022. It was lowered onto the pavement outside the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience’s offsite storage with a jack lift, and has not moved since.
Hoffman’s first instinct had been to display it. The stone, he realized, tells three tales at once: the Civil War, when Benjamin rose to the Confederate cabinet; 1948, when the two Charlotte synagogues paid for a monument to him; and 2020, when it was defaced during the summer of Black Lives Matter protests.
Last October, when the Southern Jewish Historical Society held its conference in New Orleans, Hoffman and Weinfeld convened a roundtable of historians to figure out what to do with the monument. One idea floated that seemed to gain consensus was to display the marker alongside a light projection restoring the graffiti.
For now, the monument remains in storage. Hoffman said that if and when it goes up, it will be “with its full context. Not like it’s a historical marker.”
Samantha Baskind, an art historian at Cleveland State University, thinks the museum should not wait to display it.
“Yes, originally the statue commemorates Benjamin as a distinguished Jewish American and Confederate statesman,” she said. “But the fact that it was defaced during Black Lives Matter protests makes it acquire a second history. The graffiti isn’t merely vandalism in a conventional sense. It documents a moment when Americans were publicly reevaluating Confederate symbols.”
Which means the object now holds a double meaning: why Benjamin was honored in the 20th century, and why so many people rejected that honor in the 21st.
Baskind knows firsthand the cost of institutional flinching. In 2022, she curated an exhibition of 19th-century Jewish American artists for a gallery at Princeton, including work by Moses Jacob Ezekiel, a Jewish sculptor who spent part of his career producing Confederate monuments. Baskind, who wrote a book about Ezekiel, had written labels confronting Ezekiel’s Lost Cause loyalties head-on. Late in the process, the venue that was planning on showing the exhibition canceled it.
“It was almost devaluing what your students are capable of thinking about,” Baskind said. “And isn’t that what we do in an educational environment?”
Her verdict on the Charlotte stone is unambiguous. The city should never have cleaned it. “I wouldn’t see it as damage. It’s part of the object’s history.” The graffiti “deserves interpretation and not concealment.”
And the question a museum ought to ask, she said, isn’t whether Benjamin was good or bad. “The more interesting question is: Why did different generations understand him so differently?”
Early in the 20th century, American Jews saw a success story. Today most see a man who helped run a slaveholding rebellion that waged war on other states. “Neither perspective should replace the other,” Baskind said. “A museum explains how and when those shifts occurred.”
Then she offered the distinction she believes the argument comes down to. “A monument exists to honor,” she said. “A museum or gallery exists to explain.”
Visitors to the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience can still find Judah Benjamin there. He’s in a display case in an exhibit about Jews, slavery and the Civil War: two Confederate $2 bills bearing his portrait, one from 1862, one from 1864. Both are blank on the back.
“Which tells you something about the financial solvency of the Confederacy,” Hoffman said. “Save money. Just print it on one side.”
Half a mile away, one of the last monuments American Jews built to the highest-ranking Jew in the Confederacy, and to the standing he seemed to promise them, lies in a cardboard box in the dark, its graffiti scrubbed, its chips intact, waiting for somebody to decide what it means.
Freedlander hopes to take a trip to Wilmington later this month with some of his grandchildren to visit family graves — including that of Abraham Weill, the man who helped a fleeing family when nobody else in town would, and got a monument he never asked for.
“I’m a bystander to all this,” Freedlander said. “I’m just the messenger. But I did want to preserve it.”
The post How a monument to a Jewish Confederate ended up in a storage unit, next to a vacuum cleaner appeared first on The Forward.
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Iran appoints AMIA bombing suspect to National Security Council
(JTA) —
For the second time this year, Iran has named a wanted suspect in the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires to a top security role.
A spokesman for the Islamic Republic’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said Monday that Mohsen Rezaei had resigned as an adviser to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, and would assume the role of secretary of Iran’s powerful Supreme National Security Council. Rezaei is a former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
Rezaei is wanted by Argentina and is subject to an Interpol Red Notice issued at Argentina’s request over his alleged role in the 1994 attack, which killed 85 people and remains the deadliest terrorist attack in Argentina’s history.
Earlier this year, Ahmad Vahidi, another suspect in the AMIA case and also the subject of an Interpol Red Notice, was appointed IRGC commander.
In a landmark ruling in 2024, an Argentine court held Iran and its proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, responsible for the bombing, setting the stage for international legal action.
In June 2025, Argentina’s federal judiciary ordered that 10 Iranian and Lebanese suspects accused in connection with the deadly 1994 AMIA bombing be tried in absentia. Rezaei and Vahidi are among them.
The eight other suspects accused by the late AMIA special prosecutor, Alberto Nisman, are: former Iranian Intelligence Minister Ali Fallahijan, former Iranian foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati, former Iranian ambassador Hadi Soleimanpour, former Iranian cultural attache in Buenos Aires Mohsen Rabbani and former Iranian diplomat Ahmad Reza Asghari, as well as suspected Hezbollah operatives Salman Raouf Salman, Abdallah Salman and Hussein Mounir Mouzannar.
The post Iran appoints AMIA bombing suspect to National Security Council appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel and AIPAC on the ballot in the Minnesota Senate and U.S. House races
(JTA) — A pair of Democratic primaries in Minnesota on Tuesday are among a string of high-profile battles between progressive and moderate candidates, where Israel and the pro-Israel lobby serve as key wedge issues.
The state’s highest-profile race is the U.S. Senate primary between Rep. Angie Craig, who has been endorsed by the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, and Lieutenant Gov. Peggy Flanagan, who says she would reject AIPAC’s money and accuses Israel of committing a genocide.
The most recent data gathered in late July through early August has Craig with a 2-percentage point lead, within the 5.3% margin of error. Another poll, conducted in late July by a group supporting Flanagan, shows her with a 14-point lead. The Democratic nominee, whether it be Flanagan or Craig, is expected to win the general election in November.
The race, and the candidates’ sparring over AIPAC, comes as the lobby and Israel under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have become increasingly unpopular among Democratic voters. Israel is also an issue in the Democratic gubernatorial primary in neighboring Wisconsin taking place on Tuesday.
Flanagan has referred to Craig as “AIPAC’s candidate” in the Senate race, which prompted Craig to distance herself from the group’s spending during a TV debate in June.
“AIPAC has not contributed at all, the PAC, to my Senate campaign,” said Craig, whose wife, Cheryl Greene, is Jewish. “Not one penny.”
Flanagan countered that, while AIPAC itself has not donated to Craig’s campaign, it has held fundraisers for the four-term congresswoman. AIPAC did not respond to a request for comment.
Just last week in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, progressive Abdul El-Sayed defeated the moderate Rep. Haley Stevens, whose AIPAC endorsement was the frequent target of opposition attacks.
Flanagan has drawn the support of American Priorities, a pro-Palestinian super PAC that aims to counter AIPAC. The group spent about $54,000 on ads boosting her candidacy, according to FEC filings.
Flanagan’s platform includes blocking offensive weapons sales to Israel — a position that all but seven Senate Democrats voted for in April — and advancing a two-state solution that “allows for a secure Israel and Palestinian self-determination.”
Craig, who also backs a two-state outcome, voted against the recent amendment proposed by Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie that would have halted $3.3 billion in military aid to Israel.
In a statement explaining her vote, Craig panned Netanyahu and the war in Iran, but wrote that the amendment would endanger Israelis and American troops and allies in the region. After the vote, Flanagan wrote, “A vote to send $3.3 billion of taxpayer money to fund additional weapons of war to Benjamin Netanyahu is unconscionable. Enough.”
Craig has the endorsement of a number of Democrats in Congress and the Senate, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. She is also endorsed by lobbying group Democratic Majority for Israel, former Democratic presidential contender Pete Buttigieg, and Minneapolis’ Jewish mayor, Jacob Frey, who rose to national prominence for his response to the deadly results of the deployment of immigrant enforcement officials in his city.
Flanagan has drawn endorsements from a swath of major progressive figures including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and outspoken pro-Palestinian Reps. Ro Khanna of California and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. Flanagan is also endorsed by the state’s Democratic Party affiliate, the Democratic Farmer Labor Party.
On Sunday Sanders posted on X,”There is a reason why the super PACs and billionaires are flooding Minnesota with $20 million to defeat Peggy Flanagan. Same thing as Michigan. They do not want somebody in the Senate who will stand up for the working class.”
Spending by political action committees affiliated with AIPAC has also come to the fore in the Democratic primary race for the House seat that Craig is vacating.
The most moderate of the three leading candidates is State Sen. Matt Klein, who has expressed support for the U.S.-Israel relationship and is endorsed by DMFI. Last-minute spending by outside groups has sparked accusations that AIPAC is indirectly involved.
“AIPAC is coming after me,” said former Lakeville mayor Matt Little, one of Klein’s opponents, in a video.
Klein’s two opponents — Little and state Rep. Kaela Berg — both accuse Israel of committing a genocide, and have both speculated that AIPAC is behind some of the Klein spending.
Berg supports placing conditions on U.S. aid to Israel and halting weapons sales, and Little says the U.S. must end all military aid and weapons sales to the country. On the policy page of his campaign website, Little refers to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack as “an act of wanton slaughter against innocent civilians” and says that people should condemn “the anti-Semitism that followed.”
Berg is listed as “primary approved” by the liberal Jewish Middle East advocacy group J Street, while Little has been boosted by American Priorities, which has spent about $64,000 in his favor. He is also endorsed by the DFL and Congressional Progressive Caucus leader Rep. Pramila Jayapal.
The latest polling in the district — conducted at the end of May by a group that favors Klein — found Little leading Klein with a 7-percentage point lead, and Berg trailing by another 3 points. 39 percent of voters were undecided, and Little and Klein were about even after voters received more information about the three candidates.
Craig has declined to endorse any of the candidates to replace her.
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