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‘We have to be here fighting’: Deborah Lipstadt opens up on her Poland-Germany trip with Douglas Emhoff
BERLIN (JTA) — Second gentleman Douglas Emhoff made headlines late last month during a trip to Europe, where he met with other foreign leaders working to combat antisemitism and returned to his ancestors’ town in Poland.
But the trip was originally Deborah Lipstadt’s mission.
The historian, an authority on Holocaust issues and now the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, had planned to go to Krakow and Berlin on behalf of the Biden-Harris administration. The trip included a visit to the memorial and museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau on the 78th anniversary of the death camp’s liberation by Soviet troops and, in Berlin, a meeting with special envoys and coordinators who, like Lipstadt, are charged with the task of countering hatred against Jews.
The itinerary fit perfectly with Emhoff’s own anti-antisemitism campaign, so he asked Lipstadt late last year if he could come along.
As she reflected in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency after returning home, Emhoff was not the only one to get emotional on the trip.
This interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.
JTA: You met with special envoys on antisemitism from other countries, as you and Emhoff continue to work on a national plan to fight antisemitism at home. Did any concrete policy suggestions come out of those meetings?
DL: The meeting with the special envoys on antisemitism now is the third meeting we have had together.
But I think it was very important to send the message that we are all government appointees, and we speak government to government. So we have already gotten into that rhythm, and it was a very useful meeting. It was also a useful meeting because there were people there from the White House, from my staff, who are involved in this interagency process, and they got to hear from the people who are composing, writing, who have written national plans. And I think that was very helpful. So it was one of the most productive meetings.
You also attended an interfaith meeting with Jewish, Catholic, Protestant and Muslim participants, hosted by the Central Council of Jews in Germany in Berlin. What came out of that?
That actually went very well. The groups tended to talk about what they do together. …One of the things I urged the group, and it may have been bringing coals to Newcastle, but it is a sort of a new effort on their part… is that [talking about things that affect multiple faiths] is a good way of building relations. For instance, [my office had] a meeting in October, convened by the EU but with very strong support from the State Department, from my office, on ritual slaughter. Which of course affects both Jews and Muslims, kashrut and halal. So here is a tachles [goal], a brass tacks area which we could work on together. And that was an excellent meeting, a whole day at the EU.
What do you see as the main challenges in fighting antisemitism and hate today?
You know, some people say this is just like the 1930s. It is not. Back then, you had government-sponsored antisemitism. Whether it was Germany, whether it was other countries, even in the United States. We didn’t have government sponsored antisemitism, but there was a failure of the [U.S.] government [to respond].
On Monday morning, we were sitting in Topography of Terror [Berlin’s museum and archive on the history of the Gestapo], and it was government officials discussing “how do we fight antisemitism?” And everybody around that table is paid by the government. They are government officials, officially appointed. That’s a big difference. That is a humongous difference. That is a sea change.
And then we had the second gentleman there who could easily have said, “We came into office, we put a mezuzah up at our residence. We had a Chanukah party, a Rosh Hashanah party, we had a seder…” [Instead, it] is really clear that he has taken to this issue. He has really said it a number of times… and his wife [Vice President Kamala Harris] says, “He didn’t find this issue. This issue found him.”
RELATED: We’re visiting Auschwitz because the fight against antisemitism didn’t end with liberation
On the first day I met him, which was before I was sworn into office, he said he wanted to meet me and I spent some time with him. He said, “I want to work with you.” And then in October, we had a sukkah event at Blair House [the state guest house], where the State Department brought a sukkah, and we invited ambassadors and deputy chiefs of mission from Middle Eastern and Muslim-majority countries. So sitting around the table were the Israeli ambassador, the Turkish ambassador, the Pakistan ambassador, the deputy chief of mission from Qatar, the deputy chief of mission from Saudi Arabia… And [the Second Gentleman] and I were standing in the kitchen waiting to be escorted into the room, when people took their seats. And he said to me, “Deborah, where are you traveling, where are you going?” I said “Well, in January I am going to Auschwitz-Birkenau for the 27th.” And he said “I’m in.” And that’s how it happened.
You have been to Auschwitz many times…
Dozens of times, I can’t keep count. You know I have been many times, but I work very hard so that it never becomes de rigeur. That it becomes “min haminyan” as you would say in Hebrew. … All you have to do is remind yourself of what happened there. And so it doesn’t matter if it’s your first time or your 15th time. If you are cognizant of what happened there, it sits with you.
…When I go to Auschwitz, especially when it was around my trial [after being sued by British writer David Irving for calling him a Holocaust denier], I had to look at things in a very forensic way, you know: How do we prove this, how do we show that. And that of course sits with me still. But I was well aware that this was [Emhoff’s] first time and what an emotional impact this was having on him. … The thing that always strikes me about Auschwitz, the thing that you hear resounding in your ears in a thunderous way, is the silence. The absence. The little kid that would have worn the shoes that you saw in the display. The people who wore the eyeglasses. The men who shaved with that shaving stuff.
So that is always there. And it hits me at moments and then I become the historian. Analyzing. But it was very powerful, and what was also powerful was, in a way, though this seems counterintuitive, going to Poland first, which was just laden with emotion, especially for him, he went to the town where his family comes from, and got a lot of information. And then going to Germany. One would have thought, go to Germany first and then go to Poland, but in a way the emotional part became the backdrop for the business meetings in Germany.
[Emhoff] very kindly at one point described me as his mentor. Well, if I am his mentor, he is an A1 student. He is really intent on showing not just his passion about the issue but in learning about the issue. He is an accomplished lawyer, an experienced lawyer, and he knows that feeling is not enough, you’ve got to have information, and he gathered that every place he went.
Do you really have the feeling that antisemitism is on the rise or is it just more acceptable to express it?
I think both. I am not out there crunching the numbers statistically, but certainly it is more acceptable. Certainly, it is increasingly normalized. Whether it’s among comedians, whether it is articles in the newspaper, whether it is at demonstrations, it is increasingly normal. And even becomes fodder for entertainers. So whether those same people felt the same before and didn’t say anything or they now suddenly feel that, I don’t know. But many people who might otherwise have been more reticent about expressing certain things previously seem to feel freer to say antisemitic things now.
If antisemitism keeps coming back, what gives you hope?
First of all, what gives me hope, what gives me strength, is I know what I am fighting for, I am not just fighting against. I have a very strong sense of my Jewish identity, I have a very strong sense of who I am, Jewishly. I am lucky, I had a great education, etc.
Earlier this year, I guess it was September, the president did a phone call, it was his practice during the vice presidency, before Rosh Hashanah, or between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, to do a phone call with — this time I think it was 1,200 rabbis. And I came along after he spoke with them to answer questions. And one of the questions was what gives me joy and what gives me strength. And what I said to the rabbis was that I never want to become a “because of antisemitism Jew.” Driving me out of the woodwork because everyone dislikes me, hates me, or wants to harm me. Not everyone — but there are people who want to harm me.
On Monday when I was at all those meetings [in Berlin], it was Jan. 30, 90 years after Hitler came to power, right there where we were standing. Not far from there people were marching in the streets with tiki torches! Championing among other things “death to the Jews.”
And here we were, back: Yes, the good news is here we are back, openly talking about fighting [antisemitism], here we are back, government officials tasked with fighting it, someone at the ambassadorial level from my country, the second gentleman, anxious to help in this effort, but nonetheless we were back there fighting. So on one hand, you can say, “Great, we have the special envoy, great we have the second gentleman who was so open to taking this on. This is unbelievable.” But we are here fighting. We have to be here fighting.
What was your most memorable experience from the recent trip?
On Saturday night [in Poland], one of the members of the White House staff that was with us after Shabbos had hired a car to go to the little village, shtetl, whatever, that her family came from. She wanted to go to the cemetery to see if she could find any names. Now the chances of her finding the names, in the daylight, when it is 70 degrees out and comfortable [would be hard enough]. Here it was below freezing, snow was falling, the ground was icy, and it was pitch black. We were with a genealogist, but the cemetery was locked. So we thought we would have to climb the fences. I thought, “Oh my God, we are going to have an international incident!” But our driver got the key to the cemetery from the people across the street, and I asked, “How did you know?” And he said, “The people across the street always have the key.”
So we didn’t have to break in. She wanted to say a prayer, and she was totally capable of saying the prayer herself but obviously she was deeply moved, and she asked me to recite the “El Maleh Rachamim” [prayer for the soul of a person who has died] for her. And when I stopped, she gave all the names of the people, many of whom were buried there but we couldn’t find the exact places. And then I said “shenikberu” [“who is buried here”], and the person holding the flashlight for me, I couldn’t see, it was tiny print, and he’s Israeli, he said, “po.” Here, here, here! I had never said an “El Maleh Rachamim” for people who were caught up in this tragedy, here. In situ. It was very powerful.
And then on the 30th [in Berlin] after our special envoy meeting, we all walked over to the [city’s] Holocaust memorial. And Felix [Klein, Germany’s special commissioner on antisemitism and Jewish life] had brought stones. And we were standing there, and to borrow a phrase from Herman Wouk’s “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” there was this pregnant pause. And I said, “Would you like me to recite a prayer?” And I recited the prayer, another “El Maleh Rachamim,” and I became totally verklempt [overcome with emotion]. Because I was just a 12-minute walk, if that long, from where it was planned and carried out, and that was very powerful as well.
So the trip was pregnant with meaning, but I think more than just meaning, hopefully also impact.
—
The post ‘We have to be here fighting’: Deborah Lipstadt opens up on her Poland-Germany trip with Douglas Emhoff appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Whistleblower claims Trump’s campus antisemitism crackdown was a cash grab
A new whistleblower report alleges that the Trump Administration’s investigations into campus antisemitism were merely efforts to extract millions from universities, under the pretense of rooting out hate.
The report, written by the Washington, D.C.-based Government Accountability Project on behalf of former Department of Justice Attorney Haley Van Erem, alleges that the administration’s antisemitism task force carried out “politically motivated” investigations that were “unsupported by facts and contrary to law.” The investigations did not follow proper Title VI procedure, she said, adding that they were opened with predetermined outcomes, and did not respect the First Amendment.
The report has prompted Jewish U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) to initiate an investigation into the allegations. The Nexus Foundation, a watchdog organization dedicated to combating antisemitism and protecting free speech, released a statement supporting Raskin and Van Erem.
This is not the first time Raskin or Nexus have criticized the administration’s antisemitism task force. Many left-leaning Jewish organizations have long criticized Trump’s efforts, with Raskin describing them as “weaponizing, distorting and exploiting the reality of antisemitism to attack academic freedom.”
In a statement to the Forward, the DOJ denied that Van Erem worked on university investigations. “And for all matters, the Department stands behind the integrity of these investigations,” a spokesperson wrote.
According to the report, Van Erem was involuntarily re-assigned from her role as a DOJ Civil Rights attorney to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in order to investigate alleged antisemitism at medical schools — a probe prompted by a single New York Post article about protesters shouting “Free Palestine” and wearing Palestinian flags or keffiyehs at a medical school graduation.
Unable to find enough evidence of antisemitism at medical schools, Van Erem said, the task force soon expanded its probe to entire universities to increase the chances of finding it.
“This was one of the first major indications to the DOJ assignees that the investigations were not grounded in law or fact,” the report reads.
HHS did not immediately respond to request to comment.
Van Erem also criticized the administration for breaking the protocol of Title VI investigations, pursuing enforcement before first issuing a finding and allowing universities to resolve issues voluntarily. That enforcement: withholding funds.
To restrict funds, the administration used a separate legal mechanism that allows them to do so “for convenience” and for “not satisfying purpose.”
“The funding suspensions were meant to be coercive irrespective of investigative findings,” according to the report.
Van Erem and colleagues found no evidence at Brown of “deliberate indifference” to antisemitic incidents, the report said. But a supervisor allegedly discouraged sending Brown a closure letter stating those findings. According to the report, the administration settled with Columbia before an investigation was finished. Harvard sued the Trump administration, before its own investigation was complete, claiming the funding freeze was unlawful.
Van Erem said she observed findings of discrimination that she believed were actually “protected First Amendment activity” and believed that the task force’s settlement “content-based conditions” violated free expression.
Brown and Columbia both settled with the administration to restore federal funding, with Columbia paying the government $200 million and Brown agreeing to pay $50 million to Rhode Island workforce development organizations. A federal judge recently dismissed the Trump administration’s antisemitism lawsuit against Harvard, saying antisemitic incidents were “too isolated and episodic” to constitute a Title VI violation.
The post Whistleblower claims Trump’s campus antisemitism crackdown was a cash grab appeared first on The Forward.
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An influential book of a Nazi leader’s confessions is now available in English
(JTA) — Jürgen Stroop, the Nazi commander who led the killing of more than 50,000 Jews, was sitting in a cell in Warsaw awaiting his own execution.
Before he met the gallows, Stroop described in unrepentant detail his ascent as a Nazi, his destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and his daily prosecution of mass murder. He gave his account to Kazimierz Moczarski, the journalist, Polish resistance leader and veteran of the Warsaw Uprising who shared Stroop’s cell in Mokotów Prison for 255 days in 1949.
Though he is now remembered as a hero for fighting the Nazi occupation, Moczarski was villainized by Poland’s postwar Communist regime, which viewed his resistance group as a threat to their monopoly on power. His unlikely imprisonment alongside a former Nazi officer he’d once tried to assassinate gave Moczarski the chance to document Stroop’s confessions in an influential book, “Conversations with an Executioner.”
This book, despite being censored for years by the Polish government, proved revelatory about the psychology and motivations behind Nazi ideology. After decades of being translated into over 15 languages and adapted for the stage and screen, “Conversations with an Executioner” was published Tuesday for the first time in an uncensored English translation by Steerforth, an imprint of Pushkin Press.
The book’s champions say it’s about time.
“On the one hand, this book is a central historical source for this really important event in the modern history of the world,” Sean Casper Bye, the book’s English translator, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “And at the same time, it’s one that has continually struggled to get fully into publication.”
The book’s revelations about Stroop, the rise of Nazism and the psychology of genocide is reaching English readers after a long deferral. Moczarski made many unsuccessful attempts to publish “Conversations with an Executioner” after his release, but found little interest from publishers in Communist Poland.
The book did not align with Communist ideological narratives about the Holocaust, which deemphasized tragedy in favor of total victory over the Nazis. And the government’s crackdown on Polish resistance members — which led to Moczarski’s imprisonment with Stroop — remained a taboo subject.
A serialized version of the book first appeared in the Polish magazine Odra from 1972 to 1974, and Moczarski died the following year at age 68. He never saw the first censored edition in 1977, which removed references to the reasons behind his own incarceration. Nor did he see the publication of “Conversations with an Executioner” as an uncensored book in 1992, after the fall of Communism, when it became a bestseller.
Now, the book has “canonical status” in Poland, said Bye. It has been included for years on required school reading lists, shaping how generations of Polish people remember the Holocaust.
Moczarski’s account also faced an uphill battle to reach English readers. During the Cold War, censorship, disrupted communication and closed archives in Eastern Europe made it difficult to publish books from Poland in English, said Bye. That lowered the focus on Eastern European sources and languages for years in Holocaust scholarship across English-speaking countries.
The new English translation was championed by Clare Bullock, the book’s editor in the United Kingdom, who has Polish Jewish heritage. She spent years pushing for it to appear in English at multiple publishing houses, said Bye.
Moczarski and Stroop’s fates were intertwined long before they shared a cell. During World War II, Moczarski joined the Home Army, the main Polish resistance force, where he worked for the Office of Information and Propaganda.
Identifying local Nazi officials and collaborators as targets, Moczarski and his associates assassinated Stroop’s predecessor, Franz Kutschera, nicknamed the “Butcher of Warsaw” for his mass executions of Polish civilians. They also made a failed attempt to kill Stroop, detailed by Moczarski in their cell.
Though he was not Jewish, Moczarski supported and liaised with the Jewish Fighting Organization, known in Polish as ŻOB. The Home Army provided ŻOB leaders with weapons and technical instructions for the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the largest Jewish revolt against the Nazis.
A year later, Moczarski fought in the Home Army’s citywide Warsaw Uprising. The Nazis also brutally crushed this revolt, which led to the deaths of over 160,000 Poles, including some 17,000 Polish Jews who took part in the fighting or were discovered in hiding.
Instead of being rewarded after the war, Moczarski was arrested in 1945 as the Communists consolidated their power in the aftermath of Nazi rule. The new regime baselessly declared the Home Army a quasi-fascist organization, claiming they had collaborated with the Nazis rather than fighting against them. Moczarski spent 11 years in prison, where, he would later recount, he endured 49 methods of torture.
His confinement with Stroop made for another form of torture, according to Bye, who said it was “symbolically equating him, a brave Polish patriot, with a Nazi war criminal.”
The men had a third cellmate: Gustav Schielke, a German former policeman turned low-ranking SS officer who resented the police’s subordination to the Nazis, but did not resist them. In prison, these enemies lived under a code that required equality and confidentiality for survival. They slept on the floor together on three pallets, and Moczarski spent nights huddled between Stroop and Schielke to stay warm.
Moczarski made it his mission to understand the war criminals.
“If I succeed, I have the chance — if only to a certain extent — to answer my own question,” he wrote. “What historical, psychological, sociological mechanism led some Germans to come together into a gang of mass murderers who governed the Reich and did their utmost to introduce their ‘Ordnung’ — their Order — in Europe and the world?”
He unraveled in Stroop an average German middle-class man of his time, with a low level of education, a drive to rise through military ranks, a reverence for order and obedience and a penchant for parroting Nazi ideology.
As his defenses wore down, Stroop gave Moczarski a day-by-day account of his orders to crush the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. Over nearly a month, his forces battled Jewish guerilla fighters and eventually burned down the ghetto block by block. He referred to the operations as “neutralizing” Jews or “cleansing” the Warsaw Ghetto of “subhumans.”
When Moczarski asked Stroop whether he pitied the women fighters whom he captured and killed, he said the commander responded, after a long and “worked up” silence, with Nazi clichés.
“Finally, the general straightens up, smooths down the hair at his temples and replies, in a chanting rhythm,” Moczarski wrote. “‘Anyone wishing to be a true man in those days, meaning a strong one, had to act as I did. Gelobt sei was hart macht!’” The German phrase by Nietzsche, meaning “Praised be what hardens,” was taken from Nazi propaganda.
In this portrait of Stroop, Bye saw a man who was motivated primarily by moving up the Nazi Party hierarchy. While Stroop repeated Nazi tropes and adapted his beliefs accordingly — upon becoming an SS officer, he broke with the Roman Catholic Church and declared himself “Gottgläubig,” a Nazi religious term — much of his testimony amounted to a boastful account of personal victories.
“This was a type of Nazi,” said Bye. “Not everybody was a completely 100% committed idealogue. There were lots of people who were just ambitious and unscrupulous, and that was part of the engine that kept the Nazi machine going.”
The idea that the Holocaust could have been willingly committed by everyday, career-minded people, not just Nazi ideologues and sadists, has been echoed in other landmark works of scholarship and culture, from Hannah Arendt’s 1963 “Eichmann in Jerusalem” to the 2023 film “The Zone of Interest.”
“Conversations with an Executioner” has been challenged as an authentic document, since Moczarski had no materials to take notes in the cell, yet recounted years of dialogue in vivid detail. Moczarski claimed that he honed an exceptional memory in prison and could write the book in his mind. After being released in 1956, he verified facts by obtaining Stroop’s reports from the Polish Commission for Researching Nazi War Crimes and information from the U.S. Pentagon archives.
The limitations of the book as a firsthand account also make it a precious resource, said Bye. Stroop’s destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto was so effective that “Conversations with an Executioner” provided a rare surviving window into what occurred.
Bye said that voices like Moczarski’s are becoming ever more crucial as the last generation of survivors die out and the Holocaust fades from living memory. He hopes the new English translation will give readers a counterweight to current-day narratives about the Holocaust, emerging in politics and elsewhere, that mold the past to fit ideological messages.
“There are so many people who have a vested interest in getting us to look at the Holocaust in a particular way, who want to instrumentalize the Holocaust as this hugely emotionally weighty event for their own purposes,” he said. “One of the ways that we can keep in touch with the reality of the Holocaust is by going back to primary sources like this — going back to the people who did see it with their own eyes and who wrote about it themselves.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post An influential book of a Nazi leader’s confessions is now available in English appeared first on The Forward.
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California Democratic primary pits AIPAC-backed candidate against progressive Israel critic
(JTA) — AIPAC and its allies have poured millions of dollars into a California special election, transforming a race between two Democrats into a battleground over the pro-Israel group’s place in Democratic politics.
The spending in the Bay Area’s 14th congressional district is aimed at boosting Melissa Hernandez, a moderate Democrat and president of the Bay Area Rapid Transit Board, over Aisha Wahab, a progressive state senator who supports ending U.S. military aid to Israel.
Wahab replied “yes” during an April debate when asked whether Israel’s war in Gaza constituted a genocide. In contrast, Hernandez declined to give a yes-or-no answer, instead saying that Israel had a right to defend itself following the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, but that the “destruction into Gaza has gone too far.”
Wahab remains the favorite heading into Tuesday’s election to replace former Rep. Eric Swalwell, a reliable supporter of Israel in Congress who resigned in April amid sexual misconduct allegations that he has denied. Wahab finished ahead of Hernandez in the election’s June 16 special primary, receiving 42.8% of the vote compared to Hernandez’s 16.8%.
The United Democracy Project, AIPAC’s main super PAC, has poured close to $2.5 million into boosting Hernandez and attacking Wahab this election cycle, while Bold America, another group that has received funding from the United Democracy Project, has spent roughly $1.8 million, according to The Hill.
When asked about the AIPAC spending in the race by the Pleasanton Weekly, Hernandez replied, “I have no say over independent expenditures. That is the law, and I see them when you do.” She added: “I have thousands of donors and not one of them sets my agenda.”
But while the Bay Area race has become one of the the latest focuses of the pro-Israel lobby, following a costly defeat by Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, Israel has hardly been a defining issue in the contest, and Wahab has not neatly fit the mold of other progressive candidates the group has targeted this election cycle.
Wahab, who is the child of Afghan refugees, has centered her campaign on affordability issues and civil rights. While her campaign website calls for “No More Wars!” it does not specifically reference the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Citing the civilian toll in U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, her site reads, “We cannot bomb our way to lasting peace.”
Hernandez, who previously served as the mayor of Dublin, California, has focused her campaign on lowering costs and her commitments to fighting crime and increasing public safety.
Wahab, 39, has drawn endorsements from a host of labor unions, the California Democratic Party and Our Revolution, the group formed by Sen. Bernie Sanders to advance the progressive movement. Hernandez, 51, meanwhile, has received endorsements from several police and fire unions, as well as Democratic Jewish Reps. Lois Frankel of Florida and Brad Schneider of Illinois.
During a Thursday appearance on the livestream of Hasan Piker, who has faced accusations of antisemitism, Wahab said that she would have voted for the Stop the Bombs Act and supported ending all U.S. aid to Israel, though she stipulated that “humanitarian aid is important to me too.”
During the livestream, Wahab also touted a September 2025 resolution she co-authored with Jewish state Senator Scott Wiener, which called for the “end to the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and the immediate release of all hostages.” The resolution was also signed by members of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus.
In 2021, Wahab also collaborated with local Jewish leaders on a fundraiser for Afghan refugee resettlement in the aftermath of the U.S. pullout from the country.
“I work well with the Jewish community. I’m very proud to support them. They’re my constituents,” Wahab said on the livestream.
“As an Afghan, you know, I really deeply want to ensure that all people feel welcomed and safe and secure in this nation. And we know that there’s a rise in antisemitism. We know all of that,” Wahab continued. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t criticize a foreign nation. You can’t criticize their leadership.”
Wahab attributed the volume of AIPAC spending in the race to “pure racism and prejudice,” saying that her “Jewish Senate colleagues are literally confused as to why they are spending this much money against me.”
As Wahab pushes back on the attack ads, she has also garnered $200,000 in support from American Priorities, a pro-Palestinian PAC that formed as a counterweight to AIPAC.
The liberal pro-Israel lobby J Street Action Fund also announced Thursday that it was spending $100,000 to support Wahab.
Tali deGroot, the group’s vice president of political and digital strategy, said in a statement that AIPAC’s spending against her marked another “cynical attempt” to “defeat a candidate who won’t rubber-stamp their agenda.”
“AIPAC’s super PAC has failed time and again this cycle, and we expect this latest attempt to take Republican billionaire dollars and buy a Democratic primary to fail as well,” said deGroot. “Voters in the 14th deserve better, and they deserve a Member of Congress who will bring the kind of clear-eyed, nuanced and compassionate leadership that Dr. Wahab has shown throughout her career.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post California Democratic primary pits AIPAC-backed candidate against progressive Israel critic appeared first on The Forward.
