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What American Jews fight about when they fight about Israel
(JTA) — Eric Alterman, born in 1960, says the view of Israel he absorbed growing up in a Jewish family in suburban Scarsdale, New York, was decidedly one-sided.
“I went on this nerdy presidential classroom thing when I was in high school,” he recalls, “and some Christian kid from the South raised his hand and said to the rabbi, ‘I don’t get it, if the Jews could have a state, why can’t the Palestinians?’ And I was like, ‘How dare you?’”
Alterman would go on to attend Cornell University, where he wrote his honors thesis on Israel, Vietnam and neoconservatism; spend a semester abroad at Tel Aviv University; study Israeli military history while earning his master’s degree in international relations at Yale, and research a dissertation on American liberalism and the founding of Israel as a doctoral student at Stanford.
Although he frequently writes about Israel as a contributing writer at the Nation and the American Prospect, Alterman is best known for his liberal analysis of the media and U.S. politics. He’s written 11 previous books, including one on Bruce Springsteen.
Yet he never stopped thinking about the widening gap between the idealized Israel of his youth and the reality of its relations with the Palestinians, its Arab neighbors and the West. Even when Israel’s revisionist historians were uncovering evidence of massacres and forced expulsions of Palestinians during the War of Independence, and Israeli politicians and intellectuals began asking why, indeed, the Palestinians didn’t deserve a state of their own, he saw that such discussions were considered blasphemous in most American Jewish circles.
Alterman, now a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College, explores that gap in his latest book, “We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel.” The book surveys U.S.-Israel relations, but with a focus on the ways defending Israel have shaped public discourse. It’s a book about arguments: within the administrations of 14 presidents, between Washington and Jerusalem, and mostly among Jews themselves.
Earlier this month we spoke about how the pro-Isael lobby became a powerful political force, the Jewish organizations and pundits who fight to limit the range of debate over Israel, and what he thinks is the high price American Jews have paid for tying their identities so closely to Israel.
“I try to take on shibboleths that in the past have shut down conversation and take them apart and sympathetically show the complexity of the actual situation that lies beneath — so that [criticism and disagreement] over Israel can be understood rather than whisked away by changing the subject, or what-aboutism, or by demonizing the person who is raising them,” said Alterman.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Let me start by congratulating you: It’s the first book about U.S.-Israel relations with a chapter named after a Bruce Springsteen album: “Working on a Dream.”
Eric Alterman: Nobody else has caught that. But it’s not about U.S.-Israel relations. It’s the first book about the debate over Israel in the United States. There’s a million books on U.S.-Israel relations.
So let’s define that more narrowly. The title reminds me of the United Jewish Appeal slogan over the years, “We Are One,” which was about American Jewish solidarity. So who is the “we” in your title, “We Are Not One”?
There are three or four different meanings. The “we” in this book are obviously the United States and Israel. An awful lot of people argue that the United States and Israel have identical interests in the world and that’s crazy, because Israel is this tiny little country in the Middle East and we’re a global superpower thousands of miles away. So obviously, we’re going to have differences. Number two, American Jews and Israeli Jews are very different people. They have very different life experiences. And they see things quite differently as evidenced by the political split between them. The title also refers specifically just to Americans, because we can’t even discuss most things anymore. The pro-Israel community, such as it ever was, is enormously split and it’s split in angry ways.
Much of your book is about what happens to American Jews when the idealized portrait of Israel’s founding and its presumed blamelessness in its actions toward the Palestinians comes up against reality. In that context, tell me a little about your choice to devote a chapter to the Leon Uris novel “Exodus,” an extremely sanitized version of Israel’s founding, and the 1960 movie based on it.
The influence of “Exodus” is something I didn’t understand until I wrote the book. It’s crazy, because Leon Uris was this egomaniac who wrote kind of a shitty book and said that he wanted to add a new chapter to the Bible, and he kind of succeeded. I was born in 1960. When I was growing up in suburban New York, every single family had “Exodus” on their shelves. When the movie came out Israelis understood this. They said, “We can just shut down our public relations office now.” And from the standpoint of reality the movie is worse than the book because it has Nazis — the Arabs in the book are working with Nazism. Uris didn’t have the nerve to do that. So the book created this idealized Israel and this idea of [Palestinians as] evil, subhuman Nazis.
What most Americans don’t understand, or choose not to understand, is that before the 1940s most Jews were anti-Zionist, or non-Zionist. This changed in the 1940s, when, as a result in part of the Holocaust, and the reaction to that, and the triumph of Zionists, they became intensely pro-Zionist, leading up to the creation of Israel. But after that, they kind of forgot about Israel. One might have given their children JNF boxes to carry on Halloween instead of UNICEF boxes, or maybe they paid to plant trees. But Israel doesn’t show up in the American Jewish Committee’s 1966 annual report until page 35 or 36, and Nathan Glazer’s 1957 book “American Judaism” says that the creation of the Jewish state has had “remarkably slight effects on the inner life of American Jewry.”
With the events of 1967, Uris’ idealized notion of Israel came together with this terrible fear of a second Holocaust, and the terror and shame and frightening nature of that combined to transform American Judaism overnight to an enormous degree.
You are referring to Israel’s lightning victory in the Six-Day War, which even non-religious Jews saw as a kind of miracle, and redemption two decades after the Holocaust. And that transformation, you argue, put defense of Israel, combined with Holocaust consciousness, at the center of Jewish identity.
More than just the center: It basically comprised almost all of it, for many secular Jews. I quote the neoconservative Irving Kristol in the book saying in 1976 that “the Holocaust and the founding of the state of Israel” was 100% of what Judaism means.
Which in turn led to a the tremendous pro-Israel lobbying efforts, political activism and punditry.
The budgets of American Jewish organizations overnight went from social services and liberal social justice causes to defense of Israel. And rabbis were replaced at the center of public discourse by the heads of these organizations — most of whom had no religious training or knowledge of history or Judaism.
Joe Biden, then vice president, speaks at the AIPAC 2016 Policy Conference in Washington, DC, March 20, 2016.
(Molly Riley/AFP via Getty Images)
One distinction you repeatedly make is between what most Jews believe compared to the Jewish organizations that claim to represent them. Surveys show the rank and file is consistently more liberal on Israel and less hawkish than the big organizations — a gap that showed up markedly around the Iraq War and the Iran nuclear deal.
Right. The big mistake that so many in the media make is that they go to the heads of these organizations who pretend to speak for American Jews when they don’t speak for American Jews. They speak for their boards and their donors.
The shift to Jewish lobbying on behalf of Israel coincides with an era in which there is seldom daylight between what Israel wants and what the United States wants or agrees to — often to the frustration of presidents. You are critical of those who exaggerate the pro-Israel lobby’s influence — folks like Stephen Walt and John J. Mearsheimer, authors of the 2007 book “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” — but, at the same time, you write, referring to the Israel debate in America, about “the continued stranglehold that money, power, organizational structure, and clearly defined paths to personal career advancement continue to hold over the shape of foreign policy.” How will you respond to critics who will say your book is trafficking in the myth of Jewish power and its conspiracy-minded hold over American policy?
The short answer is, that’s why I wrote a 500-page book — basically, for two reasons: One, everything is incredibly complicated. And some of those complications are consistent with antisemitic myths, and therefore they have to be teased out and broken down in such a way that you’re telling the truth rather than portraying the myth.
If you say things without context, they sound antisemitic. I say that yes, Jews are very powerful in the media and many use that power on or about Israel. But I think if you lay out the examples that I use, if you look at them and examine them, I don’t see how you can conclude otherwise. The people I describe often say that about themselves — how much power and influence they yield.
Secondly, I’ve always found it just about impossible to discuss Israel with anyone, because you have to share exactly the same assumptions with that person. And if you don’t, then they take it personally, or you’re an antisemite, or, at best, you’re insufficiently sensitive to how important antisemitism is. And if you describe ways in which American Jews act in ways that are consistent with antisemitic myth, it has a way of shutting down the conversation.
Undoubtedly there’s some criticism of Israel that is motivated by antisemitism, but there’s an awful lot of reasons to be critical of Israel, particularly if you are a Palestinian or care about Palestinians. This accusation [antisemitism] has shut down the discourse and part of my hopes in demonstrating the complexities of this history is to open this up.
So let me ask about your own stake in this. Your educational background and relationship to Israel are similar in many ways to the writers and thinkers in your book who tolerate no criticism of Israel. I don’t know if you call yourself a Zionist, but you have some connection to Israel, and you’re also willing to tolerate critiques of Israel. What’s the difference between you and some of the other people who went on the same journey?
For the longest time I was comfortable with the words “liberal Zionist,” but I don’t think they have any meaning anymore. I don’t think it’s possible to be a liberal Zionist — you have to choose. Israel is the only putatively democratic country that prefers Trump to either Obama or Biden, and it’s not even close. And young Israelis are moving further in that direction and young American Jews are moving further in the opposite direction.
So you ask me if I am a liberal Zionist. I don’t think the word “Zionist” is useful at all anymore, because Israel is a country and it’s not going anywhere. I sometimes call myself an anti-anti-Zionist, because anti-Zionism is dumb. I’m very anti-BDS. If I thought [the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement] could end occupation, I would support it, even though the idea of boycotting Jews puts a bad taste in my mouth. But the theory behind BDS apparently, and I’ve spent a lot of time on this, is that the world will force Israel to give up its identity and turn the country over to its enemies. It’s inconceivable that Israel would do that and inconceivable the United States would pressure them to do that. So BDS is entirely performative. It’s more of a political fashion statement than anything else.
And to me, it speaks to the failure of Palestinian politics throughout history. I have a great deal of sympathy for the Palestinians and their bad politics because it’s based on two problems. One is that they have never been able to see the future very well. So they should have agreed in 1921 and 1937, or whenever they would have had the majority and they were being given a country by the British. They should have taken the lousy offer from Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton in 2000. I kind of get it because they have so many competing constituencies, and it’s impossible to satisfy all of them at the same time. I understand that. It’s hard to imagine a Palestinian politician who could say yes, and if you look at Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, in both cases, it’s hard to imagine making peace with them.
I read that in your book, and my first thought was, well, isn’t that basically just confirming what the pro-Israel right has always said — that Israel has no partner for peace? So maybe the best it can do is maintain a status quo that assures some security for Israel and a workable something for the Palestinians.
Well, number one I hold Israel significantly responsible for the conditions under which that has developed and that they can change those. And number two, that’s no excuse for the way Palestinians are treated, either in the occupation or in Israel. So yes, I agree. There’s no one to make peace with today, but there are many steps Israel could take that could vastly improve the lives of the Palestinians, both in the occupied territories and inside Israel. And there are a lot of steps they could take that could build confidence for a future that could weaken Hamas, that could strengthen the Palestinian Authority, so that one day peace would be possible. But they do the opposite.
An Israel supporter at a New York rally to tell the United Nations “no more anti-Israel documents or resolutions,” Jan. 12, 2017. (Don Emmert/AFP via Getty Images)
You talk about funding of Israel studies and Jewish studies departments as a reaction against fears of a pro-Palestinian takeover of academia. At the same time, you write how Palestinian supporters “succeeded in colonizing Middle East studies departments, student faculty organizations, and far-left political organizations.” Why does that matter in the long run if, as you also write, nothing’s really going to change American policy on Israel?
I gave a talk before the book came out at Tel Aviv University and someone asked me that question. I said, You care about these transformations for two reasons. One, you really will be all alone in the world. You’ll have the support of conservative [Evangelical] Christians who are in many respects antisemitic and are using you for their own purposes. So if you lose American Jews, you will be existentially alone in a way you’re not now and that strikes me as very unpleasant.
I do think that the quote-unquote pro-Israel community has a stranglehold on American politics that I can’t see changing anytime soon, and I think the change in the Democratic Party [that it will turn more pro-Palestinian] is very much exaggerated by both sides for their own reasons.
That being said, the people who are being trained now to be in the State Department and the National Security Council and the Defense Department and the think tanks and the places where the intellectual foundation of U.S. policy is made are learning something very different from what you and I learned in college. Right now, there’s no such thing as an influential Palestinian lobby in this country. There’s no pushing back. There’s no percentage for anyone opposing Israel who has a career interest in the future. That will change, and the whole shaping of the discourse will change and that will change the relationship between the United States and Israel. It’s not going to happen anytime soon, but it’s definitely going to happen.
As Jews in this country have remained largely liberal, Israel appears to be getting more illiberal, as we’ve seen with a new government that is more right-wing than any previously. And Israel has become more of a divisive element among Jews than a unifying force. As this gap appears to be widening, do you have any real hope for changing the discourse?
No, I don’t have any hopes for that. I don’t have anything optimistic to say about Israel. I think, politically speaking, from the standpoint of American Jews, everything is going in the wrong direction. But by demonstrating just how different Israeli Jews are than American Jews, and how little Israeli Jews care what American Jews think, I do think that it presents an opportunity for American Jews to think about what it means to be an American Jew in the Diaspora. Roughly half of the Jews in the world live in the United States. And since 1967 American Jews have defined themselves vicariously through Israeli Jews and taking pride in Israel. They expressed their identities by defending Israel and attacking the media when the media didn’t defend Israel.
Meanwhile, American Jews hardly ever go to synagogue. According to Pew, 20% of American Jews regularly attend synagogue and half of them are Orthodox, who are 10% of the community. What brought me back into Judaism was studying Torah. And hardly any American Jews are ever exposed to that.
So I think there’s an opportunity to reimagine Diaspora Jewry now that the Israel story doesn’t work, and it’s clear that it doesn’t work. Young American Jews are leaving or voting with their feet. They’re walking away. Israel-centric Judaism is in part responsible, although it’s not the whole story. Intermarriage is a big part of the story. The de-religionization of all groups is part of the story. But personally, I don’t see what a liberal American Jew would see in a Judaism that defines itself as it has for the past 50 years as defending Israel and remembering the Holocaust.
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Archaeologists uncover treasures of Vilnius’ Great Synagogue as Jews dispute its future
(JTA) — VILNIUS, Lithuania — Archaeologists have uncovered the full floor of Lithuania’s historic Great Synagogue, revealing treasures nearly erased by Nazi and Soviet occupations — and exposing rifts between Lithuanian Jews over how to preserve and interpret what survived.
Locals walking through the center of Vilnius now pass a hole in the ground, a portal to the rich Jewish past of a city once called the “Jerusalem of the North.” For the first time since 1940, they can see the polished, colorful floor and entire prayer platform of the Great Synagogue of Vilna, built in the 17th century, which became one the most important religious, cultural and intellectual hubs for Diaspora Jews.
In Lithuania’s small remaining Jewish community, who number less than 3,000, there is no debate that the site must be preserved. But discussions about how to protect the past — and what to build over it — have triggered pain over one of the last pillars of identity left standing for Lithuanian Jews.
The community’s main representative body plans to build a new Jewish community center over the excavation, where visitors could view the Great Synagogue floor through a glass layer or a basement-level exhibit. Above, the center would celebrate current-day Jewish life through cultural, social and educational events.
Some Orthodox Jews and their supporters oppose that project, saying the synagogue should be rebuilt as a house of worship or preserved as a purely archaeological exhibit. Other residents say the mission of a new building should be broadened beyond Lithuanian Jews, offering a center that promotes tolerance, human rights and understanding of Jewish history among all Lithuanians.
On the eve of World War II, the massive Great Synagogue stood among more than 100 synagogues and Jewish prayer houses in Vilnius, where about 40% of people were Jewish. Over 90% of Lithuanian Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and from 1944 until 1990, Vilnius was remade as the capital of the Soviet Lithuanian Republic. The synagogue was burned and largely destroyed by the Nazis, then razed by the Soviets to build a school in its place.
“This is the place that half the population would have identified their city with,” Jon Seligman, the archaeologist leading the excavation, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “So this city at the moment is missing half its identity, and because it’s such a long time since it happened, they don’t even know they’re missing half their identity.”
The excavation is over a decade in the making. Seligman, an Israel-based archaeologist whose Jewish grandparents lived in Lithuania before World War II, first proposed unearthing the synagogue’s remains in 2013 after a visit to discover his family roots. His team of archaeologists have worked there since 2015, and last year, the former Soviet school building over the site was demolished.
In an accident of history, the synagogue’s main floor was constructed below ground and spared from total erasure.
“When the building was built in the 17th century, part of the restrictions that were placed on the Jewish community was that they were not allowed to build their synagogue higher than any of the churches in the surroundings,” said Seligman. “So to create the internal majesty, if you don’t want to have a low, two-story building, what you do is you drop the floor level one story below ground surface — and that’s what they did.”
The latest installment of Seligman’s project, completed in July, fully exposed this main hall and the bimah, or prayer platform, covered in red, white, green and black geometric designs. Archaeologists also found traces of the Shulhoyf, a busy complex that formed the heartbeat of Jewish life.
Vilnius was a major center of Jewish thought, famed for both its religious tradition and modern secular Jewish culture. It was home to the 18th-century Vilna Gaon, one of the most influential Jewish sages — and also the birthplace of the Jewish Labour Bund, a secular, socialist and anti-Zionist organization. Schools taught literature and the sciences in Yiddish and Hebrew, and Zionists shared ideas alongside anti-Zionists.
Before World War II, the Shulhoyf hosted 12 prayer houses, a bathhouse, kosher butcher stalls, the first public toilets in Vilnius, the prestigious Strashun Library and the first headquarters of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, or YIVO. That institute, now in New York City, continues to preserve the Yiddish language and cultural heritage of Eastern European Jews.
Faina Kukliansky, who has since 2013 chaired the umbrella organization known as the Lithuanian Jewish Community, spearheaded the initiative to construct a community center over the synagogue.
Kukliansky grew up as the child of Holocaust survivors in Lithuania under the Soviets. She said the new space will replace the community’s current headquarters, hosted in a nearby building that is more than a century old and struggles with heating and water system issues.
Kukliansky said the new center will honor both the past and the present of Lithuanian Jews, featuring a YIVO exhibition alongside concerts, social clubs and Jewish learning events. After the Holocaust and decades of Soviet restrictions on Jewish life, those who remain are mostly secular and distant from Jewish traditions. Kukliansky said the center’s construction over the remains of the Great Synagogue will inspire Jews to trace the threads of their heritage.
“It’s very meaningful that in the place where the synagogue rose, Jewish life will be intensive because our Jewish community center is there,” said Kukliansky.
But Kukliansky’s plans have met sharp opponents from other corners of Lithuania’s Jewish world. Among the most vocal is Rabbi Sholom Ber Krinsky, an emissary for the Chabad-Lubavitch Orthodox movement who was born in Boston and has lived in Vilnius since 1994.
Krinsky said that according to Jewish tradition, the Great Synagogue site should not be covered by a building for secular cultural activities, but remain a “living Jewish religious center that continues the learning and the prayer.”
“If a site was used as a synagogue — for centuries, in this case — the holiness retains its holiness, and it’s proper to respect that holiness,” said Krinsky. “A Jewish community center might be nice, but it certainly doesn’t represent the holiness of that site.”
Krinsky has for years demanded more money for Chabad projects, which he says would be used for religious services, Jewish education and social welfare programs. He accuses Kukliansky of monopolizing funds granted to Jews by the Lithuanian government as compensation for property stolen during the Holocaust. The Good Will Foundation, an international body created through the World Jewish Restitution Organization and the Lithuanian Jewish Community, has been authorized to distribute this restitution money.
Since legislation passed by the Lithuanian parliament in 2022, the Good Will Foundation has disbursed about $9 million to compensate individual Holocaust survivors and their heirs for private property claims. Given that most Jewish property was left without any heirs, another $40 million is being allocated to support Jewish communal life — including projects like the new community center.
Krinsky said these funds have not been sufficiently used to nourish religious life. Kukliansky countered that her organization supports the Choral Synagogue, the only synagogue still active in Lithuania, where Krinsky leads the small group of Jews who usually scrape together a minyan — the minimum of 10 people required for public prayers. Compared with other Eastern European communities, Chabad’s footprint is small in Vilnius, where the Vilna Gaon led a tradition of opposing Hasidism that became central to the identity of many Lithuanian Jews.
Kukliansky also claims that Krinsky has refused to provide her with financial reports. His wife, Nechama Dina Krinsky, was indicted for tax fraud in 2023.
Kukliansky faces further criticism from Dovid Katz, an American-born, Vilnius-based scholar of Yiddish and the Holocaust. Katz advocated for rebuilding the Great Synagogue or preserving its remnants as a religious site, which he said would draw Orthodox pilgrims from around the world.
“A synagogue is a religious place, and religious leaders today — and everyday religious Jews — need to be consulted on what’s going to replace the Great Synagogue,” said Katz. “It is a place either for a replacement synagogue or for archeological remains.”
Still other critics say the Jewish representative body has split the site from a broader mission that would attract non-Jewish Lithuanians and Jews from around the world. Anna Avidan, who founded a nonprofit called Jerusalem of the North to celebrate Jewish history in Lithuania, led a conference in 2017 that invited historians, architects and students to discuss the future of a space commemorating the Great Synagogue.
Fragments of a gefilte fish dish and a Passover plate that were found at the Great Synagogue excavation site. (Shira Li Bartov)
Avidan said attendees proposed a cultural center that would host forums about tolerance, drawing international visitors and educating Lithuanians about the Jewish past of their country. She argued it would be “selfish” to build a center exclusively for the Lithuanian Jewish community, since such spaces are closed to the public, partly for security reasons. The proposals emerging from Avidan’s conference were shut down after Kukliansky’s opposition.
“We are still working on how to include Jewish history in Lithuanian history,” said Avidan. “Approaching the site as a site of Lithuanian history, that would promote this harmony and understanding.”
At the excavation site, Seligman’s team has dug up pieces of life in the synagogue, which seated about 500 people, with some 500 more squeezing in for High Holidays. The latest artifacts to emerge from the ground include a Passover plate, a dish for gefilte fish, a plaque engraved with the Ten Commandments and several seating plaques with the names of people who donated to the synagogue, assuring their spots inside.
These name plaques left clues about families who vanished from Vilnius. One marked a seat for Gitel Klachek, identified as the “wife of the late Yechezkel, Shamash d’Mata” — the city sexton. Their wealthy, influential family owned several businesses around the Great Synagogue.
On the uncovered synagogue floor and the surrounding Jewish neighborhoods, there walked people who disputed religion, Jewish identity, Zionism and other ideas. “There would have been a large contingent who would have been ultra-Orthodox. There also would have been a large contingent who were completely secular,” said Seligman. “So the city was very, very much a very mixed community.”
The fights over the memory of these ghosts — and over Lithuania’s Jewish identity — echo the disagreements that animated the Jews who once thrived there.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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AIPAC-backed Wesley Bell defeats Cori Bush in Missouri Democratic primary
(JTA) — Missouri incumbent Rep. Wesley Bell registered a resounding victory in Tuesday’s Democratic primary against Cori Bush, a prominent Democratic socialist and ardent critic of Israel.
The Associated Press called the race just an hour after polls closed, at 8:02pm local time. By the time 99% of the vote was counted, Bell had garnered 59.2% to Bush’s 36.9%.
The primary is a déjà vu moment for St. Louis. The same pair of candidates vied just two years ago to represent the state’s 1st Congressional District.
Bell prevailed in 2024 to oust Bush in a clash that was largely defined by a $9 million influx of AIPAC cash in support of Bell. In this rematch, Bush made the American Israel Public Affairs Committee a central issue in her campaign, similar to other Democratic Socialists of America candidates.
“AIPAC has become yet another way for MAGA-donors to divide the Democratic base by meddling in primaries,” Bush told JTA in a written statement prior to the primary. “In St. Louis and across the country, people know that our fight against antisemitism means fighting against the far-right’s effort to divide us.”
Federal Election Commission records show that this time around, AIPAC has invested far less in the race. Through its United Democracy Project super PAC, the pro-Israel lobby has spent in the neighborhood of $3 million on the rematch, with the vast majority targeted at opposing Bush.
In response to Bell’s decisive win on Tuesday, AIPAC posted its congratulations on X: “Our community was proud to support a strong, principled Democratic leader,” the lobby stated.
The Washington, D.C.-based Jewish Democratic Council of America, which had mobilized networks of voters to make phone calls in support of Bell, added their congratulations to the congressman following his victory.
“Rep. Bell is a leader in taking on Trump’s corruption,” the group posted on X. “We look forward to seeing him continue to fight for our Jewish and Democratic values.”
Aside from their conflicting perspectives on Israel, Bell and Bush have much in common. Born in Missouri in the mid-1970s, they are both Black progressive Democrats who entered politics after the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in the city of Ferguson.
Amid protests across Ferguson for police reforms, Bell won a seat on the city council and focused on passing such changes. He went on to become St. Louis County prosecutor in 2018, defeating a 27-year incumbent who had failed to prosecute the officer who had killed Brown.
Bush, meanwhile, became involved in politics by participating in the Ferguson protests. She lost Democratic primaries for the U.S. Senate and House in 2016 and 2018, but then won congressional races in 2020 and 2022. In 2024, however, she lost to Bell by more than 5 percentage points.
The candidates have similar stances on most political issues, prioritizing concerns like reproductive rights, gun violence prevention and the dismantling of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as lowering costs of housing, utilities, healthcare and prescriptions. But they have sharp differences when it comes to Israel, with Bush’s campaign pledging to “stand for justice in Palestine.” Bell, in contrast, has stood steadfast in his support of Israel.
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William Lawrence, El-Sayed-aligned progressive, takes Democratic House nomination in Michigan battleground race
(JTA) — An outspoken pro-Palestinian progressive who campaigned with Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed bested two establishment-backed picks in a Democratic House primary for a battleground district in the state on Tuesday.
William Lawrence, a co-founder of the climate advocacy group Sunrise Movement, took the Democratic nomination in the state’s 7th District, with the Associated Press calling the race for him Tuesday night. With 58% of the vote in, Lawrence had around 43% of the tally in the three-way race.
His opponents Bridget Brink, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, and former Navy SEAL Matt Maasdam, two centrist candidates who boasted military and foreign policy backgrounds, effectively split the establishment vote and opened a lane for the progressive.
“I couldn’t be prouder of the movement we’ve built in mid-Michigan,” Lawrence wrote on social media after the race was called. “We’re building a movement made up of real Michiganders across political divides, not DC consultants.”
At the time the AP called the race for Lawrence, another House candidate backed by El-Sayed, state Rep. Donavan McKinney, was awaiting results in his challenge to the incumbent in Michigan’s 13th District.
As with several other victorious Democratic House candidates this primary cycle, Lawrence made pro-Palestinian advocacy a central plank of his campaign. He was the only Democrat in his race to accuse Israel of genocide, and at his rally with El-Sayed in Lansing, the candidate had called for America to “stop arming Israel.”
Lawrence, whose campaign also tapped into growing public anger over data centers, will face Republican incumbent Rep. Tom Barrett in November.
Lawrence’s victory marked one area where party leadership will be pressured to support pro-Palestinian progressives if it hopes to retake Congress in November. Democrats have eyed the district, which was held by centrist Jewish Democrat Sen. Elissa Slotkin before Barrett, as a top target for flipping. Slotkin had endorsed Maasdam in the race’s homestretch while staying out of the Senate race.
It won’t be easy to line the party up behind Lawrence. He had been condemned by the Congressional Black Caucus during his campaign over resurfaced podcast comments in which he said Black Democratic leaders “defang the white left” — comments he later explained as having been prompted by his anger over Israel’s war in Gaza. Centrist House Democrats have questioned his ability to win in November.
But his campaign told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a statement ahead of primary day that they were confident his focus on “ending military support to human rights abusers and bringing that money home to fund good jobs, housing, and healthcare here at home” would play well across party lines.
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