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With ‘Let It Be Morning’ and ‘Cinema Sabaya,’ Israeli filmmakers are winning awards for portraying Palestinian stories
(JTA) — Years ago, the Israeli filmmaker Orit Fouks Rotem took a class led by director Eran Kolirin, best known as the maker of “The Band’s Visit.” This month, movies by both filmmakers are getting theatrical rollouts in the United States.
On a recent Zoom call, Palestinian author Sayed Kashua joked: “Was that his class — how to use a Palestinian story?”
Kashua was smiling on Zoom as he said it — he is, after all, known for his often fatalistic sense of humor, particularly when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And the author had given his blessing for Kolirin to make an adaptation of his novel “Let It Be Morning,” and said he loved the final result.
But like most jokes, this one had a kernel of truth: Israel’s two most recent Oscar submissions, hitting New York’s Quad Cinema within a week of each other, both — to varying degrees — tell Palestinian stories.
“Let It Be Morning” is a dark comedy about an Arab Israeli village that has suddenly and with no explanation been cordoned off from the rest of the country by the Israeli military. This event forces its Palestinian residents, including a protagonist trying to return to his comfortable middle-class life in Jerusalem, to reckon with how their dignity as citizens has been denied to them by the mechanisms of the Israeli occupation. At the Quad, the film is accompanied by a retrospective of Kolirin’s work, including “The Band’s Visit,” the basis for the Tony Award-winning musical; the retrospective is sponsored by the Israeli consulate in New York.
The all-female cast of “Cinema Sabaya,” a mix of Jewish and Arab actresses, in a film directed by Orit Fouks Rotem. (Courtesy of Kino Lorber)
The following week will see the opening of Rotem’s film, “Cinema Sabaya.” It follows a group of eight women, some Jewish and some Arab and Palestinian, who bond with each other while taking a filmmaking class in a community center in the Israeli city of Hadera. Cast member Dana Ivgy, who plays the class’s instructor, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the filming experience “felt like how living in Israel should feel,” adding, “We have more women in the film than in the Israeli government.”
Stylistically, the two films couldn’t be more different. “Let It Be Morning” is a tightly plotted narrative with boldly realized characters; almost all of its dialogue is in Arabic. “Cinema Sabaya” is a loose, heavily improvisational piece that is almost entirely set in one room, and is mostly in Hebrew (although in one tense early scene, the characters debate whether to conduct their class in Hebrew or Arabic). One is a dry, Kafkaesque satire; the other is an intimate, naturalistic drama.
But together, the films provide a snapshot of the delicate dance Israeli filmmakers must perform in the current climate. On the one hand, these art-house directors are being feted on the international stage for their empathetic storytelling that incorporates or even centers entirely on Palestinian characters. But on the other, they’re being attacked by government officials for their perceived insufficient loyalty — and their films’ very status as “Israeli” is being questioned, too, sometimes by their own cast and crew.
“Everyone can call it what they want,” Rotem said of her film. “I’m an Israeli and it’s in Israel, but I have partners who call themselves Palestinians, and some of them call themselves Arabs, and each one defined herself. I think it’s really how it should be.”
“A film does not have an identity,” Kolirin insisted in an interview with JTA. “It is a citizen of the screen.”
Eran Kolirin accepted the award for Best Director for “Let It Be Morning” at the 2021 Ophir Awards in Tel Aviv on October 5, 2021. (Tomer Neuberg/ Flash90)
Kolirin isn’t a fan of the label “Israeli film” in this case, even though that is how “Let It Be Morning” was categorized at its 2021 Cannes Film Festival premiere; its own press notes also list Israel as the “country of production.” That Cannes screening took place shortly after Israel’s deadly conflict with Hamas that killed more than 250 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and around a dozen Israelis. The events turned Cannes into a political firestorm when the film’s Palestinian cast refused to attend the premiere.
“We cannot ignore the contradiction of the film’s entry into Cannes under the label of an ‘Israeli film’ when Israel continues to carry its decades-long colonial campaign of ethnic cleansing, expulsion, and apartheid against us — the Palestinian people,” the cast’s statement read in part.
“Each time the film industry assumes that we and our work fall under the ethno-national label of ‘Israeli,’ it further perpetuates an unacceptable reality that imposes on us, Palestinian artists with Israeli citizenship,” the statement continues, calling on “international artistic and cultural institutions” to “amplify the voices of Palestinian artists and creatives.”
Kolirin himself supported the cast’s action. He knew they were grieving over the outbreak of violence in Gaza and didn’t want to put themselves in a situation where “some politician is going to wave a flag over their head or whatever.”
What’s more, he said, the status of “Let It Be Morning” as an “Israeli” film, despite the fact that around half the crew was Palestinian, was not his decision: “The film was not submitted to Cannes as an Israeli film,” he said. “You know, you fill in the form: ‘Which were the countries that gave money?’” In this case, the answer was Israel and France.
Most of the cast later did not attend the Ophir Awards ceremony, Israel’s equivalent to the Oscars voted on by its filmmaking academy, where “Morning” won the top prize (which automatically made it Israel’s Oscar submission for that year). In solidarity at the awards, Kolirin read aloud a statement from his lead actress, Juna Suleiman, decrying Israel’s “active efforts to erase Palestinian identity” and what she called “ethnic cleansing.”
Orit Fouks Rotem (Courtesy of Kino Lorber)
“Cinema Sabaya” hasn’t played host to as much offscreen controversy, but its vision of Israeli multiculturalism is still inherently political. Rotem’s mother is a local government adviser on women’s issues in Hadera, and the film was inspired by her experience participating in a photography class designed to unite Jewish and Arab women. Rotem herself later led filmmaking classes in a similar vein as research for “Sabaya.”
In the film, Ivgy’s character, who is modeled on Rotem, instructs her class to film their home lives, while secretly hoping to make a movie from their efforts. When her desire to do so is revealed, the women in the class feel betrayed: They thought they were just making films for themselves, not for their stories to be told by someone else.
Similarly, Rotem said that working with Arab and Palestinian actresses made her “aware to the fact that I can’t really tell their story.” Her solution was to allow the performers — some of whom are well-known activists who had to think twice about appearing in an Israeli movie — to voice their own opinions, and to establish the necessary trust to allow them to be unscripted on camera.
She theorizes that “Cinema Sabaya” has been so well received in Israel because “it doesn’t say ‘occupation, occupation, occupation.’ It says ‘humanity,’ so people are less afraid.” (She also noted that, in real life, the women who attended her filmmaking classes bristled at her initial suggestion to make a documentary about them, telling her to fictionalize their stories instead — which she did.)
Lately the Israeli government has a tendency to view its filmmaking class as agitators unworthy of national support, particularly when they make films criticizing the occupation. Former Culture Minister Miri Regev often disparaged films she thought were bad for Israel, including celebrated international hits such as “Foxtrot” and “Synonyms.” Her current successor, Miki Zohar, has already threatened the makers of a new documentary about the West Bank city of Hebron, saying the movie smears the military and that the directors might have to return government funds.
In recent years, Israel’s culture ministry has pushed two new controversial proposals: a grant program earmarked for those who make films in settlements, which are considered illegal under international law; and a form pledging not to make films “offensive” to Israel or the military that filmmakers would be required to sign in order to apply for certain grants, which many directors have likened to a loyalty oath. For years, some of the country’s largest grantmakers have required applicants to sign a form promising to represent their projects as Israeli on the national stage.
There has also been an effort among some members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new right-wing government to end funding to public broadcaster Kan, which the country’s film industry views as another attack on its free expression.
“Kan has all this dialogue,” Ivgy said. “It has Jewish and religious and Arab and Palestinian, for kids and for grownups. And nothing is taboo there. I feel that it’s very dangerous to close that option down.”
Many Israeli filmmakers are fighting back. Hundreds, including Kolirin and Rotem, have refused to sign the ministry’s pledge, and many have also protested the settlement grant program. Nadav Lapid, one of the country’s most celebrated and outspoken directors, harshly critiqued government restrictions placed on his own work in the 2021 drama “Ahed’s Knee,” which went on to win a special prize at Cannes.
Kolirin said he had recently been on a call with several Israeli filmmakers looking to further organize against artistic restrictions, and that it had given him hope. “I had this feeling of some optimism, which I didn’t have for a long time,” he said. But he didn’t mince words when discussing Israel’s new governing coalition, which he likened to “a circus of mad dogs unleashed.”
Rotem said that the current government is “very, very bad and scary,” but that it has only strengthened her resolve to make political films.
“For me, it’s also political to show women in Israel in a deep way: I mean Arabs and Jews,” she said. “Because I don’t think there are enough films that are doing that.”
For Kashua, a veteran TV writer and opinion columnist, the question of identity in Israeli and Palestinian filmmaking is even more pronounced. After a long career of trying to write about the Palestinian experience in Hebrew as a way of reaching Israelis, he left Israel for the United States in 2014, becoming discouraged by an incident in which Jewish extremists burned a Palestinian teenager alive as revenge after Palestinian terrorists kidnapped Israeli soldiers. Now based in St. Louis, he has worked as a writer and story editor on Israeli series that center on both Palestinian and Jewish stories — including the global hit “Shtisel,” which focuses on haredi Orthodox Jews, and its upcoming spinoff, along with “Madrasa,” a young-adult series about a bilingual Hebrew-Arabic school.
Israeli filmmakers choosing to center Palestinian stories can be its own radical political act, Kashua believes. He noted that the dialogue in “Morning” is almost entirely in Arabic, a language that Israel demoted from national language status in 2018 — doubly ironic as he had deliberately chosen to write his original novel in Hebrew.
“The idea that this film is ‘Israeli’ — it really contradicts the idea of Israel being a purely Jewish state,” Kashua said. He added that, while he had initially hoped a Palestinian director might have adapted his novel, he was ultimately happy with Kolirin’s approach.
“I truly love the movie, and it’s barely Orientalist,” he joked, echoing Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said’s famous book about how a Western lens on Eastern cultures can be reductive and harmful. “Which is a big achievement for an Israeli filmmaker.”
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I was in a high school production of ‘Anne Frank’ — today in Minnesota, I feel her fear more than ever
I want to tell you what it is like in Minnesota right now.
I grew up in a small town in southeast Minnesota, right on the Mississippi. I graduated with 98 other classmates, most of whom I’d known since kindergarten. This was a predominantly white high school in a very white community of Catholics, Lutherans, Methodists and Episcopalians. I remember only one Jewish family with kids at my school, but none of those kids were in my grade and we didn’t participate in any of the same activities. I was raised Lutheran and didn’t really have an awareness or understanding of Judaism beyond “it’s another type of religion, kinda like being a Catholic.”
I was involved in the arts from a young age and grew up watching plays at the local high school, waiting for the day I’d finally be able to perform there myself. Every year the school did one big play in the fall and, in 2005, my freshman year, it was The Diary of Anne Frank. I auditioned and was cast as Peter van Daan.
As diligent young actors will, my castmates and I dove into research and watched Schindler’s List as part of our dramaturgy. I’d read some historical fiction set in the time period around World War II and had learned about the Holocaust in school, but other than The Sound of Music, this was the first time it was more than words on a page.
We brought our newfound sense of understanding to rehearsal, but the play was still set in the 1940s. Yes, it was a story of real people, but it took place in the past and we were all Gentiles so there was still a sense that we were just pretending to understand. Even though it was realism, this was always a story, and there was always some distancing from it (In college, I would learn that this was a hint of what Bertolt Brecht called Verfremdungseffekt). After curtain call, we took our high school theater make-up off and went to Perkins for a cast party, leaving Anne’s story on the stage.
In 2009, I moved to Minneapolis, and in 2017, I moved to the Central Neighborhood. For the next four years, I lived four blocks from where Derek Chauvin would murder George Floyd in 2020. In 2021, I moved just across the interstate to the next neighborhood over and, since then, have lived eight blocks from where, on Jan. 7, 2026, Jonathan Ross shot Renee Nicole Good in the face and killed her.
The influx of federal agents to Minnesota began before the murder of Renee, but the surge that has followed and the devastation, chaos and destruction are unlike anything I ever thought I would witness in my lifetime.
In May 2020, a curfew was placed on the city after George Floyd was murdered and the city dared to demand justice. On the second or third sleepless night of the uprising, I watched several of my neighbors walk to the corner of the block to check out a loud noise. Within 30 seconds they were surrounded by officers from the police department and the National Guard. They began to flee back to their homes as the officers tried to grab and arrest them for breaking curfew. My roommates and I saw what was happening and stepped out on our front steps, screaming that those were our neighbors, that they lived there, and to just let them go inside.
For the mere act of standing on our front steps and advocating for our neighbors, officers pointed their guns at our faces and ordered us back in the house. They did end up letting the neighbors go, but made sure to roll what felt like an entire battalion of officers and tanks down my quiet residential side street afterwards. I’ve been mugged before, but that was the most unsafe I had ever personally felt in this city.
Since Jan. 7 of this year, I have felt even less safe. The scale of the reign of terror currently being enacted upon the Twin Cities and all across the state is truly unfathomable. A general sense of fear pervades the air. We all know that each of us is at a different level of risk, but we all feel like possible targets of the regime, whether because of the color of our skin or because we dared to say that what is happening here is wrong.
Schools were closed after federal agents descended on Roosevelt High during pick-up. Elected officials, including the president of the Minneapolis City Council, have been assaulted while advocating for their constituents and simply observing and documenting the activity of federal agents. Many of these agents do not wear official uniforms. They cover their faces. They drive around our neighborhoods recklessly. Families are in hiding and fear answering the door. Workers are staying home and struggling to pay rent or buy groceries because they are afraid to leave their homes.
Federal agents are abducting our neighbors. They are going through red lights and ramming people’s cars. They are taking people from bus stops, hospitals, workplaces, schools, daycares, and even from their homes. They lie to our faces and they seem to take pleasure in it. They are demanding to see identification on the street, based on nothing other than skin color. They are kicking down doors, entering homes without judicial warrants, and kidnapping residents. They are tear-gassing our business corridors. Beloved local small businesses are closing or have reduced hours because they don’t have enough staff to stay open — because the staff has been abducted by the feds and whisked away to another state before their families and attorneys could find them, or they are afraid to leave their homes because this might happen to them. Unsurprisingly, Minnesota’s corporate leadership remains silent while masked goons abduct their employees who are on the clock.
None of this is just. None of this is right. And certainly none of this is good or moral.
I no longer feel distanced from Anne Frank’s reality. I know that there have always been horrors in this world, but there is new urgency and fear when this happens in your community. In her diary, Anne wrote that in spite of everything, she still believed that people are really good at heart. I am working to hold onto that hope as well. I do believe that people are good, that it is better to care for our neighbors, and in the words of the late Senator Wellstone, we all do better when we all do better.
Minneapolis believes in this too. The community is taking care of each other. Like Miep Gies, we are donating to food banks and delivering food to those who aren’t able to leave their homes. Notaries roam to witness signatures on paperwork. People are raising money to cover rent for those unable to work. Parents and community members are patrolling daycares and schools during drop-off and pick-up to make sure their kids, teachers and staff are safe. The incredible teachers are offering distance learning options for students who don’t feel safe attending in person. We are whistling and banging drums and letting these agents know that when this is all over, justice will find every one of the miserable souls that ripped apart families and attempted to destroy our community with hate, fear and oppression.
I want to tell you all this because I want you to be prepared if they come to your neighborhoods.
I want to tell you this because we need you to be loud and clear with us that what is happening right now is not ok.
I want to tell you this because there are more of us than there are of them, and the way that Minnesotans of all backgrounds have come pouring out into the streets in the cold, showing up for their neighbors, is the way that we will win. We take care of us.
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Blacks and Jews were allies once, can they be again?
The Rekindle graduates laugh, clap their hands, and twirl to “Hava Nagila.” They are Black and white, Jewish, Christian, and agnostic.
It’s the sort of scene that Matt Fieldman, a white Jew, and Charmaine Rice, a Black Christian, envisioned when they launched Rekindle in Cleveland in 2021. The organization, now with 20 chapters nationally and six more in development, aims to revitalize Black-Jewish relations in the U.S. and help rebuild the groups’ historic connections.
Other initiatives share similar goals. Exodus Leadership Forum from CNN commentator Van Jones brings together Black, Jewish, and Black-Jewish leaders over dinner in multiple cities for “nights of deep conversation” and “a space to share history, confront hard truths and imagine a shared future,” according to a promotional video. The organization anticipates holding more than 300 dinners this year in partnership with community groups, Jones told the Forward.
Hillel International, the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, and UNCF (formerly the United Negro College Fund) are hosting Unity Dinners with speakers and dialogue for students on college campuses in 14 cities. Additional efforts include local groups for teens or adults, such as Challah and Soul in Los Angeles and the Charlotte Black/Jewish Alliance in North Carolina.
For some, nothing less than democracy is at stake. “I think the most powerful alliance for good in the history of Western civilization is Blacks and Jews together,” said Jones, who is Black.
Advocates point to rising rates of antisemitism and more than 3,000 hate crimes committed against African Americans in 2024. Blacks and Jews were effective allies for social change during the civil rights era and can be again, the thinking goes, even amid such painful obstacles as the turmoil in Gaza.
“There were relationships that were hurt as a result of the war, but we still have to continue to work as hard as we can to heal them,” said Rabbi Judy Schindler, executive director of Spill the Honey, which creates films, educational curricula for students, and workshops to help “the Black-Jewish alliance today” fight antisemitism and racism. “There’s just too much work to do right here,” said Schindler, who is white.
How bridges are being rebuilt
Movement leaders point to the need for education as a foundation for reconnection and action today. Jews were among the NAACP’s founders in 1909. Soon after, Julius Rosenwald joined Booker T. Washington to build thousands of schools for Black students. During World War II, Black soldiers fought Nazism, while Black colleges and universities offered faculty positions to Jewish academics fleeing Europe. In the civil rights era, “the room where it happened” was in the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, where leaders drafted the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Black and Jewish people have an historic alliance, said Shonda Isom Walkovitz, the Black Jewish co-founder of Challah and Soul. “It’s in both our DNAs what we have experienced, not only across Europe but in the United States. It was no ‘Blacks, no Jews, no dogs,’” she said.
Still, historical understanding is just a start, those involved in this work agree. Renewing the alliance requires opportunities for moderated, honest conversations to see where the groups’ current values, experiences and priorities intersect locally and nationally.
People need to build relationships and trust, said Fieldman, before allyship can happen. The five-session Rekindle curriculum, with an optional sixth session on Israel, is designed to deepen knowledge of each community while providing a place for questions and dialogue. Among the topics: Who benefits from the Black and Jewish communities not getting along?
“People are hungry for a space to have meaningful conversations,” Fieldman said. “They want to get off social media, and they want to have a space where they can’t be canceled or have negative ramifications of asking a question or talking honestly about their opinions.”
Jones has seen the same need at the Exodus dinners, where people enter cautiously but once “you break the seal and let people speak about their own personal experiences, not politics, not geopolitical events, but our own experiences as Jewish people, as Black people, as people who might be both Black and Jewish, the heart opens up,” he said.
Meaningful experiences are key. Rekindle participants can join each other for Shabbat dinners, church services, arts and cultural events, and holiday celebrations, including Juneteenth. Friendships have led to joint projects, such as joining a community clean-up hosted by local churches.
In Los Angeles, Challah and Soul hosted a Soulful Seder last year which attracted 150 guests. Organizers and audience members wrote a Haggadah at the Seder together that incorporated the Black American story of enslavement. This year, they will add part of the Latino experience into the same Haggadah.
The Charlotte Black/Jewish Alliance honored the 60th anniversary of the Edmund Pettus Bridge crossing in Selma, Alabama by recreating the journey from Atlanta to Selma. The group visited museums on Black history, along with synagogues and Black churches that supported protestors.
“The questions and discussions that happened on the bus – it was eye-opening,” said Ty Green, a Black Christian leader of the group. “We unfolded and opened up about our feelings about what we saw.”
Experiences like these can allow each group to see that the other is not a monolith. “Some of the bias and stereotypes of both communities exist because they’ve really never talked to anyone who was from the other community,” said Harriette Watford Lowenthal, a Black Jewish woman who has led Rekindle cohorts and trained with Exodus Leadership Forum.
She believes the voices of Jews of color are essential to this work. “In my experience, the Black community isn’t very well educated about Jews of color,” she said. Knowing there are Jews from a variety of backgrounds can boost African Americans’ connection with the Jewish community. Those perspectives may be especially important among younger people. One 2024 study found that 18-year-old registered voters are five times more likely to have an unfavorable opinion of Jewish people than 65-year-olds.
Attempts to “bring the band back together,” as Jacques Berlinerblau puts it, have their skeptics. Berlinerblau, professor in the Center for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University, wishes these organizations well but doesn’t believe the juggernaut from 60 years ago can be revived. “For the overwhelming majority of the Black community, the relationship has never been central or particularly important,” said Berlinerblau, co-author with Terrance L. Johnson of Blacks and Jews in America: An Invitation to Dialogue.
“I think the most powerful alliance for good in the history of Western civilization is Blacks and Jews together.”
Van JonesCNN commentator and founder of Exodus Leadership Forum
Jones acknowledges that interest in reuniting is higher in the Jewish community than the Black community. “Black people have so many of our own problems that have been accelerated in the past couple of years and feel quite isolated,” he said, pointing to the collapse of job opportunities in the public sector, the end of DEI initiatives, and other challenges. “It’s something of a revelation to Black leaders sometimes that our help would be needed or appreciated in the Jewish community.”
Still, there are signs of momentum. In post-fellowship surveys, 93% of Rekindle graduates report they feel “empowered to address hatred of the other community that I see in my own community” and 80% have “advocated for the other community” six months after graduation.
Exodus Leadership Forum, Spill the Honey, and other leaders are planning to collaborate this spring on a combined national strategy for advancing the Black-Jewish partnership. Collaborations could include students from historically Black colleges and universities traveling to Tel Aviv to study its tech industry, or Black residents accompanying Jews at synagogue for support, Jones said.
The work is crucial during the country’s 250th anniversary, according to Benjamin Franklin Chavis Jr., chairman of Spill the Honey and North Carolina youth coordinator for Martin Luther King Jr., in the early 1960s.
“This is a pivotal year in terms of what defines an American,” Chavis said. “Where are we going? What is the ethos? Can pluralism work, and can we be mutually supportive of one another as brothers and sisters?”
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Why is AIPAC targeting Trump’s ICE funding?
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, often a reliable ally of pro-Israel Republicans, is now echoing Democratic outrage over one of President Donald Trump’s most polarizing policies: immigration enforcement. It comes amid backlash sparked by the fatal shooting this month of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis.
AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, began airing an attack ad over the weekend against former Democratic Rep. Tom Malinowski, who is running in a Feb. 5 primary for the House seat vacated by New Jersey Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill. The ad highlights his 2019 vote for a bipartisan border funding bill, which included an increase in funds for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. “We can’t trust Tom Malinowski” to stand up to President Donald Trump, the voiceover says in the 30-second video.
AIPAC has become increasingly controversial among mainstream Democrats for backing pro-Israel Republicans who questioned the 2020 election results. That opposition deepened during the Gaza war as Democratic voters became more polarized over U.S. policy on Israel. Congressional candidates, including some Jewish Democrats, have promised not to take contributions from AIPAC. The group has also drawn attacks from white nationalists and some leaders of the MAGA movement for their lobbying on behalf of a foreign government.
The new ad is especially notable given that AIPAC has spent years cultivating ties to Trump-aligned Republicans, many of whom strongly support aggressive immigration enforcement. By attacking a Democrat over ICE funding while sidestepping Trump himself, the group is threading a narrow needle — aligning rhetorically with Democratic outrage while maintaining its broader bipartisan posture.
In the 2024 election cycle, the group spent $28 million in high-stakes Democratic primaries. That included more than $14 million, which contributed to the defeat of Rep. Jamaal Bowman, a strident critic of Israel. Malinowski, who served two terms in Congress from 2019 to 2023, holds a mainstream Democratic stance on Israel. During his first term, he traveled to Israel on a trip sponsored by the American Israel Education Foundation, AIPAC’s educational affiliate.
Israel has not been a key issue in the crowded special election in the northern New Jersey district, which includes a sizable Jewish electorate. The Jewish Democratic Council of America held a virtual candidate forum last week with eight candidates on issues important to Jewish voters.
A spokesperson for the United Democracy Project did not immediately respond to questions about why the group is targeting Malinowski, particularly on such a deeply contentious political issue. AIPAC spent at least $350,000 on the ad.
AIPAC ad is out https://t.co/f0cH6AIgja pic.twitter.com/udwL7nJgYf
— umichvoter (@umichvoter) January 17, 2026
Malinowski, 60, is a former assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor in President Barack Obama’s second term and previously served as a foreign policy speechwriter for President Bill Clinton. He first ran for Congress in 2018 in New Jersey’s 7th District, saying he was motivated by Trump’s election.
“I am myself an immigrant from Poland. My family was not Jewish, but experienced life under the Nazi occupation,” Malinowski said in an interview at the time. “That’s where my commitment to defending human rights comes from. That’s where my belief in the importance of protecting Israel comes from.” He is a close friend of former Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Malinowski was defeated in the 2022 election.
Malinowski is competing for the open seat against at least two leading contenders: Outgoing Lt. Gov. Tahesha Way and Essex County Commissioner Brendan Gill.
AIPAC typically focuses on U.S.-Israel relations and national security issues. However, its political arm has focused on domestic issues in close contests.
In 2024, they attacked Reps. Jammal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri — two of the first House members to advocate for a ceasefire after the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023 — over their votes against signature Biden-era bills, like infrastructure and healthcare.
In a statement to the New Jersey Globe, Malinowski called the attack “laughably preposterous” and suggested it would boomerang against AIPAC. “I have many pro-Israel supporters in the district, including AIPAC members, who believe you can be passionately pro-Israel while being critical of Netanyahu,” Malinowski said. “To say that they’re appalled by this ad would be an understatement. In fact, I’m reading a collective sense that AIPAC has lost its mind.”
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