Uncategorized
A history of Mel Brooks as a ‘disobedient Jew’
(JTA) — Jeremy Dauber subtitles his new biography of Mel Brooks “Disobedient Jew.” It’s a phrase that captures two indivisible aspects of the 96-year-old director, actor, producer and songwriter.
The “Jew” is obvious. Born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn in 1926, Brooks channeled the Yiddish accents and Jewish sensibilities of his old neighborhoods into characters like the 2000 Year Old Man — a comedy routine he worked up with his friend, the writer and director Carl Reiner. He worked Jewish obsessions into films like 1967’s “The Producers,” which features two scheming Jewish characters who stage a sympathetic Broadway musical about Hitler in order to bilk their investors.
Brooks’ signature move is to inject Jews into every aspect of human history and culture, which can be seen in the forthcoming Hulu series “History of the World, Part II.” A sequel to his 1981 film, “History of the World, Part I,” it parodies historical episodes in a style he honed as a writer on 1950s television programs such as “Your Show of Shows,” whose writers’ rooms were stocked with a galaxy of striving Jewish comedy writers just like him.
The “Disobedient” part describes Brooks’ relationship to a movie industry that he conquered starting in the early 1970s. In a series of parodies of classic movie genres — the Western in “Blazing Saddles,” the horror movie in “Young Frankenstein,” Alfred Hitchcock in “High Anxiety — he would gently, sometimes crudely and always lovingly bite the hand that was feeding him quite nicely: In 1976, he was fifth on the list of top 10 box office attractions, just behind Clint Eastwood.
Dauber describes the parody Brooks mastered as “nothing less than the essential statement of American Jewish tension between them and us, culturally speaking; between affection for the mainstream and alienation from it.”
Dauber is professor of Jewish literature and American studies at Columbia University, whose previous books include “Jewish Comedy” and “American Comics: A History.” “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” is part of the Jewish Lives series of brief interpretative biographies from Yale University Press.
Dauber and I spoke about why America fell for a self-described “spectacular Jew” from Brooklyn, Brooks’ lifelong engagement with the Holocaust, and why “Young Frankenstein” may be Brooks’ most Jewish movie.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “History of the World, Part II” comes out March 6. “History of the World, Part I” may not be in the top tier of Brooks films, but it seems to touch on so many aspects of his career that you trace in your book: the parody of classic movie forms, the musical comedy, injecting Jews into every aspect of human civilization, and the anything-for-a-laugh sensibility.
Jeremy Dauber: I agree. There’s the one thing that really brings it home, and it’s probably the most famous or infamous scene from the film. That’s the Spanish Inquisition scene. You have Brooks sort of probing the limits of bad taste. He had done that most famously in “The Producers” with its Nazi kickline, but here he takes the same idea — that one of the ways that you attack antisemitism is through ridicule — and turns the persecution of the Jews into a big musical number. It’s his love of music and dance. But the thing that’s almost the most interesting about this is that he takes on the role of the Torquemada character.
As his henchman sing and dance and the Jews face torture, the Brooklyn-born Jew plays the Catholic friar who tormented the Jews.
That’s right. And what’s the crime that he accuses the Jews of? “Don‘t be boring! Don‘t be dull!” That’s the worst thing that you can be. It’s his way of saying, “If I have a religion, you know, it is show business.”
His fascination with showbiz seems inseparable from his Jewishness, as if being a showbiz Jew is a denomination in its own right.
One of my favorite lines of his is when he marries [actress] Anne Bancroft, who of course is not Jewish. And he says, “She doesn’t have to convert: She’s a star.” If you’re a star, if you’re a celebrity, you’re kind of in your own firmament faith-wise, and so it’s okay. Showbiz is this faith. But it is very Jewish, because show business is a way to acceptance. It’s a way that America can love him as a Jew, as Mel Brooks, as a kid from the outer boroughs who can grow up to marry Anne Bancroft.
Jeremy Dauber is the author of “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” (Yale University Press)
You write early on that “Mel Brooks, more than any other single figure, symbolizes the Jewish perspective on and contribution to American mass entertainment.” On one foot, can you expand on that?
Jews understand that there’s a path to success and that being embraced by a culture means learning about it, immersing yourself in it, being so deeply involved in it that you understand it and master it. But simultaneously, you’re doing that as a kind of outsider. You’re always not quite in it, even though you’re of it in some deep way. In some ways, it’s the apotheosis of what Brooks does, which is being a parodist. In order to be the kind of parodist that Mel Brooks is, you have to be acutely attuned to every aspect of the cultural medium that you’re parodying. You have to know it inside and outside and backwards and forwards. And Brooks certainly does, but at the same time you have to be able to sort of step outside of it and say, you know, “Well, I’m watching a Western, but come on, what’s going on with these guys? Like why doesn’t anyone ever, you know, pass gas after eating so many beans?”
You have this great phrase, that to be an American Jew is to be part of the “loyal opposition.”
That’s right. Brooks at his best is always kind of poking and prodding at convention, but loyally. He’s not like the countercultural figures of his day. He’s a studio guy. He’s really within the system, but is poking at the system as well.
You wrote in that vein about his 1963 short film, “The Critic,” which won him an Oscar. Brooks plays an old Jewish man making fun of an art film.
On the one hand, he’s doing it in the voice of one of his older Jewish relatives, the Jewish generation with an Eastern European accent, to make fun of these kinds of intellectuals. He’s trying to channel the everyman’s response to high art. “What is this I’m watching? I don’t understand this at all.” On the other hand, Brooks is much more intellectual than he’s often given credit for.
For me the paradox of Brooks’ career is conveyed in a phrase that appears a couple of times in the book: “too Jewish.” The irony is that the more he leaned into his Jewishness, the more successful he got, starting with the “2000 Year Old Man” character, in which he channels Yiddish dialect in a series of wildly successful comedy albums with his friend Carl Reiner. How do you explain America’s embrace of these extremely ethnic tropes?
Brooks’ great motion pictures of the late 1960s and 1970s sort of track with America’s embrace of Jewishness. You have “The Graduate,” which came out at around the same time as “The Producers,” and which showed that someone like Dustin Hoffman can be a leading man. It doesn’t have to be a Robert Redford. You have Allan Sherman and all these popular Jewish comedians. You have “Fiddler on the Roof” becoming one of Broadway’s biggest hits. That gives Brooks license to kind of jump in with both feet. In the 1950s, writing on “The Show of Shows” for Sid Caesar, the Jewishness was there but in a very kind of hidden way. Whereas, it’s very hard to watch the 2000 Year Old Man and say, well, that’s not a Jewish product.
What he also avoided — and here I will contrast him with the novelist Philip Roth — were accusations that he was “bad for the Jews.” Philip Roth was told that his negative portrayals of Jewish characters was embarrassing the Jews in front of the gentiles, but for some reason, I don’t remember anyone complaining even though the Max Bialystock character in “The Producers” can be fairly described as a conniving Jew. What made Brooks’ ethnic comedy more palatable to other Jews?
“The Producers” had a lot of pushback, but for a lot of other reasons.
I guess people had enough to deal with when he staged a musical comedy about Hitler.
Exactly. But the other part is that his biggest films are not as explicitly Jewish as something like Roth’s novel “Portnoy’s Complaint.” I actually think “Young Frankenstein” is one of the most Jewish movies that Mel Brooks ever made, but you’re not going to watch “Young Frankenstein” and say, wow, there are Jews all over the place here.
What about “Young Frankenstein,” a parody of classic horror movies, seems quintessentially Jewish?
The script, which is a lot of Gene Wilder and not just Mel Brooks, is really about someone saying, “You know, I don’t have this heritage — I’m trying to fit in with everybody else. My name is Dr. FRAHNK-en-shteen.” And then people say, “No, this is your heritage. You are Dr. Frankenstein.” [Wilder’s character realizes] “it is my heritage, and I’m embracing it. And I’m Frankenstein. And you may find that monstrous but that’s your business.” It’s about assimilation and embracing who you are.
And of course, Wilder as Dr. Frankenstein is unmistakably Jewish, even when he plays a cowboy in “Blazing Saddles.”
Right. Again, by the mid-’70s, you know, you have Gene Wilder and Elliot Gould and Dustin Hoffman, all Jews, in leading roles. “Young Frankenstein” ends up being a movie about coming home and embracing identity, which is playing itself out a lot in American Jewish culture in the 1970s.
I guess I have to go back and watch it for the 14th time with a different point of view.
That’s the fun part of my job.
You talk about what’s happening at the same time as Brooks’ huge success, which is, although he’s a little younger, the emergence of Woody Allen. You describe Brooks and Woody Allen as the voice of American Jewish comedy, but in very different ways. What are the major differences?
Gene Wilder, who worked with both of them, says that working with Allen is like lighting these tiny little candles, and with Brooks, you’re making big atom bombs. The critical knock against Brooks was that he was much more interested in the joke than the story. And I think with the exception maybe of “Young Frankenstein” there’s a lot of truth to that. The jokes are phenomenal, so that’s fine. Allen pretty quickly moved towards a much more narrative kind of film, and so began to be seen as this incredibly intellectual figure. In real life, Allen always claimed that he wasn’t nearly as intellectual as everyone thought, while Brooks had many more kinds of intellectual ambitions than the movie career that he had. There is a counterfactual world in which “The 12 Chairs,” his 1970 movie based on a novel by two Russian Jewish novelists and which nobody talks about, makes a ton of money.
Instead, it bombs, and he makes “Blazing Saddles,” which works out very well for everybody.
Although he does create Brooksfilms, and produces more narrative, serious-minded films like “The Elephant Man” and “84 Charing Cross Road.”
Right, and decides that if he puts his name on these as a director, they’re going to be rejected out of hand. There is a shelf of scholarship on Woody Allen, but if you look at who had influence on America in terms of box office and popularity, it’s Brooks winning in a walk.
You also mention Brooks and Steven Spielberg in the same sentence. Why do they belong together?
Partly because they had huge popular success in the mid-’70s. Brooks is a generation older, but they are hitting their cinematic success at the same time. And they are both movie fans.
Which comes out in their work — Brooks in his film parodies and Spielberg in the films that echo the films he loved as kid.
Until maybe his remake of “West Side Story,” Spielberg is not really a theater guy in the way that Brooks is, when success meant to make it on Broadway. When Brooks was winning all those Tonys in 2001 for the Broadway musical version of “The Producers,” it may have been almost more meaningful for his 5-year-old, or 7- or 8-year-old self than making his incredibly popular pictures.
You also write about Brooks being a small “c” conservative, a bit of a square. Which I think will surprise people who think about the fart jokes and the peepee jokes and all that stuff. And by square, I mean, kind of old showbizzy, even a little prudish sometimes.
I think that’s right. There’s a great moment that I quote at the end of the book where they are trying out the musical version of “The Producers,” and they want to put the word “f–k” in and Brooks is like, “I don’t know if we can do that on Broadway,” and Nathan Lane is like, “Have we met? You’re Mel Brooks!” He’s a 1950s guy.
Another place where this kind of conservatism comes in is when you compare him to other comedians of the 1950s and ’60s — the so-called “sick comics” like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl who were pushing the envelope in terms of subject matter and politics. He wasn’t part of that. He was part of Hollywood. He was trying to make it in network television.
There is an interview in that era when he complained that people who are writing for television are not “dangerous.” Meanwhile, he himself was writing for television. But I think it’s fair to say that “The Producers” was really something different. You didn’t have to be Jewish to be offended by “The Producers.” But as we were saying before, he is more of the loyal opposition, rather than sort of truly out there. He’s not making “Easy Rider.”
An exhibit space at the Museum of Broadway evokes the scenery from the Mel Brooks musical “The Producers.” (NYJW)
“The Producers” is part of Brooks’ lifelong gambit of mocking the Nazis, I think starting when he would sing anti-Hitler songs as a GI in Europe at the tail end of World War II. Later he would remake Jack Benny’s World War II-era anti-Nazi comedy, “To Be or Not to Be.” And then there is the quick “Hitler on Ice” gag in “History of the World, Part I.” Brooks always maintains that mocking Nazis is the ultimate revenge on them, while you note that Woody Allen in “Manhattan” makes almost the opposite argument: that the way to fight white supremacists is with bricks and baseball bats. Did you come down on one side or the other?
To add just a twinge of complication is the fact that Brooks actually fought Nazis, and also had a brother who was shot down in combat. So for me to sit in moral judgment on anybody who fought in World War II is not a place that I want to be. What’s interesting is that Brooks makes a lot of these statements over the course of a career in which Nazism is done, in the past, defeated. Tragically, the events of the last number of years made white supremacy and neo-Nazism a live question again. When “The Producers” was staged as a musical in the early 21st century, people could say, “Okay, Nazism’s time has passed.” It’s not clear to me that we would restage “The Producers” now as a musical on Broadway, when just last week you had actual neo-Nazis handing out their literature outside a Broadway show. It would certainly be a lot more laden than it was in 2001.
Time also caught up with Brooks in his depiction of LGBT characters. Gay characters are the punchlines in “The Producers” and “Blazing Saddles” in ways that have not aged well. But you also note how both movies are about two men who love each other, to the exclusion of women.
There’s an emotive component to him about these male relationships. Bialystok and Bloom [the protagonists in “The Producers”] is a kind of love story. One of the interesting things is that as it became comparatively more comfortable for gay men to live their truth in society and in Hollywood, there was an evolution. In that remake of “To Be or Not to Be,” there is a much more sympathetic gay character who’s not stereotypical.
What other aspects of Brooks’ Jewishness have we not touched upon? For instance, he’s not particularly interested in Judaism as a religion, and ritual and theology rarely come up in his films, even to be mocked.
It’s not something that he’s particularly interested in. To him, being Jewish is a voice and a language. From the beginning of his career the voice is there. What he’s saying in these accents is that this is Jewish history working through me. It is, admittedly, a very narrow slice of Jewish history.
The first- and second-generation children of Jewish immigrants growing up in Brooklyn neighborhoods that were overwhelmingly Jewish.
It was a Jewishness that was aspirational. It was intellectual. It was a musical Jewishness. It was not in the way we use this phrase now, but it was a cultural Jewishness. It was not a synagogue Jewishness or a theological Jewishness. But of course he is Jewish, deeply Jewish. He couldn’t be anything else. And so he didn’t, and thank God for that.
—
The post A history of Mel Brooks as a ‘disobedient Jew’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
These Michigan rabbis couldn’t get El-Sayed’s attention. Now they’re going national.
(JTA) — ANN ARBOR – Shortly before an Oct. 24 rally featuring Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and former President Barack Obama in Detroit, 250 rabbis from across the country urged them both to take their concerns more seriously about El-Sayed’s position on Israel.
The rabbis were speaking on behalf of a group called Nonnegotiable Michigan, and they require El-Sayed to commit to their five demands before they will support him. In this case, they wanted him to vocalize support for “Jewish statehood in Israel” and a commitment to safety for “Zionist Jews” — and to do it onstage.
To their disappointment, neither headliner mentioned the movement or its demands — and El-Sayed will soon wrap his campaign, likely without having done so at all. Now the nascent movement is facing criticism from Jews to its left that the tactic backfired and made Jews more vulnerable.
In the campaign’s final days, Nonnegotiable’s attempt to find a voice in the race has also been overshadowed by pro-Israel Democratic congresswoman Haley Stevens’ endorsement of El-Sayed’s opponent, Republican former congressman Mike Rogers.
Still, the letter was the biggest rabbinical foray into U.S. politics since more than 1,100 clergy signed an open letter last year condemning “rising anti-Zionism and its political normalization” shortly before the election of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. The Michigan letter also signaled that even beyond the state, a sizable cohort of Jews are trying to state their principles amid shifting faultlines in the Democratic Party.
The organizers of Nonnegotiable are undeterred by the party’s silence. They are seeking a new national platform for liberal Zionist Jews to assert their priorities in politics.
“I do think it’s a template for a national model,” Rabbi Aaron Starr, one of Nonnegotiable’s co-founders, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “I’m certainly looking beyond this election. In two years there will be a presidential election, and another slate of candidates for elected office.”
Starr, of the Conservative Congregation Shaarey Zedek in Southfield, a Detroit suburb, said Nonnegotiable’s biggest goal was to “name the priorities that were most core to mainstream American Jews.” He believes they have accomplished that.
As Israel seems sure to remain a hot-button topic for the American electorate in the 2028 presidential race, Starr sees the need for Jews to assert their priorities as urgent.
“Everyone recognizes the growing extremism among political parties and politicians these days,” he said. “Everybody, and especially rabbis, recognizes that extremists could pop up in their own districts and their own states. So they want a forum to be able to communicate ways by which we reject extremism.”
National spotlight
Nonnegotiable’s organizers told JTA they have gathered 1,900, mostly anonymous, signatures to date within Michigan. That figure would be larger than the combined totals of named Michigan Jews who have signed open letters pledging to vote for El-Sayed (1,000) and Rogers (560).
Nationally, the organization says 4,560 people have signed the petition, including the rabbis from out of state who have joined up with the movement in its final days. The other clergy were sourced from rabbinical networks on social media, and come from 34 different states and Washington, D.C. A good chunk of them serve active congregations.
Many are from liberal or swing states, including Rabbi Samuel Stern of Temple Beth Sholom in Topeka, Kansas, where another close Senate race is unfolding. Stern told JTA he signed in order to call out “the anti-Zionist hatred that we see coming out of different political sides and candidates.”
For the rabbis on the letter, El-Sayed’s rhetoric in Michigan looms large in their states, too — in some cases, larger even than more local antisemitism controversies.
At a recent rally in Kansas, President Donald Trump used the term “Shylock,” widely considered to be an antisemitic slur, when referring to a controversy involving the GOP incumbent senator suing patients with medical debt.
Stern, though, said that his Kansas congregation was generally more concerned about El-Sayed’s rhetoric on Israel several states away than Trump’s remarks closer to home.
“It really didn’t play that much here,” the rabbi said, of Trump’s comment. “I don’t know what that means for us, or for any of the other Jewish communities, but it wasn’t as prevalent here. We’ve heard more about what Dr. El-Sayed has said, his anti-Zionism, and been more concerned about that, than about the offhand comment by President Trump.”
Nonnegotiable has also expanded onto college campuses, with an organizing campaign that has quickly formed at the University of Michigan. Around two dozen Jewish students have publicly added their names to the letter.
“I really resonated with what Nonnegotiable stands for,” student organizer Jacob Reich, who is involved in various Democratic Party initiatives on and off campus, told JTA. “I felt torn between both my Jewish identity and my identity as a Democrat.”
Among Reich’s biggest concerns about El-Sayed, he said, was the candidate’s widely criticized “hurt people hurt people” remark made after a March attack on the state’s Temple Israel. The attacker’s family members were killed in Lebanon in an Israeli strike.
El-Sayed has since apologized for those comments, and his campaign has sent mailers to Jewish households in which he pledges to fight antisemitism. Reich said he appreciated the letter, but added, “I don’t think it went far enough to address a lot of the missteps that he’s taken.”
Whose nonnegotiables?
Rabbis friendlier with El-Sayed have argued the movement is ineffective at messaging; could boost Republican policies most Jews strongly oppose; and ignores ways in which the candidate has sought to improve his relations with Jews.
Some have aired those grievances to the movement’s leaders directly.
“Nonnegotiable describes itself as an invitation rather than an ultimatum,” Rabbi Alana Alpert, of Detroit-area Congregation T’chiyah, wrote privately to the campaign’s organizers in an Oct. 8 letter. “It has had the opposite effect, driving a wedge between the campaign and Jewish interests.”
In her previously unpublicized letter, which she recently shared with JTA, Alpert compared Nonnegotiable to Uncommitted, the 2024 activist campaign in Michigan that sought to pressure then-President Joe Biden on Gaza by withholding primary votes for him. The Uncommitted movement later refused to endorse replacement nominee Kamala Harris. Trump went on to win Michigan, and the general election.
The two campaigns used “similar language,” Alpert wrote. She told her fellow rabbis that they were now “dealing with the choices, coalitions, and consequences of an actual general election with far-reaching implications.”
Rabbi Nate DeGroot, who heads the progressive Shalom Center and serves two Michigan synagogues, laid out 10 alternative “nonnegotiables” of his own that he argues “Michigan Jews care just as much about.”
In an essay shared with JTA in advance of its publication, DeGroot’s own nonnegotiables include “fierce condemnation of Christian nationalism”; support for abortion rights and trans rights; and a “commitment to beating swords into plowshares,” a phrase originating in the bible that DeGroot said should also apply to opposing the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran.
Rogers would fail to meet those criteria, DeGroot wrote. Both he and Alpert are supporters of Michigan Jews for Democracy, an ad-hoc group organizing for El-Sayed.
One argument Nonnegotiable’s critics have made is that the movement has had the net effect of benefitting Rogers, who has made an aggressive play for the Jewish vote while employing campaign language about the Muslim Brotherhood that many have argued embraces Islamophobic tropes.
Organizers have expressly denied that their cause is partisan, though some of the big names who signed the Nonnegotiable letter have since cast their ballots for Rogers.
At a recent Republican Jewish Coalition event staged for Rogers, some speakers directly referenced El-Sayed’s refusal to engage with Nonnegotiable as part of the reason not to vote for him.
“When rabbis and Jewish leaders within El-Sayed’s own party came to him with five basic, nonnegotiable commitments, fundamental principles of Jewish safety, identity, and self-determination, they asked him to affirm these commitments clearly and unequivocally,” Lauren Slutsky, a parent of a Temple Israel preschooler, told the crowd. “Weeks later, we’re still waiting.”
She argued, “If a candidate cannot clearly say that Jewish safety, including the safety of Zionist Jews, is nonnegotiable, why should our community or anyone in our community give him our vote?”
Accusations flying
Nonnegotiable’s organizers have denied that their group is affiliated with any Jewish cause but their own. Zioness, which bills itself as a progressive Zionist group, is boosting them.
Yet some Jews see in the movement an echo of more hardline pro-Israel sentiment.
J Street, the national liberal Zionist lobby, seized on a video accidentally posted to Nonnegotiable’s Instagram account that showed the account holder texting with David Victor, a former president of AIPAC and a Michigan resident. The pro-Israel lobbying giant has spent millions against El-Sayed in both the primary and the general election.
The gaffe, J Street vice president of political and digital strategy Tali DeGroot told JTA, was potential evidence that Nonnegotiable’s organizers were coordinating with AIPAC-aligned figures.
“Our fear from the start with Nonnegotiable is that it plays directly into the hands of Republicans who are cynically using the issue of antisemitism for their own political gain,” DeGroot, who has no relation to Nate DeGroot, told JTA. The texting, she insisted, “just validates that fear even more.”
J Street has not formally endorsed El-Sayed, but the lobby is generally supportive of his campaign and is spending against other AIPAC-aligned candidates this midterm cycle. Neither AIPAC nor Victor responded to JTA requests for comment.
Nonnegotiable organizers, however, dispute this account and have expressly denied any involvement from AIPAC in the group.
“If I had been aware of any of the establishment forces being involved in this, or if there was a whiff of partisanship, I would not have gotten involved,” Matt Zerwekh, an initial signer of the letter who leads Temple Emanu-El in the Detroit suburb of Oak Park, told JTA.
Some have even vocally opposed the powerhouse lobby. One of Nonnegotiable’s co-founders, Rabbi Josh Whinston of Ann Arbor’s Temple Beth Emeth, published an op-ed in the Detroit Free Press on Friday condemning AIPAC for quoting him in anti-El-Sayed mailers distributed to Jewish households.
On Sunday afternoon, hours after Stevens’ endorsement of Rogers, Nonnegotiable gathered again on Zoom with guests including Zionist pundit Hen Mazzig and Michigan U.S. Rep. Hillary Scholten.
At the exact same moment as the call, pro-Israel congressional candidate Jeremy Moss was joining a cohort of Democrats castigating Stevens for her endorsement. Nonnegotiable leaders saw it differently: Starr praised Stevens for her “bravery.”
Others, such as Scholten, didn’t raise the subject at all. The congresswoman instead praised the U.S.-Israel relationship and the Iron Dome defensive system. “I’m so proud to stand as a friend and ally of our Jewish community right now,” she told those on the call.
The real purpose of the call, though, was for Nonnegotiable to suggest that Jews could write in a candidate instead of voting for either nominee.
Their top write-in pick: Emma Lazarus, the 19th-century Jewish poet best known for having her work engraved on the Statue of Liberty.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post These Michigan rabbis couldn’t get El-Sayed’s attention. Now they’re going national. appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Ohio Senate race between Israel supporters becomes proxy battle for AIPAC versus J Street
(JTA) — A tight race in Ohio may play a pivotal role in determining which party controls the U.S. Senate, with the two campaigns serving as a proxy battleground for two Israel lobbying groups with different ideologies.
While Republican Sen. Jon Husted is technically the incumbent, in the eyes of many voters, so is Democrat Sherrod Brown. Husted was appointed by Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine to fill the seat vacated by JD Vance when he became vice president in January 2025. He is now running to fulfill the remaining two years of that term. Brown, meanwhile, served three terms in the Senate before losing Ohio’s other Senate seat to Republican Bernie Moreno in 2024.
In the background of this close race are two pro-Israel lobbying forces: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful pro-Israel lobby supporting Husted, and the liberal J Street, a frequent critic of the Israeli government that backs Brown.
For this general election cycle, Husted has earned more than $544,000 in individual contributions earmarked for him through AIPAC, according to FEC filings. During the May special primary election, he amassed more than $306,000 in such contributions.
Husted received a direct $5,000 contribution from AIPAC’s political action committee in April, according to both FEC filings and a federal lobby disclosure. Another $5,000 in February was earmarked through AIPAC, meaning that the lobby forwarded a third party’s contribution to the campaign. Husted also received a $5,000 donation from the Republican Jewish Coalition PAC.
Asked why Husted received AIPAC’s backing, Deryn Sousa, a spokesperson for the organization, wrote that “Husted is endorsed because of his support of the U.S.-Israel relationship.”
During his short time in the Senate, Husted has voted against measures to block arms sales to Israel and joined efforts to combat antisemitism.
In April, he voted against advancing two resolutions proposed by Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, seeking to restrict sales of certain military equipment – including 1,000-pound bombs and bulldozers – to Israel. That same month, he joined the Senate Bipartisan Task Force for Combating Antisemitism, and a year before, he questioned university leaders about the safety of Jewish students on campus.
Brown has likewise been a staunch supporter of Israel and Jewish Americans, voting against advancing a previous resolution to restrict arms sales, proposed by Sanders in 2024.
In 2018, Brown sponsored the United States-Israel Security Assistance Authorization Act, which would have authorized military assistance for Israel through fiscal year 2028. He also spoke out on behalf of Jewish students amid campus protests in 2024 and warned of the dangers of antisemitism after a 13-year-old was charged with allegedly planning a mass shooting at an Ohio synagogue in 2023.
Brown has been “one of the biggest recipients of J Street bundled funds for this cycle,” according to Jordan Steinberg, a spokesperson for the group. Describing Brown as “a long-time J Street champion,” Steinberg told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the Democrat has received more than $800,000 from supporters of J Street in this race.
The biggest chunk of the funds, Steinberg continued, came via JStreetPAC, which operates as a conduit for individual donors who make contributions to candidates on J Street’s website. These contributions are then reported to the FEC as donations from individuals. The group also has a super PAC, J Street Action Fund, but Steinberg said that most donations come from individuals who contribute through the traditional PAC.
J Street in September announced that it would be stepping up lobbying efforts, investing $3 million to defeat certain Republican candidates backed by AIPAC.
“He is one of the top three recipients of our bundled dollars, and we couldn’t be more invested organizationally in his victory in November,” Steinberg added. “Brown has been a longtime champion of pro-peace, pro-democracy values, and we’re proud to stand with him this cycle.”
Other differences in financing have separated the two rivals, with each campaign accusing the other of linkages to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Brown has run ads slamming Husted for taking more than $116,000 from Ohio billionaire Les Wexner, a financial client of Epstein, with the most recent $3,500 gift occurring in July 2025, according to the Federal Election Commission.
A campaign spokesperson for Husted, Tom Evans, told JTA in a statement that “the Wexners have given to dozens of candidates from both sides of the aisle – including Sherrod Brown.” Evans noted that Husted’s campaign donated all available funds, totaling $34,000, to an anti-human trafficking charity, adding that the senator voted to release the Epstein files.
While Husted did support such legislation passed in November 2025, he supported tabling an amendment requiring disclosure of Epstein file documents to the public in September 2025.
Following Brown’s attack ads, Husted fired back with allegations that his opponent took contributions from people whose names appeared in the Epstein files. Those people included Wexner’s wife Abigail, former Harvard president and U.S. Treasury secretary Larry Summers and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. FEC records show, however, that Brown never took money from Wexner himself.
The Husted campaign has accused Brown of taking more than $150,000 from a dozen people listed in the Epstein files. Evans deemed the Democrat’s ads “hypocritical,” slamming him for sitting on the files while serving in Washington for 32 years.
The Brown campaign did not respond to JTA’s request for comment.
Apart from the clashes over contributions to each campaign, the Ohio Senate race has also included a controversy over a Husted campaign hire. The former staffer, Stephen Woytek, once used a photo of SS soldiers as his Facebook profile picture and added a playlist celebrating Rhodesia, a former white-minority-ruled state often used as a symbol by white nationalists, The Washington Post reported in September. Woytek at the time told the Post that he rejects “the racist and antisemitic ideology the SS and Nazi Germany represented,” adding that although he participates in historical reenactments for educational purposes, he should have “exercised better judgment.”
After the Post contacted the campaign about the posts, Husted reportedly dismissed Woytek.
Following the Post’s report, Ohio Democratic Party leadership said that Jewish and Black community leaders joined hands in condemning the senator “for hiring a Nazi enthusiast as a member of his senior campaign team.”
“Jewish Americans and our allies need to take action to combat the rise of antisemitism and hatred and defend our values,” Adam Rosen, Ohio chapter leader of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said in a statement.
Rosen accused Husted of showing “poor judgment” in hiring Woytek, raising doubts as to whether Jewish Ohioans should trust his judgment “when he can’t choose people for positions of power who aren’t Nazis.”
Evans, Husted’s campaign spokesperson, cited Woytek’s service in the U.S. Army and described him as a student of military history who “routinely reenacts historical battles.”
“While he denies negative intent, his social media activity displays a complete lack of judgement and disregard for its impact on others,” Evans added. He stressed that Husted “demands better of those who represent him,’ noting that the senator “made the immediate decision to part ways.”
Addressing this incident, Josh Kramer, president and CEO at Ohio Jewish Communities, emphasized that “Ohio Jewish Communities has a long history of working constructively with both sides of the local aisle, and we’re fortunate to have relationships with both Senator Husted and former Senator Sherrod Brown.”
“The controversy surrounding the former member of Senator Husted’s campaign is troubling,” Kramer added, noting, however, that “Husted acted to remove the individual once the matter was brought to his attention.”
Overall, Kramer said he believes that “Ohio has demonstrated itself to be a more moderate state, or less open to extremism, than other states.”
Looking at the election from a broader perspective, Ohio Jewish Communities’ Kramer said he was grateful that Ohio’s Jewish community has long worked with both Democrats and Republicans. While he recognized a rising tendency to link antisemitism to partisan politics, Kramer said that this race is “an opportunity for candidates to demonstrate their commitment to the safety and well-being of Ohioans, including the state’s Jewish population.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Ohio Senate race between Israel supporters becomes proxy battle for AIPAC versus J Street appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Haley Stevens shocks Democrats by endorsing Republican Mike Rogers. Her move could sway Jewish voters in Michigan.
Rep. Haley Stevens, a Michigan Democrat who lost a heated Senate primary to progressive Israel critic Abdul El-Sayed, endorsed his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, on Sunday in a stunning break with her party just two days before Election Day. The move could shake up one of the country’s most closely watched Senate races.
The endorsement came after a weekend of growing tension between Stevens and El-Sayed, whose fierce criticism of Israel and association with online personalities accused of antisemitism alienated some Jewish Democrats. If elected, El-Sayed would become the first Muslim in the U.S. Senate.
Stevens, a staunch supporter of Israel who received significant backing from AIPAC during the primary, had been snubbed by El-Sayed amid efforts to unite Democrats ahead of Tuesday’s election. Just last week, she told CNN she would vote for El-Sayed and was scheduled to join him at a unity rally Sunday.
But a feud escalated over the weekend after El-Sayed refused to condemn the content of an ad from a PAC supporting his campaign that blamed U.S. aid to Israel for rising grocery prices. El-Sayed, in return, accused Stevens of “relitigating a primary that ended three months ago” and again mentioned the support she received from AIPAC.
“Our Democratic nominee for Senate said I was no longer welcome in his campaign and that I should stay away,” Stevens said in a video posted on X after attending church services in Detroit with Rogers.
Speaking to the media alongside Rogers, Steven also referenced Hasan Piker, a popular left-wing pundit who has been accused of antisemitism and has campaigned alongside El-Sayed. “I don’t belong in Abdul’s campaign,” she said. “I do not stand with Hasan Piker, who gets trafficked on our college campuses.”
The surprise endorsement could influence Jewish Democrats who have struggled with whether to support El-Sayed despite their concerns about his rhetoric on Israel and antisemitism. After the March attack on Michigan’s Temple Israel, El-Sayed said, “Hurt people hurt people,” referring to the attacker having lost family in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon. He later apologized for the comment.
Some Jewish Democrats had considered leaving the Senate race on the ballot blank, similar to what the pro-Palestinian “uncommitted” movement did in the 2024 presidential election to protest the Biden-Harris administration’s support for Israel in the war against Hamas in Gaza.
Jewish voters make up just 1.4% of the electorate in the state. However, in a race so close, they could make the difference. The latest YouGov poll of likely voters in Michigan has El-Sayed up by 4 points.
Trump carried the swing state in 2024 by about 80,000 votes. In the Senate race that same year, Democrat Elissa Slotkin defeated Rogers by fewer than 20,000 votes. Even before Sunday’s development, the Republican Jewish Coalition had spent $2 million to target approximately 50,000 Jewish voters, primarily in Oakland County, who backed Stevens in the primary.
The divisions have also become personal for Stevens, who is considering converting to Judaism. Her Jewish fiancé, Jason Turkish, attended a RJC forum last week and said he would vote for Rogers.
AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, sent direct mailers to 130,000 identified Jewish voters in the swing state. It also sponsored get-out-the-vote phone calls.
Democrats try to limit the damage
The development marks one of the biggest public splits among Democrats over Israel this election cycle, as the party is fighting to win control of the Senate.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official, called Stevens’ endorsement of Rogers “a despicable betrayal.”
Schumer stood by his endorsement of El-Sayed. In a statement Sunday, he accused Republicans of “racist, Islamophobic, and over-the-top false attacks” against the Democratic nominee. He did not directly address the Stevens endorsement. Stevens, who said she is “still a very proud Democrat,” said she wants to see Schumer become Senate Majority Leader.
The endorsement also sparked a firestorm within Stevens’ own office, with her chief of staff and other aides resigning in protest. Stevens did not seek reelection to the House after running for Senate, and her term ends in December.
Republicans seized on the divide.
“Wow, this is BIG!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. “Her following is huge, and the level of respect from the People of Michigan, especially our African American and Jewish populations, is virtually unparalleled. Haley said what few people are willing to say.”
Some Jewish Democrats also heavily criticized Stevens on Sunday, saying she was hurting the party and the country. “Anyone who makes an election this important about themselves, and not Michiganders and our democracy, should think hard about whether they are serving the greater good,” Slotkin, who is Jewish and who has hit the campaign trail with El-Sayed, wrote on X.
The Jewish Democratic Council of America, an organizing body for Jewish interests in the Democratic Party, had pointedly not endorsed El-Sayed during the campaign. Yet following Stevens’ announcement, its CEO Halie Soifer wrote, “A vote for any Republican in 2026 is a vote for Donald Trump.”
Nonnegotiable Michigan, a coalition of Michigan rabbis and Jewish Democrats, scheduled an online forum for Sunday afternoon to discuss their choices — whether to support the Republicans or leave the ballot blank — after El-Sayed ignored its repeated requests to engage. “Now, with voting underway and Election Day approaching, the question is no longer only what El-Sayed will do — but what Jewish voters will do,” the group said in a statement released before the Stevens endorsement.
Piker, on social media, called Stevens “a self interested striver who’s weirdly obsessed with Israel and has been paid handsomely for this strange obsession.” El-Sayed has distanced himself multiple times from Piker since they campaigned together in the primary, including this week after Piker compared a heavily Jewish Michigan suburb to “a KKK neighborhood.”
A shift in the Jewish vote on Tuesday could help decide the Senate race. It could also offer an early test of whether divisions over Israel will cost Democrats Jewish support beyond this election and heading into the 2028 presidential race.
JTA contributed to this report.
The post Haley Stevens shocks Democrats by endorsing Republican Mike Rogers. Her move could sway Jewish voters in Michigan. appeared first on The Forward.
