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A Jewish expert on monuments on what Philly’s famous Rocky Balboa statue can teach us about memory
(JTA) — Paul Farber was shocked when he first watched “Rocky” and saw a Star of David on the grave of Rocky Balboa’s coach, Mickey Goldmill.
As a Jew and as the founder of the Philadelphia-based Monument Lab, which has explored collective memory through art installations across the country for over a decade, Farber was well positioned to think about the deeper meaning of that brief shot.
“Anytime I see a Jewish funeral in a film, there’s some kind of call to attention. And I always want to know what that means, especially for a Hollywood production, especially when it may not be branded as a Jewish story,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“We’re not there in a prolonged series of mourning, but in a split second, seeing a Jewish site of a memory is really fascinating,” he added.
That outlook lies behind Farber’s work as the host of the new NPR podcast “The Statue,” a deep dive into Philadelphia’s famed statue of Rocky Balboa, the fictional prizefighter at the center of “Rocky.” The series delves into what sports and society can convey about memory, and in his research, Farber discovered a few Jewish nuggets found in the film series — including the fact that Rocky’s love interest was originally supposed to be Jewish.
“They made an actual gravestone [for her character] and it’s in Philadelphia’s most famous cemetery, Laurel Hill. And you can go there and see this gravestone where a movie character is ‘buried,’” he said. “People leave offerings on the gravestone, including small pebbles as if it’s a Jewish site of memory.”
In an interview with JTA, Farber shared his inspiration for the series, how his Jewish upbringing informed his life’s work and the role statues — such as that of Jewish baseball legend Sandy Koufax — do, and should, play.
This interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: To start off, I’d love to hear about how you first got interested in studying monuments.
Paul Farber: I’m really interested in the ways that, in cities, we innovate toward the future, and also come to terms with our past, and it happens often in the same exact places. That could be a statue, a street, a corner store. And so that’s a big part for me.
What really inspired this project is a conversation I had with my mother, quite a few years ago. My mother is a lifelong Philadelphian. Her parents were Jewish immigrants in South Philadelphia. And when I told her I was teaching a class at the University of Pennsylvania about Philly neighborhoods, she asked me if I was covering Rocky. When I said, “Oh, it’s not on the syllabus” — and I may have said it in a way that felt dismissive — she gave me this look that I think a lot of us know: “How could you.” So for her birthday, we watched “Rocky” and we went to see “Creed.” My grandfather went to South Philly High and was in the boxing club. He shared stories in our family about what it meant to have sport and culture and belonging go together in South Philly. I started to see that across generations, from long before “Rocky” to this moment now, almost 50 years after the release of the film, many people’s family stories could be channeled through this statue, including my own, and that was enough of a prompt to go dive in.
“Rocky” is obviously not a Jewish story, but there are some nuggets. There’s the funeral scene, and you mentioned something about Adrian almost being Jewish. I’m curious what you think about the little Jewish pieces you can pull out of this famous story, and what those mean to you as a Philly sports fan.
It blew me away that Rocky’s coach, Mick, passes away and the character Rocky goes to his funeral, and you see a Star of David. Anytime I see a Jewish funeral in a film, there’s some kind of call to attention. And I always want to know what that means, especially for a Hollywood production, especially when it may not be branded as a Jewish story. And it just opened up a whole set of questions for me that blurred between art and life, between the film series and the city of Philadelphia.
In episode two, we showcase this monumental art book that Sylvester Stallone [who played Rocky] created. There was this passage in it that just blew me away, about the first draft of “Rocky,” where he says, “As for Adrian, she was Jewish in the first draft.” And he got feedback and cut that character. We never hear about Mickey’s Judaism. We never hear about Rocky’s bond across culture. But the fact that the first scene in the “Rocky” series is in a place called Resurrection Gym — that is obvious Christian iconography — and to put Jewish characters in is really fascinating to me.
There is another famous grave that is involved in the series. The character Adrian eventually passes away, and like the statue, which was made as a bronze sculpture, for the “Rocky” film series they made an actual gravestone and it’s in Philadelphia’s most famous cemetery, Laurel Hill. And you can go there and see this gravestone where a movie character is “buried.” People leave offerings on the gravestone, including small pebbles as if it’s a Jewish site of memory.
People talk about representation on screen, and I’m not sure a Jewish funeral necessarily does that, but I would imagine for some people, seeing Rocky Balboa say the “Mourner’s Kaddish“ was maybe their first interaction with Judaism in some way. What do you make of that?
Every shot is deliberate. And it’s actually that kind of attitude and outlook that created the Rocky statue, because Sylvester Stallone was the director of that film, and they could have made a styrofoam version or a temporary one, but they spent over a year making a bronze version so that when the camera faced it, it would make contact. I think very similarly, this is part of the artistry of Stallone that plays out in our podcast series. We’re not with him when he sits shiva. We’re not there in a prolonged series of mourning, but in a split second, seeing a Jewish site of a memory is really fascinating. And to see the coach Mickey, to have his Wikipedia page say he’s Jewish, all that we have is mourning.
I think about how for immigrant Jewish communities, there are gaps in our narratives. Throughout the series, and one of the reasons I wanted to share my perspective as a queer Jewish person who grew up loving sports in Philly, I’ve been informed by my own family’s history, and what we’re able to recall and what gaps there are. And I see that being echoed for so many people in the Rocky story.
It’s clearly a very personal story for you. Why did you think it was important to start the podcast with your own identity, and to include your Jewish mother?
I think it’s important that when we talk about sites of memory, we understand that there are shared and collective ways that we bring the past forward, and there are others that are incredibly personal. My hope was to find, in this case, to spotlight, a significant site of memory in the city, but ask questions about it. And I think it was important to note what position I would take, because I don’t believe there’s one story to the Rocky statue. To tell a biography of a statue, you actually have to tell it of the people who make meaning from it. So in the series, we do a lot of work where we want to know other people’s stories and backgrounds, whether they are refugees from Afghanistan, or community organizers in Kensington [a neighborhood of Philadelphia]. My hope was by positioning this from my perspective, almost as a memoir in a way, that it opened up space for others to have their experiences be valued and made meaning of.
The official artwork for Farber’s podcast. (Courtesy)
Both with the podcast and in your work with the Monument Lab, how do you feel that your Jewish identity informs what you do? Do you see overlap between your Jewish values and the values you work on in your organization?
I absolutely think so. I grew up in a Jewish community in Philadelphia, and tikkun olam was a constant refrain. The work of tikkun olam meant a worldview that necessitated building coalitions and understanding across divides, to not diminish or under-emphasize them, but to appreciate how we work in solidarity, whether that’s around racial justice, gender justice, in various struggles. I am a co-founder and director of an organization that focuses on memory, and that I really get from the stories of growing up in a Jewish household, in a Jewish community, where memory lived in different ways. We were always aware of the stories of trauma and loss, as well as reconciliation and transformation, and how you work with the gaps that you have, and you listen, and you learn and you carry the story with you. Because that is the way to bond generations. Jewish memory really grounds what I do, and I seek to use it as a tool to learn more and to feed connection across divides.
Rocky takes on this almost mythical, godlike status, and his statue in Philadelphia is a bit of a pilgrimage site. Do you see any tension there as a Jew, given the prohibition against idol worship?
I think about the importance of memory, against forces of violence and erasure. I also understand that, in a world that is full of pain and difficulty and loss, we seek places to release that. And so I understand the pull to monuments. What I would like to see, and what we try to do through this series, “The Statue,” and also with the work of Monument Lab, is to look on and off the pedestal, and really think about how history lives with us. As we say in the series and other places, history doesn’t live inside of statues, it lives with people who steward them, who create other kinds of sites of memory, who are vigilant in their modes of commemoration. What I try to do in this work is understand the ambivalence around monuments, the pull to try to remember and be enduring through time, and just that constant reminder that whenever you try to freeze the past, or freeze an image of power, you cut out the potential to find connection and empowerment, and thus forms of survival.
In sports, there are so many ways to honor people, especially different ways that, like a statue, take on the idea of permanence. When Bill Russell died, the NBA retired his number 6 across the league. On Jackie Robinson Day, every April 15, the whole MLB honors Jackie Robinson by wearing his uniform number. But statues just have a different level of oomph. Sandy Koufax has a new statue in Los Angeles that was unveiled last year; Hank Greenberg has one. What do you think it should take for an athlete to reach that status?
The pinnacle in sports is to have a statue dedicated to you outside of the stadium. And I do believe the cultures of social media have amplified that, because we grew up with the story of Sandy Koufax not pitching in the World Series during the High Holy Days, and that wasn’t because we learned it from a statue or a plaque. We learned it because it was carried forward and put into different forms of remembering and recalling its importance. I went to several Maccabi Games in the U.S. — I used to be a sprinter. And the culture of memory and sport, they were one in the same.
In professional sports, the pinnacle is the statue, but I think you brought up other really important ways of remembering that operate in non-statue forms that feel like they are living memorials. The idea of retiring someone’s number, and keeping their number up, is a way to acknowledge, in this really public of all public spaces, an intimacy and a care, and especially when an athlete passes away, how that transcends the lines of city geography. Jackie Robinson Day is something that did not occur immediately after Jackie Robinson was the first Black player to play in the major leagues, but was a product of a later moment when people around Major League Baseball sought to activate his memory. So yes, a statue outside of a stadium is like a particular kind of professional accolade. But the other forms are really meaningful.
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Netanyahu wants his far-right allies to unite. One of them is betting on a bigger prize: replacing Netanyahu himself.
Israel’s right-wing firebrand Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, has spent the past several days under intense pressure from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to do something he plainly does not want to do: join forces in the coming election with his far-right rival, finance minister Bezalel Smotrich.
Netanyahu has good reason to be worried. Israel elects its 120-member parliament through nationwide proportional representation, but a party must win at least 3.25% of the vote to enter the Knesset. If it falls short, its votes are effectively wasted.
That is precisely the danger facing Smotrich. Recent polls ahead of the Oct. 27 election have repeatedly placed his Religious Zionism party near or below the threshold. Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power party, by contrast, is comfortably above it. Netanyahu has therefore been pressing the two men to run together, ensuring that neither party’s votes are lost. Over the weekend, Ben-Gvir’s party issued a statement saying it would not run with Smotrich.
On its face, this looks extraordinarily irresponsible.
Israel has seen what happens when parties gamble with the threshold. In 2022, the left-wing Meretz and Arab nationalist Balad parties together won roughly 6% of the vote, but because each fell below the threshold, neither entered parliament. The result helped Netanyahu secure a comfortable Knesset majority. In 1992, wasted votes for small right-wing parties similarly contributed to Yitzhak Rabin’s narrow victory.
So why would Ben-Gvir risk helping defeat his own political camp?
The obvious explanation is ego. Ben-Gvir and Smotrich dislike each other and compete for many of the same voters.
But there is another possibility: Perhaps Ben-Gvir has already concluded that Netanyahu is going to lose. If so, what looks like recklessness may be perfectly rational.
The parties opposed to Netanyahu currently lead his bloc by roughly 20 seats or more in most serious polling. And it would be naive to assume they would refuse to rely, directly or indirectly, on Israel’s Arab parties if the alternative were another Netanyahu government, an outcome they regard as catastrophic.
If Ben-Gvir believes defeat is coming anyway, preserving every possible seat for Netanyahu’s current bloc becomes a secondary concern. His real contest begins the morning after Netanyahu loses: Who inherits the Israeli right?
Running separately allows Ben-Gvir to preserve his identity, weaken Smotrich and emerge as the undisputed leader of Israel’s radical right, even if the entire Netanyahu camp ends up in opposition.
That possibility would have sounded absurd only a few years ago.
From pariah to power broker
In 2019, Ben-Gvir could not even get elected to the Knesset. For years he inhabited the outer fringes of Israeli politics, a disciple of the racist extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane whose political tradition was considered so toxic that even Netanyahu once treated him as an embarrassment.
By 2022, Ben-Gvir had become one of the most prominent figures on the Israeli right. Netanyahu made him national security minister. The question is no longer whether Ben-Gvir belongs to mainstream Israeli politics. It is whether he might someday lead a substantial part of it.
Imagine Likud going into opposition with 19 seats and Ben-Gvir emerging with 13 – roughly the current polling. Suddenly the distance between them does not look enormous, especially after Likud has spent decades becoming almost inseparable from Netanyahu. Ben-Gvir would possess a substantial parliamentary faction, a fiercely motivated base, enormous public visibility and a powerful argument to right-wing voters: I represent what comes next. Likud represents an exhausted past.
There is no law saying Likud must remain the dominant party of the Israeli right forever. Political parties survive as dominant institutions only as long as voters believe they represent something they want. Once that bond breaks, decades of accumulated political capital can disappear remarkably quickly.
Which raises the question: What exactly is Likud without Netanyahu? The party machinery will remain, along with more than 100,000 members and a formidable institutional legacy. But after three decades of Netanyahu’s dominance, separating Likud’s identity from his own has become increasingly difficult.
Many of its most independent and impressive figures have left or been pushed aside over those decades, among them Tzipi Livni, Dan Meridor, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert and Benny Begin. The cumulative exodus says something about the transformation of a once broader political movement.
The cost of Netanyahu’s compromises
Netanyahu’s dependence on Israel’s Haredi parties has surely done further damage. For decades, Likud could present itself as the natural home of Israel’s secular and traditional right: nationalist voters with strong Jewish identities who nevertheless expected the basic obligations of citizenship to be shared.
That compact is under enormous strain over military service. Most Haredi men have historically been exempted from Israel’s compulsory military service while studying full-time in religious seminaries. The arrangement has become vastly more problematic explosive since Oct. 7 and the wars that followed, which have imposed extraordinary burdens on soldiers and reservists.
The Haredim want their exemptions codified into law, and Netanyahu has attempted to comply. The issue is one of the main ones in the election. A party asking non-Haredi Israelis and their children to shoulder an ever-heavier military burden while protecting broad exemptions for the rapidly growing Haredi population should expect to pay a political price.
Here lies one of the ironies of Ben-Gvir’s rise. He represents an even more extreme version of the religious nationalism that has alienated some traditional Likud voters. Yet precisely because he is more extreme, his claim to the future right may become stronger.
Likud’s concessions to the Haredi parties can be understood as transactional politics — bargains Netanyahu needs to remain in power. Ben-Gvir’s religious radicalism is more authentic. He offers a coherent worldview in which Jewish nationalism, religious authority, territorial maximalism and hostility toward the institutions and restraints of liberal democracy reinforce one another. What Likud has adopted gradually, sometimes for reasons of political survival, Ben-Gvir offers as a complete ideological package. In that sense, he offers the product in its purest form.
Consider the Palestinian question. Much of the Israeli right wants permanent Israeli control of the West Bank. But millions of Palestinians live there, and permanent Israeli sovereignty ultimately requires an answer to their political status. If Israel permanently governs millions of Palestinians without equal political rights, its claim to liberal democracy becomes impossible to sustain. Grant them equal rights, and maintaining a decisive Jewish majority is impossible.
The mainstream right has never produced a convincing answer to this dilemma. Its effective policy has largely been to manage the contradiction indefinitely. It looks foolish in this regard. Meanwhile, the extreme right does have an answer: Palestinian submission and, ultimately, though this is whispered and not shouted, expulsion.
That answer is immoral and would carry enormous strategic consequences. It has never represented the clear majority position in Israeli society. But politically it possesses one advantage: clarity. Part of Ben-Gvir’s appeal comes from his willingness to say openly what much of the right prefers to leave unresolved.
Where the numbers are headed
Demography may strengthen him further. Israel’s secular population has lower birth rates than its Haredi and religious-Zionist populations. For decades, Likud was broad enough to accommodate secular nationalists, traditional Jews, religious voters and conservatives who wanted a strongly Jewish state while retaining some attachment to liberal democratic norms. As the right becomes more religious and culturally radical, that coalition becomes harder to maintain. Increasingly, the right will become the religious bloc, and its former secular adherents will move across the aisle.
The nationalist-religious Ben-Gvir consequently begins to look less like an aberration from the Israeli right and more like one possible expression of where it is heading.
That is why his refusal to reunite with Smotrich may be more consequential than another round of ego and rivalry. It may reflect a cold calculation: Netanyahu’s era is approaching its end, his camp may be headed for opposition, and the real prize is no longer merely a place in the next government.
It is the inheritance of the Israeli right.
Ben-Gvir has traveled an extraordinary distance already. Prior to being elected, he was convicted of offenses including supporting a terrorist organization and incitement to racism. As a young Kahanist activist in 1995, he brandished an emblem torn from Yitzhak Rabin’s Cadillac and declared, weeks before Rabin’s assassination: “We got to his car, and we’ll get to him too.”
That man is now Israel’s national security minister.
He may not be wrong about the calculation he appears to be making.
And if Ben-Gvir is positioning himself not merely to survive Netanyahu but to inherit a large part of the movement Netanyahu leaves behind, it is worth understanding that possibility now. Disasters should at least be approached with eyes wide open.
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As Nepal’s flood toll climbs, Jewish aid groups mobilize to help survivors recover
Two Jewish humanitarian groups — IsraAID and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, widely known as “the Joint” — have sent emergency aid to Nepal’s border with Tibet where flash floods and landslides have killed at least 800 people and more than 3,000 are still missing.
Triggered by a landslide that tore through the mountainous Rasuwa and Nuwakot districts on Aug. 26, the flooding has destroyed roads, bridges and entire villages and displaced tens of thousands of people.
IsraAID’s four-person emergency team landed in Kathmandu Friday evening. Mai Leshem, who is currently serving as head of mission for the Nepal response, said most of the team are the same people who worked in Nepal between 2015 and 2019, when IsraAID ran a long-term recovery program there after an earthquake killed nearly 9,000 people and injured 22,000.
“It’s a place that’s very deeply connected to us,” she said. A fifth team member, a health specialist, is expected within days.
While the Nepali government and local responders handle search and rescue efforts, Leshem said, IsraAID’s team is focused on supporting communities and first responders once the immediate danger passes — handing out hygiene and dignity kits, running stress-relief programs for kids, and working with overwhelmed hospitals to offer burnout-prevention support to staff. Those hospital workers, Leshem said, are dealing with more than the injured; families of the missing keep showing up looking for loved ones.
One moment from the team’s first days stuck with her. At a shelter in Kathmandu housing displaced residents from a hard-hit community near the Tibet-Nepal border, hand-lettered signs read “no photos, no journalists.” Leshem spoke there with a man in his mid-30s who said he wasn’t as worried about himself as he was about the teenagers and young adults around him — kids, he told her, who’d lost everything and were starting to grow angry.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been on a mission where I heard someone focus so intently on this age group,” Leshem said. “It really moved me to hear him speak with such empathy.”
A mission rooted in memory
The Joint is also coordinating its response through the local Nepali organizations it trained in disaster preparedness after the 2015 earthquake — a strategy Avital Sandler-Loeff, executive director of JDC’s Disaster Relief and Development Unit, described as central to how the organization operates. The Joint reached out to its Nepali partners within hours of the flood because those relationships were already in place.
The organization’s immediate focus is preventing a public health crisis, she said. Standing water and damaged sanitation systems have left officials worried about waterborne disease outbreaks, on top of a housing crisis for the tens of thousands who have no shelter. Some families were swept as far as 25 miles from home, she said, and can’t get back because roads and bridges are still buried in mud.
The Joint is funding hygiene kits, tents, blankets and clothing, buying locally where possible. It expects its focus to shift toward helping people rebuild their livelihoods, many of whom depend on farm fields that were destroyed. Sandler-Loeff and Mickey Noam-Alon, the unit’s director of disaster response, said they hope to travel to Nepal themselves within days, though they’re watching the same renewed flood risk that has kept rescue crews on alert.
Both Sandler-Loeff and Noam-Alon said the organization is in direct contact with other Jewish groups responding to the floods, including IsraAID and World Jewish Relief, to avoid duplicating efforts. The Joint leads the Jewish Coalition for Disaster Relief (JCDR), comprising 49 mostly North American Jewish organizations that address disasters and development challenges worldwide, but Sandler-Loeff said coordination often comes down to something simpler: “We pick up the phone and talk to our friends.”
Asked why this work matters, Sandler-Loeff pointed to her ancestors who lived through the Holocaust.“I wish more organizations had been there for them,” she said.
Noam-Alon said assisting communities in crisis carries extra weight now, at a moment of rising antisemitism worldwide. “Today,” he said, “it’s even more important to show up.”
Both IsraAID and the Joint say they expect to be in Nepal for weeks, if not longer, as the scale of what’s needed becomes clearer.
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‘I made a mistake’: Abdul El-Sayed apologizes to Michigan Jews for past comments about synagogue attack
(JTA) — LANSING — Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed apologized for his past comments regarding the March attack on Temple Israel in suburban Detroit during a meeting with the state Democratic party’s Jewish caucus at the party convention on Saturday.
The Democratic nominee told the room that his remarks following the attempted targeting of the West Bloomfield synagogue preschool, in which he had said, in part, “Hurt people hurt people,” were intended to provide “context.”
Reflecting on them, he said on Saturday, “I made a mistake.”
“If my statement caused pain, I’m sorry. It was not what I intended to do,” El-Sayed continued. Referencing the first of two statements he had made about the attack, he added, “We issued a statement, of course, condemning it, and that just should have been it, full stop.”
El-Sayed’s initial Temple Israel comments, which many Jews interpreted as justifying the attack, have alienated Jewish voters in the state. After an initial statement condemning the attack, El-Sayed then followed up with one referencing Israel’s war in Lebanon, where the attacker had lost family in an Israel airstrike.
On Saturday, El-Sayed, a former county health director, insisted that his push for “context” to the attack was broadly appropriate, but not at that moment, explaining that such “conversations” could happen “in the fullness of time.”
“Sometimes you can’t really see context in the moment of acuity or pain,” he said. “The intention for me was not to trample that pain. It was not to discount it. It was not at all to justify any sort of domestic terrorism. That’s wrong, full stop.”
El-Sayed’s apology, which was in response to a question posed to him by a Jewish Democrat in attendance, came amid a new round of outreach efforts he has been making with Jewish voters since he won Michigan’s Democratic senate primary earlier this month. He also plans to attend a Sunday Jewish caucus gathering honoring state Attorney General Dana Nessel with congressional nominee Jeremy Moss in attendance, both of whom the candidate has publicly been at ideological odds with over Jewish issues.
In recent days El-Sayed has also minimized some of his harsh critiques of Israel in his stump speeches and issued a statement distancing himself from onetime campaign ally Hasan Piker, the left-wing anti-Israel streamer.
His nomination acceptance speech later that day made only one, oblique, reference to American support for Israel: “It shouldn’t be this hard to pay your taxes and know that that money’s going to be spent on you, and your kids, and your schools, instead of being dropped in the form of a bomb on somebody else, and their kids, and their school.”
But skepticism was still palpable among the 30 or so Jewish Democrats in the room, a crowd that included one delegate who said his daughter and grandson had been inside Temple Israel when it was attacked.
“Our safety as Jews in America relies on, I think, what’s said by public figures, and how they present themselves in public, and how they advocate for Jews in public,” he said just prior to El-Sayed’s apology.
Not all of El-Sayed’s answers pleased the room. Fielding another question about whether he would support the longstanding Democratic platform of a two-state solution in the Middle East if elected senator, the candidate pivoted.
“It’s incoherent to start with a solution and say, ‘Figure out how to work here,’” El-Sayed said. “To me, it’s about starting with a process and saying, ‘How do we dignify equal rights to peace, dignity, and self-determination for Palestinian people and Jewish Israelis alike?’”
He added, as he has in other interviews, that he was open to the possibility of a two-state solution “if that’s what a free Palestinian and free Jewish Israeli people decide.” But, he qualified, “Our country, under the guise of a two-state solution, has been aiding, arming, and abetting a government that wants to foreclose on the possibility of a second state.”
That didn’t sit well with some in attendance, even as El-Sayed’s apology for his other comments was broadly appreciated.
“I really liked him apologizing for misspeaking. We’ve all made comments that we regret later on,” Rebecca Kasen, a Lansing-area Michigan Jewish Democrat in attendance, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “I was less comfortable with what he said about not supporting a two-state solution.”
Overall, Kasen said, her opinion of El-Sayed had improved after the Jewish caucus meeting as a result of his apology.
“I was probably a more reluctant voter for him” beforehand, she said. That had changed: “Instead of just going to vote now, I am going to be enthusiastically voting for him.”
As the senate race is shaping up to be the potential tipping point to decide control of the chamber in a crucial midterm year seen as a referendum on President Donald Trump, the views of the state’s Jewish Democrats regarding their party have been placed under a microscope for more reasons than just El-Sayed. That has led some longtime Jewish Democratic voters to defect to the Republican opponent, former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, and also led to some awkward moments at the convention.
In one example, Washtenaw County Prosecutor Eli Savit, the party’s progressive Jewish nominee for state attorney general, addressed the Jewish caucus by declaring, “We’re going to win and keep the attorney general’s office in the hands of a Michigan Jewish Democrat.” Conspicuously absent from the day’s events was Nessel, the Jewish Democrat currently holding the seat.
Prior to the Saturday convention, Nessel, the state’s highest ranking Jewish official, had announced she would not be attending for fear she would be targeted by antisemitic harassment. Earlier this week, in a podcast interview with The Atlantic, Nessel had reiterated her issues with El-Sayed’s comments about Temple Israel and expressed hope he would walk them back soon.
Nessel’s son Zach Nessel, secretary of the state Jewish Democratic caucus, told the caucus that his mother’s absence stemmed from “agitators” who had targeted her at the party endorsement convention in the spring. Attendance at Saturday’s event was less than one-third of what the Jewish caucus had drawn at the spring convention, organizers said.
Zach Nessel criticized the state Democratic Party for failing to take prompt action to remove the agitators from the earlier convention. He told JTA that Jews in the party “have a right to be concerned.”
“I think the Democratic Party needs to put more work into addressing their concerns,” Zach Nessel said. “But I think that can’t happen without showing up.”
Moss, the Michigan state senator who has recently been at the center of another El-Sayed-related controversy, was spotted at the convention on Saturday but did not attend the Jewish caucus events.
One ally of El-Sayed’s who also addressed the caucus is University of Michigan Board of Regents nominee Amir Makled. He is an attorney for members of the school’s pro-Palestinian encampment movement who had pushed out a Jewish pro-Israel incumbent at the previous convention. During his own address to Jewish delegates, Makled did not mention his history of social media posts including retweeting far-right antisemitic conspiracy theorist Candace Owens and sharing praise for Hezbollah leaders.
Makled’s speech later that day at the nominating convention alluded to his work with the encampments as he declared that Michigan “will never have a university where students are punished simply because their speech makes the powerful uncomfortable.”
In-between candidate meet-and-greets, Jewish caucus members shared their anxieties about their closely scrutinized role in the midterm elections. They were gravely concerned about protecting democracy and election security from Republican threats, and felt that flipping the Senate was crucial.
Yet it was hard, they said, to get much of the Jewish community onboard this time, given the positions of El-Sayed and some other members of the Democratic slate. Michigan is home to an estimated 100,000 Jews, and the senate race is currently polling in a dead heat, making their votes potentially pivotal.
“How do we unify our community to put the country first?” one attendee asked the group. “I have a hard time doing that.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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