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A Jewish museum exhibit features the Palestinian flag. Some visitors wonder if it belongs.
(J. The Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) — Tucked in the far corner of a large, brightly-lit exhibition hall on the ground floor of the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, there is a delicate-looking piece of art with a strong political message.
At first glance, it appears to be three circular vases with flowers in them. The ceramic vases sit on shelves attached to the wall, and colorful collages hang above them. On closer inspection, visitors will notice that the flowers are made out of paper and that affixed to each vase is an image of the Palestinian flag printed on foam board.
A nearby label written by the curators of the exhibit, titled “Tikkun: For the Cosmos, the Community, and Ourselves,” explains that the piece was inspired by a conversation the artist, Tosha Stimage of Berkeley, had with a Palestinian man. He told Stimage about the plants that are native to Palestine — “a place which he can no longer access due to the ongoing conflict in the region,” the curators write.
The label also includes a note about the flag: “Some may find its presence at The CJM troubling or confusing, while others may find it appropriate and forthright. Stimage recognizes the potential for these divergent responses and hopes to use them as a means of generating dialogue.”
On a Sunday afternoon in October, Maury Ostroff read the label and walked away without inspecting the artwork.
Visitors to the “Tikkun” exhibit are encouraged to share their responses to the artwork via comment cards. (Andrew Esensten)
Asked how the presence of the flag made him feel, Ostroff, who is Jewish and lives in Muir Beach, in Marin County, replied, “Unhappy.”
Why?
“It’s not offensive to me in the same way that a swastika is. My skin is a little bit thicker than that. But I wish it weren’t here.”
He added, “What’s so Jewish about this? What’s so ‘tikkun olam’ about all of this?”
For the “Tikkun” exhibit, which opened Feb. 17 and runs through Jan. 8, the CJM invited both Jewish and non-Jewish Bay Area artists to contribute new works on the theme of repair, however they chose to interpret it. “No one is listening to us,” the piece by Stimage, who is not Jewish, is the first work of art featuring the Palestinian flag to be shown at CJM in recent memory; the museum could not say when or if the flag has been displayed on its walls before.
The piece prompted several internal conversations among CJM staff when it was first submitted and, since it has been on display, has generated a variety of responses from museumgoers who have left comments in a box at the entrance to the exhibit. Intentionally or not, Stimage has raised numerous questions with the artwork, including: Does a work of art that is sympathetic to the Palestinian struggle for statehood belong in a Jewish museum? And what is the role of a contemporary Jewish museum, anyway?
“To truly be a contemporary art museum, meaning embedded in the contemporary issues of our day, our job is to provide a platform for dialogue and to share a diversity of perspectives on our walls,” said Chad Coerver, CJM’s executive director since September 2021. “If any institution [like ours] took the path of withholding artwork that troubled our staff, our board or our community, it would be very difficult to mount exhibitions.”
CJM is a member of the Council of American Jewish Museums, a network of 76 museums across the country. CAJM does not have guidelines about the kind of art its member museums can and cannot display, according to Executive Director Melissa Yaverbaum.
J. reached out to several CAJM member museums in New York, Los Angeles and other places by email to ask if they had ever shown artwork with Palestinian iconography or works by Palestinian artists. The museums declined to answer or did not respond.
In recent years, two Jewish museums have been embroiled in controversy over issues relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in Chicago staged an exhibit in 2008 on Israeli and Palestinian concepts of homeland that included maps and portraits of Palestinians. Following outcry from members of the local Jewish community who felt the exhibit presented Israel in a negative light, the museum decided to close the exhibit after only a few weeks. And in 2019, the director of the Jewish Museum Berlin resigned after the museum tweeted a link to a pro-BDS article in a German newspaper. (The museum previously came under fire for welcoming anti-Zionist scholar Judith Butler and representatives of Iran.)
In a joint interview with J., two CJM staffers who worked on “Tikkun” — co-curator Qianjin Montoya, who is not Jewish, and a Jewish senior curator who served in an advisory role, Heidi Rabben — shared the story of how Stimage’s piece came to be in the exhibit. (Montoya’s co-curator for the exhibit, Arianne Gelardin, no longer works at the museum.)
Since 2009, CJM has invited local artists from different backgrounds to create new work as part of the museum’s annual Dorothy Saxe Invitational. The idea for “Tikkun” was hatched before the pandemic put the planning process on hold. Once the CJM and Saxe — a local philanthropist and art collector — agreed on the theme, the co-curators invited artists “already engaged in healing through their relationship to community or in their practice of daily life,” Gelardin told J. last February.
The 30 artists who accepted the museum’s invitation were given only four months to conceive of and submit new works. That was likely the shortest timeline in the history of the invitational, which has been held 11 previous times, according to the museum. Each artist received a packet of materials compiled by CJM staff, with input from the Shalom Hartman Institute, a non-degree granting Jewish education center, to guide their thinking on “tikkun.”
Stimage was invited to participate because she is “very active” in the Bay Area and because “her work reflects ideas of community and connection,” Montoya said.
The curators said Stimage’s inclusion of the Palestinian flag in her submitted piece came as a surprise and prompted challenging conversations. However, they noted that they found the content of some of the other artists’ work surprising, too, and that it’s not unusual for contemporary artists to push the envelope in their work.
“I wouldn’t say we expected to receive a piece about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but we weren’t steering anyone away from that, either,” Rabben told J., adding that the submission guidelines did not place any topic off limits. “That’s a commitment from the museum to authentically represent the creative spirit of the artists that we’re working with,” she said.
Still, the curators said they engaged in a dialogue with Stimage in order to better understand each aspect of her piece and her overall intentions. Through those conversations, the curators learned that Stimage wanted to explore a moment of “rupture,” and that through her piece she hoped to communicate “that before healing or repair might happen, you have to first acknowledge that rupture,” Rabben said.
The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco is showing “Tikkun,” an exhibit of works by Jewish and non-Jewish artists on the theme of repair. (Andrew Esensten)
Coerver, who was involved in some of the conversations, stressed that “careful consideration” was given to including the piece in the exhibit. “We felt an artwork addressing the plight of the Palestinians was appropriate in an exhibition on healing and repair,” he said. (No work submitted as part of the Dorothy Saxe Invitational has ever been outright rejected, the museum said.)
Stimage did not respond to interview requests from J. According to a CV on her website, she was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and earned an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2016. She is a past fellow at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and was an artist-in-residence at Facebook in 2018. She also owns a floral gift shop in Oakland called Saint Flora.
Her work often touches on Black identity; she created a piece honoring Sandra Bland, an African-American woman whose 2015 arrest and death in a Texas jail cell sparked protests, and contributed to a 2019 San Francisco Art Institute exhibit on the Black Panther Party.
“I have a responsibility to create things that will, to the best of my present knowledge, do more good than harm, heal, inspire and uplift other humans,” she told the San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper in 2015.
Stimage’s precise views on Israel are unknown. CJM referred J. to her artist statement for “No one is listening to us,” which reads: “Olive, sage, and sumac are flowering plants native to the Mediterranean (including regions of Gaza and the West Bank) that have a direct relationship to contested ancestral land and affect the livelihood of so many Palestinian farmers and families caught in the conflict. They are positioned in the space of The Contemporary Jewish Museum as a metaphor for the ongoing conflict over land rights and the desperate need for restoration and healing of an age-old wound.”
The curators told J. that during their conversations with Stimage about her piece, they asked her why including images of the Palestinian flag was important to her but did not request that she remove them.
“We determined that none of [the piece’s] components in and of themselves signified something problematic or concerning,” Rabben said. “Of course, we had the awareness that the symbol [of the flag] will be read in a variety of ways by a variety of people.”
(Rabben pointed out that the exhibit includes other works with national symbols rendered in provocative ways, such as a black-and-white photograph of an American flag that was torn apart and partially reassembled by Mexican-American artist Jose Arias.)
The Palestinian flag — which contains the Pan-Arab colors of black, white, green and red — was adopted by the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964. Since then, it has been the primary symbol of Palestinian nationalism.
For decades, the PLO was considered an enemy organization by Israel, and anything associated with it “had no place in Israeli public life,” said Eran Kaplan, an Israeli-born professor of Israel studies at San Francisco State University. Israel never went so far as to ban the flag. However, during the First Intifada, which lasted from 1987 to 1993, Israeli soldiers sometimes followed orders to confiscate the flag from protesters in the West Bank and Gaza.
With the signing of the Oslo Accord in 1993, Israel and the PLO recognized each other as negotiating partners. Yet the Palestinian flag remains a contentious symbol in Israel today. Kaplan noted that it recently served as a flashpoint during the funeral procession of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Palestinian American broadcaster who was killed in the West Bank in May. (The IDF conducted a review and admitted that the Israeli soldier who shot her had most likely misidentified her as an armed militant.) After warning Abu Akleh’s family not to display the flag, Israeli police attacked mourners in East Jerusalem, ripping flags out of their hands and off of the vehicle carrying her casket.
Today, the flag holds different meanings for Israelis and American Jews from different generations and political persuasions.
“There are large segments in Israeli society who view any form of Palestinian national identity as a threat to the existence of Israel,” Kaplan said. “There are others who view the PLO as legitimate partners in any form of negotiations [over the creation of a Palestinian state], but there’s an absolute split over those questions.”
Given the sensitive nature of Stimage’s work and others in the exhibit, the curators decided to solicit feedback from visitors via comment cards available at the entrance to the hall. Rabben said the museum has received a number of comments specifically about “No one is listening to us,” most of which were positive. “The majority of those comments were ‘Thank you for offering space for this topic at the museum,’” she said.
Last month, a security guard sitting in the “Tikkun” exhibition hall told a reporter that he had not witnessed any expressions of outrage or protest through the first nine months of the exhibit. “When we opened we were afraid of negative reactions, but they’re not stressed about it,” he said of visitors. “We have shown worse things here.” The guard, who has worked at the museum since it opened in 2008, mentioned a 2010 exhibit, “Our Struggle: Responding to Mein Kampf,” which included a copy of Hitler’s autobiography. “Some people were cussing us out” for displaying the book, he recalled.
Meanwhile, on the same floor as “Tikkun,” there is another, smaller exhibit containing potentially offensive art. A sign outside of the room warns visitors that inside is a Hitler marionette created by the parents of puppeteer Frank Oz. “Our intention in displaying this object is to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive through the objects and firsthand stories of those who experienced its persecution, and to encourage conversation and education about the ongoing horrors of antisemitism and authoritarianism today,” the sign says.
Coerver, CJM’s executive director, said he was proud that the museum’s three current exhibits — “Tikkun,” “Oz is for Oznowicz: A Puppet Family’s History” and “Gillian Laub: Family Matters,” which includes photographs that Laub took of her Trump-supporting relatives — are raising “challenging questions” and providing opportunities for both visitors and museum staff to “expand our horizons.”
“We’ve been wading into some issues that I think are a little thicker than maybe we’ve been confronting in the past,” he said, “and I hope that continues.”
A version of this piece originally ran in J. The Jewish News of Northern California, and is reprinted with permission.
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Beyond the frame, thousands are being murdered in Auschwitz but here, there are blueberries
”It’s a detective story,” Moisés Kaufman said. “It focuses on an archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum who is offered a mysterious album. The person offering the album claims that it is photographs of Auschwitz.”
Kaufman is talking about Here There Are Blueberries, the play about those photographs and that archivist. Kaufman conceived and directed the play, which he co-wrote with Amanda Gronich of the Tectonic Theater Project. It was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize. The archivist — Rebecca Erbelding — “is very skeptical because there are very few photographs of Auschwitz in existence,” Kaufman, Tectonic’s founder and artistic director, told me over Zoom. “The Nazis did not want any photographs or records of what they were doing there.”
Once Erbelding gets the album, she discovers that the photos are authentic, but there are no photos of victims, only Nazis, including Josef Mengele. “The play,” Kaufman said. “is a detective story of her trying to figure out what these photos tell us.”
The album, which consisted of more than 100 photos taken between May and December 1944 and put together by Karl-Friedrich Höcker, a Nazi SS officer, was front page news in 2007 when Erbelding and the museum revealed it. “It’s something we didn’t know,” Kaufman said. “When you think Auschwitz, what do you think? Gas chambers, crematoria, you think barracks. And this is not that. We had never seen these photos before.”
Höcker “was a very high-up guy,” Kaufman continued. “That’s one of the reasons why the album is so important. Because he was very close to the center of operations. We’re looking at how the people who were running the camp behaved, and how they lived their daily lives.”
Kaufman decided he needed to turn those photos and that story into a play.
“I come from a Holocaust survivor family,” he said. “My father was a Holocaust survivor, and I knew that … I would at one point in my life have to write about this. But I kept postponing it because, as you probably know, the Holocaust is the one historical event that has been most written about. Many movies have been made about it. It’s like the historical event that has been most chronicled in art. So I thought, ‘What else is there to say?’ And yet, when I saw these photographs, I thought, this is something we didn’t know. I want to write a play about that.”
The play uses the photos, projected on the stage as the story is told.
“The Tectonic Theater Project is an experimental theater company,” Kaufman said. “And the kind of formal question for us was, ‘Can you write a play from an album of photographs? Can the photographs carry part of that narrative?’ Every play we do has a new form. We try to never repeat ourselves.”
Kaufman, 62, grew up in Caracas, Venezuela, and immigrated to New York City in 1987. He was nominated for a Tony Award for directing I Am My Own Wife and for writing 33 Variations. Blueberries previously played at the La Jolla Playhouse in California, the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington DC and Off Broadway at New York Theater Workshop.
The play’s title is taken from a picture in the album. “There’s a photograph in the album where they are eating blueberries,” Kaufman said — the title is a caption that the album’s owner had written. “I don’t want to give too much away,” Kaufman said, “but the location where this photograph is taken was something that few people knew about — that this location existed. And to me, it kind of encapsulates the spirit of the photos, which is a spirit of, a quotidian, a casual, the how do we live life in a moment like this?”
“What is happening outside the frame is that they’re killing 1.1 million people. Right outside the frame,” Kaufman continued. “And it poses questions about who we are as human beings.”
“We talk a lot about, what is the distance between culpability, complicity, and complacency?” said Kaufman. “And where do each one of us fall in that continuum?”
Why would someone knowing what’s happening in the camp take these photos and make an album of them?
“I think he thought the Reich was going to last a thousand years,” Kaufman said. “I thought that, in part, he wanted to chronicle his contribution to it.”
Kaufman said that although the play deals with what happened more than 80 years ago, it has a key relevance to today. “I think at a moment in time where so many governments around the world are turning towards authoritarianism, this play holds a mirror up to us. Who do we want to be?” he said.
What does he want audiences to get from this play after seeing it? What does he hope they are thinking as they leave the theater or afterwards?
“Number one, they’re going to see photographs that they’ve never seen before, and they’re going to see images that they’ve never seen before. Hopefully, the images will elicit new ideas, and hopefully, the conversation that they’re having when they exit the theater is different from the conversation they were having when they entered.”
The photo album, Kaufman said, “chronicles the life of everyone who runs the camp — people who worked in the kitchen, secretaries, high command, the people who drove the buses, the people who run the offices, the people who run the gas chamber. Everybody is portrayed. And I think that it invites the audience to think about not only how are humans capable of such a thing, but how are we all capable of such a thing? And what do we have to do in order to prevent ourselves from doing such a thing?”
‘Here There Are Blueberries’ begins performances Nov. 2 at Broadway’s Barrymore Theater and runs through Jan. 10.
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‘Halloween meets Israeli chutzpah,’ as holiday grows beyond American expats in the Jewish state
Israeli cellphones have been pretty busy lately, given Tuesday’s monumental national election. There were the constant robocalls and daily text surveys leading up to Election Day. And with the scramble to form a coalition now underway, Israelis are glued to their phones, waiting for news alerts and debating every possible scenario in various group chats. But around Tel Aviv, hundreds of parents have an extra WhatsApp group to manage: the one dedicated to their neighborhood’s trick-or-treat event, set to take place this Saturday night.
“Can we change the date for Sabbath observers?” one mother asks.
“Halloween is always October 31st,” someone responds.
“I don’t think anyone here cares about the actual date,” another chimes in.
There are dozens of questions about where to buy candy in bulk, along with frantic costume emergencies. “Our order won’t make it! Does anyone have a witch costume for an 8-year-old?”
“We are so excited,” one parent writes. “This is our first time. Can someone explain how it works?”
Over the last decade, Halloween in Israel has grown from a small gathering of American immigrants into neighborhood-wide celebrations across Tel Aviv and other big cities. Bars and clubs now host annual spooky soirées, and costume shops that once depended almost entirely on Purim sales have added a second busy season in late October. And on Saturday night, thousands of children are expected to take to the streets for some classic trick-or-treating — with an Israeli twist.
The birthplace of Halloween b’Aretz remains its epicenter: Tel Aviv’s Old North neighborhood. The area has long been an enclave of both young families and English-speaking immigrants, a combination that helped transform the unfamiliar Halloween ritual into an annual local tradition.
The first trick-or-treat event was organized in 2015 by expat mothers Smadar Barak and Eliza Duenow, whose children were missing an American Halloween. It began with just 10 families spread out across the Old North. Within four years, that number had jumped to more than 100. And it was no longer just English speakers. Israeli friends and classmates had begun asking if they could join “American Purim.” Participation exploded as other neighborhoods began hosting their own Halloween-themed events.
But over time, many of the original families, including both organizers, returned to the States. The whole thing might have fizzled out completely had it not been for Noa Rudik, a young mother on extended maternity leave, who often ran Jewish holiday events for neighborhood families.
“A community candle-lighting for Chanukah. A kibbutz-style Shavuot celebration in the park. I saw that families, like mine, were hungry for opportunities to be together,” Rudik says.
Somehow, she ended up on an email list from Duenow, who was organizing a group pumpkin order and carving activity. Born and raised in Israel, Rudik had very little exposure to Halloween, but she was immediately enchanted. After taking her kids to the pumpkin carving, they eventually joined the trick-or-treaters. “In those early years, we didn’t have access to all of the Halloween supplies, so everything was very homemade — the costumes, the decorations, which I love. Plus, what kid doesn’t want to run around all night collecting candy?”
Beyond her own family’s enjoyment, Rudik understood the holiday’s potential for community building. “It doesn’t get any more communal than Halloween,” she points out. “Rosh Hashanah. Passover. You can celebrate those holidays just within your own family. Many people do. But for trick-or-treating, you literally cannot do it without your neighbors.”
Rudik and a few others eventually took over for Barak and Duenow and opened it up to the entire community. Today, the original WhatsApp group has close to 1,000 members, and nearly every Tel Aviv neighborhood hosts its own event. While the early trick-or-treaters sometimes had to endure strange looks as they traipsed from house to house in their costumes, these days you can feel the spirit of Halloween across the city, as the sidewalks fill with pint-sized ghosts and goblins.
Not everyone is on board with the Pagan-rooted holiday, though. Last year, Israeli pop star Miri Mesika sparked a public debate over Halloween and Jewish identity when she pointedly told an interviewer that her daughters would be waiting until Purim to dress in costume. Rudik has also sensed some reluctance on the part of the Tel Aviv municipality to support trick-or-treating, even though it typically helps fund her other events. Efforts to promote the activity through local schools were also met with objections from some parent representatives, leading to a compromise: each could decide whether to pass the invitation along to their class.
Occasionally, Rudik hears from more traditional families who are hesitant or have decided not to participate. “But otherwise, the response has been overwhelmingly positive,” she reports. “Most people do not even think about the religious aspect or the fact that it’s not ‘our holiday.’ They just see it as an opportunity to be creative, to spend time with friends, and to come together as a community.”
All of which involves some pretty complicated logistics. Even with the holiday’s growth in popularity, most residents don’t hand out treats, so America’s door-to-door model won’t work. In the early years, participants shared addresses, apartment numbers and even door codes with each other. But as the group grew, the prospect of giving hundreds of strangers access to their buildings became less appealing. Some families moved their candy stations downstairs; others divided up, with one parent taking the children around while the other stayed home to distribute candy, as they often do in the States. For years, families navigated with a Google map of participating homes. Last year, a tech-savvy neighborhood parent designed a custom trick-or-treating app that will now be available across the city.
“Start-up Nation does Halloween,” Rudik jokes.
The guiding principle is that anyone collecting candy should also help provide it. Some families put up elaborate decorations and stick around to distribute treats; others leave a simple help-yourself bowl by the door. Those who can’t host typically arrange to buy candy for someone else’s house, which gets coordinated through the Whatsapp group the week before.
“We go by the honor system,” Rudik says. “We trust people to figure out a way to contribute. And there is always plenty of candy for everyone.”
But just in case, Rudik spends much of the night manning a centrally located emergency candy station, dispatching reinforcements to households that are running low.
After more than a decade, the festivities usually run pretty smoothly, though the growing number of Israelis has brought with it a learning curve.
“I really love that this started with Americans,” Rudik says. “I think it lends a legitimacy that would not necessarily be there if a bunch of Israelis just decided to start trick-or-treating. But it has definitely changed shape over the years.”
“Halloween meets Israeli chutzpah,” she calls it. Like any cultural tradition, trick-or-treating comes with its own etiquette that isn’t necessarily obvious to newcomers.
“Usually parents would be responsible for making sure their kids follow the rules. But we realized parents themselves didn’t necessarily know the ins and outs. Most of us didn’t grow up on this,” she points out.
One year, after families complained that older children had emptied their unattended candy bowls, Rudik and her fellow organizers visited neighborhood schools to talk to the kids and sent parents reminders on WhatsApp.
“In the days before Halloween, we really urge everyone to review the rules with their children: just take one candy, leave enough for others. Be good neighbors.”
This year’s turnout is expected to be their biggest yet, Rudik says, with several hundred families registered in the Old North alone. It follows a string of quieter celebrations, beginning in 2020, when the pandemic kept everyone inside.
“I think we did something over Zoom,” Rudik says, rolling her eyes.
Then came the quietest year of all: 2023. Less than three weeks before Halloween, on Oct. 7, Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel’s southern border, killing more than 1,200 people and taking another 251 hostage.
“It wasn’t even a question,” Rudik recalls. “It was just obvious to everyone it would be cancelled. Nor was it specific to Halloween. No one was in the mood to celebrate anything. We were just engulfed in grief.”
The following year, the organizers went ahead with a toned-down version.
“The war wasn’t over, there were still hostages in Gaza,” she says, “but we also felt like we wanted to give the children some sense of normalcy. We asked people not to do anything too gory or scary — no blood or body parts or skeletons — and everyone really respected that. It was a pretty muted night.”
Last year, Israeli Halloween was back in full force, with one new addition: an adults only party, which Rudik also co-organized and will be bringing back this year as well. “Most of us didn’t get to celebrate Halloween as kids,” she says, with a smile. “So we are just making up for lost time.”
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Jewish Democrats head to the polls frustrated with their party. Will they still help flip control of Congress?
For decades, Jewish voters have been among the Democratic Party’s most loyal supporters, though Republicans have made some inroads in recent elections. Now, with early voting underway and the midterms just days away, Jewish voters could help decide control of Congress in what may signal a broader change.
After a heated primary season, Republicans see an opportunity and signs of a potential shift their way. They hope growing Jewish frustration with Democrats over antisemitism and support for Israel will translate into votes in closely contested races.
Democrats need a net gain of four House seats and four Senate seats to take control of both chambers. But the Democratic Party’s advantage among Jewish voters on the generic congressional ballot has fallen from 49 points to 13.
CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten recently highlighted a sharp decline, for example, in Democratic support among Jewish voters in New York. Gov. Kathy Hochul’s lead among Jewish voters has narrowed from 51 percentage points in 2022 to just 13 points this year.
In Michigan, Jewish Democrats remain divided over their party’s Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, who has intensified his criticism of Israel in recent weeks. Last weekend, a PAC supporting the El-Sayed campaign faced online backlash for a TV ad that showed a couple blaming Israel aid for the high price of groceries.
But whether that frustration will lead Jewish voters to stop supporting Democratic candidates is another question.
Two national surveys conducted this year show Jewish voters remain firmly in the Democratic camp despite the declines. A September poll by the Jewish Electorate Institute found that 71% of Jewish voters planned to support Democrats for Congress, compared with 23% who planned to support Republicans. Another survey, conducted by GBAO Strategies, found Democrats with a 67%-26% lead among Jewish voters.
The Jewish Electorate Institute poll also found that Jewish voters were nearly equally concerned about rising antisemitism within both parties.
Still, with control of the House and Senate at stake and several close races, even a small shift among Jewish voters could make a difference.
Republicans see an opening in Michigan
Michigan offers perhaps the clearest test of the battle over the Jewish vote.
The Republican Jewish Coalition is spending $2 million to target approximately 50,000 Jewish voters, primarily in Oakland County, home to some of Michigan’s largest Jewish communities.
Sam Markstein, RJC’s spokesperson, said in an interview with the Forward that the campaign includes digital advertising, direct mail, text messages, phone calls and door-to-door canvassing in communities such as Bloomfield Hills, West Bloomfield and Southfield, where former Rep. Haley Stevens performed strongly in the Democratic Senate primary.
It’s the group’s largest general-election investment, after its super PAC, the RJC Victory Fund, spent $3.9 million against Kentucky Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, an Israel critic, in the GOP primary earlier this year. Massie lost by nine points.
El-Sayed’s nomination has divided Jewish Democrats because of his criticism of Israel and his response to the March attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield that some Jewish voters interpreted as justifying the attack. He later apologized for the remarks. Some Jewish Democrats are publicly supporting former Rep. Mike Rogers, saying El-Sayed has to assuage concerns in his outreach and in public comments.
Jewish voters make up just 1.4% of the electorate in Michigan. But the stakes are high, with polls showing a dead heat between El-Sayed and Rogers. In 2024, Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin defeated Rogers by fewer than 20,000 votes. A relatively small shift among Jewish voters could prove crucial.
In his closing statement during the last Michigan Senate debate, Rogers appealed directly to Jewish Democrats “who are afraid for their children, when their daughters can’t wear their Star of David walking across Michigan’s campus” to support him. “You’ll have a home with us,” Rogers said. At a rally last Sunday, Trump once again accused Democrats of disloyalty, saying that Jewish voters backing El-Sayed “should be ashamed of themselves.”
Markstein predicted that “you could see a Republican carry the Jewish community in Michigan for the first time in decades.” He suggested there’s an “acceleration of Jewish voters” out of the Democratic Party after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack and the subsequent rise in antisemitism. But Markstein also acknowledged that the change may be gradual.
“I don’t think that’s going to happen overnight,” he said. “I do think they’re going to be much more open-minded and be a lot more ticket-splitting in the future.”
The RJC plans to examine precinct-level election results rather than relying solely on exit polls, Markstein said, to measure whether Jewish voters are moving toward Republicans.
Jewish Democrats fight to hold their voters
The Jewish Democratic Council of America is also mounting its largest midterm voter outreach effort, hoping to prevent Jewish dissatisfaction with Democrats from turning into Republican votes.
While its advertising budget is significantly smaller than the RJC’s, JDCA is relying heavily on direct voter outreach.
JDCA said it is spending more than $300,000 on digital advertising specifically targeting Jewish voters, aiming for more than 4 million ad impressions by Election Day.
Its advertisements include campaigns against Rep. Mike Lawler in New York, Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton in Texas and Republican Sen. Jon Husted in Ohio. Other ads target younger Jewish voters in six states and 20 competitive House districts.
The organization has also mobilized more than 715 volunteers, who have made over 640,000 direct Jewish voter contacts through phone banks and canvassing; they’ve also recruited 32 campus fellows to help organize voters.
Halie Soifer, JDCA’s CEO, accused Republicans of exploiting Jewish fears about antisemitism.
“In the closing weeks of this election, Republicans are invoking fear as a political tactic, tapping into Donald Trump’s culture war,” Soifer wrote in an email to supporters. She accused Republicans of using antisemitism and Islamophobia to divide voters rather than addressing economic concerns. “It’s going to backfire,” she said.
“Democrats aren’t perfect, but Republicans under Trump aren’t the answer,” Soifer added.
The battle beyond Michigan
Beyond Michigan, Republicans are also trying to persuade Jewish voters to reject mainstream, pro-Israel Democrats, arguing that the party has moved too far to the left in an effort to satisfy the progressive wing.
One major test is New York’s 17th Congressional District, where Jewish voters make up an estimated 20% of the population. Although the RJC is not making a major investment there, other groups are spending heavily in one of the country’s most competitive House races.
The incumbent Republican congressman, Mike Lawler, has maintained close relationships with the growing Hasidic and Orthodox communities in Rockland County and parts of Westchester County and made Israel and antisemitism central issues in his campaign. The Democratic candidate, Cait Conley, an Army veteran and former national security official, is also a strong supporter of Israel. She has condemned antisemitism and publicly criticized New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s statement marking the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack.
In Georgia, Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, who is Jewish, faces Republican Rep. Mike Collins in another competitive race.
Ossoff has faced criticism from some Jewish supporters over his votes to block certain weapons sales to Israel. In a recent debate, Collins criticized Ossoff for supporting El-Sayed, describing the Michigan Senate candidate as “the guy that hates Israel.” Ossoff has accused his opponent of ties to white nationalism, a charge Collins rejected.
But that dissatisfaction with Ossoff has not necessarily translated into support for his Republican opponent. Georgia state Rep. Esther Panitch, a Jewish Democrat who has criticized Ossoff’s Israel positions, is supporting his reelection.
J Street, the liberal pro-Israel organization, is spending nearly $500,000 to support Ossoff as part of a $3 million digital advertising campaign across five competitive races. Unlike JDCA and the RJC’s Michigan campaign, J Street’s advertisements target the general electorate, not specifically Jewish voters.
Tali deGroot, J Street’s vice president of political and digital strategy, said J Street is working to elect a “pro-Israel, pro-peace, and pro-democracy majority.”
Florida offers another test of the Jewish vote.
In the newly drawn 25th Congressional District, Jewish Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz, an outspoken supporter of Israel, is facing Republican Scott Singer, the former mayor of Boca Raton who is also Jewish. The district’s new boundaries favor Republicans, with Trump carrying the area by nine percentage points in 2024.
Moskowitz has frequently criticized antisemitism within his party and clashed with progressives over Israel. The outcome of this close race could show whether a Jewish Democrat with strong pro-Israel bona fides can win a Republican-leaning district. The GOP’s leading House super PAC recently canceled a planned $6 million advertising campaign in the district after major political forecasters shifted the race to “Lean Democratic.”
Florida’s Senate race between Republican incumbent Ashley Moody and progressive Democrat Angie Nixon offers a broader, though less competitive, test of the Jewish vote in a state where Jews make up an estimated 3% to 5% of the population.
Together, these races could show whether Jewish voters are judging Democratic candidates by their own positions on Israel and antisemitism or by the direction of the party as a whole.
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