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A new version of the famous Holocaust diary is being called ‘Anne Frank pornography’ and getting banned from schools
(JTA) – Among the many books that conservative parents have recently asked their children’s schools to remove is a lushly illustrated version of the most famous Holocaust diary.
The graphic adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary, published in English in 2018, has found itself at the center of a growing number of controversies involving book removals from school libraries. A small number of passionate activists have pushed for the book to be removed from schools in Florida and Texas, calling it “pornography” and even “antisemitic.” Sometimes, they’ve succeeded.
The movement to police children’s literature — particularly graphic novels — on the basis of race, sex and gender has encompassed thousands of different titles, and it has grown to become a potent political force with potential reverberations for the 2024 presidential race. The official who has played one of the biggest roles in enabling parents to challenge school library books, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, is now running for president.
To defenders of the illustrated book — including the foundation created in Frank’s memory, historians and Jewish groups — the inclusion of Anne Frank’s diary among the list of banned books is a sign that the movement is bigoted and misguided.
Proponents of removing the book from schools say the graphic adaptation is essentially an obscene version that distorts Frank’s legacy and aids in “grooming” children. Even some Jewish parents and at least one Jewish lawmaker have objected to the book’s presence in schools.
“I read the diary of Anne Frank many times as a kid. I don’t remember any of that stuff that they put in that graphic novel,” Florida Rep. Randy Fine told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Calling the adaptation an “Anne Frank pornography book,” Fine continued, “And frankly that graphic novel is antisemitic. To sexualize the diary of Anne Frank in that sort of inappropriate way, it is antisemitic.”
Here is what you need to know about the book, the criticism it’s facing and the context that has made it a flashpoint in a deepening culture war.
What is ‘Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation’?
Published in 2018, “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” is a new, abridged version of Frank’s famous diary presented in comic-book format. The project was authorized by the Anne Frank Fonds, the Switzerland-based foundation started by Anne’s father Otto Frank, which controls the copyright to the diary Otto rescued after he survived the Holocaust. Anne herself perished in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after hiding out for most of the war with her family in an Amsterdam annex.
The Oscar-nominated Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman, together with illustrator David Polonsky, put the new book together. It was intended as a companion piece to the 2021 animated film “Where Is Anne Frank,” which Folman directed.
While the film tells the fanciful story of Anne’s imaginary friend Kitty coming to life and wandering through modern-day Amsterdam, the book is a straightforward, though heavily truncated, rendition of Anne’s original diary. All of the entries it reproduces are taken from her original text, and dialogue between the characters in the annex is based on Anne’s own recollections of their conversations. Some of its supporters resist the label “graphic novel,” which they say implies the story is fictional.
The new book, the foundation says, is not meant to replace Frank’s original diary, first published in Dutch in 1947 as “The Secret Annex” and in English in 1952 as “The Diary of a Young Girl.” That book, along with subsequent editions that restored some passages edited out of the first publication, continues to be published and widely read in dozens of languages.
Why and how is the book being challenged?
A handful of parent activists, the largest “parents’ rights” group in the country and at least one Republican state lawmaker — Fine — have specifically gone after “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” as part of their larger campaign against what they say is obscene and pornographic content in schools. After a few isolated incidents of parental opposition to the book over the last year, their efforts have gained steam in recent months.
Organized by members of “parents’ rights” groups such as Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education, parents nationwide have brought challenges against thousands of books in school libraries, the vast majority of which deal with topics of race, gender and sexuality. This movement began as parents organized to oppose COVID-19 mask mandates in public schools, and picked up steam in the aftermath of the 2020 racial justice protests following George Floyd’s murder, as well as recent political controversies involving LGBTQ-focused issues such as medical procedures for trans children.
The groups operate under the presumption that their children’s educators and librarians might be trying to sneak leftist viewpoints (including what they call “critical race theory” and “gender ideology”) into the classroom, or even that they are “grooming” their children.
Increasingly, such parents have trained this focus on books, and have become particularly sensitive to any literary depictions of sex and/or LGBTQ identity — particularly in graphic or comic-book format. Some of the most-banned books in schools across the country are graphic novels and memoirs with LGBTQ themes, including “Gender Queer” and “Fun Home.”
“People are just so uncomfortable with the idea of seeing anything represented visually,” said Kasey Meehan, director of the Freedom to Read program at the literary free-speech activist group PEN America. “Time and time again, when graphic novels are taken, an image is pulled out of context or an image is held up and declared as porn.”
Florida has emerged as a frontier for this movement under the leadership of DeSantis, who is a Republican. Under new laws he championed, educators can face felony charges for making obscene material accessible to students; the state also has a new law, dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” by its critics, that prohibits any classroom instruction on sexual identity or orientation in elementary and middle school, and limits it in high school.
Why are parents complaining specifically about the graphic adaptation?
Critics of the book say they are objecting to the small handful of passages in which Anne describes sexual matters. In one, she discusses a time she asked a female friend if they could show each other their breasts, but was rebuffed. (“If only I had a girlfriend,” she muses.) In another, she describes clinical details of her own vagina.
These passages are Anne’s own writing, and were part of her actual diary. Folman and Polonsky reproduce them in the book and show a full-page illustration showing her wandering through a garden of female nude statues in the Greco-Roman tradition.
This illustration, which is presented as coming from Anne’s imagination, has garnered the most intense blowback from parents. In Facebook groups devoted to book challenges, some members have shared screenshots of the page as evidence of the adaptation’s obscene qualities, questioning why any parent would want their child to read it.
Some people challenging the book have offered other explanations. Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of Moms For Liberty whose Florida district has removed the book, told JTA that she was troubled by the fact that the adaptation only replicates a small percentage of the original diary, while leaving out what she believed to be crucial context: the original epilogue that shifted from Anne’s first-person narration to a larger study of the victims of the Holocaust. (An afterword does appear in the graphic adaptation.)
Inveighing against current child literacy levels she said are woefully low, Justice was also infuriated by the idea that Frank’s diary needed an illustrated version to begin with.
“Anne wrote the diary when she was 13,” she said. “So the diary is written at a level where children of that age can completely understand it.”
What has happened when parents have challenged the book?
The book first grabbed headlines in August 2022, when administrators at Keller ISD, a public school district in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas, ordered staff to remove it (along with a selection of other books) from their shelves. The book had been challenged by a single parent the previous year, and the school’s new board, backed by right-wing special interest groups, had ordered its review policy for classroom materials to be completely overhauled. Any books that had ever been challenged in the district were to be removed from circulation until the matter had been resolved. Following public outcry, the book was returned to Keller’s shelves a week later.
A second Texas school district, Katy ISD outside Houston, had also placed the book under review during the 2021-22 school year, ultimately determining it was only appropriate for high school students.
The book soon landed on the radar of parent activists in Florida. One Florida school district, Indian River County Schools on the state’s Atlantic coast, ruled in April that the book was “not age-appropriate” at any level of instruction, including high school. A parent there had challenged it, claiming that the book “minimizes the Holocaust.”
After a review, the district agreed with the parent, telling JTA it had determined the book to be “a fictional novel,” “not the real diary of Anne Frank,” and filled with “inappropriate content.” The district superintendent issued a statement backing the ruling, citing Florida’s statewide Holocaust education mandate as a reason why the school should not make the book available to students.
The national leadership of Moms For Liberty issued a statement siding with the district — and emphasizing that Anne Frank’s diary is not itself objectionable.
“There are multiple versions of Anne Frank’s diary of varying age appropriateness available to students,” the statement said. “Only this ONE version was removed.”
Justice, the Moms for Liberty cofounder, is a former board member for Indian River County Schools and still lives in the area. She told JTA she does not like the book either and said its removal was a sign of the system working as it should: School administrators took a parent’s challenge seriously and came to a decision.
“If the superintendent and the school board wanted it there, it would be there,” she said. “If the Holocaust education group in the county had wanted it there — these are Jewish people — had wanted it there, it would be there.”
Another Florida school district, Clay County Public Schools outside Jacksonville, has kept the book restricted from student access for some five months and counting, following a single parental complaint earlier this year. That parent, Bruce Friedman, is Jewish, and has become a leading voice of the broader book challenge movement. He challenged the graphic adaptation along with hundreds of other books in his district that he deemed to be inappropriate for students. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s grooming,” he told JTA about the adaptation.
Facing a backlog of book challenges, Clay County in April altered its challenge policy to make it harder for parents like Friedman to file blanket requests to remove many books at once for broadly defined reasons. But notably, the district retained the pending challenge to “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” even after its policy change. A final decision on the book is still pending.
How are the book’s supporters responding to the criticism?
Activists opposed to the book banning movement and experts on the diary’s publication history say critics of the Anne Frank adaptation are wrong even about the most basic facts of their objections.
First, while the visual format of the graphic adaptation (which incorporates some surreal imagery) arguably lies somewhere between fact and artistic interpretation, and its rendition of the diary is severely abridged, the book did not invent the passages these parents find objectionable, as some have alleged. Those came, word for word, from Frank herself. Both passages were fully restored to her English-language diary beginning with versions published in the 1980s, largely without incident.
A crucial part of the argument against the graphic adaptation is the idea that both of these passages were excised from the initial English-language edition of the diary. Both Friedman and Fine have told JTA they have no recollection of having read the passages with sexual content in their own childhood memories of the diary.
They almost certainly did, said Ruth Franklin, a book critic and author who is writing a book about Frank and her diary to be published next year by Yale University Press. According to Franklin’s research, the very first English-language edition of the diary did indeed include one of the two passages the parents are now objecting to: the part where Anne discusses her attraction to another girl.
Franklin said that, contrary to popular belief, Otto Frank was the one who pushed for the passage to be included in the diary’s first English-language edition after it was excised from the Dutch original. Otto is often portrayed as having been responsible for removing the passage so as to sanitize Anne’s language for a general audience.
Contemporary parents who insist they did not read the passage as children, she said, are “misremembering.”
“If they were to actually go to the library and open up the edition that has been in print since 1952, they would be unhappily surprised to find what’s there,” Franklin said. “It seems inconsistent to me to go after the graphic adaptation and not the diary itself.”
At least one parent has objected to the unabridged text-based version of the diary before. In 2013, a Michigan mom challenged an unabridged edition of the diary, citing the same passages that today’s parents are objecting to in the graphic adaptation. She argued that the unabridged diary was “inappropriate for the middle school,” and tried to push her daughter’s district to swap out the “definitive” edition of the diary for the original version that excised one of the objectionable passages. The parent’s objection made national news, was the subject of much condemnation and was ultimately rejected by the district.
Conditions in schools have changed in the last decade, with parents in multiple states newly empowered to challenge books in their children’s schools. The movement has caught up not only the graphic version of Anne Frank’s diary but a growing number of other titles with Jewish and Holocaust themes.
Meehan of PEN America suggested that the parents who objected to Anne exploring her sexuality were doing so because of the passages’ latent LGBTQ themes, meaning that the text had become an example of “intersectionality,” or representing more than one marginalized group. Some of the book’s opponents, including Justice, have separately attacked the idea of intersectionality.
“When there are multiple themes represented in a book,” Meehan said, “then that book becomes even more a focus of efforts to remove it.”
For the Anne Frank Fonds, the Swiss group that controls the diary and authorized the adaptation, the situation is clear-cut. From across the Atlantic, the group issued a statement responding to challenges of the diary in all its forms: “We consider the book of a 12-year-old girl to be appropriate reading for her peers.”
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Fire at Postville, Iowa, kosher meat processing plant shuts down production ahead of the High Holidays
(JTA) — A major fire at one of the largest kosher meat processing plants in the United States is poised to increase the price of kosher meat ahead of the High Holidays, in addition to devastating the plant’s local community.
Investigators in Postville, Iowa, said on Wednesday that the fire that devastated AgriStar Processing started accidentally in the facility’s laundry room. The fire, which began on Tuesday, destroyed at least 75% of the plant and has put more than 600 people out of work, Fire Chief Jeff Bohr told the local TV network KCRG.
The fire has also interrupted a linchpin of kosher meat production, according to OU Kosher, the oversight agency run by the Orthodox Union.
“The damaged facility means a significant portion of kosher beef and chicken slaughtered and sold in the US will not enter the kosher supply chain,” Rabbi Moshe Elefant, the organization’s CEO, said in a statement on Wednesday. “Kosher consumers will feel the impact of the tightening supply with reduction of availability.”
Elefant said OU Kosher was working to “find solutions for ramping up production at other plants” while warning that the crisis could fuel bad actors.
“Unfortunately, when supply is limited, it creates opportunity for unscrupulous individuals who seek to make money by preying on the well-meaning Kosher observant public,” he wrote.
Jarad Bernstein, the executive director of the Jewish Federation of Greater Des Moines, said the fire represented “a terrible situation” in an email to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“The impact on the local community and the business will be large,” he said.
The fire is not the first time that a crisis at AgriStar has sent the community into a tailspin. In 2008, a federal immigration raid at the plant, then known as Agriprocessors, netted the arrest of hundreds of workers and led to the arrest and conviction of the company’s longtime CEO Sholom Rubashkin on 86 counts of bank fraud, mail fraud and money laundering. It also led most of Postville’s Jewish residents to leave the town, which had developed as an unusual stronghold of Orthodox life in eastern Iowa.
Saying that “many people” believed Rubashkin’s 27-year prison sentence had been excessive, President Donald Trump commuted Rubashkin’s sentence in 2017. Rubashkin’s conviction stands.
Canadian Jewish billionaire Hershy Friedman purchased Agriprocessors and reopened it as Agri-Star. He told JTA in 2016 that he had done so after being urged by Jewish leaders to ensure competition in the kosher meat processing industry.
“It wasn’t done for financial purposes; it was done to really cater to the Jewish community,” he said about the purchase. “During the time Rubashkin was closed, the price of beef roughly doubled. After we acquired it, it came right back down.”
Friedman also said he had shored up the company’s employment practices, which had run afoul of the law, and made improvements to the slaughter process that had made Agriprocessors a target of animal rights activists.
Agri-Star said in a statement on Wednesday that it appreciated the first responders who “worked tirelessly and selflessly to protect lives and contain the fire” and the employees who had shown “inspiring” care for each other. It also indicated that it did not yet know the future of the plant.
“We understand there are many questions about what comes next,” Agri-Star wrote on social media. “While we are still gathering information and evaluating our short-term plans, we are committed to sharing verified updates as soon as they become available. We appreciate your patience as we work through this process thoughtfully and responsibly.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Fire at Postville, Iowa, kosher meat processing plant shuts down production ahead of the High Holidays appeared first on The Forward.
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California law on antisemitism in schools will be enforced after free speech challenge is defeated
(JTA) — A California law to prevent antisemitism in schools will be enforced after a federal judge dismissed a challenge from teachers and students who said it violated free speech.
U.S. District Judge Noël Wise on Tuesday ruled against a lawsuit opposing Assembly Bill 715, which went into effect in January. The new law introduces measures to curb the “widespread surge in antisemitic discrimination, harassment, and bullying” faced by “Jewish and Israeli American pupils across California.”
As part of the law, California is establishing an Office of Civil Rights with a new statewide antisemitism prevention coordinator for public schools, who has not yet been appointed. The law mandates teachers to provide “factually accurate” instruction rather than “advocacy, personal opinion, bias, or partisanship.” It requires local educational agencies to take action if they find that instruction or school-sponsored materials are discriminatory.
A group of teachers, students and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee filed a challenge in November. They said the law was unconstitutionally vague, chilled speech in the classroom about Palestinians and discriminated against Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students and perspectives.
Wise said it was too soon to consider these claims, given the uncertainties still surrounding the new Office of Civil Rights, its leadership and how it will define and respond to antisemitism. She also said that teachers and students did not provide sufficient evidence of infringements on free speech, and teachers could not claim speech rights on the job.
“Teacher Plaintiffs are not acting as private citizens and therefore do not have First Amendment rights while teaching,” Wise said in her ruling.
She also dismissed the claim that the law would discriminate against non-Jewish students. “The existence of an Antisemitism Coordinator does not change the Office’s overarching purpose to stop discrimination generally; it merely reflects the State’s decision to accord specific funds to a specific problem,” she said.
Malak Afaneh, a staff attorney at ADC, said the group was reviewing the court’s decision and considering its options.
“AB 715 has already caused educators to alter the way they teach out of fear that classroom discussions or activities could trigger complaints or investigations,” Afaneh said in a statement. “When teachers feel compelled to abandon cultural identity projects or avoid discussions about Palestine, it is students who are denied the opportunity to engage with diverse ideas and perspectives.”
The Jewish Community Relations Council of San Francisco celebrated Wise’s decision as “great news.”
“This ruling, and the fact that the case has been dismissed with prejudice, affirms that AB 715 is a strong, legitimate approach to protecting Jewish students — and all students — against harassment and discrimination,” the group said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post California law on antisemitism in schools will be enforced after free speech challenge is defeated appeared first on The Forward.
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The El-Sayed effect: How Jews and Israel are factoring into Michigan’s other primary races
(JTA) — DETROIT — The intra-party debate over Israel that has dominated Michigan’s Democratic U.S. Senate primary is reverberating further down the ballot throughout the state.
Progressive former county health official Abdul El-Sayed’s bid to lead a swing state as an avowedly pro-Palestinian senator is being mirrored on a micro scale in Michigan’s 7th District — one of the nation’s most hotly contested congressional seats. In addition to endorsing a candidate there, El-Sayed and his movement have also taken aim at a Detroit-area incumbent who has belatedly embraced a pro-Israel platform, while a key architect of the 2024 “Uncommitted” movement is also running for local office.
In contrast, a young Jewish candidate hopes to pick up the mantle of El-Sayed’s rival in the Senate race, centrist U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens — and buck a growing national trend of Democrats turning away from supporting Israel. Jewish Democrats in the state, many of whom are drifting away from the party as a result of the discourse around the primary, are watching closely.
Here’s what you need to know about how Israel and Jewish issues are affecting other races in Michigan’s primary on Tuesday.
A swing district Dems hope to flip is dragged into the Israel debate
In Michigan’s 7th District, William Lawrence, a former climate activist who has called for an end to all military aid to Israel, is challenging two centrist Democrats for the party’s nomination.
The district, which stretches from the state capitol in Lansing into the Detroit exurbs and encompasses Michigan State University, is currently represented by a Republican. But Democrats are eyeing it as a promising pickup; the seat was previously held by Jewish Democrat Elissa Slotkin, who won her Senate election in 2024 even as Donald Trump won the state.
Lawrence’s campaign, though, is far from Slotkin’s staunchly moderate playbook. Lawrence recently rallied with El-Sayed, independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Lansing, where he called to “stop arming Israel and bring our money home to invest in housing and social security.”
Both of his major primary opponents, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bridget Brink and former Navy SEAL and Obama military aide Matt Maasdam, declined to refer to Israel’s conduct in Gaza as a genocide at a candidate forum, while Lawrence did. Recent polling from two Brink-sponsored firms shows Brink in the lead, while an April poll from the Lawrence-aligned Data For Progress puts him ahead by 6 points. Lawrence’s hopes for the nomination likely rest on Brink and Maasdam splitting the establishment vote.
As with many progressives running this cycle, opposition to Israel makes up a key part of Lawrence’s pitch — which his campaign feels confident about, despite the purple political makeup of the district.
“There is broad support for ending military support to human rights abusers and bringing that money home to fund good jobs, housing, and healthcare here at home,” his campaign told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an emailed statement responding to a list of questions about his positions on Israel.
Lawrence was a co-founder of the influential climate activist group Sunrise Movement, which has experienced infighting over pro-Palestinian advocacy. His rhetoric on Israel also played a role in the biggest scandal of his campaign to date. Comments he made on a 2024 podcast disparaging Black Democratic leaders as “a pillar, frankly, for establishment, capitalist, imperialist American power” that “defangs the white left” resurfaced shortly before his big-ticket rally earlier this month.
The Congressional Black Caucus condemned his remarks and called on his supporters to “withdraw their support.” In a subsequent statement, Lawrence said he had been referencing “my horror at the genocide in Gaza” and talking about working “to organize Black Americans against the genocide.” (Though she appeared at the Lansing rally with him, Ocasio-Cortez has declined to endorse Lawrence.)
Fewer than 10,000 Jews live in the greater Lansing area, out of a total population of 479,000, according to a 2021 population report from Brandeis University. Local Jewish institutions have expressed alarm about El-Sayed’s movement: When the candidate brought left-wing streamer Hasan Piker to MSU’s campus for a rally earlier this year, the university’s Hillel issued a statement saying it was “deeply troubled” by the appearance of what it called a “known antisemite.”
Asked by JTA about the safety of his Jewish would-be constituents, Lawrence’s campaign responded, “Will takes Jewish safety extremely seriously and stands firmly against anti-semetisim [sic] which is unfortunately on the rise across the political spectrum.” The Brink and Maasdam campaigns did not respond to JTA requests for comment.
After moving from DSA to pro-Israel, this Detroit congressman is fighting to keep his seat
Why is a Detroit-area race between two non-Jews, in a district with few Jews, also pivoting on Israel? The answer reveals the state of intra-left politics today.
In Michigan’s 13th District, encompassing much of Detroit and its western suburbs, state Rep. Donavan McKinney is challenging incumbent U.S. Rep. Shri Thanedar for the Democratic nomination. A member of the Democratic Socialists of America who has been endorsed by, and campaigned with, El-Sayed and national pro-Palestinian figures, McKinney’s campaign literature champions a focus on “kitchen-table issues,” including public health in Detroit.
Yet his website’s major policies also include a large section labeled “Palestine,” in which he pledges to end military aid to Israel and calls on Israel to “release all Palestinians who have been detained.”
A Black politician running against an Indian-American incumbent in a majority-Black district, McKinney has also made racial representation a central factor to his campaign, twinning Black identity with the pro-Palestinian cause as a growing number of other local activists have also done.
McKinney’s embrace of the issue could play particularly well in his race against Thanedar, who has — unusually — ventured from the left to the center on Israel. A businessman and failed gubernatorial candidate (he and El-Sayed both lost the Democratic primary to Gretchen Whitmer in 2018), Thanedar was initially a DSA member himself. As a state legislator in 2021, he co-sponsored legislation calling for an end to U.S. military support of Israel.
He abruptly changed course during his 2022 congressional run, in a redrawn district formerly held by Palestinian-American Rep. Rashida Tlaib. Thanedar then expressed more pro-Israel views on the campaign trail even as pro-Israel lobbyists AIPAC endorsed an opponent. (He largely self-financed his successful congressional run.)
Once in Congress, Thanedar took an AIPAC-sponsored trip to Israel and shifted his views to become a staunch pro-Israel advocate. After the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, he renounced his DSA membership, citing a New York rally hosted by the group praising the attacks that he called “hate-filled and antisemitic.”
“I see this as the biggest murdering of Jews since the Holocaust,” Thanedar told the Michigan Advance, of the attacks, also publicly criticizing Tlaib for her own response. AIPAC, once his enemy, spent more than $2 million on his 2024 reelection campaign, according to federal disclosures. The lobbyists are fundraising for Thanedar again this cycle, though the latest reported federal elections data indicate that AIPAC-aligned spending for him has been a tiny fraction of the millions it has spent in other races.
The battle looks to be bruising. Polling is scant, but a progressive-aligned poll earlier this month had Thanedar a narrow 4 points up. On Monday a handful of Congressional Black Caucus members, breaking with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, endorsed McKinney — a rare measure to take against an incumbent. The caucus’s McKinney backers include Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Summer Lee of Pennsylvania, both hardline Israel critics.
Neither McKinney’s nor Thanedar’s campaigns responded to JTA requests for comment for this article.
A young Jewish LGBTQ legislator may pick up Stevens’ pro-Israel torch
As Jewish Democrats in Oakland County, the affluent, heavily Jewish Detroit suburbs, have bemoaned the state-level Democratic tilt toward anti-Israel rhetoric, many are clinging to a silver lining: state Sen. Jeremy Moss, who is bidding for Stevens’ congressional seat in the 11th District.
Moss, a Jewish and pro-Israel candidate, has a campaign platform of standard liberal issues including gun safety, cost of living and LGBTQ rights (Moss is gay). He has been endorsed by many of the state’s leading Democrats. And while his campaign website platform doesn’t mention Israel or antisemitism, he has angrily denounced antisemitism in both parties.
“The overwhelming majority of Jews believe in a place of refuge in a Jewish homeland. But if you even mention how woven the Jewish religion is with Jewish sovereignty in Israel, today you get called a ‘colonizer,’ a ‘racist,’” Moss said in a 2024 speech from the state Senate floor. “‘Zionist’ is now being weaponized as a slur, and it is infuriating that the same people who will say that also post ‘Happy Passover’ to all who are observing without acknowledging what we’re actually observing.”
Moss called out antisemitism on the left again after the attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield earlier this year. Following the state Democratic convention in Detroit, at which a lawyer for pro-Palestinian encampments who had a social media history of praising Hezbollah received the party’s nomination for the University of Michigan board of regents, Moss called the nomination “unacceptable” and said he would refuse to vote for the nominee. Moss’s campaign did not return a JTA request for comment for this story.
Many Jews in the district who back Stevens also have high praise for Moss — though AIPAC, which has broken campaign records in spending for Stevens’ Senate race, has spent minimally for Moss, according to the latest federal elections data. Democratic Majority for Israel made a small donation to his campaign, as have former AIPAC leaders.
Moss probably doesn’t need their support: He has a strong likelihood of prevailing in the primary. Though polling in the district is scant, he dwarfs his competitors in fundraising and name recognition. Some pro-Palestinian progressives, including California U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, have backed Aisha Farooqi, an attorney who has called to halt military aid to Israel. Her campaign, though, hasn’t caught on with El-Sayed’s supporters on the level of Lawrence’s or McKinney’s. Another fringe candidate, Don Ufford, launched a website called “AIPAC Jeremy Moss” in a bid to target the presumptive frontrunner.
Should Moss prevail in the primary and in the general election, he would return the heavily Jewish district to Jewish representation for the first time since former U.S. Rep. Andy Levin lost his 2022 reelection bid to Stevens — in a redistricted primary that saw AIPAC backing Stevens. Levin, a progressive, is backing El-Sayed in the Senate race.
An ‘Uncommitted’ founder returns … with big-ticket Democratic support
Further down the ballot, a key architect of Michigan’s 2024 “Uncommitted” movement designed to pressure Democrats on Israel is running for state Senate — as a Democrat.
Abbas Alawieh, a Lebanese-American former legislative staffer for both Levin and Tlaib, is making a bid for local office after becoming a national name for his role in pushing Democrats to vote “Uncommitted” over former President Joe Biden in the 2024 state primary ballot. The movement, which began as Listen to Michigan, was based largely on dissatisfaction with Biden’s support of Israel’s war in Gaza.
It attracted a groundswell of support — including from some Jews — and spread to other states, crystallizing a lack of enthusiasm for Biden that built to him stepping off the presidential ticket. Alawieh emerged again as a thorn in the party’s side during that year’s Democratic National Convention, when he and other “Uncommitted” delegates unsuccessfully lobbied to place a Palestinian speaker on the agenda.
As he now emerges as a party hopeful, Alawieh is mending some surprising fences in the establishment. This month he secured the endorsement of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and recently sat down for a meeting with former Vice President Kamala Harris — who lost Michigan in her 2024 presidential run, which many analysts chalked up at least in part to “Uncommitted.” (Alawieh himself has said he voted for Harris, though not all of his movement’s co-founders did.)
The former VP “initiated” the meeting after months of phone calls, Alawieh said in a statement, adding that he had urged her to oppose “the Israeli military’s genocide in Gaza” and “ethnic cleansing” in Lebanon.
Alawieh says he doesn’t expect Israel to be a major part of his focus in the state Senate. Still, he recently told the Michigan Advance, “The party was undoubtedly wrong about Gaza in 2024.” His campaign did not respond to a JTA request for comment.
He is running in a district that includes Dearborn, which has a large Arab and Muslim population. Alawieh isn’t the only “Uncommitted”-adjacent figure running for office this primary cycle: In Wisconsin, Francesca Hong, who helped lead the parallel “Uninstructed” movement, has a plausible path to victory in her gubernatorial primary.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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