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American Jews created historic summer camps. Or did summer camps create American Jews?
(JTA) — Among Sandra Fox’s most memorable finds during her years mining American archives for materials about Jewish summer camps was a series of letters about the hours before lights-out.
The letters were by counselors who were documenting an unusual window in the day when they stopped supervising campers, leaving the teens instead to their own devices, which sometimes included romance and sexual exploration.
“It was each division talking about how they dealt with that free time before bed in ‘age-appropriate ways,’” Fox recalled about the letters written by counselors at Camp Ramah in Wisconsin, the original iteration of the Conservative movement’s network of summer camps.
“I’ve spoken to Christian people who work at Christian camps and have researched Christian camps. There is no free time before bed,” Fox told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “That’s not a thing if you don’t want kids to hook up. So it was just amazing to find these documents of Camp Ramah leaders really having the conversation explicitly. Most of the romance and sexuality stuff is implicit in the archives.”
The letters are quoted extensively in Fox’s new book, “The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America.” Fox, who earned a PhD in history from New York University in 2018 and now teaches and directs the Archive of the American Jewish Left there, tells the story of American Judaism’s most immersive laboratory for constructing identity and contesting values.
Next week, Fox is launching the book with an event at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn. (Tickets for the Feb. 23 event are available here.) Attendees will be able to tour adult versions of some of the most durable elements of Jewish summer camps, from Israeli dance to Yiddish and Hebrew instruction to Color Wars to Tisha B’Av, the mournful holiday that always falls over the summer.
“I never considered doing a normal book party,” Fox said. “It was always really obvious to me that a book about experiential Jewish education and role play should be celebrated and launched out into the world through experiential education and role play.”
Sandra Fox’s 2023 book “The Jews of Summer,” looks at the history of American Jewish summer camps. (Courtesy of Fox)
We spoke to Fox about her party plans, how Jewish summer camps have changed over time and how they’ve stayed the same, and the cultural history of that before-bed free time.
This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. We’ll be continuing the conversation in a virtual chat through the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research Feb. 27 at 1 p.m.; register here.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Given how much Jews like to talk about camp, were you surprised that this book hadn’t already been written?
Sandra Fox: There’s been a lot of fruitful research on the history of various camps, but it’s usually been focused on one camping movement or one camp type. So there are articles about Zionist camps. There are certainly articles out there about the Ramah camps. A lot of camps have produced books — either their alumni associations or a scholar who went to let’s say, Reform movement camps have created essay collections about those camps. And there are also books about Habonim and other Zionist youth movements.
I don’t really know why this is the first stab at this kind of cross-comparison. It might be that people didn’t think there would be so much to compare. I think the overwhelming feeling I get from readers so far, people who preordered and gotten their books early, is that they’re very surprised to hear how similar these camps are. So perhaps it’s that scholars weren’t thinking about Jewish summer camps that came from such diverse standpoints as having something enough in common to write about them all at once.
Also distance from the time period really helps. You can write a book about — and people do write a book about — the ’60s and ’70s and have been for decades, but there’s a certain amount of distance from the period that has allowed me to do this, I think, and maybe it also helps that I’m generationally removed. A lot of the scholars who’ve worked on camps in the postwar period went to camps in the postwar period. It makes a lot of sense that it would be harder to write this sort of sweeping thing perhaps. The fact that I’m a millennial meant that I could write about the postwar period — and also write kind of an epilogue-style chapter that catches us up to the present.
What’s clear is that there’s something amazing about studying summer camp, a completely immersive 24/7 experience that parents send children away for. There’s no better setting for thinking about how adults project their anxieties and desires about the future onto children. There’s also no place better to think about power dynamics and age and generational tension.
I was definitely struck by the “sameyness” of Jewish camps in your accounting. What do you think we can learn from that, either about camps or about us as Jews?
I do want to say that while there’s a lot of sameyness, whenever you do a comparative study, there’s a risk of kind of collapsing all these things and making them seem too similar. What I’m trying to convey is that the camp leaders from a variety of movements took the basic structure of the summer camp as we know it — its daily schedule, its environment, its activities — and it did look similar from camp to camp, at least on that surface level.
If you look at the daily schedules in comparison, they might have a lot of the same features but they’ll be called slightly different things depending on if the camp leans more heavily towards Hebrew, or Yiddish, or English. But the content within those schedules would be rather different. It’s more that the skeletal structure of camp life has a lot of similarities across the board and then the details within each section of the day or the month had a lot of differences.
But I think what it says is that in the postwar period, the anxieties that Jewish leaders had about the future of Judaism are really, really similar and the solution that they found within the summer camp, they were pretty unanimous about. They just then took the model and inserted within it their particular nationalistic, linguistic or religious perspectives. So I think more so than saying anything about American Jewry, it shows kind of how flexible camping is. And that’s not just the Jewish story. Lots of different Americans have embraced summer camping in different ways.
So many people who have gone to camp have a fixed memory of what camp is like, where it’s caught in time, but you argue that camps have actually undergone lots of change. What are the most striking changes you documented, perhaps ones that might have been hard for even insiders to discern as they happened?
First of all, the Israel-centeredness of American Jewish education as we know it today didn’t happen overnight in 1948, for instance. It was a slower process, beyond the Zionist movements where that was already going on, for decades before 1948. Ramah and the Reform camps for instance took their time towards getting to the heavily Zionist-imbued curricula that we know.
There was considerable confusion and ambivalence at first about what to do with Israel: whether to raise an Israeli flag, not because they were anti-Zionist, but because American Jews had been thinking about proving their loyalty to America for many generations. There were some sources that would talk about — what kind of right do American Jews have to raise the Israeli flag when they’re not Israeli? So that kind of Israel-centeredness that is really a feature of camp life today was a slower process than we might think.
It fit camp life really well because broader American camps used Native American symbols, in some ways that are problematic today, to create what we know of as an iconography of camp life. So for Jews, Israel and its iconography, or Palestine and iconography before ’48, provided an alternative set of options that were read as Jewish, but it still took some time to get to where we are now in terms of the Israel focus.
One of the reasons I place emphasis on the Yiddish summer camps is to show that in the early 20th century and the mid-20th century there was more ideological diversity in the Jewish camping sphere, including various forms of Yiddishist groups and socialist groups and communist groups that operated summer camps. Most of them have closed, and their decline is obviously a change that tells a story of how American Jewry changed over the course of the postwar period. Their legacy is important, too: I have made the argument that these camps in a lot of ways modeled the idea of Yiddish as having a future in America.
What about hookup culture? Contemporary discourse about Jewish camps have focused on sex and sexuality there. What did you observe about this in the archives?
I think people think of the hookup culture of Jewish camps today and certainly in my time in the ’90s and 2000s as a permanent feature, and in some ways I found through my research and oral history interviews that that was the case, but it was really interesting to zoom out a little bit and think about how Jewish summer camps changed in terms of sexual romantic culture, in relationship to how America changed with the sexual revolution and the youth culture.
It’s not it’s not useful to think about Jewish hookup culture in a vacuum. It’s happening within America more broadly. And so of course, it’s changed dramatically over time. And one of the things I learned that was so fascinating is that Jewish summer camps were actually their leaders were less concerned in a lot of ways about sexuality at camp in the ’40s and ’50s, than they were in the late ’60s and ’70s. Because earlier premarital sex was pretty rare, at least in the teenage years, so they were not that concerned about what happened after lights out because they kind of assumed whatever was going on was fairly innocent.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, that’s when camps have to actually think about how to balance allowance and control. They want to allow campers to have these relationships, to have their first sexual experiences, and part of that is related to rising rates of intermarriage and wanting to encourage love between Jews, but they also want to control it because there’s a broader societal moment in which the sexuality of teenagers is problematized and their and their sexual culture is more public.
There’s been a real wave of sustained criticism by former campers about the cultures that they experienced, arguing that the camps created an inappropriately sexualized and unsafe space. There’s been a lot of reaction to that and the broader #MeToo moment. I’m curious about what you can speculate about a future where that space is cleaned up, based on your historical research — what is gained and what, potentially, could be lost?
Without being involved in camping today — and I want to really make that disclaimer because I know a lot of change is happening and lot of organizations are involved to talk about this issue better, to train camps and camp leaders and their counselors to not create a pressured environment for camper — I think what the history shows is that this hookup culture did not come about out of nowhere. It was partly related to the broader changes in America and the sexual revolution.
But it was also partly created because camps really needed to have campers’ buy-in, in order to be “successful.” A huge argument of my book is that we think about the power of camps as if camp directors have campers as, like, puppets on strings, and that what they do is what happens in camp life. But actually, campers have changed the everyday texture of life at camp over the course of the decades in so many different ways by resisting various ideas or just not being interested.
So hookup culture is also part of making campers feel like they have freedom at camp and that’s essential. That’s not a side project — that is essential to their ability to get campers to come back. It’s a financial need, and it’s an ideological need. If you make campers feel like they have freedom, then they will feel like they freely took on the ideologies your camp is promoting in a really natural way.
The last part of it is rising rates of intermarriage. As rates of intermarriage rose in the second half of the 20th century, there’s no doubt in my mind from doing the research that the preexisting culture around sexuality at camp and romance at camp got turbo-boosted [to facilitate relationships that could potentially lead to marriage between two Jews]. At that point, the allowance and control that camp leaders were trying to create for many decades leans maybe more heavily towards allowance.
There are positives to camp environments being a place where campers can explore their sexualities. There’s definitely a lot of conversation about the negative effects and those are all very, very real. I know people who went through horrible things at a camp and I also know people who experienced it as a very sex-positive atmosphere. I know people in my age range who were able to discover that they were gay or lesbian at camp in safety in comparison to home, so it’s not black and white at all. I hope that my chapter on romance and sexuality can maybe add some historical nuance to the conversation and give people a sense of how this actually happened. Because it happened for a whole bunch of reasons.
I think there’s a consensus view that camp is one of the most “successful” things the Jews do. But it’s hard to see where lessons from camp or camp culture are being imported to the rest of Jewish life. I’m curious what you see as kind of the lessons that Jewish institutions or Jewish communities have taken from camp — or have they not done that?
Every single public engagement I do about my work has boiled down to the question of, well, does it work? Does camp work? Is it successful? And that’s been a question that a lot of social scientists have been interested in. I don’t want to oversimplify that research, but a lot of the ways that they’ve measured success have been things that are not necessarily a given to all Jews as obviously the right way to be a Jew. So, for instance, in the ’90s and early 2000s, at the very least, a lot of research was about how, you know, “XYZ” camp and youth movement were successfully curbing intermarriage. A lot of them also asked campers and former campers how they feel about Israel, and it’s always if they are supportive of Israel in very normative ways, right, giving money visiting, supporting Israel or lobbying for its behalf — then camps have been successful.
I’m not interested in whether camps were successful by those metrics. I’m interested in how we got to the idea that camp should be successful in those ways in the first place. How did we get to those kinds of normative assumptions of like, this is a good Jew; a good Jew marries a Jew; a good Jew supports Israel, no matter what. So what I wanted to do is zoom out from that question of success and show how camp actually functions.
And then the question of “does it work” is really up to the reader. To people who believe that curbing intermarriage is the most important thing, then camps have been somewhat successful in the sense that people who go to these heavily educational camps are less likely to marry out of the faith.
But I am more interested in what actually happened at camp. And in terms of their legacies, I wanted to show how they changed various aspects of American Jewish life, and religion and politics. So I was really able to find how camping was essential in making kind of an Israel-centered Jewish education the norm. I was also able to draw a line between these Yiddish camps over the ’60s and ’70s that closed in the ’80s and contemporary Yiddish. The question of success is a real tricky and political one in a way that a lot of people have not talked about.
And is camp also fun? Because you’re creating a camp experience for your book launch next week.
Camp is fun — for a lot of people. Camp was not fun for everyone. And so I do want to play with that ambivalence at the party, and acknowledge that and also acknowledge that some people loved camp when they were younger and have mixed feelings about it now.
The party is not really a celebration of Jewish summer camp. People will be drinking and having fun and dancing — but I want them to be thinking while also about what is going on and why. How is Tisha B’Av [the fast day that commemorates the destruction of the ancient Jewish temple in Jerusalem that falls at the height of summer] commemorated at camp, for example?
Or what songs are we singing and what do they mean? I think a lot of people when they’re little kids, they learn songs in these Jewish summer camps that they can’t understand and later they maybe learn Hebrew and go, whoa, we were singing what?! My example from Zionist summer camp is singing “Ein Li Eretz Acheret,” or “I Have No Other Country.” We were in America and we obviously have another country! I don’t think anyone in my youth movement actually believes the words “Ein Li Eretz Acheret” because we live in America and people tend to kind of like living in America and most of them do not move to Israel.
So at the party we’ll be working through the fun of it, and at the same time the confusion of it and the ambivalence of it. I want it to be fun, and I also want it to be something that causes people to think.
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Conservative rabbis just told interfaith couples they don’t count — again
Acting improv students learn a fundamental tool called “Yes. . . And.” As you step into a scene, you take what you are given, you don’t ignore it, you don’t try to change it. YES, this is what I have to work with. Then comes the AND: here’s how I build on it.
The guidance issued last week from the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards giving guidance on supporting interfaith families got as far as “Yes,” but dropped the ball on “And.”
The committee’s statement, known as an Omnibus Teshuvah, recommended measures that opened the doors for interfaith families to be included in many life-cycle, religious and communal events — but declined to endorse a measure called for by many families: permitting Conservative rabbis to marry a Jew to someone who is not Jewish.
Let’s start with the “Yes!” The Conservative movement has definitively acknowledged and accepted the reality that many Jewish families are interfaith families. While this has been so for decades, the stated position since 1989 sent them a harsh and strongly disapproving message: “The Conservative movement has been committed to discouraging both the idea and the act of intermarriage.”
The Rabbinical Assembly emphasized its commitment to Jewish law, but included a statement that tolerance might “‘encourage others who are so inclined to intermarry’ without consequence.”
Those consequences were in effect tocut the interfaith couple and family out of Jewish communal life, creating bitterness, pain, and family rupture on the one side, and effectively ensuring that Judaism was diminished on the other.
In fact, one of the anecdotes I often share about why I chose to work with interfaith families and support their decisions is the time that I witnessed a Bat Mitzvah — who was raised in a Jewish home, kept kosher, had respect for Shabbat, and had attended Hebrew School her whole life — stood alone at the Bimah, because her only surviving parent had never converted to Judaism. Instead of being the proud and joyous moment it should have been, she was isolated from her father, the man who had raised her Jewishly and brought her to this milestone. My heart broke for both of them, and my shame of being even partially complicit moved me to examine and change my perspective. In the fullness of time, the RA has realized that creating tsuris at a time of joy is unacceptable. The new guidance explicitly says that that father can stand on the bimah. Mazel tov..
Deserving of equal praise, if not more, is the decision to allow grieving families with Jewish connections avenues to Jewish practices in mourning that provide comfort, strength and faith. This too is progress: A family death is not a time to wag one’s finger and metaphorically tell the mourner that they have to sleep in the bed that they made.
And representing the other end of the life cycle, a rabbi may now congratulate an interfaith family for the birth of a child. Being able to celebrate the advent of a baby into the household should always have been an open avenue of clergy communication, and that it is now is nothing but a positive change.
This turnaround is no small feat and deserves its recognition. The Rabbinical Assembly has identified and addressed many of the strictures and attitudes that previously diminished the enjoyment of a joyous event or added pain for a grief-stricken individual. An interfaith family is no longer subject to “consequences,” to use a term as stated in the 1989 decision — mostly.
All the life-cycle events that interfaith families have struggled with are at long last within the welcome embrace of the Conservative movement, save one: The wedding itself. The fig leaf in the forms of a misheberach (a blessing) by the rabbi either before or after the wedding and the blessing of the home the couple is creating does nothing but call attention to the movement’s disparagement of the creation of interfaith families. The movement is in effect saying: “We are repulsed by your decision to marry outside the strictures of our interpretation of Judaism, but we will not exact revenge upon you for doing so.” Small comfort.
Here is where the “and” can still come in — and where the Conservative movement itself has paved the way for it to happen.
The religious law prohibition against interfaith marriages derives from a verse in Deuteronomy 7:3 “You shall not intermarry with them: do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons.”
This biblical statement has evolved from meaning marriage with the seven nations proscribed in the Torah to general intermarriage.
However, as recently as the 19th century, the renowned scholar Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch noted that the prohibition was based on the presumption that the resulting family would be estranged from the Jewish community. That presumption was based on a self-fulfilling prophecy that an interfaith family would be shunned, and therefore not engage with their community.
The committee of the Rabbinical Assembly fulfills this prophecy as it concludes the new guidance with this hurtful assertion: “The role of Conservative/Masorti clergy on the wedding day remains limited, but that specific day is only one small aspect of the establishment and growth of a family.” Relegating a wedding to be a small aspect to the ‘establishment and growth of a family’ is patently untrue, as evidenced by the great importance society at large, and Jewish society in particular place on this event.
The RA, by sticking with the prohibition against interfaith marriage, is perpetuating the very estrangement that Rav Hirsch posits is the entire motivation for opposing interfaith marriage. Nevertheless, that very foundation, the estrangement from the community, is no longer a barrier unless we want it to be. The Omnibus Teshuvah maps out how an interfaith family can be welcomed into the community and how they can engage in almost every other Jewish life cycle event and communal engagement.
Why then, does the RA persist in condemning the act of interfaith marriage?
The movement itself already has the religious law tools they can use to find a way forward. The arguments the RA used to pave the way for LGTBQ individuals, couples and families to be integrated into Jewish society are equally valid here. The first principle they used was that of Dor dor V’doroshav, that every generation is obligated to interpret the Torah in their terms — in effect, that the accumulated knowledge and experience of Judaism over time has bearing on rabbinical decisions. In terms of interfaith marriage, the accumulated knowledge and experience is demonstrating that interfaith families retain a Jewish identity and desire to remain a part of the community. Intentional interfaith families show dedication and great consideration to incorporating Judaism into their lives, and that this is not a new phenomenon.
In a decision two decades ago embracing LGBTQ Jews, Rabbi Elliot Dorff and colleagues leaned on the concept of human dignity, kavod ha briot, quoting the Talmudic stricture: “So great is human dignity that it supersedes a negative commandment of the Torah.” They point out that living in humiliation violates this idea.
Perhaps most powerfully, we read that homosexual marriage is “understood to be a profound desire by gay and lesbian Jews to sanctify their lives and establish faithful families guided by the light of Torah.” Should that “profound desire” within an interfaith marriage not carry equal weight?
Today, by continuing to deny legitimacy to an interfaith marriage, the RA relegates the couple to a lesser status, belittling them for following their emotional guidance, and denying them their full humanity.
The RA has issued some remarkable guidance in this Omnibus Responsum. YES! The many parents and grandparents who will receive with gratitude the congratulations on the birth of their children, the families who will be allowed to be united at the bimah at a B’Mitzvah, the mourners who will find strength and comfort from clergy during their time of grief — they will all be positively affected by the new permissions and guidance. These are concessions, but important ones.
In spite of the limits of this guidance I hold out hope for the “AND” that is to come. Not just the recognition that interfaith marriages happen, but the inherent truth that they can be a joyful part of the Jewish experience and a positive force in their community.
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Justice Department pledges action on antisemitic hate crimes in New York as it recognizes Ari Halberstam murder as civil rights case
More than 30 years after Ari Halberstam was killed in one of New York’s deadliest antisemitic attacks, the U.S. Justice Department has formally acknowledged that if his murder had happened today, it would be investigated as a federal hate crime and civil rights violation.
At the same time, the Justice Department also pledged that it would be devoting resources to investigating and prosecuting hate crimes across New York as antisemitic attacks continue to climb in New York City.
NYPD statistics released this week show that in the first seven months of 2026, anti-Jewish incidents rose 8.5%, and 57% of the reported hate crimes in the city involved Jewish victims. In addition, anti-Jewish incidents increased 53% in July compared with the same month last year.
Halberstam was 16 when he was murdered in 1994 when Rashid Baz, a Lebanese-born cab driver, opened fire on a van carrying Lubavitcher yeshiva students across the Brooklyn Bridge. Baz was convicted of murder and sentenced to 141 years in prison, where he died in 2023.
Because the attack was not immediately recognized as an act of terrorism and later rejected as part of a conspiracy, Ari’s mother, Devorah Halberstam, for decades fought to have her son’s killing recognized as an antisemitic hate crime and a federal civil rights matter.
“There is no question that if the murder of your son, Ari Halberstam, had occurred today, we would investigate it and seek to prosecute it as a federal hate crime,” wrote former U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton in a letter dated July 23, one of his final acts before becoming director of national intelligence on Monday. The acknowledgment came weeks after Clayton met with Devorah Halberstam, who co-founded the Jewish Children’s Museum in Brooklyn. It expands on remarks Clayton delivered in June at an NYU Law School conference on combating hate crimes. “I have discussed these matters with my successor, Jamie McDonald, and we are fully aligned,” Clayton wrote.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office did not immediately respond to questions about what specific steps the office is taking under McDonald’s leadership to address the recent increase in antisemitic hate crimes across the city.
Halberstam, who is credited with helping draft New York state’s first anti-terrorism laws and has spent decades facilitating the training of law enforcement officers on combating terrorism and hate crimes, said the letter gives her hope that the federal government remains committed to confronting antisemitic violence.
“With hatred on the rise nationally and internationally, I am deeply concerned about the safety of Jewish New Yorkers,” she said in a statement. “I will continue to fight to ensure that no other mother has to bury her child because of hatred, as I did.”
Earlier this year, Halberstam hosted Mayor Zohran Mamdani at the Jewish Children’s Museum in Brooklyn. Since taking office, Mamdani has come under scrutiny from Jewish leaders over his handling of antisemitism and anti-Israel protests. Some Israeli officials have accused the mayor of fueling antisemitism through his sharp criticism of Israel.
In a statement on Monday, Mamdani called the rise in antisemitic hate crimes “unacceptable” and pointed to an 800% increase in funding for the city’s Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes. “The work to uproot antisemitism out of this city is one that will continue,” Mamdani said, “ until we see hate crimes come to an end in the city.”
JTA contributed to this report
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Lawn signs for Abdul, door knocking for Haley: Michigan Jews split in Senate Democratic primary
(JTA) — OAK PARK, Michigan – Karen Bick has spent the days leading up to Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary fielding calls from Jewish friends urging her to vote for U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens.
Despite the pressure, Bick, 69, said she plans to sit out the race altogether. As much as she is compelled by the campaign of Stevens’ progressive opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, his accusations that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza have kept her from voting for him. Stevens’ campaign, she said, hasn’t given her enough reason to vote for her instead.
“I am very pro-Israel. I’m not pro-Netanyahu, which is part of the whole thing. A lot of my friends who are Jewish have been calling me, trying to get Haley, but it’s like they’re looking at one issue,” said Bick, a Jewish resident of Oak Park, a suburb of Detroit. “I don’t think that Israel should take precedence over all the other issues just because somebody’s pro-Israel.”
Bick’s ambivalence reflects a divide among Michigan Jews in a primary where Israel has emerged as one of the sharpest contrasts between the candidates. Stevens has served in the House since 2019 as a reliable supporter of Israel, while El-Sayed, a former county health official, has made opposition to U.S. support for Israel and AIPAC’s spending in the race a hallmark of his campaign.
That doesn’t mean El-Sayed is without Jewish supporters.
Barbara Weinberg Barefield, a longtime Detroit resident who helped found the city’s Jewish Voice for Peace chapter, has been campaigning for El-Sayed since the beginning of the race, including organizing fundraisers, phone banking and canvassing. She also helped organize “Jews for Abdul,” a group of Jewish supporters working to elect him.
Weinberg Barefield, 76, said that El-Sayed’s use of the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza was an essential component of her support for him.
“We are trying to let people know that there are many Jewish people that support Abdul and support his objectives and support his voice,” Weinberg Barefield said. “Justice, equality, and freedom are part of the fabric of me being a Jew and the message that we put forth for ‘Jews for Abdul:’ that he is a candidate that represents our morality, our ethics, and frankly, I think these are the things that most people in this country want.”
Suzanne Levin, an 83-year-old Jewish Michigander, initially supported Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow, whose withdrawal from the race left progressive Jews in the state facing a political dilemma.
For Levin, the choice quickly became clear. She got an El-Sayed lawn sign and “Jews for Abdul” t-shirt and threw her support behind his campaign.
In doing so, Levin has rejected accusations from Stevens and some Jewish Democratic leaders in the state that El-Sayed’s rhetoric and associations have crossed the line into antisemitism.
“They believe all this crap about El-Sayed, that he’s antisemitic, and I have listened to so many of his talks, and when they ask him ‘should there be an Israel,’ he says there should be a place where people could all be safe and and people should be okay,” Levin said.
Other Jewish Democrats have reached a starkly different conclusion about El-Sayed, who has said the Israeli government is as “evil” as Hamas and often accuses Israel of committing “genocide” in Gaza while advocating that U.S. aid to Israel be diverted to domestic priorities.
Halie Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, which has endorsed Stevens, said that she had been “concerned” by El-Sayed’s response following the March attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan.
At the time, El-Sayed sparked outcry by putting out a statement that discussed Israel’s war in Lebanon, where the attacker’s brother was killed. Soifer said she believed El-Sayed “equivocated and provided a justification for a situation, which there was no justification.”
“If he wants to be senator of a state that has such a large Jewish population, he must demonstrate an ability to stand with that community as we face the rise of antisemitism,” Soifer said. “On that issue in particular, Haley has been a leader in Congress.” The state has close to 130,000 Jews.
Soifer said her group’s volunteers had put out close to 10,000 calls to Michigan voters urging them to back Stevens.
Zach Nessel, a 23-year-old Michigan State University graduate and the secretary of the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus, shared many of Soifer’s concerns as he knocked on doors for Stevens in Oak Park Monday.
“I’m absolutely concerned about his rhetoric,” said Nessel, whose mother is Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel. “I think he’s spending more of his time trying to ostracize pro-Israel Democrats than he is looking to fight Trump, and that’s what I see amongst a lot of his allies.”
Nessel said he had been especially concerned by El-Sayed’s campaign event at his alma mater in April alongside Hasan Piker, an anti-Israel streamer whose rhetoric has been called antisemitic by many Jewish groups and leaders.
“The fact that my former Dem Club is hosting an antisemite that has positive things to say about Hezbollah, a U.S. designated terrorist organization that has killed Americans, that’s horrifying,” Nessel said. “And the fact that you know Abdul is campaigning with someone like that is insane.”
Nessel said that he had visited over 500 homes across the Detroit area to champion Stevens. During his visits, he said voters rarely brought up Israel or AIPAC on their own.
But Nessel said he worried that a potential El-Sayed victory Tuesday could encourage other candidates to adopt similar tactics, with consequences for Jewish participation in the Democratic Party.
“Most people, they want to fight Trump and they want to make things more affordable,” Nessel said. “And if this sort of commotion is successful, then they’ll keep on doing it, and that’ll make it hard for members of the Jewish community to continue to participate in our party.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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