US Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) leaves a meeting of the House Republican Conference in the US Capitol on Wednesday, June 4, 2025. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect

US Rep. Thomas Massie was defeated in Tuesday’s Republican primary by Trump-backed challenger Ed Gallrein in a closely watched race in Kentucky widely viewed as a referendum on party loyalty and US support for Israel.

In his concession remarks, Massie drew immediate attention when he said he had to “find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv” to concede, a remark widely interpreted as a reference to what he and his supporters have described as substantial pro-Israel backing for Gallrein’s campaign.

“I would’ve come out sooner, but I had to call my opponent and concede. And it took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv,” Massie said.

Gallrein, a retired Navy SEAL and political newcomer, garnered approximately 54.9 percent of the vote compared to Massie’s 45.1 percent, emerging victorious by nearly a 10-point margin. With the defeat, Massie will depart Congress at the conclusion of his 7th term.

Gallrein was endorsed by US President Donald Trump and benefited from significant support from pro-Israel donors and aligned advocacy networks. The race attracted national attention, with Trump-aligned groups and conservative super PACs spending roughly $19 million in support of Gallrein’s campaign. For many observers, Gallrein’s victory underscores both Trump’s continued influence in Republican primaries and the party’s generally unified stance on Israel policy.

Massie, long one of the most independent voices in the House Republican Conference, had frequently broken with GOP leadership on foreign policy issues, including US military aid to Israel, funding for the Iron Dome missile defense system, and the Iran war. Massie also drew criticism from pro-Israel groups for opposing aid packages, skipping Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress, and accusing Israel of targeting civilian infrastructure during military operations in Gaza and Lebanon while omitting that terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah embed military infrastructure within civilian areas.

Beyond issues of foreign policy, Massie also drew sharp criticism from Trump after he co-sponsored and pushed for legislation to release the Justice Department’s files related to the late financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein alongside prominent House Democrats, leading the president to frame Massie as a party disruptor and disloyal Republican.

The race unfolded amid growing tensions within the Republican Party over antisemitism, foreign policy, and support for Israel. Though older Republican voters continue to support Israel in substantial numbers, a growing number of polls indicate that younger Republican voters are far more skeptical of the US-Israel alliance, with many wanting to end aid to Israel and cease foreign military campaigns. Critics accused Massie of amplifying antisemitic rhetoric within segments of the Republican coalition by engaging in certain behaviors, such as making repeated appearances on the podcast of Tucker Carlson, a political pundit frequently accused by critics of promoting antisemitism.

In the days leading up to the election, Massie faced mounting criticism over a series of remarks and associations that Jewish organizations and pro-Israel activists condemned as antisemitic.

On Friday, he declared the election “a referendum on whether Israel gets to buy seats in Congress.”

Over the weekend, he invited antisemitic social media personality Ryan Matta to his home for a meet-and-greet event. He posed for a photo with Matta wearing a shirt emblazoned with the phrase “American Reich,” a direct reference to the Nazi regime. Massie has not commented on the incident or distanced himself from Matta.

Massie also came under fire over an advertisement released by a pro-Massie super PAC targeting billionaire Republican donor Paul Singer, a prominent Jewish supporter of pro-Israel causes who has backed efforts to defeat the incumbent. The ad characterized Singer as a “pro-trans billionaire” and displayed a rainbow-colored Star of David behind his image — imagery critics condemned as antisemitic.

Further, on Sunday, Massie lambasted the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), an organization that aims to increase the number of Jews within the Republican Party, accusing the group of using Gallrein as a “puppet” and claiming they are “running his race.”

Gallrein campaigned on a platform aligned closely with Trump’s foreign policy approach, emphasizing continued US security assistance to Israel and a more traditional Republican posture on Middle East policy. His campaign was boosted by outside groups and donors supportive of a strongly pro-Israel agenda.

The outcome reinforced the increasingly narrow political space within the GOP for lawmakers who break with Trump and the party’s dominant pro-Israel posture.

Once known for his libertarian-leaning independence, Massie increasingly found himself isolated as GOP voters and donors coalesced around candidates aligned with both Trump and pro-Israel priorities. The race also reflects a broader trend in Republican primaries, where alignment with Trump and with pro-Israel policy positions has become a key predictor for viability in many competitive districts.

In a statement, the RJC congratulated Gallrein and accused Massie of “trafficking in antisemitism and bottom-of-the-barrel nativism at a time when Jew-hatred is on the rise,” calling Massie’s conduct “wildly unacceptable and outrageous from an elected member of Congress.”

Anti-Israel demonstration at Johns Hopkins University, which has one of the best medical schools in the world, in Baltimore, Maryland, US, April 30, 2024. Photo: Robyn Stevens Brody/SIPA USA via Reuters Connect

Jewish community advocates on Wednesday called on the US Congress to use its lawmaking power to stop health care unions from spreading antisemitism in the workplace through anti-Zionist advocacy, arguing unions have wasted resources and countenanced flagrant discrimination of Jews throughout the field of medicine.

Addressing the House Education and Workforce Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions, lawyers, health workers, and civil rights activists shared a stream of claims alleging that union bosses have effectively converted labor unions into political action committees for the anti-Zionist movement. The consequence, they argued, has been to embolden those who mistreat Jews as a “proxy” for Israel, leading to incidents of bigotry which would be decried were they perpetrated against other minority groups.

“The issue is not whether health care workers may hold political views,” Deena Margolies, litigation staff attorney for the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, told the committee. “The problem arises when health care unions use their authority and resources to promote antisemitic campaigns outside their labor mission. Jewish and Israeli health care professionals are then placed in an impossible position: The union that is supposed to represent them is also helping to create the hostile work environment they must endure.”

Anti-Zionist union activity even affects patient care, Margolies added, noting that some mental health practitioners now offer services which they say can “decolonize” patients of pro-Zionist viewpoints. The enterprise is predicated on the idea that Zionism, which an overwhelming majority of Jews say is central to Jewish identity, is a pathology.

“Congress can and should act,” she said.

Dr. Jacob Agronin, a cardiology fellow at Temple University Hospital, told Congress that Jewish workers should have the right to permanently suspend payment of union dues.

“What I would hope for is the option for those that disagree with this union on a fundamental level not be compelled to pay dues to this union,” Agronin said. “I think it’s absurd that the union can call for blatant discrimination against Israeli colleagues and then compel those same colleagues to pay them.”

The Algemeiner has reported extensively on how a wave of antisemitism swept health care following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel. So widespread was the problem that it became the subject of a 2025 study which found that 62.8 percent of Jewish health care professionals employed by campus-based medical center reported experiencing antisemitism, a far higher rate than those working in private practice and community hospitals. Fueling the rise in hate, the study noted, were repeated failures of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives to educate workers about antisemitism, increasing the likelihood of antisemitic discrimination.

Months earlier, the StandWithUs Data & Analytics Department found through its own survey that nearly 40 percent of Jewish American health care professionals have encountered antisemitism in the workplace, either as witnesses or victims. A substantial number of the 645 Jewish health workers who responded to its questions also said they were subject to “social and professional isolation,” and 26.4 percent felt “unsafe or threatened.”

Outside the US, the crisis of antisemitism in health care has manifested in medical settings around the world, including in South America, Australia, and across Europe.

As for union antisemitism, the subject continues to be a focus of Jewish civil rights activism.

Earlier this month, the Brandeis Center filed a civil rights complaint alleging that the National Education Association proliferated antisemitism across its interstate network of chapters, offices, and K-12 schools by systemically enacting policies which resulted in Jews being blocked from promotions, mentorship opportunities, and participation in social justice initiatives. The disturbing document went further, arguing that antisemitic discrimination at the NEA is more than an invisible, bureaucratic force which disappears Jews from governance roles. According to the complaint, it is a force applied by anti-Zionists who lead mobs against Jewish delegates attending union conferences; perpetrate acts of physical intimidation; and delete guidance on teaching students about the Holocaust from official documents.

“The NEA’s conduct is both completely illegal and morally unjustifiable,” Brandeis Center chairman and founder Kenneth Marcus said in a statement announcing the action. “This is exactly the type of discrimination against which Title VII was designed to protect.”

In New York City, the federal government is investigating reports that members of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) are procuring students for membership in anti-Zionist study groups teaching that Israelis are “genocidal white supremacists” and that Hamas terrorists are “martyrs.” The initiative there is funded by a nonprofit titled “Rethinking Schools,” which itself has been a recipient of exorbitant financial gifts from the NEA.

Meanwhile, students at Columbia University recently escalated their fight against a graduate workers union dominated by anti-Israel advocates by filing a federal complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

The students allege that the bosses who run Student Workers of Columbia (SWC), an affiliate of United Auto Workers (UAW), devote more energy and resources to pursuing “radical policy proposals” than improving occupational conditions. In collective bargaining negotiations, it allegedly pressures the university to adopt the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel and to enact other measures, such as ending its partnership with the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and closing a dual-degree program with Tel Aviv University.

“All of this adds up to a union that is out of control, and I note that they don’t have an agenda against the mullahs in Iran, against the dictator who runs Turkey, against the Chinese communists who oppress their citizens or the North Koreans. But they have an agenda against Israel, the one democracy in the Middle East,” Glenn Taubman, staff attorney for the National Right to Work Foundation (NRTW), told The Algemeiner during an interview at the time.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

Pink chalk outlines an approximately 20-foot-long rectangle on the sidewalk outside the Park Slope Food Coop, demarcating a sort of free speech zone to separate two camps of activists from the business of the organic grocery store within.

Inside the pink line, two opposing groups have taken root in recent weeks, building up to a long-brewing May 26 vote over a proposal to boycott Israeli products that has riven the Brooklyn institution’s roughly 16,000 members.

When the Forward visited last Friday, members of the group, PSFC for Palestine, were handing out fliers and urging members to vote yes. The other group, Coop4Unity, was handing out opposing fliers urging shoppers to “bring back cooperation” and “stop polarization” — that is, to vote against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions resolution.

It is a largely symbolic measure, given that the Coop only carries a handful of items imported from Israel; at least one, Al Arz tahini, was founded by an Israeli Arab in Nazareth. (It was bought in 2022 by the Sugat Group, an Israeli company.) Yet the fight is resonating beyond the coop, spurring a sharp sermon from a progressive rabbi and the larger attention of the boycott-Israel movement.

The pink lines forced the groups close enough together that some members there to shop or work were confused, calling over their shoulders to someone trying to hand them a flier “I’ve already signed on,” before realizing they meant to direct their comment at the other group.

One older member walked up to a man handing out fliers against the boycott wearing a hat emblazoned with the logo for the Maccabi Tel Aviv football club, which features a large Star of David. “I think I disagree with everything you’re doing,” the shopper told the man in the Tel Aviv hat in a serious tone, before realizing that they were in fact on the same side of the issue.

Still others seemed deeply frustrated by the drama’s very existence. “It’s a grocery store!” shouted one woman over her shoulder as she walked in the doors.

It’s not just a grocery store, though. The Coop, long a charmingly eccentric neighborhood institution, has a certain outsized cultural power. It has been spoofed by the likes of Broad City and The Daily Show. And it has become a microcosm of the debates over Israel that are splintering the wider progressive movement.

This is far from the first time the Park Slope Food Coop has been embroiled in exactly this issue; in 2012, when the coop first voted on a BDS motion — which was a vote on whether to even hold a vote on BDS — the line to get in was so long it took almost an hour for everyone to file in. The proposal didn’t pass then, but has come up in various forms regularly since.

Boycotts are par for the course at the Coop. The store, which is open only to members who must work shifts in order to shop, has regular general meetings where members can bring issues up for discussion and voting, whether politics or loudspeaker volume. They have endorsed numerous product boycotts in the past, including from South Africa during apartheid, Chile under Pinochet, U.S.-produced grapes in solidarity with United Farm Workers and Domino sugar in solidarity with striking workers.

But since Oct. 7, the temperature of the debate has risen to a new level of animosity that blew up publicly with remarks by a member during the Coop’s most recent general meeting.

“We can’t keep making the same mistakes between what we did with the Nazis and what we did with other hateful groups,” said the participant, during discussion on the vote. “Jewish supremacism is a problem in this country and we will move forward as a country with or without this Coop.”

People at the meeting applauded.

The remarks stunned and disturbed some Jewish members.

“To hear everyone start clapping was pretty jarring. To hear that in real life — to feel all the horrible antisemitic and anti-Zionist abuse that you get on line in real life,” said Ramon Maislen, who attended the meeting and is part of Coop4Unity. “It’s a hostile environment for Jewish members.”

The Coop’s staff, among the few paid to run the operation amid the thousands of volunteers, say the stakes spill over into the survival of the Coop itself.

“Conflicts much bigger than the Coop are playing out in General Meetings,” wrote Joe Szladek, the Coop’s current general manager, in an email to membership, “putting real strain on our governance and on the Coop as a whole.”

The vote

The Coop has always been a political project for many of its members, and its 53-year history has been punctuated by animated debates over decisions from whether to start selling meat (yes) and beer (yes, but only if it’s warm), to whether to accept credit and debit cards (debit yes, credit no).

The Israel boycott resolution has two prongs: One would require the Coop to boycott Israeli-made products “until Israel complies with international law in its treatment of Palestinians.” It is paired with a measure to lower the voting threshold to pass boycott measures from a 75% supermajority to a simple 50% plus one majority.

This, some Coop members contend, is against the Coop’s fundamental ethos of cooperation and a machination to ensure the boycott passes.

One of the Coop’s co-founders, Joe Holtz, opposes the boycott. Holtz retired in 2024 after 50 years as the store’s general manager, one of its few paid roles, and is now hoping to step back into leadership — he is running for the Coop board because, as he wrote in his election statement, “the historic governance system is frankly not working well anymore.”

Other Coop4Unity members say the fight is about the Coop’s health. If members feel the Coop has become too political, longtime member Barbara Mazor said, they will leave, putting the Coop in danger of losing revenue and not meeting payroll.

“The question isn’t what you do think about BDS and what do you think about Israel-Palestine,” she said. “We’re fiduciaries!”

Others, including Alyce Barr — who joined the Coop at age 23 in 1978, just five years after its founding, and is a member of PSFC for Palestine — believe the opposite is true. Barr pointed out that the supermajority has only been required for boycotts since 2016, and arose as a reaction to previous debates over BDS. And, she said, the near-100% agreement on past boycotts was the result of an in-person voting requirement that meant only a small, motivated group was voting at all, hardly representing the entire membership.

“Saying that all the members agreed and that every other boycott was a supermajority and now all these people who support Palestine are making a new thing — it’s a bubbe meise, a lie.”

Tensions erupt

The Coop fight has spilled over into the larger community. On a recent Shabbat, Rabbi Rachel Timoner, a Coop members who leads Parks Slope’s large Reform synagogue, Congregation Beth Elohim, gave a sermon forcefully exhorting against the BDS resolutions, even as she repeatedly emphasized her own support for Palestinian rights and said some members might support the Coop’s boycott.

She asked attendees at the service to meet her after to discuss how to get out the vote against BDS, saying she will resign if the resolution passes, and predicted that many other Jewish members will too. Timoner was struck by the “Jewish supremacism” comment, comparing it to Nazi rhetoric.

“Why is this petty, annoying fight in our neighborhood grocery store worth so much time and effort?” she said in her sermon. “Because it is part of something much larger. In the end it is about antisemitism. A real and rising threat which ultimately carries existential danger both for Jews and every society in which it takes hold.”

Barr called the rabbi’s remarks “fearmongering.” As for the rhetoric of Jewish supremacy, Barr referred me to a statement on the term put out by Jewish Voice for Peace, which defines the term narrowly as the belief that “Jews are superior to other groups, in this case Palestinians,” and refers to its promulgation by far-right Jewish groups like the Jewish Defense League, founded by Meir Kahane.

As a Jew — one who grew up in the Borscht Belt in a town where a cross was burned on the borders — Barr said she does not see how something being sold, or not sold, at the Coop would make her unsafe. She said that she has felt upset for years at seeing Israeli products on the shelves, yet hasn’t quit over an issue in nearly 50 years of membership.

“We can have a conscience, we can disagree,” Barr said. “One way or another, we can go on and be a Coop.”

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