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Few Jews, many aliens: Inside Roswell’s vanishing Jewish community
(JTA) — ROSWELL, New Mexico — If it weren’t for an Ashkenazi Jew named Stanton T. Friedman, the world might have long ago forgotten what’s come to be known simply as the “Roswell incident.”
Instead, countless books, documentaries and made-for-TV dramas have explored the 1947 discovery of mysterious materials found on a New Mexico ranch that Friedman argued were the relics of extraterrestrials. A wave of successors, including a prominent Israeli-American physicist, continue to press the case for alien contact. And this dusty desert town has been transformed according to an unusual paradox: It’s shaped by conspiracy theories, yet is home to virtually no Jews.
Roswell’s only synagogue, Congregation B’nai Israel, closed up and moved to Albuquerque five years ago.
“They didn’t have a rabbi and they only met twice a month, on Fridays,” said Leslie Lawner, who made the move with her husband in 2020, reducing Roswell’s tiny Jewish population by two. “There was really nothing we could do for them.”
The Lawners left behind a town that is largely defined by what happened in the summer of 1947, when local rancher W.W. “Mac” Brazen found rubber strips, tin foil, thick paper and other debris on his property and shared the material with Sheriff George Wilcox of Roswell. The sheriff brought the unusual artifacts to the attention of the Roswell Army Air Field, which on July 9 of that year announced that it had recovered the remains of a “flying disc.”
The outrageous RAAF claim was quickly denounced as erroneous by local military officials who said the debris was actually the wreckage of a crashed weather balloon and related equipment.
That would have been the end of it, if not for Friedman, a nuclear physicist and highly regarded “ufologist” who revisited the incident in the 1970s, devoting the rest of his life to proving the existence of flying saucers. In 1987, Friedman — who died six years ago — told the New York Times that federal officials had engaged in a “cosmic Watergate” to cover up the truth.
Now, this remote city of 47,000, located east of the White Sands Missile Range and about a three-hour drive southeast of Albuquerque, is known for one thing and one thing only: flying saucers.
Here in Roswell, those saucers are ubiquitous — beginning with one atop the “Welcome to Roswell” sign east of town along U.S. 380. There’s also a UFO-shaped McDonald’s, along with a bug-eyed little green alien relaxing under an umbrella in front of the nearby Western Inn.
Another extraterrestrial creature reclines on a bed in the display window of White Mattress, not to mention yet another, even more tacky, E.T. proudly holding up the Dunkin Donuts marquee along Main Street. Not surprisingly, Martians are a common theme in Halloween displays here.
In 1997, the Air Force — attempting to dispel rumors that had persisted for decades — released a 231-page report concluding that alien bodies recovered at the Roswell crash site weren’t aliens at all, but dummies used in parachute tests. It also said that the “spacecraft” that had fallen to Earth on Brazen’s ranch was really an Air Force balloon used in a top-secret program code-named Project Mogul to monitor the atmosphere for evidence of Soviet nuclear tests.
Asked at the time if the new report would finally put the matter to rest, retired Air Force Col. Richard Weaver told NBC’s Today show said: “No, I doubt it. This has become a religion to many people. It’s almost a cult. Certainly, an unbelievable financial opportunity for many folks. So I think this is going to endure.”
Now, the town has taken on added prominence with the Pentagon’s recent establishment of an All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office. President Donald Trump is a known skeptic of UFOs. But in a 2020 campaign video, he said, “Roswell’s a very interesting place with a lot of people that would like to know what’s going on.”
In a town forged around the religion of aliens, Jewish life is virtually nonexistent. There aren’t enough Jews here to make a minyan — let alone support a synagogue — and the few who did live here have mostly died off or moved away.
Lawner and her husband Bob rarely attended services at Congregation B’nai Israel, located a block from their house at 8th and Washington, during their 27 years in Roswell. But Lawner did help develop a curriculum on Holocaust studies for Sidney Gutierrez Middle School, which she helped found and where she taught for 17 years.
It was an area of inquiry that overlapped with one outlandish but persistent theory about the Roswell incident. Annie Jacobsen claims in her 2012 book, “Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base,” that just before the Roswell crash, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin recruited Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele — the infamous Auschwitz “angel of death” — to create “grotesque, child-size aviators” to pilot a plane in order to trigger widespread panic throughout the United States.
The obsession with aliens has divided Jewish voices. An Orthodox Jewish rabbinical authority, Rabbi Pini Dunner of Beverly Hills, California, has called the Roswell incident “nonsense.”
“Most people don’t believe any of this, nor, for that matter, do we entertain the claims of those who maintain that the Apollo moon landings were all an elaborate hoax, or that Denver International Airport stands above an underground city that serves as a headquarters for the masonically inspired New World Order,” Dunner wrote in an online post. “It’s not that any of these conspiracy stories can be categorically disproved, but we feel they do not need to be. The question is: why would any intelligent person believe such nonsense to be true?”
But some Jews are attached to the idea that aliens are out there — including one of the most prominent scientists making the case today. The Israeli-American physicist Avi Loeb, who runs a lab at Harvard University, argues that some objects and phenomena in space cannot be explained except as evidence of extraterrestrial technology.
Loeb has emphasized the appeal of aliens and space exploration on Jewish grounds. “It is reasonable to imagine the absence of antisemitism in interstellar space,” he wrote earlier this year, noting that anything traveling from the other side of the Milky Way would have had to set out before there were Jews.
This month, Loeb released new data that he said suggested that an object in space that will come within 269 million kilometers of Earth later this year may have extraterrestrial origins. The resulting frenzy has embroiled U.S. transportation officials and even Kim Kardashian.
Loeb’s argument is rooted in theoretical physics. But here in Roswell, aliens are experienced in concrete terms. Factual or not, this past July, Roswell marked 78 years since the mysterious 1947 event, with an annual Roswell UFO Festival that lures thousands of tourists from all 50 states and beyond.
Every year, sidewalk vendors do a brisk business selling funnel cakes, alien salt-and-pepper shakers and other trinkets, while tourists happily pay $5 each to visit the downtown International UFO Museum and Research Center.
“These exhibits are designed not to convince anyone to believe one way or another about their subjects,” says a sign at the museum’s entrance. “Visitors are encouraged to ask questions.”
Local merchants don’t seem to care much what really transpired that night in 1947. They’re just grateful for all the desperately needed cash this festival generates.
“Roswell didn’t have a tourist industry and one of my friends was telling me about this UFO stuff. So we started the UFO Festival,” said Tim Jennings, the town’s mayor. “I don’t know what happened, but something definitely happened. It’s not unreasonable. We live out in the middle of the desert, and without a lot of bright lights, at night you can see a lot.”
Added Todd Wildermuth, Roswell’s public information officer: “I don’t have an opinion about it. I haven’t really given it any deep thought.”
To say Roswell is remote is a vast understatement. Some 140 miles from the nearest interstate highway, the town is also unbearably hot and dry. One quickly learns not to go anywhere without a water bottle; it’s even better to stay inside where there’s air-conditioning.
Roswell is certainly not the kind of place to visit if you don’t like reptiles and other poisonous creatures. At the local Home Depot, two of the biggest-selling items, along with plywood and barbecue grills, are Harris Scorpion Killer and Snake-A-Way pellets.
These days, only a handful of Jews remain in Roswell. A Google search for “Roswell” and “Jewish” reveals three synagogues in Roswell, Georgia — a suburb of Atlanta — one of which is a Messianic church.
“There was never a large community here,” said Cymantha Liakos, a Philadelphia native who wasn’t raised as a Jew but recently took a DNA test and discovered she has Jewish ancestry. Liakos, a former geologist, settled in Roswell with her husband, William, a doctor.
Her 23-year-old son, John, a graduate of the nearby New Mexico Military Institute, visited Israel in 2022 as the first Roswell native (and quite possibly the last) ever to participate in Birthright, the program that takes young Jews to Israel on free trips.
Today, the corner structure that had housed B’nai Israel since its establishment in the 1940s is a medical clinic.
“The building was deteriorating and there was no one within the group who knew how to keep it up,” said Judy Stubbs, B’nai Israel’s former treasurer. “Since there was so few of us left, we decided it was in our best interests to sell it.”
The community’s Torah, meanwhile, has found a new home at Congregation Nahalat Shalom in Albuquerque, New Mexico’s largest city and home to many of the state’s estimated 25,000 Jews. In 2018, Roswell’s dwindling Jewish community agreed to “indefinitely loan” Nahalat Shalom the sacred scroll, which had been rescued from a small town in Czechoslovakia by the Karnowsky family during World War II.
In 2018, Nahalat Shalom’s spiritual leader, Rabbi Min Kantrowitz, led a special Simchat Torah dedication service in the presence of Kathryn Karnowsky and her Jewish friends from Roswell.
So what do the handful of Jews remaining in Roswell think about the 1947 “incident” that made their town famous?
“My husband is from a ranching family with longtime roots in this area, and all of their ranch neighbors strongly believe it is not a hoax,” said Liakos. “There was an incident, and a government cover-up. Both of us are scientists, and we’re not shrugging it off as ridiculous.”
Stubbs, a longtime resident of Roswell and former city council member, agrees with her friend.
“People ask me that all the time,” said Stubbs, who remains active in politics. “With all the continued hype, I believe something must have happened. A lot of people come here to find out, but no one has the answer. Unless the federal government chooses to open the records, it’s a question that will never be answered.”
The post Few Jews, many aliens: Inside Roswell’s vanishing Jewish community appeared first on The Forward.
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Is AIPAC a ‘monster’ that decides Congressional races? The data shows otherwise
At a rally for progressive candidates last week, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani called AIPAC “monsters.” The pro-Israel lobby, he told the crowd, uses “millions in dark money to accomplish a single goal, to preserve their power so that they can turn us against one another.”
This is not an insulated idea. Graham Platner, Maine’s Democratic Senate nominee, was proud to stress that he was a candidate AIPAC would never endorse starting with one of his very first online ads.
On the left — and, more quietly, the right — versions of the “monster” narrative are spreading, suggesting that AIPAC is an electoral force with bottomless pockets that decides who serves in Congress.
The truth is quite different. To find it, I pulled both primary and general election outcomes for every Congressional candidate that AIPAC’s traditional PAC backed in 2022 and 2024 — 788 candidates across the two cycles — from the Federal Electoral Commission. I ran the same exercise for 17 peer single-issue PACs, including the NRA and Planned Parenthood.
The data shows that while AIPAC has an impressive operation, its electoral results do not outperform those of any other major single-issue lobby. AIPAC itself cites a 95% win rate on endorsed candidates as evidence of its political muscle, but that high level of success is partially attributable to the fact that, according to my sample, some 86% percent of AIPAC’s endorsements go to sitting members of Congress. And incumbents win about 95% of general elections — regardless of who funds them.
What’s more remarkable than the number of elections AIPAC wins is how often it gets credit or blame — depending on your politics — for deciding races.
When former Rep. Cori Bush lost her 2024 primary against an AIPAC-backed challenger, AIPAC was widely cited as influencing the race — even though even though Bush spent much of 2024 fighting a federal investigation into her campaign-fund spending, and lost to Wesley Bell, a former St. Louis County prosecutor with the kind of district-wide name recognition no PAC can buy. That same year, Rep. Summer Lee, who had been at least as outspoken on Israel’s conduct in Gaza as Bush, beat AIPAC’s preferred candidate in the Pittsburgh primary by more than 20 points.
Somehow, the narrative that AIPAC rather than voters decides Congressional races wasn’t overturned by Lee’s win. It’s almost like people who want to believe that Jews control politics in the United States have a bias toward seeing instances that on the surface may appear to confirm that belief — and toward ignoring those that contest it.
When the group’s main PAC supported candidates who were not yet sitting members of Congress, their picks won about 91% of primaries. This sounds high, indeed, but other major lobbies do even better. For instance, lobbies including the NRA, Sierra Club, and Planned Parenthood all boast success rates over the same period of more than 95%.
AIPAC is, in this context, indistinguishable in terms of its win rate than all other lobbies.
Perhaps an even more important test is tight races — primaries decided by 10 percentage points or fewer. Here, AIPAC wins about 79% of the time. This is comparable to the win rate of all other lobbies I saw, but not by far the largest. For instance, the NRA’s win rate in these tight races is 84%, the Sierra Club 88%, and Planned Parenthood 83%.
So it is true that AIPAC plays a real role in American politics. What gets missed amid the excess scrutiny on AIPAC: that role is, in effect, no different from that of any other lobby. In fact, AIPAC is in practice often slightly less effective than many of its peers.
That truth helps make clear how dangerous the disproportionate attention AIPAC receives from the media, and from candidates opposed to its priorities, can be. To single out a well-funded lobby with many Jewish members, and to cast it as the secret hand behind every contested race, isn’t just wrong on the data. It rhymes with the oldest antisemitic trope there is: that Jews quietly run the world.
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Feds open antisemitism investigation into National Education Association
(JTA) — The Trump administration is launching an antisemitism investigation into the National Education Association, the influential public school teachers union, over purported employment discrimination.
The probe is based on allegations that Jewish members of the NEA were harassed and “physically intimidated” during the organization’s 2025 annual convention, including a reported case of NEA members appearing to cheer at mention of the 2005 attack on a march for Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado.
The complaint, based on the accounts of several Jewish NEA members, also spotlighted recent controversies, such as materials from the union that labeled a map of the state of Israel as “Palestine” for Indigenous People’s Day and a handbook that failed to identify Jews as the primary victims of the Holocaust. They further alleged that the union’s diversity hiring guidelines harmed its Jewish members.
The Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a legal group that has brought several other such antisemitism cases to the Trump administration, filed the complaint that triggered the NEA investigation. The case is being handled through the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, whose authority to investigate employment discrimination also extends to union membership.
“We really appreciate the EEOC’s decision to open this investigation,” Marci Miller, director of legal investigations at the Brandeis Center, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
In a statement to JTA, the NEA said, “We take concerns like this seriously and are reviewing the matter through our established processes.” The union added that it “does not tolerate antisemitism in any form and is committed to ensuring that all members and students, including Jewish members and students, can work and learn in a safe and welcoming environment.”
The NEA has previously said its map labeled “Palestine” “does not meet our standards,” and updated its Holocaust handbook in response to the pushback.
Jews in public school education have expressed concern about tensions over the last few years. In 2021, many Jewish groups rallied against NEA proposals to oppose Israel; the measures did not pass. At its 2025 convention, the NEA had voted to boycott the Anti-Defamation League, though its executive committee rejected the vote following pushback from Jewish groups.
The GOP-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce is also investigating the union over antisemitism, citing several of the same instances later outlined in the Brandeis Center complaint.
The EEOC’s NEA case is part of an expansion of the Trump administration’s antisemitism investigations beyond college and K-12 campuses. Last week the U.S. Health and Human Services Department opened its own probe into the American Psychological Association, also based on a Brandeis Center complaint.
In addition to alleged harassment of Jewish members at the convention, Miller said the center’s NEA complaint also involved diversity-based hiring practices at the union: “Jewish members in particular have been harmed by this policy because they have not been recognized as a racial or ethnic group worth counting for purposes of this policy.”
The EEOC has tackled antisemitism cases against other institutions, but its role in such investigations is controversial. The agency’s chair, Andrea Lucas, is currently demanding that the University of Pennsylvania turn over a list of Jews affiliated with the university as part of the commission’s antisemitism investigation into the Ivy League school. Several Jewish groups, as well as the university itself, have argued that such a demand will make Jews less safe.
Some Jewish groups have alleged that the administration has used antisemitism allegations as a pretext to undermine institutions it considers ideologically unfriendly.
One of Lucas’s defenders in the Jewish community is Kenneth Marcus, the Brandeis Center’s founder. Lucas herself is not Jewish but recently defended her legal strategy to Jewish leaders at a campus antisemitism conference.
Asked about this, Miller said the Brandeis Center was providing “dozens” of Jewish witnesses to the EEOC for consensual interviews.
“There’s no demand for anybody else,” she said. “We have plenty of information.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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New York primary tests Mamdani’s pull and Israel as a campaign issue
New York City Democratic voters are going to the polls today in congressional primaries that are doubling as a referendum on U.S.-Israel relations, as candidates allied with Mayor Zohran Mamdani test whether his brand of democratic socialism and criticism of hardline pro-Israel money in politics will translate into broader electoral success.
Mamdani has endorsed Columbia Gaza war encampment leader Darializa Avila-Chevalier and former City Comptroller Brad Lander in challenging sitting members of Congress, and Assemblymember Claire Valdez for an open seat.
All have campaigned using the terms “genocide” and “apartheid” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank, and Mamdani himself has singled out Israel and its champions as adversaries.
At a Brooklyn campaign rally last week, Mamdani compared the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to “monsters” who “move millions in dark money to accomplish a single goal — to preserve their power, so that they can turn us against one another.”
The statement drew widespread condemnation from Jewish leaders, including some of Mamdani’s supporters. And it comes as Democratic infighting over Israel nationally has intensified, with candidates across the political spectrum increasingly treating support from AIPAC as politically toxic.
All three of the Mamdani-endorsed congressional candidates have made Israel or AIPAC a central part of their campaigns, though each in different ways. AIPAC backs candidates aligned with continued U.S. support for Israel military aid and has spent upwards of $38 million nationally this election cycle, a Politico analysis found — though exact AIPAC contributions are difficult to track due to its use of shell PACs and tactic of funneling money directly to campaigns.
In the 10th Congressional District in lower Manhattan and western Brooklyn, Lander is challenging incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman, zeroing in on Goldman’s support for U.S. military aid to Israel and his past ties to AIPAC. Lander opted not to take part in New York City’s annual Israel Parade, while Goldman used his participation to appeal to Jewish voters.
Earlier this month, Israel and Gaza consumed roughly 15 minutes of a one-hour debate between the candidates. Goldman expressed a desire to move on, arguing that “Israel is not the most important issue in this district,” while Lander countered that Gaza represents “one of the significant moral and humanity challenges of our time.”
Goldman has defended his support for Israel as consistent with his values. He told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in February that there is “an undercurrent of antisemitism in the degree to which AIPAC seems to be vilified.”
The heat boiled over on Sunday when a Brooklyn coffee bar chain, Poetica Coffee, declared on social media after Goldman and his young daughter stopped by that it would have turned Goldman away from the cafe had staff known who he was, posting to Instagram that they don’t serve “genocide enablers.”
Next to a picture of Goldman taken outside the shop after he had ordered a coffee, and another image showing $9.82 refunded, the post added: “Do you see how it doesn’t taste like genocide juice? Or are you still having a hard time telling the difference?” (The account has since been disabled.)
Lander, who identifies as a liberal Zionist, had acknowledged the potential for anti-Israel passions in the race to get out of hand — telling an interviewer that criticizing AIPAC makes him “queasy” given “the antisemitic tropes at play,” but that he feels an obligation to call out its funding nonetheless as he promises to curtail U.S. military aid to Israel.
Goldman has not commented on the incident, other than to reply on Instagram: “The barista could not have been nicer to my 7-yr-old daughter and me.” Lander criticized the coffee shop’s response, telling the Forward, “There are plenty of ways to lobby elected officials and express outrage at the votes they’ve taken without turning coffee shops into places people don’t feel welcome.”
On the other end of the spectrum, Avila Chevalier attended a rally held in Times Square on Oct. 8, 2023 widely condemned for condoning Hamas’ violence. She has said she attended in anticipation of an Israeli military response, citing “a pattern in which whenever there is an incident, the state of Israel engages in a response that is often disproportionate and creates a greater loss of life.”
And she told the New York Editorial Board last week that Zionism “is an ideology that is looking to create a political system where one group of people has more standing before the law than another group of people.”
She faces AIPAC-backed incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat in NY-13, which covers Upper Manhattan and portions of the Bronx.
“To know that my opponent takes AIPAC money is something that, for a lot of people, is just disqualifying. It is [about] Palestine at the heart of it, but it’s also what it says about someone’s inability to stand up against something that is so blatantly horrific, someone who refuses to name a genocide,” Avila Chevalier told the Nation. “Can you trust someone who won’t even say that word to fight for you on the most basic of issues?”
Addressing AIPAC’s support for him in a primary debate, Espaillat said “no one dictates or tells me how to vote, my constituents do that.”
Meanwhile, in NY-7, which includes parts of Brooklyn and Queens, Valdez has sought to make Israel and AIPAC a campaign issue in a race where AIPAC is not involved and the candidates have broad agreement on Gaza.
Valdez faces Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, whom she has critiqued for not using the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions until after he announced his candidacy. She also accused Reynoso of benefiting from secretive pro-Israel money, despite no evidence that AIPAC has supported his campaign.
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