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How Jewish politics are shaping the 2026 election map, from coast to coast
(JTA) — After a year in which Israel, antisemitism and political polarization scrambled long-standing alliances, the American Jewish political map is heading into 2026 unusually unsettled.
From New York City Hall to swing-state governors’ mansions to some of the most crowded Democratic primaries in memory, the coming election cycle will test how much Jewish voters still cohere as a political bloc — and whether the issues that have dominated Jewish life since Oct. 7 will continue to shape the ballot box. The rise of outspoken pro-Palestinian candidates, fractures inside both parties over Israel, and the growing visibility of antisemitism on the left and the right have turned races that might once have seemed parochial into national bellwethers.
As Democrats and Republicans jockey for control of Congress and key statehouses, Jewish candidates and Jewish issues are no longer confined to the margins. Instead, they are central — sometimes uncomfortably so — to debates about ideology, identity and power. These are the big political questions facing the American Jewish community as 2026 approaches.
The Mamdani era begins
After the most closely watched — and, in some Jewish corners, feared — mayoral race in generations, Zohran Mamdani will be sworn in as New York City’s next chief executive on the first day of the year. For many Jews, both in and beyond New York, 2026 will be measured by how the democratic socialist mayor will wield his power and influence once in office — and by how many candidates in the midterms are able to follow in his footsteps when it comes to explicit pro-Palestinian activism.
Ahead of his inauguration, Mamdani seemed to heed some of the Jewish alarms over his harsh criticism of Israel. During his transition he dismissed a staffer over her past antisemitic posts; met with the New York Board of Rabbis, which include some vocal critics of his; and, after the deadly attack on a Hanukkah celebration in Australia, visited the grave of the Lubavitcher Rebbe.
Tensions remain. The Anti-Defamation League has launched a controversial monitoring project focused on his administration. He also still pledges to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu should the Israeli prime minister visit New York, a threat that Netanyahu has shrugged off.
Once he takes power, Mamdani’s outreach efforts to Jews will continue to be closely scrutinized, as will Jewish leaders’ willingness to be in the same room with him — or to discourage, or encourage, further attacks on him.
Seismic shifts on the right
Republicans could have seized upon the rise of Mamdani as an effort to appeal to worried Jews ahead of the midterms as the pro-Isael, anti-antisemitism party. Instead, the GOP now seems unsure what it thinks about Jews at all.
While President Donald Trump says he remains resolutely pro-Israel, and many establishment Jewish groups continue their eagerness to work with him, his second-in-command JD Vance has opened the door to a rising tide of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment on the party’s hyper-nationalist wing. At Turning Point USA’s annual convention, Vance declined to join the critics of conservative antisemitism, and instead encouraged the party to widen its tent.
Meanwhile, conservative thought leaders such as the Heritage Foundation and Turning Point USA, which have wielded power to vet and promote GOP candidates, have opened doors to outright conspiratorial talking points about Jewish and Israeli power, via figures such as open antisemite Nick Fuentes and podcaster Tucker Carlson, who has offered him a friendly platform.
Already some Republican candidates, driven by “America First” ideology and their disdain for U.S. aid to Israel, are taking explicitly anti-Israel platforms. Florida gubernatorial hopeful James Fishback, for example, has pledged to refuse donations from AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, and praised Heritage for its defense of the Carlson-Fuentes interview. “Why is it that when we’re critical of Israel, it feels like a fourth branch comes out to almost criminalize our speech?” the Gen Z hedge-fund manager has said.
And in the Ohio gubernatorial race, the biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy — who as a 2024 presidential candidate was one of the first major figures of his party to suggest cutting aid to Israel — appears to be the likely GOP nominee. He will likely face a Jewish Democratic candidate, former state health official Dr. Amy Acton.
A test for Josh Shapiro
A Jewish governor with a national profile, Josh Shapiro is seeking reelection in November. Stacy Garrity, his GOP opponent, is the only person to earn more votes in Pennsylvania history than Shapiro when she was elected state treasurer in 2024. A popular moderate with a reputation as a humanitarian war hero, Garrity hopes to unite the state as Shapiro did, despite her record of boosting election denials. She’ll remind Jewish voters that she boosted the state’s Israel bond investments.
An upset — seen by insiders as unlikely but not impossible — could put a screeching halt to talk of Shapiro becoming the first Jewish president.
The Upper West Side story
Few Democratic primaries this year promise to be more circus-like than the race for the Manhattan district being vacated by longtime Jewish Rep. Jerry Nadler, a progressive on domestic issues who could read the haftarah at synagogue one day and offer what he considered loving criticism of Israel the next. Nine candidates have so far thrown their hats in, including three big Jewish names with very different takes on Jewish issues.
The favorite is New York State Assembly member Micah Lasher — a close confidant of Nadler. But Lasher’s path to the nomination is far from guaranteed, especially if progressives want to send a message to a Democratic establishment that they are unhappy for a range of reasons — including Israel.
Enter Cameron Kasky, a survivor of the Parkland High School shooting and Jewish Gen Z political activist. The 25-year-old, courting pro-Palestinian voters, has already made fighting “support for genocide” a central plank of his campaign (he recently returned from a pro-Palestinian solidarity mission to the West Bank). And Kasky isn’t alone among Jewish candidates popular with the online left: Jack Schlossberg, 32, a Kennedy scion with millions of social media followers, is running on what he describes as the “cost-of-living crisis” and erosion of democratic norms under Republican leadership.
Threading the needle on Israel
As support for Israel erodes in the Democratic party and in portions of the right, a number of Jewish candidates insist that there is room for progressive Jewish voices who can be critical of Israeli policy. A number of declared Jewish candidates this year are looking to represent this vanguard. In many cases they’re vying to replace long-serving Jews and/or stalwart Democratic leaders.
Kasky exemplifies the trend. But progressive Brad Lander, the Jewish New York City comptroller and Mamdani ally, may have a clearer path to Congress: He is challenging Jewish Rep. Dan Goldman, a more typically pro-Israel lawmaker, for his House seat, and early polling has given him an advantage.
Scott Wiener, a state senator in California, is running for the seat being vacated by retiring Democratic figurehead Nancy Pelosi. Wiener holds conventionally left-of-center views on housing reform, civil rights, LGBTQ+ issues, climate and tech regulation and has pushed for antisemitism prevention in schools. He has also publicly condemned actions by the Netanyahu government.
And Daniel Biss, the progressive Jewish Israeli mayor of Evanston, Illinois, is running in the Chicago-area congressional district previously held by retiring Jewish Rep. Jan Schakowski. Like many pro-Israel centrists, he’s an advocate of the two-state solution, but has veered to their left by calling for an early ceasefire in Gaza and for pausing offensive U.S. weapons sales to the Israeli government amid the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. He is facing, amid a slew of challengers, the leftist Palestinian-American influencer Kat Abugazelah.
Israel and the midterms
Months after the tentative ceasefire, will voter sentiment about the Gaza war have an impact on midterm races? AIPAC, whose endorsements were once courted by politicians, is now seen as toxic by candidates who have been reading the tea leaves. Case in point: Rep. Seth Moulton, the Massachusetts Democrat, has publicly said he will return the campaign donations he previously received from AIPAC and will not accept future support from the organization.
In New York’s 15th Congressional District race, where Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres is seeking reelection, former state assemblyman and ex‑Democratic National Committee vice chair Michael Blake has made Torres’s pro‑Israel stance a central issue of his campaign. Blake has accused Torres of prioritizing U.S. support for Israel over his constituents’ needs, including alleging that Torres’s positions effectively support what Blake calls a “genocide” — language that has drawn criticism from local Jewish leaders.
In the Michigan Senate race, Rep. Haley Stevens, a non-Jewish pro-Israel stalwart who previously won AIPAC’s support over progressive Jewish incumbent Andy Levin, is the favorite in the race right now. But she faces two progressive challengers, including one, former county health executive Abdul el-Sayed, who has also labeled Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as “genocide” and opposes U.S. military aid to Israel.
A Jewish hopeful for New York governor
Bruce Blakeman is the first Jewish county executive of Long Island’s Nassau County. He shouldered aside former frontrunner Elise Stefanik, upstate’s fiery Trump ally and scourge of college presidents, for both Trump’s endorsement and the likely Republican nomination to challenge Gov. Kathy Hochul. Blakeman’s hawkish pro‑Israel advocacy aligns him with the segment of the Republican base that emphasizes strong U.S.-Israel ties and opposition to movements like BDS. In the 2026 governor’s race, he’s likely to draw a contrast with Democrats, even if Hochul herself has strong pro-Israel bona fides.
Much ado about a tattoo
Graham Platner, the progressive Maine Senate candidate running in what Democrats see as a must-win race, has refused to quit following revelations that the military veteran had a Nazi-era tattoo on his chest for years. Even after shedding staff and facing fiery condemnations over both the tattoo and derogatory comments he made on Reddit, a defiant Platner is still polling within range of establishment candidate Gov. Janet Mills ahead of the June 9 Democratic primary.
Could the oyster farmer (who has claimed he didn’t know what the tattoo was, and covered it up following the revelations) actually pull off the upset primary win? Like Mamdani and several other progressive candidates this year, Platner also holds ardently pro-Palestinian views and has accused Israel of genocide. The elder statesman of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, has shrugged off questions about his tattoo, giving it a Jewish stamp of non-concern.
The post How Jewish politics are shaping the 2026 election map, from coast to coast appeared first on The Forward.
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University of Michigan will have a leader who defended pro-Palestinian protesters in court
A civil rights attorney who defended pro-Palestinian protesters in court and made social media posts viewed as pro-Hezbollah and antisemitic, has won his bid for the University of Michigan Board of Regents.
Michigan is one of a few states in which voters play a direct role in choosing university overseers. As a regent, Amir Makled (D) will help oversee expenditures at the university where his clients, the student protesters, were arrested. The position is unpaid and carries an eight-year term. Democrat Paul Brown won the other seat up for election, maintaining the board’s 6-2 Democratic majority.
Makled beat out Republican challenger Lena Epstein, who is Jewish and previously identified as a “Jewish Messianic believer of Christ,” but recanted the statement and later said she was “100% Jewish.” Mainstream Judaism does not accept Messianic Jews because they believe in the divinity of Christ and try to convert Jews to Jesus.
Epstein told the Forward in an April interview that the Democrats had handed her an opportunity to win the seat by endorsing Makled, who was facing intense scrutiny. In one of his controversial posts, Makled called Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah a “martyr” after he was killed by Israeli strikes in 2024. He lost an endorsement from Service Employees International Union for the posts and later deleted them.
In the regents race, voters picked up to two of six candidates, with the top two winning. Makled received 25.6% of the vote while Brown received 27.2%. Epstein received 22.2% while her fellow Republican Michael Schostak received 22.6%.
Makled’s election comes as part of a wave of Democratic Party wins, including in Michigan, which elected as Senator Abdul El-Sayed (D), who also faced severe backlash for statements related to Israel and Gaza and for appearing alongside streamer Hasan Piker, who has been accused of antisemitic rhetoric.
Israel played a major role in the rhetoric surrounding Michigan’s midterms. But voters, including 60% of Jewish voters that voted for El-Sayed according to early exit polls, favored sharp critics of the Jewish state to candidates in support of it.
The post University of Michigan will have a leader who defended pro-Palestinian protesters in court appeared first on The Forward.
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This grandson of Holocaust survivors is headed to Congress. The ADL has concerns about his antisemitism record.
The election of Daniel Biss, a Jewish critic of Israel, to an Illinois congressional seat Tuesday has sparked a public feud between the Anti-Defamation League and the liberal Zionist group J Street over whether the ADL remains a credible voice in the fight against antisemitism.
After Biss, the former Jewish mayor of Evanston, Ill., won his seat Tuesday night, the ADL Midwest took to social media to express “serious concerns” about Biss’ “approach to antisemitism.”
J Street, which had endorsed Biss, hit back, noting that Biss is the grandson of Holocaust survivors and calling the ADL’s statement “a shanda,” the Yiddish word for disgrace.
“It is hard to read this statement without wondering how far the ADL has drifted from the organization it once was – a gold standard in our community for standing up against bigotry, hatred and discrimination,” J street wrote on X.
Biss, who speaks Hebrew and spent childhood summers in Israel, was elected with 75% of the vote in a district where 11% of the electorate is Jewish.
“It saddens me to watch the ADL, once a preeminent civil rights organization, devolve into an entity that traffics in fear, intimidation and extremism,” Biss wrote in a statement to the Forward. “This kind of rhetoric does nothing to keep the Jewish people safe—in fact, it undermines that very cause.”
The ADL has long faced scrutiny from critics who view the watchdog group as labeling too broad a swath of Israel criticism as antisemitic, while less forcefully condemning antisemitism when it comes from the political right.
“Our statement speaks for itself,” an ADL spokesperson wrote in an email to the Forward.
In its statement, the ADL pointed to a specific set of concerns involving Biss’ record as mayor of Evanston, Illinois, the college town home to Northwestern University.
Biss did not provide Evanston police support that Northwestern requested after reported “antisemitic conduct” at the Gaza war encampment on campus in April 2024, the ADL said, “raising serious questions about whether the safety, dignity, and equal access of Jewish students were treated with the urgency they required.”
Biss has defended his decision not to dispatch police to the encampment, writing in response to a congressional inquiry that forcibly clearing the protest would have gone against police department advice and suppressed “constitutionally protected speech.”
The ADL also said that Biss “dismissed scrutiny of his response as a politically motivated attack fueled by AIPAC, rather than substantively addressing the concerns raised by Jewish students and community members.”
Biss made opposition to AIPAC a central theme of his primary campaign for Congress after the hardline pro-Israel lobbying group spent millions opposing him and supporting another candidate, state Sen. Laura Fine.
In an interview with the Forward in March, Biss said it was “absurd” that AIPAC opposes imposing any conditions on U.S. military aid to Israel. “And then try to enforce it with millions of dollars of dark money, is certainly bad for democracy and bad for our politics here in America,” Biss added.
At the same time, Biss faced pressure to his left on Israel in the primary, defeating Kat Abughazaleh, a Palestinian-American who has characterized Israel’s conduct in Gaza as a genocide. Biss, who has described himself as a progressive Zionist, declined to use the word genocide, despite repeated calls from Abughazaleh to do so.
In a March op-ed in The Nation, Biss wrote that he believed he was one of AIPAC’s top targets partly because “I’m the grandson of Holocaust survivors. My mother is Israeli. My extended family lives in Israel. AIPAC knew that they couldn’t dismiss me as anti-Israel or antisemitic.”
The ADL also criticized Biss for supporting the repeal of an anti-BDS law, which bars Illinois from investing public pension funds in companies that boycott Israel. That position, the ADL said, “raises additional concerns about his willingness to stand against efforts to isolate and delegitimize the Jewish state.”
In an April Substack post explaining his position, Biss said that he personally opposes the global movement to boycott Israel, but he does not believe the government should “stop people from using their economic agency to advocate for their values.”
Biss will succeed Rep. Jan Schakowsky, a Jewish lawmaker who represented the district for nearly three decades and was also an outspoken critic of AIPAC.
The post This grandson of Holocaust survivors is headed to Congress. The ADL has concerns about his antisemitism record. appeared first on The Forward.
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At the Vatican, two elderly men — one Jewish, one Catholic — exchange gifts and mutual admiration
On Wednesday, two senior citizens, Robert Zimmerman, 85, a Jew originally from Minnesota, and Robert Prevost, 71, a Catholic of Chicago, had a brief meeting at the younger man’s office in central Italy.
Sources on the scene report that Zimmerman was in town for business and Prevost, who goes professionally by Leo, had recently cited Zimmerman’s work in the preface to a book about nuclear disarmament.
Both men dressed in uniform, looking a bit Spy Vs. Spy, with Zimmerman in a black hoodie and Prevost in white with a small white skull cap. The confab was brief, a bulletin from Prevost’s workplace reported, consisting of “greetings and a few lighthearted exchanges.”
Prevost gifted Zimmerman with prayer beads, and Zimmerman presented Prevost with a copy of his memoir, published under his pen name, Bob Dylan.
While Zimmerman was raised in a Jewish home, he had, for a time in the late 1970s to early 1980s, converted to born-again Christianity, confounding many.
The post At the Vatican, two elderly men — one Jewish, one Catholic — exchange gifts and mutual admiration appeared first on The Forward.
