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How the Holocaust is remembered in the land of Anne Frank
(JTA) — You’d think that in a country so closely identified with Anne Frank — perhaps the Holocaust’s best-known victim — cultivating memory of the genocide wouldn’t be a steep challenge.
That’s why a recent survey, suggesting what the authors called a “disturbing” lack of knowledge in the Netherlands about the Holocaust, set off alarm bells. “Survey shows lack of Holocaust awareness in the Netherlands,” wrote the Associated Press. “In the Netherlands, a majority do not know the Holocaust affected their country,” was the JTA headline. “The Holocaust is a myth, a quarter of Dutch younger generation agree,” per the Jerusalem Post.
“Survey after survey, we continue to witness a decline in Holocaust knowledge and awareness. Equally disturbing is the trend towards Holocaust denial and distortion,” Gideon Taylor, the president of the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which conducted the study, said in a statement.
Like other recent studies by Claims Conference, the latest survey has been challenged by some scholars, who say the sample size is small, or the survey is too blunt a tool for examining what a country’s residents do or don’t know about their history. Even one of the experts who conducted the survey chose to focus on the positive findings: “I am encouraged by the number of respondents to this survey that believe Holocaust education is important,” Emile Schrijver, the general director of Amsterdam’s Jewish Cultural Quarter, told JTA.
One of the scholars who says the survey doesn’t capture the subtleties of Holocaust education and commemoration in the Netherlands is Jazmine Contreras, an assistant professor of history at Goucher College in Maryland. Contreras studies the historical memory of the Holocaust and Second World War in Holland. In a Twitter thread earlier this week, she agreed with those who say that “the headline that’s being plastered everywhere exaggerates the idea that young people in NL know nothing about the Holocaust.”
At the same time, she notes that while the Netherlands takes Holocaust education and commemoration seriously, it has a long way to go in reckoning with a past that includes collaboration with the Nazis, postwar antisemitism, a small but vocal far right and a sense of national victimhood that often downplays the experience of Jews during the Shoah.
“It’s such a complex issue,” Contreras told me. “There’s no one answer to how the Holocaust is remembered in the Netherlands.”
Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I took the opportunity to speak with Contreras not only about Dutch memory, but how the Netherlands may serve as an example of how countries deal with Holocaust memory and the national stories they tell.
Our interview was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Tell me a little bit about when you saw the survey, and perhaps how it didn’t mesh with what you know about the Netherlands?
Jazmine Contreras: My major problem is that every single outlet is picking up this story and running a headline like, “Youth in the Netherlands don’t even know the Holocaust happened there. They cannot tell you how many people were killed, how many were deported.” And I think that’s really problematic because it paints a really simplistic picture of Holocaust memory and Holocaust education in that country.
There are multiple programs, in Amsterdam, in other cities, in Westerbork, the former transit camp. They have an ongoing program that brings survivors and the second generation to colleges, to middle schools and primary schools all across the country. And they also have in Amsterdam a program called Oorlog in Mijn Buurt, “War in My Neighborhood,” and basically young people become the “memory bearers” — that’s the kind of language they use — and interview people who grew up and experience the war in their neighborhood, and then speak as if they were the person who experienced it, in the first person.
You also have events around the May 4 commemoration remembering the Dutch who died in war and in peacekeeping operations, and a program called Open Jewish Houses [when owners of formerly Jewish property open their homes to strangers to talk about the Jews who used to live there]. It’s really amazing: I’ve actually been able to visit these formerly Jewish homes and hear the stories. And, of course, the Anne Frank House has its own slew of programming, and teachers talk a lot about the Holocaust and take students to synagogues in places like Groningen, where they have a brand new exhibit at the synagogue. They are taking thousands at this point. The new National Holocaust Names Memorial is in the center of Amsterdam.
I think, again, this idea that children are growing up without having exposure to Holocaust memory, or knowledge of what happened in the Netherlands, is a bit skewed. I think we get into a dangerous area if we’re painting the country with a broad brush and saying nobody knows anything about the Holocaust.
Have you anecdotal evidence or seen studies of Dutch kids about whether they’re getting the education they need?
Anecdotally, yes. I was invited to attend a children’s commemoration that they do at the Hollandsche Schouwburg theater in Amsterdam, which is the former Dutch theater that was used as a major deportation site. And it’s children who put on a commemoration themselves. Again, not every child is participating in this, but if they’re not participating in the children’s commemoration, then they’re doing the “War in My Neighborhood” program, or they’re doing Open Jewish Houses, or they’re taking field trips. That’s pretty impressive to me, and it’s pretty meaningful. They want to help participate in it in the future. They want to come back because it leaves a lasting impression for them.
Let’s back up a bit. Anne Frank dominates everyone’s thinking about Holland and the Holocaust. And I guess the story that’s told is that she was protected by her neighbors until, of course, the Nazis proved too powerful, found her and sent her away. What’s right and what’s wrong about that narrative?
Don’t forget that Anne Frank was a German Jewish refugee who came to the Netherlands. And I think that part of the story is also really interesting and left out. She’s this Dutch icon, but she was a German Jewish refugee who came to the Netherlands, and the Dutch Jewish community was single-handedly responsible for funding, at Westerbork, what was first a refugee center. I think that’s really complicated because now we also have a discourse about present-day refugees and the Holocaust.
Jazmine Contreras, an assistant professor of history at Goucher College, specializes in Dutch Holocaust memory. (Courtesy)
I’ve also never quite understood the insistence on making her an icon when the end of the story is that she’s informed on and dies in a concentration camp. The idea that the Franks were hidden here fits really well into this idea of Dutch resistance and tolerance, and her diary often gets misquoted to kind of represent her as someone who had hope despite the fact that she was being persecuted. In the 1950s, her narrative gets adopted into the U.S., and we treat it as this globalizing human rights discourse.
We don’t talk about the fact that she’s found because she’s informed upon, and we don’t talk about the fact that you had non-Jewish civilians who were informers for a multitude of reasons, including ideological collaboration and their own financial gain.
And when it was talked about most recently, it was about a discredited book that named her betrayer as a Jew.
That was a huge controversy.
I get the sense from your writing that the story the Dutch tell about World War II is very incomplete, and that they haven’t fully reckoned with their collaboration under Nazi occupation even as they emphasize their own victimhood.
On the national state level, they have officially acknowledged not only the extensive collaboration, but the failure of both the government and the Crown to speak out on behalf of Dutch Jews. [In 2020, Prime Minister Mark Rutte formally apologized for how his kingdom’s wartime government failed its Jews, a first by a sitting prime minister.] Now, the question is, what’s happening in broader Dutch society?
Unfortunately, there was an increase in voting for the Dutch far right, although they’ve never managed to get a majority or even come close to it.
Something else that’s happening is that many ask, “Why should Dutch Jews get separate consideration after the Second World War, a separate victimhood, when we were all victimized?” The Netherlands is unique because it’s occupied for the entirety of the Second World War — 1940 to 1945. There is the civil service collaborating, right, but there’s no occupation government. So it’s not like Belgium. It’s not like France, not like Denmark. And there was the Hunger Winter of 1944-45 when 20,000 civilians perished due to famine. You have real victimhood, so people ask, “Why are the Jews so special? We all suffered.”
And at the same time, scholarship keeps emerging about the particular ways non-Jewish Dutch companies and individuals cooperated with the Nazis.
The NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, which has done so much of this research, found that Jews who were deported had to pay utility bills for when they weren’t living there. You have a huge controversy around the the Dutch railway [which said it would compensate hundreds of Holocaust victims for its role in shipping Jews to death camps]. The Dutch Red Cross apologized [in 2017 for failing to act to protect Jews during World War II], following the publication of a research paper on its inaction. A couple of decades ago, the government basically auctioned off paintings, jewelry and other Jewish possessions, and in 2020 they started the effort to give back pieces of art that were in Dutch museums. Dienke Hondius wrote a book on the cold reception given to survivors upon their return. Remco Ensel and Evelien Gans also wrote a book on postwar Jewish antisemitism.
So a lot has been happening, a lot of controversies, and, thanks to all of this research, a lot happening in order to rectify the situation.
It sounds like a mixed story, of resistance and collaboration, and of rewriting the past but also coming to terms with it.
There’s a really complex history here of both wanting to present it as “everybody’s a victim” and that the resistance was huge. In fact, the data shows 5% of the people were involved in resistance and 5% were collaborators. So it’s not like this wholesale collaboration or resistance was happening. It was only in 1943, when non-Jewish men were called up for labor service in Germany, that they got really good at hiding people and by then it was too late.
Right. My colleagues at JTA often note that the Nazis killed or deported more Dutch Jews per capita than anywhere in occupied Western Europe — of about 110,000 Jews deported, only a few thousand survived.
Yes, the highest percentage of deportation in Western Europe.
A room at the Anne Frank House museum where she and her family hid for two years during the Holocaust in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. (Photo Collection Anne Frank House)
Since this week is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, let me ask what Holland gets right and wrong compared to maybe some other European countries with either similar experiences or comparable experiences.
The framing of that question is difficult because there’s so many unique points about the Holocaust and the occupation in the Netherlands. Again, it was occupied for the entirety of 1940-45. You have a civil service that was willing to sign Aryan declarations. The queen, as head of a government in exile in London, is basically saying, “Do what you need to just to survive.”
One of the big problems is there are people like Geert Wilders [a contemporary right-wing Dutch lawmaker] who practice this kind of philo-Semitism and support of Israel, but it’s really about blaming the Muslim population for antisemitism and saying none of it is homegrown. They don’t have to talk about the fact that there was widespread antisemitism in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
In the Netherlands they’re not instituting laws around what you can and can’t say about the Holocaust like in Poland [where criticizing Polish collaboration has been criminalized]. There are so many amazing educational initiatives and nonprofit organizations that are doing the work. And even these public controversies ended up being outlets for the production of Holocaust memory when survivors, but mostly now the second and third generations, use that space to talk about their own family Holocaust history.
Tell me about your personal stake in this: How did the Holocaust become a subject of study for you?
I specialize in Dutch Holocaust memory. I’m not Jewish, but my grandparents on my mother’s side are Dutch. For my first project I looked at relationships between German soldiers and Dutch women during the war during the occupation, and I eventually kind of made my way into the post war, when these children of former collaborators were still very marginalized in Dutch society. It ties into this. I do interviews with members of the Jewish community, children of resistance members and children of collaborators and how these memory politics play out.
What is the utility of events like International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the major Holocaust memorials in educating the public about the Holocaust and World War II?
International Holocaust Remembrance Day and May 4 result in the production of new memories about the Holocaust and the Second World War. I was at the 2020 International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration when the prime minister formally apologized. It was a really big moment, and it allowed the Jewish community, and the Roma and Sinti community, a space to remember and to share in that and to speak to it as survivors and the second and third generation.
Unlike the United States, the Netherlands is a small, insular country, so the relationship between the public and the media and academics is so close. So in the weeks before and the weeks after these memorials, academics, politicians and experts are publishing pieces about memory. That’s useful to the production of new memories and information about the Holocaust.
But what about the other days of the year? Will putting a monument in the center of Amsterdam actually change how people understand the Holocaust? That is a question that I think is harder to answer. The new monument features individual names of 102,000 Jews and Roma and Sinti and visually gives you the scope of what the Holocaust looked like in the Netherlands. But does that matter if somebody lives outside of Amsterdam and they’re never going to see this monument?
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Ceasefire and political pressure test U.S.-Israel Iran war pact
Israel is now in a precarious position following President Donald Trump’s sudden declaration of a ceasefire in the Iran war, say experts on security and the Middle East.
On Tuesday evening, President Trump announced in a Truth Social post that he would declare a two-week pause to the war that began on February 28, just an hour and a half before his ultimatum to Iran was set to expire. He had demanded that Tehran reopen the Strait of Hormuz — which had been closed for weeks, choking global energy markets — or face a catastrophic military assault, warning that “a whole civilization will die tonight.”
The Pakistani Prime Minister, who had mediated between the U.S. and Iran, announced that the truce was “effective immediately” and would apply not only to the U.S. and Iran, but also to “their allies” — namely Israel and Lebanon, both of which had been involved in recent exchanges of fire.
But Israel had other ideas. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — while stating that the U.S. had coordinated with Israel before agreeing to the ceasefire — disputed the Pakistani claim that the ceasefire included Lebanon. Israel has continued to strike its northern neighbor hard in the wake of the announcement.
Netanyahu maintains the U.S. had assured him it would continue to press on issues critical to Israeli security — namely seeking to ensure that “Iran no longer poses a nuclear, missile and terror threat to America, Israel, Iran’s Arab neighbors and the world.” So far, Iran has resisted such demands.
Despite the ceasefire announcement, Iran struck Israel and Gulf countries well into the evening, and Israel, too, carried out several strikes in the immediate aftermath of the announcement.
Split support
The ceasefire has underscored growing differences between Washington and Jerusalem over both the conduct and goals of the war.
According to Jonathan Panikoff, the director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council and a former U.S. intelligence official, Israeli and U.S. objectives were misaligned from the outset. Israel sought not only to degrade Iran’s military capabilities but also to pursue regime change.
For the U.S., “it was always less clear … the regime change question was always much more up in the air, and even on the nuclear program, you haven’t seen nearly as much effort against it in the same way as obviously happened during June,” said Panikoff, referring to the 12-Day-War during which the U.S. targeting Iranian nuclear infrastructure with unprecedented force.
Panikoff also said that coordination between Israel and the U.S. on the ceasefire agreement itself was somewhat dubious. “The U.S. almost certainly talked to Israel about the potential ceasefire, but it’s unlikely that Israel played a meaningful role in the decision,” said Panikoff, who believes Israel would have preferred to continue the war to “get through the remainder of the target list.”
Misaligned public opinion in the two countries regarding the war is likely driving the divergence. While the majority of Americans do not support the war, with 61% saying they do not approve of Trump’s handling of the conflict, Israeli support has remained broad across the political spectrum, even amid sustained missile attacks. For Israelis, confronting Iran is viewed as existential. “Iran is a fundamental thing. On the American side, it just is not the same threat,” Panikoff said.
According to Dana Stroul, the Director of Research at the Washington Institute and a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East in the Pentagon, Israel’s actions in the immediate aftermath of the ceasefire reflect that gap. She noted that Israel carried out additional strikes in Iran, “which indicates that they still had more targets on their strike list that they wanted to work through, and they were willing to risk, for a brief moment in time, not complying with the ceasefire to do more.”
Stroul said the U.S.-Iran peace talks scheduled to take place on Friday in Islamabad have exposed further tensions. Disputes over whether Israeli operations in Lebanon should halt have already complicated talks between Washington and Tehran. “The Iranians are saying, ‘if Israel doesn’t stop in Lebanon, we won’t go to Islamabad.’”
As a result, she said, “the issue of Israeli behavior and Israeli military action will become a hinge of whether these negotiations proceed on the ceasefire.”
“Within less than 24 hours, the debate shifted from whether or not the parameters for the talks on Friday in Islamabad are acceptable for U.S. national security interests, to where Israel is within this framework,” said Stroul.
Stroul said that this could also create a moment of “peak vulnerability for Netanyahu,” who tied his political future to his alignment with Trump.
Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid has already taken a swing at Netanyahu in a post on X, stating: “Netanyahu led us to a strategic collapse. There was here a disgraceful combination of arrogance, irresponsibility, negligent staff work, lies sold to the Americans that damaged the trust between the countries. A military success that turned into a diplomatic disaster.”
He added, “Israel had no influence whatsoever on the agreement signed tonight between the United States and Iran. Netanyahu turned us into a protectorate state that receives instructions over the phone on matters concerning the core of our national security.”
Finger-pointing at Israel
The ceasefire coincided with revelations published in the New York Times on internal White House deliberations as Trump weighed military intervention in Iran earlier this year. According to the Times, Netanyahu used a private meeting with Trump and key U.S. officials at White House to present a plan outlining how the U.S. and Israel could work together to bring down the Islamic Republic, including a montage featuring potential alternative leaders for Iran.
While the presentation appeared to have impressed Trump, the report indicates that the President did not completely buy Netanyahu’s argument that regime change was a viable outcome. Instead, he relied on U.S. intelligence assessments that concluded the U.S. had the capacity to decapitate Iran’s leadership and dismantle its military capabilities, but that hopes for regime change were “detached from reality.”
Based on those assessments, Trump moved forward with a strategy focused on more limited and easily achievable objectives, though working in lockstep with Israel.
The report is unlikely to quell criticism from those who argue that Israel pushed the U.S. toward confrontation with Iran at the expense of U.S. interests.
Panikoff warned of potentially broad political consequences for the longtime allies depending on the outcome of the peace talks and any future fighting. “If this war ends with Iran being in a stronger strategic position regionally.… I think you’re going to get a lot of Republicans, especially in the MAGA wing of the Republican Party, who are going to start to question how this relationship has gone forth. When you combine that with where the Democratic Party is and with Democratic bases right now, I think it portends some real future challenges for the U.S.-Israel relationship.”
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Why I interviewed Mahmoud Khalil
Since he was targeted for deportation by the Trump administration, Mahmoud Khalil has become both a celebrity among those who supported the campus protests against Israel and a villain for Jews who thought the demonstrations fueled antisemitism and sought Israel’s violent destruction.
While Khalil had addressed general allegations that the protests had created a hostile climate on campus in previous interviews — arguing that they may have made students uncomfortable but not unsafe — he had not spoken in detail about some of the most pressing questions for Jews who may have been alarmed by his arrest but were unsure about his actual beliefs.
What did a “free Palestine” — a core demand of the protesters — mean to Khalil?
What did he think about Oct. 7 and Hamas?
And how did he think the protest movement should relate to Jews who don’t share their views?
When a representative for Khalil reached out last month asking whether I wanted to interview him, it presented an opportunity to present his answers to these questions to the Forward’s audience.
I had no illusion that Khalil was going to assuage the concerns of every reader who believe he is antisemitic or otherwise misguided, but I saw my job as trying to understand where he was situated within a protest movement that is gaining political power and influence but remains more fractious than many people outside the movement are aware.
These divisions include divergent views over what the acceptable forms of Palestinian resistance are, what the ultimate objective of anti-Zionism should be, and how the movement should treat Americans — and especially American Jews — who disagree with it.
I know that such distinctions may not matter for those who think that any failure to recognize Israel’s right to maintain a Jewish majority, or opposition to Zionism, period, crosses a red line.
But even those who find anti-Zionism unacceptable may appreciate the opportunity to grapple with how and why a growing number of Americans, including Jews, are turning away from support for Israel in the wake of the wars in Gaza and now Iran. The question of who is going to harness that political sentiment and what they plan to do with it is becoming more important.
I wanted to know where Khalil stood on looming questions.
***
His answers, corroborated through conversations with others who knew and worked with him during the encampments at Columbia as well as his past public statements, were revealing.
Overall, they situated Khalil as a leader of the more conciliatory wing of the protest movement when it came to how it should engage with Israel’s supporters. He has read about and seriously engaged with liberal Zionism, and expressed sympathy for Jews who support Israel; he said Hamas was not a true representative of the Palestinian people, and that it was unacceptable for them to target and kidnap Israeli civilians; and he said that Israeli Jews should remain in a “free Palestine” with full rights.
He supported the statement from protest leaders that condemned a Columbia student who had said “Zionists don’t have a right to live,” opposed the ultimately violent takeover of Hamilton Hall and avoided the slogan “globalize the intifada.”
But his answers also underscored the gulf between even the more moderate protesters and the position of many liberal American Jews, who believe Israel committed war crimes or genocide in Gaza but remain horrified by the atrocities committed by Hamas on Oct. 7 and think that a two-state solution is the only way to preserve Jewish safety while respecting Palestinian rights.
Khalil wanted to assuage Jewish fears that he believed were at least partly responsible for the appeal of Zionism, and yet he did not acknowledge the full extent of violence on Oct. 7 — that Palestinian militants intentionally killed Israeli civilians — which perfectly epitomized a major source of these fears.
Whatever you may think of Khalil or his political views, I’m glad that the Forward can serve as a forum for people both inside and outside the Jewish community to speak with American Jews and I hope you’re able to learn something about Khalil and the movement he helped lead from our conversation.
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In rallies taking on Israel, a defiant Hasan Piker boosts Michigan Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed
(JTA) — ANN ARBOR, Michigan — Outside, in a line that stretched around the block, the hundreds of people who turned out for Abdul el-Sayed’s campaign rally with Hasan Piker gave a range of reasons for showing up.
Some said they liked el-Sayed’s message of Medicare for All, a key plank of the former county health executive’s bid for an open Senate seat. Some were furious about the war in Iran, which the candidate has angrily denounced.
Others just liked the guy. “He’s a really great speaker and a really passionate person,” Natalie Gould, a master’s candidate in public health who had worked with el-Sayed in Detroit, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Inside, though, one issue made the crowd roar louder than any other: any time a speaker, from el-Sayed to Piker to the newly elected student body president, accused Israel of genocide. The progressive movement in which Piker has styled himself a kingmaker, one that is ardently pro-Palestinian while largely dismissive of any claims of antisemitism, was coalescing.
“In the beginning it was a lot lonelier when we spoke out. They used the same exact heinous smear: They said, ‘You’re antisemitic,’” Piker told the crowd. “And back then I felt a lot lonelier. But I don’t feel lonely anymore.”
Piker, the leftist Twitch streamer with millions of followers, was the evening’s biggest draw — and its biggest lightning rod. After el-Sayed announced the two would hold a pair of campaign stops together Tuesday, the streamer’s past clips and comments about Jews and Israel led numerous Jewish leaders and both of el-Sayed’s opponents to denounce the events. Some compared Piker to Nick Fuentes, the openly antisemitic far-right streamer who has divided Republicans. Leading Democrats called for the party to distance itself from Piker altogether.
Hasan Piker looks on as U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed delivers a stump speech in Ann Arbor, Michigan, April 7, 2026. Piker, a popular Twitch streamer accused of antisemitism, prompted controversy for campaigning with El-Sayed. (Andrew Lapin/JTA)
Pushback continued until just before the events started. An hour before the first rally, at Michigan State University, that school’s president and governing board issued a joint statement affirming their campus free speech principles while also condemning antisemitism. The school’s Hillel chapter had already called Piker a “known antisemite,” expressing concern about his appearance.
At the next stop at the University of Michigan, el-Sayed told the crowd that the campus pro-Israel club Students Supporting Israel had planned to protest the event. But the group wasn’t visible outside the building, and the club’s Instagram page announced that its “March Against Extremism” had been “postponed,” which the group attributed to “extenuating circumstances” that it did not explain.
El-Sayed leaned into the energy, embracing Piker onstage and mocking the negative attention the rally had received. The rally overlapped with President Donald Trump’s deadline for Iran to make concessions or “a whole civilization will die,” which led to a temporary ceasefire in the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.
“Apparently, the most important thing happening on Twitter was whether or not we were going to campaign with Hasan,” he told the crowd. “Somehow Fox News found it fit to cover this rally six f–king times and not talk about the fact the president wants to commit a genocide in Iran.”
Also leaning in were the night’s other speakers, who were all being showcased on Piker’s livestream — where, during downtime in-between speeches, he bemoaned what he described as a bad-faith campaign to paint him as antisemitic. (He also said he’d been hoping to eat at Zingerman’s, a famous Jewish-style gourmet deli in Ann Arbor.)
“I told Piker just now, I was like, ‘You’re never going to be canceled up in Michigan,’” Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the House’s fiercest critic of Israel, said during her own stump speech.
Rep. Summer Lee, of Pennsylvania, also delivered a speech, and Rep. Debbie Dingell, of Michigan, attended but did not speak.
Candidates for local office also stood next to Piker, including Amir Makled, a candidate for the university’s Board of Regents who was the legal defense for the school’s student pro-Palestinian encampment movement.
The crowd was young and diverse in age and race. While Piker received cheers when he shouted out his fans, some of the attendees told JTA they were more mixed on him, while others had little familiarity with his streams. But they all agreed he had juiced El-Sayed’s campaign.
“I mean, there’s tons of people here,” Ann Arbor resident Joey Ryan said while queuing up for the over-capacity rally outside, gesturing behind him. “I remember the Joe Biden Michigan stuff, and it was not like this. I remember the Bernie Sanders rally in early 2020, and it was more like this.”
Ryan said that Piker, like other streamers, operated in the “attention economy” space, where “saying inflammatory things sometimes can get you attention.” But, he said, “I also think it’s been blown completely out of proportion when you have the president of the United States calling Iranians non-human, as an example, to bomb them, and that includes the synagogue that was blown up in Iran today. Like, there are Jews in Iran as well. Is that not antisemitism?”
“Some of the stuff he says is kind of crazy. I’m not going to lie, there’s some stuff he said that I disagree with,” another attendee, a current University of Michigan student who declined to give her name, said of Piker. Content creators, the student said, can “get out over their skis.”
If anything, Piker and el-Sayed became more honed in on Israel as the day went on. At their first East Lansing stop, both made only a handful of comments about Israel and AIPAC. By the time they reached Ann Arbor that evening, the headliners had amped up their broadsides, with Piker referencing a new Pew Research Center study showing that 84% of Democrats under 49 have a somewhat or very unfavorable view of Israel.
“There’s only a handful of Democrats that are actually outspoken on this atrocity, outspoken on the relationship that we have with a foreign country that we simply always have to send unlimited billions of dollars to — a country that has health care, mind you,” Piker said. “You do not, but Israel has free health care.” The crowd booed at this line.
(L-r) U.S. Rep. Summer Lee, Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, and Twitch streamer Hasan Piker pose during a rally for El-Sayed, April 7, 2026. (Andrew Lapin/JTA)
As another rallying cry, he told them, “When you feel really sad, when you feel really angry, remind yourself of the worst fascist that you know. It could be Donald Trump, it could be Rabbi Shmuley. They’re going to be very excited if you stop fighting.” (Piker later told JTA that he was referring to Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, a pro-Israel Twitter gadfly who Piker said was “pro-genocide.”)
The candidate, too, amped up his criticisms of AIPAC in particular. The pro-Israel lobby, which has poured millions of dollars into congressional elections, is facing a resolution of opposition from the Democratic National Committee this week.
“AIPAC tells us that the number one goal of our foreign policy is to align with a foreign government,” el-Sayed said, to boos. “You know, when I talk about AIPAC, everybody says, ‘Well, it’s because you’re Arab Muslim.’ No it’s not. It’s because I’m f–king from Michigan, and I want my tax dollars back in Michigan.”
He also joked that AIPAC ads against him might finally give him something he’s dreamed about. “The one thing you’re supposed to have, as an American Muslim, is a nice beard,” he said. “And I was never gifted with that. But for three months this summer, AIPAC’s going to give me the beard of my dreams.”
At both campaign stops, El-Sayed, who grew up in a heavily Jewish Detroit suburb not far from Temple Israel, the synagogue that was attacked last month, also said he welcomed Jews to his movement.
“All of us love and revere Jewish folk, our Jewish neighbors, the faith of Judaism,” he said in Ann Arbor, to applause. “Trust me, nobody will fight harder against antisemitism than somebody who intimately understands what it’s like to be discriminated against because of how I look.”
He reiterated the point in an interview after the event.
Supporters of Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed cheer Rep. Rashida Tlaib as she denounces Israel during a rally in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that also featured Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, April 7, 2026. (Andrew Lapin/JTA)
“I am so grateful I’ve grown up in a community with a large proportion of Jewish Americans. I learned a lot from the Jewish tradition. I’m grateful to have been invited to bar and bat mitzvahs and to be invited to Seders and to be invited to spend time at shul,” el-Sayed told JTA.
“I stand deeply and profoundly against antisemitism in the same way that I stand deeply and profoundly against Islamophobia,” he added. “Those two things always run together. It is not antisemitic to criticize a foreign government, and it’s not antisemitic to criticize a super PAC that is intent on aligning our interests with the foreign government.”
In the interview, the candidate also reiterated the sentiment behind his own statement on the Temple Israel attack, in which he had referenced the Israeli war in Lebanon. “I also think it’s just critical for us to understand that hurt people do hurt people, and the circumstances happening 6000 miles away can affect the lives that we live here,” el-Sayed said Tuesday.
At the end of the rally, Piker climbed back onto the stage with El-Sayed to a standing ovation. The two men embraced, then posed for a selfie with the crowd behind them.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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