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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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I gathered the data on Jewish fiction publishing. The trends are alarming.
(JTA) — In early 2023, I wrote a novel that was Jewish in every possible way. The lovers called each other “ahuvati” and “neshama sheli” — Hebrew for my love and my soul. There were scenes in Tel Aviv, family histories shaped by the Holocaust, a climax involving cancellation by left-wing antisemites, and an overall tone of aching sadness.
I was already a successful nonfiction author with two books that had sold more than 150,000 copies. I had a track record and a substantial online platform, And my new book garnered substantial interest. When I began querying fiction agents in early 2024, I received 20 requests for the full manuscript and four offers of representation in just six weeks.
But there were warning signs. One non-Jewish agent told me that my Jewish social media presence might make the book impossible to sell. “At least your characters aren’t Zionists,” she said. (My characters were obviously Zionists.) A Jewish agent gave me painful but pragmatic advice. She told me that I should probably remove all Jewish content in the book that didn’t directly drive the plot. Most painfully, she suggested that I change the name of a character named Yael. “It’s one of my favorite names,” she said. “But it’s Israeli.”
I signed with an agent who assured me that no such changes were necessary, and the novel went out to publishers.
It did not sell.
There are countless reasons a book may not be published. Taste is subjective. Editors carefully build their lists. Nobody is owed a book deal. And it remains entirely possible that my novel wasn’t as good as the agents thought it was.
But after I shared my experience online, Jewish writers began telling me stories that sounded unnervingly familiar. Authors whose expected book deals vanished. Writers whose agents could “no longer champion” their careers. Books that were bought for six figures before Oct. 7 but barely promoted afterward. Israeli agents with stacks of manuscripts that American publishers would not even consider.
For Jewish authors, perhaps the most visceral gut punch was a viral spreadsheet titled “Is your fav author a zionist???” It was a list of Jewish fiction authors, color-coded by how Zionist they were perceived to be, with a column detailing their purported transgression. The spreadsheet itself was eventually taken down, but the message sent to the industry was clear: If you work with Jewish authors, it will cost you.
Aware that even the staggering evidence I was amassing remained anecdotal, I wanted to find a way to track the impact of what was happening more empirically.
I turned to Publishers Marketplace, the leading industry database where many book deals are announced, and reviewed fiction deals for books by Jewish authors that publicly signaled Jewish or Israeli content. What I found was grim. Between 2023 and 2024, there was a 76% decline in fiction deal announcements to large presses that mentioned Jews, Judaism or Israel. The numbers improved somewhat in 2025, but they did not recover. Compared with 2023, announced sales of Jewish books were still down 47% at large presses.
And the early 2026 numbers are worse: Looking at what has been announced so far this year and annualizing the comparison, fiction deals mentioning Jewish content are down 82% at large presses compared with 2023.
Like all data sets, this one is imperfect. Not every book deal is announced on Publishers Marketplace, and not every announcement mentions Jewish content when a book contains it. It may be that agents and publishers are less willing than they once were to mention Jewish themes in deal announcements, despite the content of the books themselves.
But the data is the best we have for now. And if the problem is that Jewish content is something the industry feels that it needs to obscure when announcing deals, that is also a major problem.
Whatever the explanation, I found that there is no question that publicly announced fiction deals foregrounding Jewish themes dropped sharply after Oct. 7, and the decline appears to be worsening. This should alarm anyone who cares about Jewish literature, but also anyone who cares about the free exchange of ideas.
I am currently working with the Anti-Defamation League as it examines antisemitism in publishing. Part of my efforts have been to understand what’s happening on an individual level, because while data is important, it can only tell us so much.
As someone well connected in the Jewish literary scene, I reached out on social media to ask people across the industry to share their experiences. I expected a handful of messages. Instead, my inbox filled with accounts from published and unpublished authors, agents, editors, Big Five employees, audiobook performers and marketers. People from every part of the industry described specific patterns of exclusion around Jewish writers, Jewish stories and Israel-related material. These trends fit with what PEN America related at length last week in its report on Jewish and Israeli exclusion in publishing — a report that I believe held back from reckoning fairly and honestly with what Jewish authors are facing.
I had begun my investigation wondering whether my own novel simply wasn’t good enough. And the truth is, it may not be. But this isn’t about any one book. What we’re looking at is a broader pattern: Jewish stories have become professionally risky, while Israel-related material has become positively radioactive. Because of that, many institutions within publishing appear to be choosing silence over confrontation.
The stakes here are not simply professional disappointment for Jewish authors, or even the destruction of creative careers. For the Jewish community, the stakes are existential. If Jewish stories are not published, then part of the Jewish record goes missing.
As a people, text has been our portable homeland. We have used words to bind ourselves together, in argument and agreement, across generations. Sentences have tied Am Yisrael to Eretz Yisrael. Modern Zionism was argued into existence through pamphlets and speeches. Law, memory, argument, longing, testimony, jokes, recipes, grief, liturgy: we have always carried ourselves through history in words.
In the rabbinic telling of the Roman siege of Jerusalem, Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai’s plea is: “Give me Yavneh and its sages.” He does not ask to save the temple or Jerusalem, but instead to save the Jewish people through the study of Torah. In the face of what could have been our obliteration, he helped usher in the era of Rabbinic Judaism by placing his faith in our texts.
In the Warsaw Ghetto, Emanuel Ringelblum and his fellow members of Oneg Shabbat secretly documented Jewish life under Nazi occupation. As the death vise of history tightened around them, they preserved Jewish testimony. And in 1949, just months after Israel’s War of Independence, S. Yizhar published “Khirbet Khizeh,” a novel documenting the moral complexity of 1948 in real time. He trusted his readers’ collective empathy and intellect, even while his new state was raw, precarious, traumatized and still fighting to understand herself.
Jews do not wait until history is finished with us. We write while the dust is still in our mouths.
But our stories don’t only serve as testimony to our pain. They are also about sex, food, family, money, mysticism, ambition, marriage, doubt, Israel, diaspora, bad decisions, holy arguments, vulgar jokes, longing, grief, pleasure, and survival. They are the record of people who are still here, still making art, still spinning stories in multiple languages.
It is true that many of our most lasting stories did not need a publishing house at all. But carrying those stories forward has always been collective work. If the institutions entrusted with publishing literature will not carry or promote Jewish stories, then Jews will have to build the institutions that will.
While I still hope to publish my own novel one day, this stopped being about my manuscript a long time ago. What matters now is reenvisioning Jewish publishing as an act of peoplehood — one that we must all roll up our sleeves to make happen.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post I gathered the data on Jewish fiction publishing. The trends are alarming. appeared first on The Forward.
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How a Trump attack on Jon Ossoff could fuel the first Jewish presidency
(JTA) — Jon Ossoff, the Jewish senator from Georgia and the focus of speculation about a 2028 run for the presidency, is prepared to be the target of an address Thursday night by President Donald Trump.
Ossoff told reporters that if Trump, as expected, questions his and Sen. Raphael Warnock’s 2021 election wins, then the president would be “calling Georgia voters illegitimate.”
Trump has repeatedly claimed without basis that his 2020 presidential election defeat in Georgia, and wins by Democrats Ossoff and Warnock in runoffs the following January, were rigged. He has deployed federal law enforcement to Georgia to search for evidence of fraud, even though repeated probes have uncovered nothing.
The speech comes as Ossoff has gained national attention for his repeated attacks on the president in his reelection bid against Trump-endorsed Rep. Mike Collins.
Ossoff’s battle with Trump could fuel buzz for his vying for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028.
Ossoff has repeatedly denied interest in running for president this cycle. But Democratic pollster Adam Carlson imagined an excerpt from a “Former President Ossoff’s memoir in 2060.”
“I wasn’t planning on running for president. It was never an ambition of mine,” Carlson wrote on X, following initial reports that Trump’s address could come as soon as Monday. “Then Trump did that super weird address on July 13, 2026 and here we are.”
Ossoff, 39, were he to run and win, would be the first Jewish president of the United States, and his Jewish identity has crept into discussions about his potential candidacy.
He has drawn comparisons to Barack Obama, who said in 2006 that he “will not” run for president, two years before he did so successfully.
The buzz around Ossoff has largely focused on his sharp criticism of Trump, attracting some prominent left-wing figures. Progressives such as Gen Z commentator Jack Cocchiarella and Zohran Mamdani adviser Morris Katz have lauded Ossoff’s messaging.
Left-wing streamer Hasan Piker — a harsh Israel critic who has drawn allegations of antisemitism — said Ossoff “will be my dark horse pick, depending on how he presents himself if he has ambitions for higher office.”
One subject that Ossoff has largely steered clear of during his reelection campaign is Israel, a growing wedge issue among Democrats and a litmus test for democratic socialists like Piker. While multiple possible presidential candidates have sworn off the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, Ossoff has not weighed in on the group.
Ossoff has positioned himself as an Israel supporter who opposes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Just over a month after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, he referred to himself as a “pro-Israel Jewish American” in an address. He said he was praying for the Israeli hostages’ freedom and urges “mercy for the innocent civilians in Gaza.”
He has since voted to block some weapons sales to the country — along with an increasing number of Senate Democrats who have questioned military assistance to Israel as the war has devastated Gaza — while voting to allow the sale of defensive weapons. He wrote in July 2025 that “the United States must continue to support the Israeli people, who face the persistent threat of rocket and missile attack and have been subjected to intense aerial bombardment from Iran, Lebanon, and Yemen.”
Ossoff’s first vote against weapons in November 2024 spurred a critical open letter from several Georgia Jewish organizations including synagogues, Jewish schools, the local Anti-Defamation League chapter and other groups. His vote also drew the attention of AIPAC, which released 30-second ads attacking U.S. senators — including Ossoff — who had voted to block weapons sales.
Radio host Eric Messersmith said last month that, in an effort to win over a party that is divided on Israel, Ossoff “might be the Democrat that can thread the needle because even though he’s Jewish, he’s very critical of the Israeli government, very critical of Benjamin Netanyahu.”
“He has credibility on that issue, so it’s possible that I think he could fill that lane in between the two extremes of the Democratic party,” Messersmith said in a widely circulated conversation on CNN.
CNN’s Elex Michaelson drew criticism online when he added, “As a Jew, some people read a little more Jewish than other people, and Jon Ossoff may not read as Jewish as [Pennsylvania Gov.] Josh Shapiro does, for whatever’s that worth.” Michaelson later apologized.
Ossoff has deep ties to the local Jewish community, and has spoken about the impact of growing up around his uncle who was a Holocaust survivor.
Living among survivors “has a profound impact on how I view the State of Israel, recognizing that the State of Israel was established 75 years ago as Jews rebuilt in the ashes of the Holocaust, and sought to establish a secure homeland for the Jewish people,” Ossoff told the American Jewish Committee in May 2023.
The Georgia Democrat’s team reported that Ossoff raised an $20 million in the year’s second quarter, ending it with $42 million in cash on hand.
Jewish Insider reported that some Jewish Georgians are torn. Collins has faced accusations of antisemitism and having ties to the far right. Collins’ son-in-law is a white nationalist social media influencer who has shared antisemitic material and Nazi imagery, CNN reported on Thursday. Collins has said some of his own statements were misunderstood, and has defended himself by citing his support for Israel.
“Donald Trump’s handpicked candidate Mike Collins is a notorious bigot, antisemite, and extremist,” Ossoff posted on social media last month.
Ahead of Trump’s address, Ossoff said he expects the president “to use whatever he puts out there on Thursday as a pretext” to interfere in the November election, or “to lay the groundwork for challenging the result.”
The post How a Trump attack on Jon Ossoff could fuel the first Jewish presidency appeared first on The Forward.
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In the wake of Graham Platner’s success (and fall), a candidate to replace him changes his mind about ‘genocide’
(JTA) — When Jordan Wood vied last fall for the Democratic nomination for Maine’s U.S. Senate seat, he avoided accusing Israel of genocide, citing a link between rising antisemitism and “the language” that people use.
Graham Platner, who went on to overwhelmingly win the nomination, did not stint on using the term. Platner is out after accusations of sexual assault, and Wood is once again running in the abbreviated primary to replace him. (Platner has denied the accusations.)
And now the former congressional staffer is changing his tune.
“I believe we can’t continue to fund Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” Wood wrote on social media last week. “It’s a moral atrocity. We should be using our taxpayer dollars to fund schools, healthcare, and childcare here at home, not on bombing innocent civilians.”
Last November, Wood said he was concerned the word was so loaded as to be dangerous. He told Democratic commentator Kaivan Shroff that he believed Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza, but stopped short of using the term genocide.
“I’ve hesitated on it because I’m also seeing a real rise in antisemitism in the United States,” Wood said then. “My husband is Jewish, and the acts of violence toward Jewish Americans is very much connected to the language that we use.”
It would be “a huge deal for the United States Congress to designate what’s going on in Gaza as a genocide officially,” Wood said
“There could be consequences to that of U.S. citizens that have served in the IDF,” he said. “Do they get prosecuted?”
Wood’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment on what prompted him to adopt the term.
The Maine Democratic Party has until July 27 to nominate a replacement for Platner, an anti-Israel progressive, in hopes of unseating GOP Sen. Susan Collins.
Wood, along with major candidates Troy Jackson, Nirav Shah and Shenna Bellows have all accused Israel of having committed genocide since launching their campaigns, underscoring the shrinking popularity of Israel among Democratic voters and their representatives in the wake of its war in Gaza – and perhaps noting Platner’s success in making Israel an issue in the race.
In an interview this week with The Advocate, Wood criticized the embattled Platner, while saying that he would “carry on that platform” that had energized Maine voters.
“I separate Graham, the movement, from the person,” Wood said. He pointed to issues like conditioning aid to Israel and rejecting corporate PAC and AIPAC money, as priorities that he shared with Platner.
Wood told Shroff in November that he would not take money from AIPAC, and added that there is a “huge amount of distrust” of the pro-Israel lobbying organization among Democratic voters.
“I believe the only way to truly prove to a voter that you are voting and prioritizing policies in their best interest, and for our country’s best interest, is to remove any perception of corruption or misdealing,” Wood said.
He has also been consistent in saying that he would vote in support of Bernie Sanders’ resolutions to block the sales of certain weapons to Israel, while maintaining that that shouldn’t mean halting the U.S.-Israel relationship altogether.
“The United States should absolutely have a cooperative relationship with Israel, and I want that relationship to work. But a real partnership is not a blank check,” Wood told Jewish Insider last week. “It comes with honesty and accountability. The United States has enormous leverage with the Israeli government, and we’ve been refusing to use it.”
Wood and a number of other candidates will participate in a televised debate on CNN on Thursday night, ahead of the July 27 nominating convention.
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