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Jewish institutions awaken to climate crisis, with hundreds pledging action

(JTA) — For a decade starting in 2002, Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi devoted herself to pro-Israel advocacy. After that, the Jewish philanthropist and activist from Annapolis, Maryland, went all in to fight for disability rights, working in the field for the next decade. Now, Mizrahi is focused on climate change. 

“Let me put it this way: In 2021, we donated to one climate organization, and in 2022, we donated to 17 of them,” Mizrahi said, referring to the small charity fund she runs with her husband, tech entrepreneur Victor Mizrahi. This year, the couple made their largest climate-related donation yet, sending a group of nine climate reporters to Israel to meet tech startups working on ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Mizrahi and her husband have also begun commercially investing in such startups. 

“I was hoping other people would solve it,” she said. “But the pace of the change is not nearly meeting the demand at the moment. I felt that even though I don’t know the subject, I’m just going to have to do it because I have kids and I don’t want this world to fall apart.”

Climate change has long ranked at or near the top of a list of issues concerning Jews in the United States, according to multiple surveys, and Jews have been heavily involved in the wider climate movement. But until recently, the issue had a marginal place on the agendas of Jewish communal organizations, which neglected climate even as the subject took on importance in the activism and policies of other religious communities and in the larger philanthropic world.

Mizrahi’s newfound emphasis on climate is an early example of a larger shift that is underway in Jewish philanthropy, a multibillion-dollar world made up of thousands of individual donors, charitable foundations and nonprofit organizations. 

“It’s the beginning of what will become a more widespread focus among Jewish groups,” said Rabbi Jennie Rosenn, the founder and CEO of the Jewish climate group Dayenu. “We’re seeing an awakening to this as a profoundly Jewish issue, and awakening to the role that the Jewish community has to play in addressing the climate crisis.”

Scientists say that decisions regarding carbon emissions made in the next few years will affect life on Earth for thousands of years to come. The most recent warning came in March, when leading global experts with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a new report, stating that “there is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.” 

The large Jewish populations living in the coastal United States are vulnerable to extreme storms, sea-level rise, severe heat and other weather disruptions — a situation dramatized in the recent Apple television series “Extrapolations,” in which a rabbi contends with rising sea waters infiltrating his Florida synagogue. Meanwhile, Israel is experiencing a slew of impacts from drought and floods to security threats tied regional climate-related instability. 

A flooded road after heavy rainfall in the central Israeli city of Lod, Jan. 16, 2022. (Yossi Aloni/Flash90)

Israeli officials visit the site where a road collapsed into a large sinkhole at Mineral Beach in the Dead Sea on December 7, 2017. Many facilities and beaches have been closed or shut down in recent years following the increase in sinkholes caused by ever-declining sea levels, as climate change strains the country’s water resources. (Mark Neyman/GPO)

The last few months have seen a flurry of new initiatives aimed at both greening Jewish institutions and directing collective action on climate. 

In December, for example, Rosenn’s group published a report calculating that endowments of Jewish organizations, from family foundations to local federations, are invested in the fossil fuel industry to the tune of at least $3 billion. The report launched an ongoing campaign called All Our Might that urges Jewish leaders to withdraw these investments and put the money toward clean energy instead.

Meanwhile, many of the most prominent Jewish organizations in the country — representing local federations, Hillel chapters, summer camps, community centers, day schools and nearly every religious denomination — had already joined a new green coalition organized by another Jewish environmental group and were preparing to unveil pledges to do more in the fight against climate change. 

The unveiling of the climate pledges happened in March, under the leadership of Adamah, a nonprofit created through the merger of two stalwarts of Jewish environmentalism, Hazon and the Pearlstone Center. 

“Climate and sustainability have not been on the list of priorities for the vast majority of Jewish organizations; this coalition and these climate action plans reflect a deep paradigm shift and culture change moving forward,” Adamah CEO Jakir Mandela said at the time. 

The commitments made by members of Adamah’s Jewish Climate Leadership Coalition include sending youth leaders to global climate summits, reducing emissions of buildings and vehicles and lobbying the federal government to pass climate policies. 

More than 300 congregations and nonprofits have joined. For Earth Day, Adamah announced a million-dollar fund offering interest-free loans and matching grants to Jewish groups for projects to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. 

If any single event can be said to mark the debut of the climate issue as a top Jewish communal priority, it is probably the recent annual conference of the Jewish Funders Network, which took place in March in Phoenix, bringing together thousands of donors and charity executives. 

For the gathering’s first event, before the formal opening of the conference, a group of participants went on a field trip to downtown Phoenix to learn about the local effects of the climate crisis. Far more people signed up than organizers anticipated, and with about 55 passengers, the tour bus chartered for the occasion reached capacity. Mizrahi, who was among the participants, said the trip was helpful as a networking opportunity for like-minded philanthropists. 

Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz, the founder of the activist group Arizona Jews for Justice, took the group to a local church where immigration officers drop off asylum seekers, so that conference attendees could hear about how environmental disasters drive cross-border migration. The trip continued with a visit to a downtown homeless encampment known as the Zone, where participants were invited to imagine the challenge of spending the summer season outside, with temperatures sometimes reaching 120 degrees. The conversation eventually turned to the issue of water scarcity across the state.

“We wanted to expose them to how the existential threats posed by climate change are not long term, but are already here,” Yanklowitz said. “People down in the Zone are dying every summer from heat exhaustion and dehydration.”

Based on his debrief with the group afterward, Yanklowitz feels the trip left an impact on participants. 

“I didn’t hear anyone say, ‘Oh, I’m changing my commitments.’ But I did get the sense that climate change was kind of abstract for many people, and that now it really hit home,” Yanklowitz said.

The rest of the conference featured multiple talks and gatherings dedicated to climate, including on the main stage, and an announcement that Birthright, which offers free trips to Israel for young Jews, was increasing its own climate activism with the help of a new donation. 

In an interview, Ellen Bronfman Hauptman and Stephen Bronfman, children of Birthright founder Charles Bronfman, said their $9 million gift is meant to honor their father on the occasion of his 90th birthday, while also bringing Birthright more in line with the values of a new generation that is environmentally-minded. 

Birthright organizers will use the funding to develop programming focused on climate that could, for example, expose participants to Israel’s clean tech scene. The money is also intended to help Birthright lower its own carbon footprint, potentially by switching to electric buses or adding more vegetarian meals. 

The Bronfmans hope that Birthright’s significant purchasing power in Israeli tourism will nudge the industry toward more ecologically sustainable practices. 

“To me, Birthright is like Walmart — everyone wants to do business with them,” Stephen Bronfman said. “They have the power to dictate terms to their service providers and affect the supply chain.” 

The widespread interest in climate mobilization among Jewish groups comes after years in which the issue languished outside the mainstream. Rosenn, the head of Dayenu, who has attended about 15 conferences of the Jewish Funder Network, noticed a change this year. 

“There used to be half a dozen people at a breakfast before the program talking about climate. And it wasn’t even climate, necessarily — it was the environment writ large,” she said. 

The Jewish world is, in many ways, still lagging behind the larger climate movement. Divesting endowment funds from the fossil fuel industry, for example, is seen as a bold step among Jewish groups even though at least 1,590 institutions representing nearly $41 trillion in assets have already publicly committed to doing so, according to a website tracking such pledges. About a third of the groups on the list are defined as faith-based organizations, but only three are Jewish: Kolot Chayeinu, a congregation in Park Slope, Brooklyn; the Reform movement’s pension system; and the American Jewish World Service, a global justice group. 

Rabbi Laura Bellows, now Dayenu’s director of spiritual activism and education, waves matzah as she encourages major financial organizations to divest from fossil fuels at a rally in Washington, D.C., April 20, 2022. (Bora Chung | Survival Media Agency / Courtesy of Dayenu)

Adamah’s own climate plan doesn’t include a pledge to divest but only a promise that it will investigate the option of doing so for its endowment and employee retirement funds. Instead, the plan touts the group’s education and advocacy efforts, and focuses on reducing emissions at its retreat centers. 

Adamah’s chief climate officer, Risa Alyson Cooper, acknowledged that Jewish community institutions have been “largely absent” from the divestment movement and said her group regards divestment as one of several required tools for addressing the climate crisis.

She said the Jewish community hit a milestone when 12 of the 20 founding members of Adamah’s climate coalition said in their climate plans that they would consider amending their financial practices. That was significant, she said, in light of the organizations’ complex and deliberate governing structures, which can make executing such changes onerous.  

“While the Jewish community may have lagged behind in years past, we are catching up quickly,” Cooper said. 

Such a shift would mark not only a milestone for Jewish climate activism but also a departure from how the Jewish community has historically done philanthropy, said Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster, executive vice president of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. 

She said wielding financial holdings for social impact has been a hallmark of advocacy by Christian groups. Last year, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) opted to divest from fossil fuels in light of the climate crisis.

The Jewish community, meanwhile, has tended to act primarily through charitable donations. One of the reasons for the difference, she said, is that the Jewish community is much less centralized with communal assets spread across many endowments, making the actions of any single group relatively less impactful. 

“Adamah had done some really important work to change individual behavior and grow people’s connections to the environment, but the bigger piece of bold collective action to fight the climate crisis was missing,” Kahn-Troster said. “The overall community is late to respond to the urgency of the problem. But I do think that the work of these organizations is very significant, so I’m excited to see it.”

Kahn-Troster’s historical view is informed by the legacy of her father, Rabbi Lawrence Troster, an environmental activist who had pushed for communal Jewish action on climate, and by the passion for climate justice displayed by her 15-year-old, Liora Pelavin, a member of the Jewish Youth Climate Movement, an arm of Adamah. 

“Finding a meaningful Jewish space to do grassroots-level climate advocacy that many young people are demanding has been really important to Liora,” Kahn-Troster said. 


The post Jewish institutions awaken to climate crisis, with hundreds pledging action appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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Meet the only Jewish president of a Catholic university

Synagogue president and Catholic university president aren’t typically jobs one holds concurrently.

But in 2023, Greg Weiner became president of both Assumption University, a Catholic college in Worcester, Mass., and Congregation Beth Israel, a Conservative synagogue in the area.

Weiner’s inauguration in March of that year made him the first and only Jewish president of a Catholic university — one with the motto “Until Christ be formed in you.”

To him, the combination just made sense.

“I never had any hesitation at all about whether being a Jewish president would work — quite the opposite,” Weiner told the Forward. “The divide in society between people who do and don’t treat religion seriously is much wider than between particular religions.”

Shortly after Weiner’s inauguration, college presidents found themselves in the national spotlight as pro-Palestinian protesters built tent encampments on college campuses across the country in the aftermath of Oct. 7

During that time, Weiner became a figurehead for an unconventional idea: that Jewish students who felt unwelcome at secular universities ought to consider attending Catholic institutions like Assumption instead.

Now, Weiner continues to make the case that Catholic schools have much to offer Jewish students.

“The challenge for Jewish families, Jewish parents, Jewish students, is we have to ask ourselves: Do we value education, or do we simply value the prestige that’s associated with certain universities?” Weiner said. “Because, in a lot of cases, those seem to be inversely correlated.”

How Weiner became president

To state the obvious: Appointing a non-Catholic to head a Catholic university was not a risk-free choice.

How would students, faculty and trustees react? Would the university, founded in 1904 by the Catholic Augustinian order known as the Assumptionists, be accused of turning away from its Catholic history, character and mission?

Historically, Catholic universities were exclusively led by priests from the Catholic order that founded the school. Universities like Notre Dame have continued that tradition; every president since its founding in 1842 has been a priest of the Congregation of Holy Cross.

But as Catholic universities have increasingly sought to attract students of all faiths — and as the number of priests available to lead universities has declined — more laypeople have taken the helm. For instance, Loyola University in Chicago named the first laywoman instead of a priest as president in 2016. The Jesuit Fordham University did the same in 2022, breaking with its 200-year tradition.

“I wouldn’t entirely downplay some tensions here, as much as the motto of our university is ‘Until Christ be formed in you,’” said the Rev. Dennis Gallagher, an Assumptionist priest who serves as Vice President for Mission at Assumption University. “Clearly, he’s not going to give personal credence to that particular expression.”

But Gallagher said he was won over by how Weiner articulated the value of a Catholic liberal education, which emphasizes inquiry and debate — values that also happen to be very Jewish.

An Assumption education asks humanity’s’ “enduring questions,” and attracts the kind of students who “haven’t determined that they know the answers to those things before they arrive,” Gallagher said.

Weiner, who draws parallels between Talmudic debate and Assumption’s inquiry-driven approach to education, was well-positioned to promote those ideals, Gallagher said.

Weiner was also not an outsider at Assumption. After a career in Democratic politics that included working as press secretary for then-Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey and getting his PhD in government at Georgetown University, Weiner joined the faculty at Assumption in 2011 as a political science professor. He quickly rose the ranks, becoming provost and vice president for academic affairs in 2019. After former Assumption President Francesco Cesareo announced his retirement in 2022, Weiner became interim leader.

Gallagher said he didn’t think trustees were seriously considering Weiner for the job of president at the time. But when Weiner excelled in the interim role, the choice became clear.

“I remember saying, ‘I think what we’re looking for is right here with us,’” Gallagher said. “Somebody that can both understand and communicate what a Catholic — albeit not being Catholic himself — what a Catholic liberal education is about.”

In the end, Weiner’s appointment drew far more celebration than controversy, with the university actively embracing his Jewish identity. A rabbi bestowed a special blessing upon Weiner at his inauguration.

A Jewish haven?

Weiner, who grew up as a member of the lone Jewish family in the small town of Luling, Texas, is comfortable with being the only Jew in the room.

When a childhood friend expressed concern that Weiner was going to hell, he took it as “a very ham-handed way of expressing genuine caring,” he said. “I was born without the gene that tells you to get offended quickly.”

That same instinct carried into his career. At first, Weiner said, he didn’t publicly lean into his Judaism as part of the presidency. But in the aftermath of the attacks of Oct. 7, he felt “a particular responsibility to speak out.”

In December 2023, Weiner made a splash with a Wall Street Journal op-ed suggesting Jewish students feeling alienated from Ivy League campuses ought to consider Catholic schools like Assumption.

At the time, other Catholic schools were also explicitly courting Jewish students amid turmoil over Israel and antisemitism on college campuses across the country.

Still, it was an unconventional pitch: Assumption has no Hillel or Chabad on campus, and students are required to take Catholic theology courses where they learn about Christian morality, sacraments and other church doctrine.

But whatever Assumption lacked in Jewish religious life, Weiner said it has made up for in campus culture. Assumption had no student encampments protesting Israel after Oct. 7, in part,  Weiner said, because Assumption students are more interested in arguing over ideas in a philosophy class than organizing a protest.

Weiner, who has written four books on political theory and previously worked as a political aide for several Democratic politicians, said students on campus hold a range of views about Israel. But Assumption is not a place filled with student activists.

“Too many campuses have encouraged moral certainty, intellectual certainty, when Socrates says, ‘Philosophy begins with a confession of ignorance,’” Weiner said. “Education requires a certain amount of humility.”

Eli Beberman told the Forward he initially chose Assumption in 2018 because it was close to home and had a strong secondary education program. He expected being Jewish at a Catholic school might require some adjustment. He never imagined the university’s president would become Jewish his senior year.

“Seeing upper level leadership at Assumption also be Jewish was a really cool experience for me,” Beberman said.

Assumption was a place where interfaith friendships thrived, Beberman said. Though there was no Hillel on campus, Beberman was able to pray in an interfaith space with a Torah. He also celebrated Jewish holidays with non-Jewish friends, hosting Shabbat dinners and a Hanukkah party in the dorms, where his parents brought over their “famous brisket.”

“I was able to practice my religion how I wanted to, and I felt very comfortable on campus being a non-Catholic student,” Beberman said.

Jewish faculty members, too, said Weiner’s presidency changed how they saw the university.

Samantha Goldman, a Jewish associate professor of special education at Assumption, said she didn’t seek out a job at a Catholic institution. But once she got there, she was surprised at how natural the environment felt.

“Having a Jewish president of a Catholic institution really communicates this sense of welcoming and inclusivity that might not otherwise be apparent,” she said.

Others were drawn specifically to the culture Weiner fostered. In 2024, Mary Jane Rein left her job as executive director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. She said Clark had failed to properly support her after students protested a talk she helped organize featuring an Israeli reservist. That inspired her to come to Assumption, where she launched the Center for Civic Friendship, which helps students engage in civil discourse across ideological divides.

“To my surprise as both a scholar and a Jew,” Rein wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “I feel a warmer welcome and more commonality of purpose at a Catholic institution than at Clark, a secular one.”

That same year, Weiner was reappointed for a five-year term through May 2030 in an announcement trustees said reflected “deep confidence in his leadership.”

To Weiner, the success of his presidency is evidence that Judaism and Catholicism are not as far apart as they may seem.

“Obviously, [there are] some foundational theological differences,” Weiner said. “But with respect to the educational commitments, I think they’re quite compatible.”

The post Meet the only Jewish president of a Catholic university appeared first on The Forward.

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The secret Jewish history of the ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show’

“Rocky Horror,” which opened in London cinemas on this day in 1975 is the cultural phenomenon that simply refuses to die. Rather, since its first incarnation as a 1973 London stage musical, “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” has been continuously reborn on the silver screen, in subsequent Broadway stage productions, and, in 2016, as a direct-to-TV film, starring Laverne Cox of “Orange Is the New Black” fame as the transgender Dr. Frank-N-Furter, the mad-scientist role originated by Tim Curry.

In all its incarnations, however, “Rocky Horror” has always been more than just a performance. Its appeal has been widely driven as a participatory event. Film critic Roger Ebert summarized it best writing about the original 1975 film: “‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ is not so much a movie as more of a long-running social phenomenon,” because “the fans put on a better show than anything on the screen.” What Ebert refers to is the interactive tradition that has grown up around “Rocky Horror,” whereby fans attend midnight showings primed for a party as much as a screening: reciting the lines out loud along with the characters and interspersing them with “callouts” — responses that have been accepted into the Rocky Horror canon much as the Talmud is commentary on the Mishnah that has in and of itself become part of the sacred text. In the case of “Rocky Horror,” this also includes activities, such as throwing rice or confetti in the air when the married couple in the film leaves the church; squirting water pistols during a rainstorm; and tossing rolls of toilet paper when one character says “Great Scott!”

In one of the most overtly Jewish moments in and outside of the film, a speech by Dr. Frank-N-Furter hailing the creation of the Golem-like creature of the title, Rocky Horror, is met by chaotic noisemaking on the part of the partygoers onscreen and off. In the original film, some of the crowd generates noise with ratchets – a percussion instrument that looks suspiciously like a gragger, as if Dr. Frank had said “Haman.” There are other Purim-like touches in the film, such that temple congregations have made “Rocky Horror” into part of their annual ritual, such as a “Rockin’ Hora Purimshpiel” in which several of the musical numbers are rewritten as Purim songs.

Other Judaized versions of “Rocky Horror” that have appeared over the years include “Hebrew Horror,” which was staged in Los Angeles in 2007, and the “Rocky Hora Chanukah Song” by the Jewish punk-rock parody group, the Shlomones (sort of a redundancy, since several members of the Ramones were in fact Jewish, as was their outlook in numerous ways, including their song, “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg.”

The original London stage version was produced by British-Jewish theatrical impresario Michael White, who was born to Eastern European Jewish-immigrant parents in Glasgow, Scotland. White’s credits had already included the boundary-shattering “Oh! Calcutta!” — the first all-nude revue in commercial theater — and he went on to co-produce the “Rocky Horror” film as well as “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”

The original musical and film were decades before their time in celebrating the sexual fluidity of the LGBT world – indeed, there wasn’t such a term as LGBT, much less a socio-political acceptance of it, for years to come. The new TV film version is in no small part an effort to seize this cultural moment when LGBT, and particularly transgender issues, are now part of mainstream political and cultural discussion, especially what with the casting of openly trans actress Laverne Cox.

The original did, however, have a political consciousness beyond its seemingly outrageous effort to provoke. Dr. Frank-n-Furter’s lab coat in the movie was inspired by a Nazi concentration camp inmate uniform and was adorned by the pink triangle that the Nazis used to label what we now call LGBT inmates. And in the film at least, there were implications that Frank’s rival, Dr. Scott was a Nazi.

The 2016 version was again produced by music industry legend Lou Adler, who was responsible for turning the stage musical into the original film starring Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick and Meat Loaf. In that version, Eddie was played by American Idol star Adam Lambert, the role played by Meat Loaf in the original Broadway cast and film. Lambert, who starred as Joshua in “The Ten Commandments: The Musical,” has achieved fame as a solo artist and as the replacement for the late frontman Freddie Mercury in the rock band Queen. Lambert’s Jewish mother, Leila, was a dental hygienist.

Seth Rogovoy is a contributing editor to the Forward.

The post The secret Jewish history of the ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show’ appeared first on The Forward.

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Sister of pro-Israel stalwart Lindsey Graham secures GOP Senate nomination 

(JTA) — South Carolina Sen. Darline Graham defeated U.S. House Rep. Ralph Norman in a special primary runoff on Tuesday, putting her in a dominant position to win the Senate seat left vacant with the death in July of her older brother, the pro-Israel stalwart Lindsey Graham.

The Associated Press called the race two hours after polls closed at 9:01pm. By the time 99% of votes were tallied, Darline Graham had secured 52.3% of the votes to Norman’s 47.7%.

“Tonight is a great victory, but it’s not the finish line,” Graham told her supporters on Tuesday night. “In fact, it is the starting line for an even bigger fight, which lies ahead.”

If Darline Graham goes on to win November’s general election against Democrat Annie Andrews, she will have big shoes to fill. Her brother served 23 years in the Senate and eight in the U.S. House. He traveled to Israel about a dozen times between Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack on the Jewish state and his death at age 71.

Heading into the primaries, analysts expressed no doubt that Darline Graham would be pro-Israel. But matching Lindsey Graham’s level of foreign policy activity, they warned, would be a formidable task. Meanwhile, her campaign to date has largely avoided discussion of international affairs. Instead, she has focused on domestic concerns like reducing spending, securing borders and promoting Trump-backed policies.

During a debate aired on C-SPAN last week, Graham struggled to respond to a foreign policy question about Taiwan and the South China Sea, ultimately admitting that she’s “not that informed on national security.”

“I’m not a polished politician up here,” she said. “National security is not my thing, not my area of expertise.”

Later addressing issues of affordability, Graham linked the domestic economic situation to the war in Iran and said she trusts President Donald Trump “to get the Strait of Hormuz open.” She also voiced her preference for financial sanctions over putting troops on the ground.

Asked about the country’s relationship with Israel, Graham described the Jewish state as “one of our strongest allies.” Recognizing her brother’s close relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, she added that during a recent meeting with the Israeli premier, she vowed to “continue supporting Israel in any way” she can.

“We have to stand with Israel,” Graham said.

At their previous face-off, Graham had secured 33% of the vote, while Norman came in second place, at 25%, against eight fellow Republicans. But South Carolina requires primary winners to earn a majority of votes in order to avoid a two-candidate runoff. In the November general election, Graham will contend with Democrat Annie Andrews, a pediatrician who is unlikely to prevail in the solidly Republican state.

Tuesday’s runoff marked the third time in two months that South Carolina Republicans came to the polls to select a Senate candidate. Lindsey Graham, won the first primary in June but died suddenly the next month from an aortic dissection.

A few days later, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican, appointed Darline Graham to finish her brother’s term. Though she only had minimal policy experience, including a leadership role at the South Carolina Commission for the Blind, she earned President Donald Trump’s endorsement and declared her candidacy in the full race.

Trump celebrated Graham’s nomination in a Tuesday night Truth Social post, writing that “Darline Graham rides Trump endorsement to win GOP nomination for brother’s South Carolina seat.”

Graham thanked Trump profusely during her Tuesday night acceptance speech, recognizing the president as one of her brother’s “closest friends” and crediting him for helping her secure a victory.

Norman, meanwhile, thanked his supporters on Tuesday night for their “prayer crusade of a campaign,” stressing that he “did not prepare a concession speech.” He accused “outside PACs” of spending $8 million opposing him and blamed the Democrats for this situation, adding that “they got what they wanted.”

He recognized Trump’s role in the race as a supporter of Graham, noting that he “never understood why he got involved” but that it is the president’s prerogative to do so. Nonetheless, Norman pledged that there “won’t be any tears” and that he planned to back Graham.

“I’m not supporting a Democrat, so I will support her, Darline, as best I can,” he added. “We’ll live to fight another day.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Sister of pro-Israel stalwart Lindsey Graham secures GOP Senate nomination  appeared first on The Forward.

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