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Meet the real Jewish Republican of color being floated to replace George Santos, the fake one
(JTA) — Last Friday, as George Santos completed his second week in Congress, Mazi Melesa Pilip was contemplating the relief Shabbat would bring — and also the sting of the betrayal she felt by her fellow Long Island lawmaker.
Among the welter of falsehoods that Santos scattered throughout the byways of the Great Neck area in northern Long Island he and Pilip both represent — Santos in Congress, Pilip as a Nassau County legislator — Santos has pitched himself as a Jewish and Black Republican who overcame hardship to earn multiple degrees.
All lies, but as it happens those descriptors apply to Pilip, an Ethiopian Jew who won’t count out a run for Congress if Santos ever accedes to demands, including from fellow Republicans, to resign. (Santos says he intends to serve out his two-year term.)
“I’m not going to lie to you, people are definitely asking me to run,” she told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an interview as she drove while shopping for Shabbat. “That doesn’t mean nothing.”
Pilip said her journey into American politics was propelled by her experience advocating for fellow Ethiopian immigrants in Israel — where she moved as a child through the Operation Solomon airlift and lived until marrying her American husband — and by her children’s experience with antisemitism in their Long Island schools.
“I am a strong believer, if you see something’s not working well for your community, or for yourself, you have to be involved,” she said. “You can’t just complain from outside.”
A Politico reporter, Olivia Beavers, reported on Twitter last week that Pilip was one of two Republicans the Nassau County Party is considering running should Santos step down. (The other is Jack Martins, a state senator; both he and Pilip ousted Democrats in a recent Republican sweep of Nassau County.)
Right now, Pilip said, she is focusing on serving her constituents through the Nassau County legislature. Any decision about replacing Santos, she said, is up to Joseph Cairo, the GOP chairman in Nassau County.
“The only person who can make a decision on who’s going to run will be the chairman,” Pilip said. “Time will show — it’s too early to say anything to be honest. I will continue to serve my residents and I love serving the people. I want to be a voice for the people, and anything I can do to help more people, I will definitely consider it.”
Cairo has not said yet who he would like to run to replace Santos, but two things are clear: He wants Santos to go, and he likes Pilip, a lot.
Cairo convened a press conference last week of leading Nassau County Republicans calling on Santos to step down because of the multiple lies he told while running and because he faces multiple criminal investigations. In unrelenting reporting since last month, reporters have detailed how Santos lied about his education, his job experience, his charitable giving and his family background.
“Today, on behalf of the Nassau County Republican Committee, I’m calling for his immediate resignation,” Cairo said at the press conference.
Cairo had led an effort to diversify GOP candidates on the island, and a year ago, at Pilip’s swearing-in ceremony, he explained why: He was an Italian American whose parents favored Republican ideals but felt unwelcome in the GOP until they helped integrate it themselves, in New Jersey and then on Long Island. It had become his mission to bring more minority candidates into the fold, and he recruited several of them to run in the 2021 local elections.
Pedram Bal, a Persian Jew and the mayor of Great Neck, told Cairo he should look at Pilip, an Ethiopian-Jewish immigrant who was active in efforts to revitalize Great Neck, and who had been vice president of her synagogue, Kol Yisrael Achim. It was an easy sell, Cairo said, and it paid off.
“An Orthodox Jewish woman, a religious refugee from Ethiopia is elected as a Republican to the Nassau County legislature!” he marveled at the inauguration.
Of the many lies Santos has told about himself, the Nassau County Republicans at the press conference seemed especially offended by his claims of descent from Holocaust survivors.
“For him to make up this story, that his parents were Holocaust survivors is beyond the pale. It is simply tragic and outrageous, and disgusting,” said Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive who is the first Jew elected to the position. “He is a stain on the House of Representatives. He’s a stain on the Third Congressional District.”
Pilip calls for the prosecution of the alleged assailant in the violent attack on a Jewish New Yorker in 2021, at a press conference, in Mineola, N.Y., Jan. 29, 2023. (Office of Mazi Melesa Pilip)
Jewish Republicans have been at pains to call on Santos to quit: The Republican Jewish Coalition said he will not be welcome at its events. With much fanfare, the RJC had presented Santos and Max Miller, a freshman Republican from Ohio, as the next generation of Republican Jewish leaders at its annual conference in Las Vegas in November. Miller last week also called on Santos to resign, saying in a statement that Santos sought to “benefit from the murder of millions of Jewish people.”
When Pilip spoke at the press conference, she did not address his lies about his heritage. “I’m also paying for the lies told by Congressman George Santos,” she said. “People trusted him, people campaigned for him, including me, as a county legislator. At this point, the trust is no longer there. Therefore, he should resign.”
In her interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Pilip said she found the fact of Santos’s compulsive lying more offensive than the lies themselves, including about his heritage. She had put her reputation on the line campaigning for him last year.
“I trusted him and I told people to vote for him. I campaigned with him. And so when you do something like this, and then keep every day there’s something new coming about him,” she said. “It’s making you feel uncomfortable because people asking, you know, what’s, what’s going on, Mazi, what happened with this guy?”
Pilip campaigning for the legislative seat in 2021 had bonded with her constituents. Speaking to local media she described how much she enjoyed the hustle of campaigning.
“I was going from synagogue to synagogue, bringing out the vote,” she told Five Towns Jewish Home last year.
“Sometimes I would leave Friday night to go to a shul and I would sleep at someone’s house on Friday night because I’m shomer Shabbat and I couldn’t walk back home,” she told the local magazine for Orthodox Jews. “And then I would go to another synagogue the next day, on Shabbat, to spend time there and talk to people. Only when Shabbat was over would I go home. I did this for two months. It was intense but it was worth it. I met a lot of people. I would go to train stations and park events — any event, large or small, I was there.”
She became a local celebrity, giving birth to twin daughters — her sixth and seventh children — just weeks before the election.
Pilipl, 43, said in her interview with JTA that her involvement in politics was almost inevitable, after she had migrated to Israel on Operation Solomon, the 1991 airlift, when she was 12.
“I have always been very active, even as a child in Israel,” advocating for the opportunities she saw that Israelis just a few years older than her were enjoying. Over her father’s objections, she enlisted in the paratroop division of the Israel Defense Forces (she says he is now proud of her service). While at university, she led the Ethiopian Student Union for two years. She has a degree in occupational therapy from the University of Haifa and a degree in diplomacy and security from Tel Aviv University.
“I was a voice of so many young kids who wanted equal opportunity and really my main focus was especially education, because I do believe through education, you can achieve a lot and you can integrate into the society,” she said. “So we were encouraging younger-generation [Ethiopian immigrants] my age to go to higher education. Because we came, you know, from nothing, and we came without any education.”
She met her husband, an American medical student at the Technion, while she was at the University of Haifa. They moved to the United States, where she became active speaking about Israel for Jewish federations and other Jewish groups. Her Instagram handle couples the U.S. and Israeli flags. Her husband, Adalbert, who was born in Ukraine, and whose mother is the child of Holocaust survivors, was especially offended by Santos’s Holocaust lies, Pilip said.
“Why would you use this painful history and create something like this and tell people that his grandparents survived just for the political benefit of it?” she said.
Pilip said her political interests were revived two years ago when her oldest son was preparing for bar mitzvah and he told her about antisemitic comments he endured from a classmate in the Great Neck Public Schools system. “He said, ‘Mom, you know, this child told me, I wish Hitler would kill you all,’” she recalled. She said that perhaps the child had been bullied, and was acting out against others, but it rattled her that he was resorting to antisemitism. “That a 12-year-old child would talk like this? It’s bad.”
So when Bal, the Great Neck mayor, approached her about running for elected office, she was game.
She campaigned on reviving Great Neck’s downtown, but also acting as a bridge in troubled times among the multiple minority communities in the area.
“Promoting understanding, education of cultures, religions and systemic hate has to be addressed from our young people on up,” she said in a candidate’s statement before her election.
Last Friday, however, she was looking forward to a little respite from the Santos follies.
“I’m going to pick up a couple of things from the grocery,” she said “I have to cook for my kids for Shabbat. Shabbat is starting early. So I think I’ll just spend time with my family, my kids. Just a very relaxing time.”
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The post Meet the real Jewish Republican of color being floated to replace George Santos, the fake one appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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UK lawmakers press government on why West Bank imports haven’t yet been banned
(JTA) — British lawmakers from across the political spectrum are pressing the government to ban imports from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, saying that explanations for why such a ban has not yet been imposed were inadequate.
During a three-hour House of Commons debate on Thursday, lawmakers argued that Britain’s long-standing position that the settlements are illegal under international law means it should fall in line behind other countries advancing bans, particularly at a time of rising settler violence and efforts to expand Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
The debate — the latest in a number of formal discussions about a potential ban in Parliament — was led by Abtisam Mohamed, a politician from the governing Labour Party who is the first Arab woman and first Yemeni member of Parliament. She was denied entry into Israel in 2025, a year after being elected.
“I want to pose a simple question to the government today, a question that sits at the heart of this debate,” Mohamed said in opening the session. “If settlements are illegal, why have we not made an outright ban on trade? What exactly is it that we’re waiting for?”
Lawmakers from other parties piled on.
“There is no excuse that we have to wait for other countries to move because they’ve moved ahead of us,” said Ellie Chowns from the left-wing Green Party, which has made opposition to Israel part of its platform. “There is no excuse that this is too technically difficult because the legal framework already exists.”
And a member of the Conservative party, which has traditionally favored strong ties with Israel, said he was unconvinced by the argument, made recently by a government official, that other measures that are potentially less complicated to administer could achieve the same pressure on Israel.
“We’ve done everything except the obvious, which is just the ban,” said the lawmaker, Kit Malthouse. “The question I’m left asking is, why? Why the reluctance? Why the hesitation? Nobody’s buying the complexity argument.”
On Monday, EU foreign ministers met to discuss a ban on products from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, in order to gauge if there is enough support for the move. The EU’s foreign minister said a ban on imports was the most popular option under discussion and said she expected that the conversation would soon advance.
The discussion in the House of Commons comes as the British Labour government is in flux, with a new prime minister set to take over from Keir Starmer next week. It also comes as the government is taking steps to reassure a Jewish community that has been rattled by a number of violent incidents. This week, the government both allocated more than $300 million in security funding for Jewish institutions while also formally declaring Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, seen as tied to many of the attacks, to be a terrorist group, in a move that enables more intense prosecution.
In an appearance before the Foreign Affairs Committee earlier in July, the government’s top Middle East minister fended off allegations that the Labour government was slow-walking pressure on Israel. Hamish Falconer also noted that British Jewish leaders are urging against an import ban.
“There are legitimate and reasonable concerns from the British Jewish community that if we were to take steps which were crude, which were untargeted, could have unintended consequences on the lives of the community who are already under considerable pressure,” he said. “I do take that seriously for obvious reasons.”
The Board of Jewish Deputies, an umbrella organization for almost 200 Jewish groups in Britain, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that it was reluctant to comment on a potential ban on West Bank imports before a new prime minister is installed. But the group has previously weighed in strongly against efforts to boycott Israel, arguing in a 2017 report that “to hasten a solution to the settlements would be to assist the chances of negotiations through promoting peace, rather than the problematic boycott campaign.”
Falconer also signaled that all bets could be off if the Israeli government moves forward with a settlement project known as E1, telling the Foreign Affairs Committee, “I have said repeatedly that no one should benefit from a profit made on land that has been unlawfully procured.”
The E1 initiative would expand Jewish settlements on a stretch of land east of Jerusalem, bisecting the West Bank, and is seen by both its proponents and critics as a bid to undercut a potential future Palestinian state. The current right-wing Israeli government has moved the E1 project significantly toward actualization, approving it formally.
If the project proceeds further, Falconer told lawmakers, “then we and our friends and allies would take tangible action in response.”
The post UK lawmakers press government on why West Bank imports haven’t yet been banned appeared first on The Forward.
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Cori Bush to fellow progressives: My reelection would be ‘the knockout’ punch to AIPAC
(JTA) — Cori Bush told fellow progressives during a virtual rally on Monday night that she intends to deliver a “knockout” punch to AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, by winning her congressional primary next month.
When Bush, the two-term progressive Democratic congresswoman, was defeated in a bruising primary two years ago, both she and her adversaries attributed the loss in part to AIPAC.
The group’s PAC spent more than $4 million to defeat Bush, who was one of two members of Congress to vote against a measure to deny entry to the United States to Hamas terrorists who perpetrated Oct. 7, and declined to call Hamas a terror group on the campaign trail.
Now, as AIPAC has rapidly transformed into a radioactive bogeyman among Democrats and Bush’s fellow progressives have mounted an ascent across the party, Bush is out for revenge.
“Jamaal Bowman says it best: He said that Chris Rabb gave a jab to AIPAC. He says that Darializa and Claire … they gave uppercuts to AIPAC,” Bush said. “But then when I win, that will be the knockout.”
Bush is currently running against Missouri incumbent Rep. Wesley Bell in a field with three other candidates. In 2024, Bell defeated Bush 51.1% to 45.6% in a field of four candidates. A February poll sponsored by Bush’s campaign had Bell and Bush tied, with Bush receiving 44% of the votes, while Bell had 40%. (The survey had a margin of error of 5.4%.)
Bush was referring to a list of prominent progressives, including one, Bowman, who like her was primaried out of Congress in 2024, and three who won primaries decisively in Pennsylvania and New York this year. She was speaking at an online rally organized by Our Revolution, the group formed by Sen. Bernie Sanders to advance the progressive movement.
The rally came as the movement tries to move past a setback in Maine, where Graham Platner, a progressive and staunch critic of Israel, withdrew after winning the Democratic Senate primary amid allegations of sexual assault. One of the candidates vying to replace Platner on the ticket, Troy Jackson, joined other leading progressives including Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and California congressman Ro Khanna in taking the virtual stage.
Jackson did not mention Israel or AIPAC in his comments, even after announcing in recent days that he believes Israel committed genocide in Gaza. Instead, he listed an array of other issues animating left-wing voters.
“I know that there’s real pain, anger, and disappointment, and I’m not going to try and minimize that. But look, this movement has always been bigger than one person,” he said, alluding to Platner’s exit. “It’s about taking on a system rigged against working people, fighting for Medicare for all, strong unions, higher wages, reproductive freedom, and an economy where billionaires and corporations finally pay their fair share.”
Other candidates took aim more squarely at Israel and its supporters. El-Sayed, who in recent days has taken to calling Israel a “rogue state,” noted that AIPAC and its allies have spent more than $40 million to defeat him. (AIPAC has spent nearly $15 million on the race to date.)
“Donald Trump is not himself the disease in our politics; he’s the worst symptom of the disease of our politics,” El-Sayed said. “The disease is the system that allows big corporations, billionaires, special interest groups like AIPAC, to buy and sell politicians in ways that leave them rigging the system against us.”
El-Sayed also took aim at foreign military aid in his remarks, telling those gathered, “It shouldn’t be this hard to pay your taxes and know that that money is going to be spent on you and your kids rather than to annihilate somebody else and their kids.”
Minnesota congressional candidate Kaela Berg similarly cast her refusal to accept AIPAC money as part of a broader rejection of corporate influence in politics.
“We are the revolution, we are bringing that working class voice, that lived experience, two and a half decades of fighting the bosses, being people in Congress who cannot be bought, being the antidote to corporate Democrats and to Republicans,” Berg said. “I do not take AIPAC money. I do not take corporate money.”
Khanna, fresh off a trip to the Middle East during which he claimed that Israeli soldiers took the side of armed settlers who detained him in the West Bank, used his remarks during the town hall to shift attention from his detention to the treatment of Palestinians.
“Yes, people know I was detained, but if there’s one obligation, I feel I want to tell in every part of this country the story of apartheid in the West Bank,” Khanna said. “The story of these Palestinians who are being treated in an inhumane, undignified way, and if we can tell that story, I believe we will finally get change.”
Khanna, who has emerged as one of Israel’s fiercest critics in Congress since Oct. 7, also told attendees that the progressive wins across the country reflected growing support for the movement’s policy positions, including its opposition to Israel.
“We are winning, and we’re winning not because of candidates,” Khanna said. “We’re winning because we stand for Medicare for all. We stand against the genocide. We stand against foreign wars.”
The post Cori Bush to fellow progressives: My reelection would be ‘the knockout’ punch to AIPAC appeared first on The Forward.
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Five countries over four days: How Cuba’s Maccabiah Games delegation made it to Israel
(JTA) — Nearly three decades after Hella Eskenazi’s first trip from her home in Cuba to the Maccabiah Games in Israel, the journey hasn’t gotten much easier.
This time, she was joined by dozens of athletes who had to travel through five countries over more than four days to reach Israel — a consequence of both the turmoil affecting travel to Israel generally and the unique complexities of getting anywhere from their communist island nation in the Caribbean.
The first time Eskenazi made the trip was 1997, when she was a member of Cuba’s national karate team, and her country’s sole representative at the sports competition known as the “Jewish Olympics.” That was the year the Games were marred by the collapse of a pedestrian bridge over the Yarkon River in Tel Aviv that killed four members of the Australian delegation and injured 60 others.
This time around, Eskenazi, now 56, is both an athlete and the vice president of Patronato de la Casa de la Comunidad Hebrea de Cuba, her nation’s Jewish community and main synagogue. She’s a former Hebrew school director and has been involved in Cuba’s Maccabi programs since 2013, Cuba’s first year with a full delegation.
For this summer’s Games, Cuba sent 52 athletes to participate, many of whom already live in Israel after making aliyah. But for the 29 members who made the journey from Havana, the trip was anything but easy.
And that would have been the case even if Air France hadn’t canceled their flights — due to the conflict in Iran — halfway through their travel.
As Eskenazi explained, due to a variety of political and economic factors, it’s not easy to get out of Cuba. Her athletes needed various visas that would allow them to travel through Europe to get to Israel, and Cuba does not have a national airline with the same international capabilities as travel giants like Air France or Turkish Airlines.
And because Cuba’s oil supply lags behind much of the world, Air France does not offer flights from Cuba. So they had to travel to Panama first, just to get to Paris.
The original plan, Eskenazi said, was for a portion of the delegation to fly from Havana to Panama to Paris to Tel Aviv. But when Air France canceled all its flights to Tel Aviv, they had to pivot — which wasn’t easy given their restrictive travel visas.
Part of the delegation flew from Paris to Austria, while others went through Abu Dhabi, where Eskenazi said Cubans don’t need visas. And each group had layovers of 12 or 15 hours, making the total journey from Cuba to Israel take four or five days.
Eskenazi’s journey was different, because she had a visa that allowed her to travel through the United States. She flew from Havana to Miami to New York to Tel Aviv. Even then, she still had an 18-hour layover in New York.
Eskenazi said her group would not have made it to Israel without the help of the Maccabi World Union, the global organization that puts on the Games and supports local delegations.
“We are here thanks to the Maccabi World Union,” she said in a phone interview from Israel. “Maccabi World Union, they did many things for Cuba, for the Cuban Jewish community to participate in this Maccabiah.”
So once the Cuban cohort finally made it to Tel Aviv, it was understandably a meaningful arrival.
“It has been very very emotional for us because in Cuba we have many difficulties right now,” Eskenazi said. “And to arrive here, to have electricity, to have food, to be safe, to have our friends, to make sport, to share with all of the people from all over the world, has been very emotional, very emotional for us.”
It’s also been a successful trip, competitively speaking.
Cuba has won several medals, competing in sports including softball, futsal and basketball. Eskenazi herself has won two: a silver medal in the one-mile run and a bronze in the five-kilometer competition for the 55-59 age bracket.
But beyond sports, Eskenazi said it’s been a special experience for her athletes — who hail from a country with a relatively affluent but small Jewish community — to be surrounded by Jews from around the world.
“It’s very important because imagine that you can share with people from Holland, from France, from the United States,” she said. “We met people from Ukraine, from Argentina, from Mexico, from different parts of the world. It’s been very very emotional.
“We are happy to be here because we love to share here with the Israeli way of life,” Eskenazi added. “For us it’s very interesting, and we love Israel. Remember that we are Jewish people, and the Israeli people, they are friendly. This is a very special country. If you can see people, for example, with kippah on the street, with tefillin or tallit, it’s like to be inside of the synagogue, a big synagogue. It’s amazing to be here.”
And after the Games end, it’s right back on the plane home. Hopefully with fewer stops this time.
Eskenazi said her delegation is again splitting up into smaller groups, with some flying back through Paris and Panama, and others going through Madrid straight to Havana.
Regardless of the logistics and the travel delays, Eskenazi said Israel is a special place.
“When I visit Israel, I feel like Cuba, like my country,” she said. “I feel that this is my home, also.”
The post Five countries over four days: How Cuba’s Maccabiah Games delegation made it to Israel appeared first on The Forward.
