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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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Why The 36 Award
Antisemitism is, unfortunately, a fact of life in the United States and around the world. Jewish people continue to experience harassment, discrimination, and violence. Antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories exacerbate the problem.
Antisemitism does not exist in isolation; it both reflects and accelerates the erosion of democratic norms, institutions, and trust, emerging alongside other forms of hate and prejudice that collectively weaken the social fabric and the shared commitments on which all communities depend.
And while naming antisemitism and its impact is necessary, what truly matters is our shared responsibility to confront it.
This is a moment to push back collectively, within and beyond the Jewish community. No single organization, community, or ideology can meet this challenge alone. The pursuit of solutions requires acknowledging what we do not yet know, remaining open to learning, and committing to the collective effort.
Nathan Cummings Foundation (NCF) approaches this work as part of a broader justice journey and our commitment to Racial, Economic, and Environmental Justice (REEJ). As an institution rooted in the Jewish tradition of tikkun olam, repairing the world, our commitment to social justice and Jewish values has long guided our work across our focus areas, which includes being in partnership with leaders across REEJ.
We believe that our pursuit of justice is incomplete if it does not also address antisemitism. Antisemitism is oppression and is inseparable from broader struggles against bigotry, exclusion, and threats to democratic life. Addressing it strengthens movements, deepens solidarity, and reinforces the conditions necessary for collective progress.
Recognizing and engaging this challenge is essential to building a more just, inclusive, and democratic society and advancing our pursuit of REEJ.
With all of this in mind, NCF, in collaboration with the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable and supported by a growing coalition of partners across the country, created The 36 Award. The award takes its name from a powerful concept in Jewish tradition: the belief that in every generation there are 36 righteous individuals whose actions help sustain the world.
Across the country, there are people confronting antisemitism in ways that do not always attract headlines. They are building relationships across lines of race, faith, geography, and ideology. They are helping communities navigate difficult conversations. They are creating new models, narratives, and pathways toward understanding. In many cases, they are demonstrating that combating antisemitism and advancing broader justice are not competing goals but mutually reinforcing ones. The 36 Award is designed to find those individuals and elevate and support their work.
The challenges before us are significant. Yet history reminds us that lasting progress often begins with people willing to see possibilities others overlook. The search for those people is what The 36 Award truly represents.
We believe that new ideas matter and that solidarity can be built through courageous leadership, which often emerges where few are looking. We are excited to announce the inaugural winners of The 36 Award. Please visit 36award.us to learn about these inspiring individuals.
Sincerely,
Rey Ramsey, President & CEO
Amy Sorensen Ben-Dov, Chair, Board of Trustees
Nathan Cummings Foundation
The post Why The 36 Award appeared first on The Forward.
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The 36 Award Winner: Building a Public Health Response to Antisemitism
Myrieme Churchill, Executive Director of Parents for Peace (P4P), has been named an inaugural recipient of The 36 Award, honoring a decade of work building what may be the first confidential intervention program in the world focused specifically on antisemitism.
Churchill leads P4P, a national public health organization serving families, schools, and communities across the United States and Canada. Through its Antisemitism Intervention and Recovery (AIR) Program, P4P brings together licensed psychologists, peer interventionists, and a team that includes former neo-Nazis and former jihadists. Its central argument once sounded unlikely to many in the field: extremism is not just a security issue, but a public health crisis that demands early intervention, education, and community-based support. The need has grown sharply. P4P says it saw a steep rise in anti-Jewish hatred after October 7, 2023, both in its own caseload and across society. In 2025, 70 percent of its helpline cases involved antisemitism, spanning far-right white nationalism, jihadist networks, and far-left movements.
Churchill’s path to this work began in Morocco. The daughter of a Black Moroccan Muslim father and a white French Christian mother, she grew up biracial and rarely felt she belonged anywhere. As a child, she was excluded and targeted by other children who misidentified her as Jewish and often used the word “Jew” to insult her.
“That history gives me a deep appreciation for how identity, exclusion, and belonging shape people’s lives,” Churchill said.
Those early experiences left her with questions that have stayed with her ever since: Why do people hurt one another? Where does hate come from? Why have Jews so often been made the scapegoat? The questions led her to a career as a therapist. Her early work took her to the streets of Marseille, where she worked with young immigrants targeted by traffickers, and later to Boston, where she treated people with mental illness and addiction. Both jobs, she said, taught her how vulnerable people are at risk for abuse, self-destruction, and harming others.
Over years of clinical work in addressing addiction, Churchill began to notice a pattern. For some people, extremism seemed to work the way a drug does, offering relief from pain along with a sense of identity and purpose. People could get hooked on hate the way others get hooked on substances.
That insight became the foundation of the P4P model. Rather than treating extremism of any kind, including antisemitism, as a set of beliefs to argue with, the organization treats it as a maladaptive way of coping with grievance, isolation, and trauma. In P4P’s framing, extremism works like a psychological addiction, offering belonging at the cost of truth, safety, and humanity. Instead of relying on shame, public condemnation, or debate, P4P helps families recognize warning signs and assess escalating behavior, and helps their loved ones build healthier sources of identity, belonging, and purpose, while working with public safety resources when necessary. The goal is to replace hate with resilience, education, and genuine connection.
AIR, which P4P bills as the world’s first antisemitism helpline, builds on the organization’s existing public health approach and helpline model. It offers free, confidential support from trained interventionists to worried families, educators, and community members, as well as to people who are trying to step away from anti-Jewish beliefs themselves. P4P is also developing trainings for families, schools, and religious organizations on recognizing early warning signs, navigating online risks, and responding with evidence-based intervention.
The model was tested on the very first call to the AIR helpline in 2016. A mother had found several rifles under her son’s bed, along with a manifesto describing his plan to attack a synagogue. She was terrified and reluctant to contact law enforcement. Churchill stayed on the line and worked to earn the mother’s trust enough that she would call 911. The FBI later confirmed that the guns had been confiscated and that the young man had been hospitalized for treatment of psychosis.
“Courage sometimes means entering the worst moment of someone’s life and not looking away,” Churchill said.
P4P says its early intervention work has since helped prevent potential attacks on synagogues and violence against Jews, and has helped hundreds of people repair relationships, return to school or work, and rebuild lives no longer governed by extremist ideology.
Sagit Sade Attia, a member of the P4P board, described that work as a deliberate moral choice. “Rather than writing off people consumed by hate as beyond redemption, Myrieme has chosen the far more difficult path of engaging directly with individuals and families affected by radicalization, while never losing sight of the needs and safety of those targeted by hate,” she said.
The choice has not always been easy to explain. When Churchill first began describing extremism as an addiction, she recalled, people looked at her as if she had three heads. Public health framing has since moved closer to the mainstream, but an approach that begins with compassion for people who hold antisemitic views can still invite skepticism at a moment when Jewish communities feel under threat. Churchill answers by pointing to outcomes like the hundreds of families supported.
P4P doesn’t do this work alone. It has partnered with the Combat Antisemitism Movement, the ADL, the American Muslim and Multifaith Women’s Empowerment Council, and the Department of Homeland Security, as well as Bangladeshi and other immigrant communities. It has worked with the Harvard School of Public Health and Georgia State University to evaluate its work and to train former extremists as interventionists. Churchill has spoken at Eradicate Hate following the 2018 Tree of Life shooting, briefed Congress as part of a bipartisan effort, and testified before the Massachusetts Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism, where she urged antisemitism trainings in schools. Churchill puts it simply: “Antisemitism is not a Jewish problem alone; it is an all-of-us problem, and everyone pays the price when it spreads.”
The post The 36 Award Winner: Building a Public Health Response to Antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
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Building the Legal Case Against White Nationalism
David Brody, founder of the Alliance of Jewish Americans, has been named an honorable mention for The 36 Award in its inaugural year. Brody has spent his career in courtrooms and coalitions confronting hate, and he believes Jewish safety in the United States depends on standing with every community that white nationalism targets.
Brody traces his commitment to his family and to the South. “As a Jew from Georgia, my Jewish identity was defined against the backdrop of the Black-Jewish shared struggle in the South,” he said. His great-grandmother fled pogroms, arrived in the United States as an unaccompanied minor with no English or education, and became a union organizer. His father registered voters for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and spent four decades researching how poverty and discrimination affect the health of rural Black families. “My family taught that being Jewish in America means fighting for social justice,” Brody said.
Before launching the Alliance in 2026, Brody founded and led the Digital Justice Initiative at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the first tech policy program at a legacy racial justice organization. There, he built the first case applying public accommodations law to online harassment, representing Taylor Dumpson, the first Black woman to serve as student government president at American University, against a neo-Nazi website’s publisher who targeted her. Brody co-led the team representing Metropolitan AME Church in Washington, D.C., in its case against the Proud Boys after the group vandalized the church. He helped draft and championed what became the AI Civil Rights Act of 2025, which more than 80 civil rights, privacy, consumer, and labor groups have endorsed. His nominator, Erin Simpson of the Ford Foundation, said Brody coined the phrase “privacy rights are civil rights” at a time when many did not yet see the connection. She described him as “the engine that powered an entire community of racial justice and technology policy organizations.”
Brody said Jewish civil society is robust but has lacked a dedicated national legal organization, similar to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund or Lambda Legal. The Alliance is meant to fill that gap. It uses open-source investigative techniques to collect and preserve evidence of civil and human rights violations and white nationalist threats, with the goal of making that evidence admissible in court.
From his years litigating against white supremacists, Brody saw that few organizations take on litigation against white nationalism systematically, and that most investigative work in the field produces research reports rather than evidence that can stand up in a legal proceeding. He argues that white nationalism, which has motivated deadly attacks ranging from Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 to a Buffalo grocery store in 2022, poses the greatest threat to Jewish safety in the United States in generations.
The Alliance’s work includes both near-term and longer-term legal investigations. Part of this work involves leveraging AI tools responsibly, such as using them to accelerate needle-in-a-haystack investigations of white nationalist activity or other threats that would not be cost-effective for human researchers. Other work is meant to provide evidentiary foundations for long-term efforts to research, document, and seek accountability for rights violations in the U.S. Brody said he is focused on what the field needs now and what it will need in five years.
Brody’s approach to coalitions is grounded in patience. He spent six years drafting model bills, persuading allies with different priorities, and testifying twice before Congress in support of privacy protections. In 2024, when a bipartisan privacy bill in Congress was stripped of its civil rights protections, Brody gathered signatures from more than 50 organizations on an opposition letter in under 24 hours, and the bill died. “Those groups did not sign because I told them what to do,” he said. “They signed because I spent years working with them, earning their trust, and advocating for their interests.”
Brody credits the courage of his clients for putting their names and faces on high-profile cases against violent white supremacists. He arranges his work so that, by the time a moment of risk arrives, “we have friends at our side.” He resists the idea that this takes a special method. “Building bridges does not require a special approach,” he said. “One should show up for everyone, listen with empathy, and do the work.”
The post Building the Legal Case Against White Nationalism appeared first on The Forward.
