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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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Anti-Israel Michigan Senate Candidate Promoted Group Behind Holocaust Memorial Protests
Former Wayne County Health Director Abdul El-Sayed, a Democrat now running for US Senate in Michigan, speaks at a “Hands Off” protest at the state Capitol in Lansing, Michigan, on April 5, 2025. Photo: Andrew Roth/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
Abdul El-Sayed, a Democratic candidate for US Senate in Michigan, is facing scrutiny over his past fundraising and public support for a political advocacy group whose affiliates organized anti-Israel protests at Holocaust memorial sites in Washington, DC, and the Detroit metro area.
El-Sayed previously recorded a fundraising video and appeared at multiple events in support of Justice, Education, Technology PAC (JET-PAC), an organization focused on expanding the political influence of Muslim Americans in US politics. In the video, posted online in 2018, El-Sayed urged viewers to donate to the group, praising its efforts to train Muslim Americans in civic engagement and advocacy.
JET-PAC later drew widespread condemnation after its medical advocacy arm, Doctors Against Genocide, helped organize protests outside the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan. The demonstrations condemned Israel’s military campaign against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza and described the war as a “genocide,” language that Jewish leaders and Holocaust educators denounced as false, antisemitic, and deeply offensive.
Doctors Against Genocide (DAG) called on activists to obtain free tickets to the Holocaust Museum in Washington with the intention of protesting inside the facility before moving the demonstration to the White House. The planned protest sparked backlash from Jewish organizations and community leaders, who argued that targeting Holocaust memorial sites crossed a moral line.
The group ultimately canceled the demonstration.
“The goal of our event was to visit the Holocaust Museum to express our empathy for the horrors of that genocide. Additionally, we wanted to bring awareness to the ongoing genocide in Gaza,” the group said in a statement.
“Our initial communication did not sufficiently convey this, leading to misinterpretations and unfounded accusations,” it continued. “As DAG we stand against all hate of vulnerable people, whether that hate comes in the form of antisemitism, anti-Palestinianism, anti-Black hate, anti-White hate, or any other prejudice. Never again for all.”
In a later statement, the group apologized for a “lack of clarity” but continued to imply that the Holocaust is comparable to Israel’s military operations against Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that launched the war with its Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.
Comparing Israel to Nazi Germany is antisemitic, according to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which has been adopted by dozens of governments and hundreds of civic institutions around the world.
Despite the backlash, DAG, which is a program of JET-PAC, later orchestrated a protest outside the Zekelman Holocaust Center in July 2024, once again sparking outrage from local Jewish community leaders.
Organizers of the protest explained that they targeted the museum over its purported positive portrayal of Israel and alleged unwillingness to elevate the historical displacement of Palestinian Arabs.
“The museum is not objective. They present the history that the right-wing will allow them to put on. The question we have for them is: How are you now going to portray the Nakba,” said Rene Lichtman, a Holocaust survivor and organizer of the demonstration.
“Nakba,” the Arabic term for “catastrophe,” is used by Palestinians and anti-Israel activists to refer to the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948.
“You end the story, and I know because I’ve been speaking here forever, with the happy ending of the Jews, the [Nazi concentration] camp survivors coming to Israel,” Lichtman continued. “But that is no longer the ending. We know that from the last eight months. What about the Palestinian people?”
Mark Jacobs, a lawyer, community activist, and co-director of the Coalition for Black and Jewish Unity, said protests at Holocaust centers amount to an attack on Jewish historical memory.
“I find it pretty grotesque that the protesters would select the Holocaust Center, a solemn and sacred place, to essentially call for the eradication of Israel, which was created as a safe harbor for the Jewish people after the world’s worst genocide,” Jacobs told Deadline Detroit in July, referring to the Zekelman protest. “But of course we have seen a steady stream of antisemitic protests, vandalism, and violence at various Jewish sites throughout the US and the world since the barbarism of Oct. 7.”
At the protest outside the Zekelman Holocaust Center, speakers accused Israel of war crimes and criticized what they described as the influence of “Israel’s lobbyists.” Dr. Nadal Jboor, a featured speaker and member of Doctors Against Genocide, said Israel’s military actions should be stopped through international pressure, calling a ceasefire a “medical intervention.”
JET-PAC, founded by former Cambridge, Massachusetts city councilor Nadeem Mazen, has described its mission as empowering Muslim Americans politically. El-Sayed appeared at JET-PAC galas and panels alongside the group’s leadership and promoted the organization on social media over multiple years, calling it “amazing.”
In the 2018 fundraising video, El-Sayed said JET-PAC was “incredibly important for engagement, political engagement for the Muslim community,” adding that the group helped people “fight for and advocate for a more just, more equitable, more sustainable society.”
El-Sayed’s support for the organization raises questions about his policies toward the Jewish community and combating extremism in the wake of the Holocaust memorial protests, which occurred amid a historic rise in antisemitic hate crimes across the US following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
El-Sayed’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
The controversy has unfolded as El-Sayed and another Michigan Senate candidate, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, have both publicly accused Israel of committing genocide, positions that have alienated some Jewish voters in the battleground state.
Just days before the anniversary of the Oct. 7 atrocities, McMorrow called Israel’s response in Gaza a “moral abomination,” saying it was “just as horrendous” as the attack carried out by Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists, who perpetrated the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
However, McMorrow has since softened her stance on the Israel-Hamas war, recently lamenting in an interview that the term “genocide” has become a “purity test” for many progressive Democrats.
Detroit-based community activist and philanthropist Lisa Mark Lis said McMorrow’s comments echoed antisemitic tropes and amounted to political pandering.
Detroit-based community activist Lisa Mark Lis wrote in a Facebook post that McMorrow’s comment “feeds into the Jew-hatred tropes and is a lie.”
El-Sayed has not publicly addressed the Holocaust museum protests directly, but his past fundraising and advocacy for JET-PAC have drawn new attention as Jewish leaders warn that invoking genocide rhetoric at Holocaust memorials represents a dangerous normalization of antisemitism.
Jewish organizations have repeatedly stressed that criticism of Israeli policy does not justify protests at institutions dedicated to memorializing the murder of six million Jews, arguing that such actions exploit Holocaust memory and inflame anti-Jewish hostility.
The progressive champion was a prominent supporter of the “Uncommitted movement,” a coalition of Democratic officials which refused to support the 2024 Kamala Harris presidential campaign over what they characterized as her support for Israel. However, El-Sayed later clarified that he would support Harris over Donald Trump in the general election.
El-Sayed has been especially critical of Israel’s war in Gaza. On Oct. 21, 2023, two weeks after the Hamas-led slaughter of 1,200 people and kidnapping of 251 hostages in southern Israel, the progressive politician accused Israel of “genocide.” The comment came before the Israeli military launched its ground campaign in Gaza.
He also compared Israel’s defensive military operations to the Hamas terrorist group’s conduct on Oct. 7, writing, “You can both condemn Hamas terrorism AND Israel’s murder since.”
In comments to Politico, El-Sayed criticized Democrats’ handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, arguing that they should become the “party of peace and justice” and said that they “ought not to be the party sending bombs and money to foreign militaries to drop bombs on other people’s kids in their schools and their hospitals.” He called on Democrats to stop supporting military aid for Israel, saying, “We should be spending that money here at home.”
Recent polling has shown El-Sayed trailing both McMorrow and Democratic primary frontrunner US Rep. Haley Stevens among voters.
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IDF Reports Steep Drop in Palestinian Terrorism but Threat of West Bank Violence Remains High
Israeli soldiers walk during an operation in Tubas, in the West Bank, Nov. 26, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman
Terror attacks in the West Bank — and the number of Israelis killed by Palestinian terrorists — fell sharply in 2025 compared with the previous two years, according to a new Israel Defense Forces (IDF) report, even as security officials warn the threat remains volatile.
The IDF’s Central Command on Monday released an annual security assessment showing Palestinian-perpetrated terrorist activity in the West Bank fell significantly in 2025, with overall incidents — including stone-throwing and firebomb attacks — down 78 percent from the previous year.
According to the data, Palestinian terrorist activity spiked in 2023 with 847 attacks that killed 41 Israelis, declined in 2024 to 258 incidents with a death toll of 35, and then fell sharply in 2025 to just 57 attacks resulting in 20 Israeli fatalities.
These latest figures mark the lowest level of West Bank Palestinian terrorist attacks and fatalities since the war with Hamas began, even though violence remains far higher than in 2021, when just three Israelis were killed.
As Israeli intelligence and security forces intensified operations across the West Bank, the military said the drop in attacks followed the launch of Operation Iron Wall — a large-scale January 2025 campaign aimed at dismantling terrorist infrastructure — along with continuous operations throughout the year, including a sustained IDF presence in the Jenin and Tulkarm refugee camps.
According to the newly released report, Israeli forces confiscated over 17 million shekels intended for terrorist activity, seized more than eight tons of dual-use materials, shut down 17 weapons-manufacturing sites, and confiscated 1,370 weapons components.
During a major operation last year, the IDF dismantled a Hamas network in Hebron that was preparing attacks across the West Bank and Israel, with members trained in weapons use, improvised explosive device fabrication, and intelligence gathering on potential Israeli targets.
Even while noting positive trends, however, the military cautioned that it remains on high alert under a “war tomorrow” scenario, warning that terrorist groups could attempt to trigger a wider uprising in the West Bank.
Last month, the IDF raised alarm bells over a growing terrorist threat in the West Bank, warning that Iranian-supplied weapons in the hands of Palestinian militants could enable an Oct. 7-style attack and prompting Israeli intelligence and security forces to intensify operations across the territory.
According to Joe Truzman, a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington, DC-based think tank, Israeli officials should be closely monitoring the West Bank as the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas regroups and rearms in the Gaza Strip after two years of war.
“Hamas and its allied factions understand that igniting violence in the territory would divert Israel’s attention during a critical time of rebuilding the group’s infrastructure in Gaza,” Truzman said last month.
“The release of convicted terrorists to the West Bank under the ceasefire agreement may be a factor in the resurgence of organized violence in the territory,” he continued.
The latest IDF report also highlights a surge in attacks by Jewish extremists against Palestinians in 2025, recording around 870 incidents — a roughly 27 percent increase from the previous year, with a notable rise in serious cases.
In the wake of this surge in violence, the Israeli government has formed a joint task force — comprising the IDF, police, Border Police, and Shin Bet intelligence agency — to prevent and investigate attacks against Palestinians and the wider Muslim community.
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Qatari Money Corrupting Georgetown University, New Report Says
Students, faculty, and others at Georgetown University on March 23, 2025. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Georgetown University’s suspect relationship with the country of Qatar is the subject of another report which raises concerns about what the Hamas-friendly monarchy is getting in exchange for the hundreds of millions of dollars it spends on the institution for ostensibly philanthropic reasons.
Titled, “Qatar’s Multidimensional Takeover of Georgetown University,” the new report, by the Middle East Forum, describes how Qatar has allegedly exploited and manipulated Georgetown since 2005 by hooking the school on money that buys influence, promotes Islamism, and degrades the curricula of one of the most recognized names in American higher education.
“The unchecked funds provided by Qatar demonstrate how foreign countries can shape scholarship, faculty recruitment, and teaching in our universities to reflect their preferences,” the report says. “At Georgetown, courses and research show growing ideological drift toward post-colonial scholarship, anti-Western critiques, and anti-Israel advocacy, with some faculty engaged in political activism related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or anti-Western interventionism.”
Georgetown is hardly the only school to receive Qatari money. Indeed, Qatar is the single largest foreign source of funding to American colleges and universities, according to a newly launched public database from the US Department of Education that reveals the scope of overseas influence in US higher education.
The federal dashboard shows Qatar has provided $6.6 billion in gifts and contracts to US universities, more than any other foreign government or entity. Of the schools that received Qatari money, Cornell University topped the list with $2.3 billion, followed by Carnegie Mellon University ($1 billion), Texas A&M University ($992.8 million), and Georgetown ($971.1 million).
“Qatar has proved highly adept at compromising individuals and institutions with cold hard cash,” MEF Campus Watch director Winfield Myers said in a statement. “But with Georgetown, it found a recipient already eager to do Doha’s bidding to advance Islamist goals at home and abroad. It was a natural fit.”
MEF executive director Gregg Roman added, “Georgetown is Ground Zero for foreign influence peddling in American higher education. It has not only abandoned its mission to educate future generations of diplomat and scholars to represent US interests at home and abroad, but is working actively to undermine the foundations of American government and policy. No doubt they’re eager to get the money, but at base this evinces an ideological hostility to Western civilization.”
Georgetown’s ties to Qatar’s have aroused suspicion before.
In June, the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism Policy (ISGAP) released a report titled, “Foreign Infiltration: Georgetown University, Qatar, and the Muslim Brotherhood” a 132-page document which revealed dozens of examples of ways in which Georgetown’s interests are allegedly conflicted, having been divided between its foreign benefactors, the country in which it was founded in 1789, and even its Catholic heritage.
According to the report, the trouble began with Washington, DC-based Georgetown’s decision to establish a campus on Qatari soil in 2005, the GU-Q located in the country’s Doha Metropolitan Area. The campus has “become a feeder school for the Qatari bureaucracy,” the report explained, enabling a government that has disappeared dissidents, imprisoned sexual minorities without due process, and facilitated the spread of radical jihadist ideologies.
In the US, meanwhile, Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding “minimize the threat of Islamist extremism” while priming students to be amenable to the claims of the anti-Zionist movement, according to ISGAP. The ideological force behind this pedagogy is the Muslim Brotherhood, to which the Qatari government has supplied logistic and financial support.
Another recent Middle East Forum (MEF) report raised concerns about Northwestern University’s Qatar campus (NU-Q), accusing it of having undermined the school’s mission to foster academic excellence by functioning as a “pipeline” for the next generation of a foreign monarchy’s leadership class.
MEF found that 19 percent of NU-Q graduates carry the surnames of “either the Al-Thani family or other elite Qatari families.” Additionally, graduates from the House of Thani, the country’s royal family, are overrepresented in NU-Q by a factor of five despite being only 2 percent of the population.
The report also said that NU-Q uses its immense wealth, which includes a whopping $700 million in funding from Qatar, to influence the Evanston campus in Illinois, Northwestern’s flagship institution. “Endowed chairs, faculty exchanges, and governance links” reportedly purchase opinions which are palatable to the Qatari elite instead of investments in new NU-Q campus facilities and programs.
“The financial flows raise concerns about whether the Doha campus is a facade and whether the funding is in effect underwriting access and institutional influence rather than solely supporting the overseas campus,” the report continued. “The pattern at NU-Q mirrors the dynamic uncovered by the US Department of Justice in the 2019 Varsity Blues Case, where federal prosecutors exposed how a small group of privileged families exploited side-doors into elite universities through fraudulent athletic recruiting and exam manipulation. While the tactics differ, the structural similarity is clear: insiders repeatedly securing access that ordinary applicants could never obtain.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.