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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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Looking for a Yiddish-related event?
The Forverts website now includes a new feature. Each week, you’ll find a listing of upcoming events related to the Yiddish language or culture, both online and in person.
The list will include lectures in English or Yiddish; concerts; plays; day trips; conversation groups and reading circles.
If you know of a Yiddish-related event coming up, let us know by emailing schaechter@forward.com.
Sunday, Nov. 1, 2 p.m. ET. In this Zoom event, L.A. Yiddish culture activist Miri Koral will discuss a unique translation project of 160 works written by diverse masters of Yiddish poetry who perished in the Holocaust. Poet and Holocaust survivor Binem Heller compiled the anthology in 1951 to ensure that the works of these wonderful poets aren’t forgotten, and Koral is determined to get them all translated into English, opening them up to a much wider audience. The program will be in Yiddish. Register.
Sunday, Nov. 1, 2 p.m. ET. Some of the most passionate Yiddish love poetry and prose was written about Crotona Park in the Bronx, an area that fell off the beaten track in the last century. In this on-site tour in Yiddish, scholar Eve Jochnowitz will guide us as we explore the neighborhood and the literature it inspired. The event is free but a donation of $18 is suggested. The group will meet at the corner of Charlotte Street and Crotona Park East. Register.
Sunday, Nov. 1, 2 p.m. ET. Come shmooze in Yiddish with people all over the world at the shmueskrayz hosted by the Parizer yidish-tsenter. The atmosphere is friendly and relaxed. Feel free to sip coffee or a glass of wine. No registration necessary. Zoom link here
Thursday, Nov. 5, 7 p.m. ET. In this Zoom event, we’ll hear an English translation of detailed Yiddish letters written by Shlomo Vorobeichic, a Jewish man in Vilna before the war, to his siblings who had settled in the U.S. Although Shlomo, his wife and two children perished in the Holocaust, two children survived and kept the letters. One of them, Moi Ver, became a well-regarded photographer. In the 1990s, Moi Ver’s daughter Lilian Falk translated her grandfather’s letters into English, giving us a vivid view of Vilna in the early 20th century. Register.
Friday and Saturday, Nov. 6-7. Stockholm khevre: Attend a Yiddish film festival that includes contemporary Yiddish works like the 2026 film Moishe Badkhn (Moishe the Wedding Entertainer); Welcome to Yiddishland (2024), and the Yiddish-Ukrainian film SHTTL (2023). All films are subtitled in English. Tickets.
Sunday, Nov. 8, 3 p.m. ET. Folks in the DC/Maryland/Northern Virginia area: Join the DMV Jewish Labor Bund for a bimonthly Yiddish song circle at Maryland Meadworks. All levels of Yiddish and singing ability are welcome.
Tuesday, Nov. 10, 3 p.m. ET. Toronto folks: Yiddish studies scholar Sonia Gollance will discuss and read excerpts of Tea Arciszewska’s Yiddish play Miryeml, which Gollance translated as part of her project to uncover Yiddish plays by women. The play is often described as a powerful memorial to the 1.5 million children murdered in the Holocaust. The in-person lecture will take place at the University of Toronto and will be in Yiddish. More info.
Wednesday, Nov. 11, 7 p.m. ET. Attend an in-person staged reading of Sh. An-ski’s legendary folk drama, The Dybbuk, directed by Mikhl Yashinsky. The play, originally written in Russian between 1913 and 1916, was translated into Yiddish by An-ski himself and inspired countless film, opera, and ballet adaptations. Register.
Thursday, Nov. 19, 7 p.m. ET. Learn what makes Quebec an essential place on the world map of Yiddish culture historically and today in this Zoom talk between the Yiddish Book Center’s director of special projects, Sebastian Schulman, and Brian Calvert from Jewish Heritage Travel. The discussion will feature a sneak peek at the Center’s upcoming group tour to Montreal and Quebec City. The trip is a unique chance to experience Yiddish-Quebecois culture—its history, art, music, cuisine—as well as Montreal and Quebec City as historic and contemporary centers of Jewish life and creativity. Register.
The post Looking for a Yiddish-related event? appeared first on The Forward.
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These rivals in a close House race agree on Israel. They’re fighting over who Jewish voters can trust.
Israel and antisemitism have emerged as central issues in several closely watched midterm races. But in New York’s 17th Congressional District, where Jewish voters could help decide one of the country’s most competitive House contests, the two candidates have more in common on those issues than their campaigns suggest.
Cait Conley, the Democratic challenger to incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Lawler, is not a progressive Democrat who Republicans have been warning Jewish voters about in recent campaigns. An Army combat veteran and former national security official, she strongly supports Israel, opposes additional conditions on U.S. military aid and rejects accusations that Israel committed genocide in Gaza. She has also criticized New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani over his statement marking the third anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack and has vowed to confront antisemitism within her own party. But that may not be enough to win Jewish votes from Lawler, who is popular with Jewish voters.
The district includes Rockland and Putnam counties and parts of Westchester and Dutchess. It has one of the largest Jewish populations in the country, with Jews making up an estimated 19% of its population, according to a 2024 study. It is one of the key House races where Jewish voters could make the difference in a closely contested election that will determine which party controls Congress.
Kamala Harris carried the district by a narrow 50-49 margin in 2024, and it voted for Joe Biden by a 59-39 margin before that. The late Jewish congresswoman Nita Lowey, a Democrat, represented the district for three decades until her retirement in 2020. Her successor, former Rep. Mondaire Jones, chose not to run in the redrawn district in 2022 and instead lost a bid for a House seat representing parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn. During his unsuccessful 2024 campaign against Lawler, Jones had to delete a social media post that some deemed insulting to Orthodox Jews after he remarked that the former Republican House Speaker’s meeting with Rabbi David Twersky, the 86-year-old spiritual leader known as the Skverer Rebbe in Rockland County, “was a waste of everyone’s time.”
Conley, 31, faces a difficult challenge in her bid to unseat Lawler, who has deep relationships with Orthodox and Hasidic voters since he first won his seat in the 2022 midterms by a narrow margin of about 2,000 votes, thanks in part to strong support from the large Hasidic communities in Monsey, New Square and New Hempstead in Rockland County.
That makes the race a test of whether a moderate, pro-Israel Democrat can win back Jewish voters who have grown concerned about the growing influence of progressives within the Democratic Party.
In separate interviews with the Forward, Conley and Lawler both stressed their support for Israel and commitment to fighting rising antisemitism. To draw a contrast, Lawler, 40, questioned whether Conley would stick to her positions if elected, while Conley accused him of using his ties to Jewish voters to distract from his support for President Donald Trump’s agenda.
A Democrat who rejects conditions on Israel aid
Conley, a West Point graduate and 16-year Army combat veteran who later served as counterterrorism director on President Joe Biden’s National Security Council and oversaw election security efforts at the Department of Homeland Security, occupies a different position on Israel than many progressive Democrats.
She supports Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state, backs continued U.S. military assistance and opposes imposing conditions on that aid, including on offensive weapons.
“I do not believe that what is going on in Gaza is a genocide, and I do not believe in further conditioning assistance to Israel, so it continues to have the means to defend itself against the very real threats that are posed,” Conley said in an interview. “I will be an effective and strong advocate for the Jewish community and assistance to Israel in the Democratic Party.”
Conley said her experience serving in the Middle East shaped her understanding of the threats Israel faces, particularly from Iran and terrorist organizations.
At the same time, she supports a two-state solution and believes American politicians should be able to criticize Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or other Israeli leaders without questioning Israel’s legitimacy. She expressed concern, though, that criticism of Israeli government policies can sometimes become an excuse for targeting Jews. Conley also supports expanding federal security grants for synagogues and other religious institutions.
Conley said she supported the targeted American strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in 2025, but opposes Trump’s war with Iran because she believes it has made the United States less secure and increased energy prices.
Lawler isn’t buying Conley’s pro-Israel pitch
Lawler dismissed the suggestion that he and Conley hold essentially the same positions on Israel and antisemitism.
“That’s laughable on its face,” he said in an interview.
His central argument is that Conley may sound like a moderate on the campaign trail but would ultimately follow Democratic leaders in Congress, as support for Israel becomes increasingly divisive within the party.
“She’ll be a rubber stamp on whatever the majority of the Democrats want to do,” Lawler said, citing the July vote to eliminate the $3.3 billion in annual military assistance to Israel. A record 103 of 212 Democrats supported the measure. Another 10 Democrats abstained. Conley “is not going to stand up and be a lone voice on these issues,” he said.
“At the end of the day,” Lawler added, “I have a very clear record of delivering on these issues, and there’s staunch differences in approach.”
A Republican who speaks the community’s language
Lawler’s relationship with Orthodox and Hasidic voters goes beyond his positions on Israel. A practicing Catholic, Lawler has made those relationships part of his political brand, going back to his election to the State Assembly in 2020. He has taken credit for lowering the temperature in Rockland County after local GOP officials in 2019 posted a video widely criticized as antisemitic. He regularly attends community celebrations and has helped arrange meetings between local rabbis and religious leaders, President Donald Trump and Republican leadership.
Earlier this year, William Paul, the son of Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, confronted him in a Washington bar, believing the New York congressman was Jewish. Paul later apologized and said he has a drinking problem for which he is seeking treatment.
His presence in the community has become so familiar that his campaign even has Yiddish materials and songs promoting his reelection. The songs are shared in popular WhatsApp groups, played at weddings and blasted from trucks driving through Hasidic neighborhoods to encourage people to vote.
Lawler’s campaign is aiming to surpass the 22,000 votes he received in Hasidic neighborhoods in 2022 and 26,000 votes in 2024, as polls show the race is a dead heat. In an interview with Punchbowl News, he predicted 30,000 Orthodox votes, arguing that the community’s participation is difficult for pollsters to capture.
In his interview with the Forward, Lawler said his popularity comes from a simple strategy: showing up.
“I am really the first elected official that has shown up, you know, consistently and publicly in this community, and not just to see the leadership of the community, but to meet the people,” he said. Lawler has even picked up some Yiddish vocabulary along the way. Asked what word he had learned, Lawler quipped, “I love the word shanda to describe Chuck Schumer,” using a Yiddish term for disgrace about the Senate Democratic leader, who is Jewish.
Lawler believes his efforts have helped build support beyond the Orthodox and Hasidic communities, including among Reform and secular Jews who might otherwise vote Democratic but are concerned about their party’s direction on Israel. “Democrats have effectively abandoned Jewish Americans,” he said.
Conley acknowledged Lawler’s visibility in the community but questioned whether it is matched with policies that benefit Jewish families. “Mike Lawler shows up for the photo op, but when it comes to acting, he turns his back on the community every time,” she said. Conley pointed particularly to his support for Republican-led legislation cutting Medicaid spending and other federal benefits.
A fight over antisemitism in politics
Conley said her own outreach has focused on convincing Jewish voters that she understands their security concerns and shares their commitment to Israel, even as she disagrees with Lawler on domestic policy.
She also spoke of a personal connection to the Jewish community as a member of the LGBTQ community, recalling how Jewish Americans stood up for LGBTQ rights. “That’s why I proudly stand beside them and let them know that there are people who deeply care and will proudly stand shoulder to shoulder with them and fight back against antisemitism,” she said.
As Lawler highlights his ties to Jewish voters and questions whether Conley would stand up to anti-Israel voices in the Democratic Party, Conley accuses him of associating with Republicans who have faced accusations of antisemitic rhetoric and ties to white nationalists.
She said Lawler had a double standard: condemning antisemitism among Democrats while supporting Republicans who have faced accusations of antisemitic rhetoric or associations with white nationalists. “He is the biggest hypocrite,” she said of Lawler. “He is a political operative who will do whatever is politically convenient for his political ambition.”
Conley cited, for example, Peter Oberacker, a Republican state legislator running against Democratic Rep. Josh Riley in the neighboring 19th District, who came under fire after a Facebook post from Veterans Day 2015 resurfaced in which he paid tribute to his grandfather who served in the Nazi-German military during World War II. Lawler attended Oberacker’s campaign launch last year and praised him. Lawler also contributed $5,000 to his campaign.
Conley described Oberacker as an “overt Nazi sympathizer” and said Lawler’s support for him undermined his claim to be a defender of Jewish Americans. Conley also pointed to Lawler’s past connections with members of the New York State Young Republicans, whose group was disbanded following a Politico investigation exposing racist and antisemitic messages. Lawler condemned it and called for those involved to resign from leadership positions.
Asked directly about the criticism, Lawler defended Oberacker. “He’s not an antisemite,” Lawler said, adding that Oberacker represents Jewish constituents in the state Senate. He dismissed Conley’s accusations as an attempt to distract from her own political alliances. “I think Cait is grasping at straws,” he said.
Lawler pointed to Conley’s decision to run on the Working Families Party ballot line, a progressive party that endorsed Mamdani in last year’s mayoral primary and has accused Israel of genocide. He also noted her remarks in a September interview, when she said that she “respects” what Mamdani represents to many New Yorkers. “I don’t respect antisemites,” Lawler said.
Lawler was the lead sponsor of the bipartisan Antisemitism Awareness Act that would require the Department of Education to use the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism — which classifies most anti-Zionism as antisemitic — when investigating allegations of discrimination. It passed in the House in 2024 by an overwhelming majority of 320-91, but was stalled in the Senate due to resistance over constitutionally protected free speech. It was reintroduced in the House last year.
More recently, Lawler partnered with Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a Jewish moderate Democrat from New Jersey, on a bipartisan House resolution condemning antisemitic rhetoric from online personalities including Hasan Piker and Candace Owens.
Conley said she recognizes the rise of “extremism and antisemitism in both parties” and has heard from Jewish voters who feel abandoned by some of the same political allies they once supported. By speaking out on these issues and committing to confront them within her own party, Conley is aiming to convince these voters that they do not have to support a Republican to feel protected.
“The Jewish community knows they have a home in the Democratic Party. Period,” she said.
The post These rivals in a close House race agree on Israel. They’re fighting over who Jewish voters can trust. appeared first on The Forward.
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Rift between Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens puts Michigan Jews on edge
(JTA) — ANN ARBOR, Michigan — An 11th-hour public feud between Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and his pro-Israel former primary rival is further exacerbating tensions between Jewish voters and the nominee ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections.
U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens, who this summer narrowly lost the race for the Democratic nomination to El-Sayed, had previously endorsed her former competitor and was set to join him at a rally Sunday in the crucial final days of campaigning. Michigan is locked in a tight race that could help determine which party controls the Senate.
Instead of a show of unity, Stevens is now forcefully criticizing El-Sayed for his recent criticism of Israel and for not condemning a PAC ad, made by an outside group to boost his campaign, that blamed Israel for rising grocery prices. El-Sayed has shot back, invoking Stevens’ close relationship with the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC.
Stevens, who represents a large Jewish district in suburban Detroit, unloaded on El-Sayed Friday in a series of interviews with the New York Times published early Saturday morning.
On social media Friday, Stevens had said she expected El-Sayed to shortly condemn the ad, paid for by Rebellion PAC, a project of far-left commentator Cenk Uygur. El-Sayed had earlier distanced himself from the ad but had not commented on its content.
“We are not going to say that the cost of groceries is because of Jews and the Jewish state,” Stevens told the Times, adding, “Maybe it is what you want people to believe.” She stopped short of formally rescinding her endorsement of El-Sayed.
The feud comes at a moment when much of the Democratic establishment has coalesced behind El-Sayed in the key Senate race, even as deep concerns remain among many traditionally Democratic Jewish voters. Stevens’ own fiancée, Jewish Democratic megadonor Jason Turkish, said this week he would be voting for Republican nominee Mike Rogers. Stevens told the Times she had met with a rabbi in advance of their wedding and was mulling converting to Judaism.
In a statement sent to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and other outlets Friday, El-Sayed accused Stevens of “relitigating a primary that ended three months ago.” He also said he had already “defeated” spending “from outside corporations and AIPAC” on behalf of Stevens.
El-Sayed did not mention the Uygur ad, nor another ad — this one produced by his campaign — that featured a brief clip of far-right commentator and anti-Israel voice Tucker Carlson announcing he wouldn’t vote for Rogers. Stevens had publicly urged El-Sayed to take down the Carlson ad, which the campaign had aired on conservative TV channels.
The El-Sayed campaign has dropped Stevens’ name from its description of Sunday’s planned Detroit church event, which is now scheduled to feature Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina and Sen. Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland. USA Today and other outlets have reported that El-Sayed’s campaign has asked Stevens to stay away from all future events.
Stevens and Turkish did not return a JTA request for comment.
In her social media statement Friday prior to El-Sayed’s response, Stevens had outlined Jewish constituent concerns about El-Sayed, noting that he himself has used rhetoric akin to blaming Michigan’s financial ills on Israel.
“The ad did not invent its argument; it dramatized one Dr. El-Sayed has made in his own words throughout this campaign: that Israel is the reason Michigan cannot afford schools, health care, and child care,” Stevens wrote. “Abdul promises to get money out of politics. He can begin by getting Israel out of his explanation for everything Michigan cannot afford.”
Both Turkish, in an earlier JTA interview from a Rogers event, and Stevens, to the Times, said their final breaking point with El-Sayed came after a recent debate in which the nominee had declined to say whether Israel or Iran posed a bigger threat to the United States.
El-Sayed on Friday did condemn a separate comment from anti-Israel streamer and former campaign ally Hasan Piker, who is Uygur’s nephew. In a stream this week, Piker had compared the heavily Jewish Detroit suburb of West Bloomfield to a “KKK neighborhood,” adding, “The supremacist attitude underlying their worldview is identical.”
In a statement to Jewish Insider about Piker’s comments, El-Sayed noted he grew up near West Bloomfield and stated, “Comparing Jewish Michiganders to the Ku Klux Klan is utterly inappropriate and flat out wrong.”
Meanwhile, Republicans are jumping at the Jewish divide. Rogers, a former congressman, has seized on the intraparty feud to appeal to Jewish voters who had supported Stevens in the primary. Earlier this week, President Donald Trump called Jews who back El-Sayed “crazy,” leading to condemnation from some Jewish leaders.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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