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Ritchie Torres’ challengers are testing how Israel plays in the Bronx — and taking aim at ‘Zionists’ in a Jewish neighborhood
(New York Jewish Week) — In his campaign to unseat the Bronx’s pro-Israel congressman, Ritchie Torres, political organizer Jose Vega has referred to the New York City borough as “Gaza West.”
In both Gaza and the Bronx, he’s said, young people’s lives are “being destroyed.” And in a recent video, Vega identified what he sees as the root of the Bronx’s problem: the concentration of power in Riverdale, the neighborhood where much of the district’s Jewish population resides.
“Rich people like to live in areas where they can buy the politicians easily — like Ritchie Torres, who is bought and controlled by Zionist influencers and millionaires, who all live in Riverdale,” Vega said in a recent video.
The video included photos of Torres meeting with Jewish leaders, with motion graphics highlighting the outline of a kippah on Torres’ head. It has drawn condemnation from Jewish leaders, who accused Vega of using antisemitic tropes.
“Just because you use the word Zionist instead of Jew doesn’t make it any less antisemitic,” said Eric Dinowitz, Riverdale’s Jewish City Council member. “Especially in your video when you have little traces around yarmulkes. Like, it is very clearly an anti-Jewish sentiment that is driving his argument.”
Rabbi Binyamin Krauss, principal of the Modern Orthodox day school SAR Academy, called the video “ugly, ugly, old-fashioned antisemitism.”
The video has served as a particularly contentious chapter in a Democratic primary race for Torres’ seat, which has often revolved around the incumbent’s support for Israel — and which could be a test of how strongly a Democratic primary campaign centered around Israel resonates with voters.
Torres represents New York’s 15th Congressional District, which covers a large part of the Bronx and is one of the poorest districts in the country. And in a moment when many progressives are hoping to take on moderate pro-Israel Democrats, he has made himself an obvious target.
A former City Council member who joined Congress in 2021, Torres is a vocal pro-Israel advocate who’s said he always has been and “always will be” a Zionist and has called himself “the embodiment of a pro-Israel progressive.” He’s received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, and been enthusiastically embraced by pro-Israel Jews in his district and across the city. In December, children from local Jewish schools serenaded him as he received the Shamash Leadership Award from the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, in a ceremony held at SAR.
Pro-Palestinian activists as well as some local constituents, meanwhile, have taken aim at Torres’ support for Israel, claiming he’s more focused on foreign policy than his own Bronx district. The Jewish and anti-Zionist podcaster Adam Friedland tore into Torres during an interview last year that went viral.
Torres’ spokesperson has said in statements that the congressman is focused on issues such as housing, affordability and standing up to Donald Trump.
“Voters across the Bronx, no matter their religion, race, or background, trust Ritchie Torres to be their voice in Washington because he is a lifelong resident who delivers real results,” said Torres’ spokesperson, Benny Stanislawski, in a statement. “He remains focused on the issues that matter most to his community, from public housing to affordability, while forcefully pushing back against the harmful attacks coming from the Trump administration, whether they be ICE’s abuses or repeated cuts to the social safety net.”
Stanislawski continued, “Efforts to divide the Bronx and pit communities against one another will fail, because this borough knows who is fighting for them and who is simply desperately chasing relevance.”
But with a primary coming up in June, some of his challengers — and many of New York City’s progressive voters, who recently elected an anti-Zionist mayor in Zohran Mamdani — are hoping that Torres’ support for Israel will work against him. It is the first time Torres has faced a primary challenge since taking office.
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The three-term congressman’s challengers include Michael Blake, the former State Assembly member who recently ran an unsuccessful mayoral campaign; Vega, a 26-year-old political organizer from the LaRouche movement, which has been described as conspiracy-driven and “cultlike”; Dalourny Nemorin, a public defender and Democratic Socialists of America organizer; and TikTok musician Jon LaTona.
Andre Easton, a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, is running as an independent in November’s general election.
The only challenger with a record of supporting Israel, State Assembly member Amanda Septimo, suspended her campaign soon after launching it, citing a recent lupus diagnosis.
Blake, who lost the primary against Torres for the same district in 2020, has made Torres’ donations from AIPAC his focal point.
A former vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, Blake said in a phone interview that Democrats, and “especially a true progressive Democrat should be opposed” to positions that AIPAC espouses, such as that the United States should provide military aid to Israel.
Blake kicked off his campaign with an endorsement from former mayor Bill de Blasio, and a launch video slamming Torres for taking donations from AIPAC.
The video drew allegations of fanning the flames of antisemitism, in part because it featured Guy Christensen, an influencer who justified the killing of two Israeli embassy workers near the Capital Jewish Museum in D.C. last year. Blake has said including Christensen in the video was “a miss”; his campaign has since taken down the original video and reposted a new version that does not feature Christensen.
Skeptics pointed out that Blake himself had previously spoken at AIPAC events and attended a trip to Israel that it ran. But he has since spoken out against the organization and scrubbed posts from his social media profiles, while sharply criticizing Israel for committing a “genocide.”
Blake’s change of heart was convincing enough to earn him praise from Track AIPAC, the X account with more than 400,000 followers that works “to end AIPAC and the Israel lobby’s stranglehold on American Democracy” by documenting politicians’ campaign donation numbers from AIPAC and other pro-Israel lobbying groups.
“AIPAC’s Rep. Ritchie Torres has a serious, anti-genocide, anti-apartheid primary challenger in #NY15!” the account posted. “@MrMikeBlake is taking a courageous stand against Israel lobby corruption!”
Included in Blake’s launch video was a clip of Mamdani praising Blake; the two cross-endorsed each other toward the end of the mayoral Democratic primary, in which Blake finished eighth.
Mamdani, whose endorsement could boost a candidate’s profile among progressives, has not weighed in on the 15th district race — and until recently, Blake wasn’t the only candidate showcasing his relationship with the new mayor.
Septimo, who was elected to a second term in the State Assembly in 2024, told Politico that Mamdani, a former colleague in Albany, is “supportive of me and my efforts to deepen my work and the reach of my work.” During last year’s mayoral election, the New York Times wrote that Septimo was part of Mamdani’s inner circle and “brain trust.”
Unlike Blake — and unlike Mamdani himself — Septimo is a longtime supporter of Israel. She strongly opposed Mamdani’s failed “Not On Our Dime” legislation which was aimed at blocking nonprofits from funding Israeli settlements in the West Bank. She also went on an AIPAC-sponsored trip to Israel in 2016, and visited again following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack.
Septimo had said her campaign would focus on “centering people in the Bronx and what they’re facing on a daily basis,” rather than international issues. But she suspended her bid last week when she revealed that she had been diagnosed with lupus.
By keeping international issues in the background, Septimo had taken a starkly different approach from Blake’s anti-AIPAC campaign — a move that might be more resonant with voters in the district, according to a political strategist.
“I don’t know if this is a winning approach for Michael Blake,” said Democratic strategist Trip Yang. “Ritchie Torres is a fairly well-liked incumbent in his district, and he has over $14 million in the bank.”
Yang added that it was affordability, and not Israel-Gaza politics, that fueled Mamdani’s rise.
Ross Barkan, a journalist and one-time State Senate candidate, said he doesn’t see Israel as being central to Bronx voters’ priorities in the way that it might be in more heavily Jewish districts, such as the 10th Congressional District race between Rep. Dan Goldman and Brad Lander.
“It’s just not a place where that many voters are emotionally tied to Israel,” Barkan said of the 15th district. “So whether you’re for Palestinian rights or for Israel, it might not resonate much either way.”
That characterization would be news to Jews living in Riverdale, one of the most Jewish neighborhoods in the city where Israeli flags hang on front lawns and synagogues and Ha-Makolet: Shoshi’s Market carries a wide range of Israeli products. The neighborhood is home not only to SAR but to a nondenominational day school, Kinneret, whose founders in 1947 included the Zionist leader Golda Meir — and whose portrait hangs in the hallway.
According to a 2023 UJA-Federation of New York community study, there are 16,000 Jewish adults and 4,000 Jewish children living in Riverdale and the adjacent Kingsbridge neighborhood. Jews are a small minority across the Bronx, though, with an estimated population of 29,000 in the borough of 1.4 million, approximately half of whom live in the 15th district.
Torres was already popular in the district before Riverdale was added in 2022. But the neighborhood has a special bond with him.
“As Jews in this community, we obviously support Ritchie, and would love that the vote gets out for him,” said Michael Brown, a Jewish Riverdale resident, in an interview. “It’s not just his support for Jews, but he’s been good for his whole constituency.”
Brown said his daughter attends SAR, where Torres has been a frequent guest. “I know, as a congressman, I’m not supposed to have favorites — but SAR is one of my favorites because it is a special and magical place,” Torres told the entire student body during a December 2023 visit, a day after he was heckled for his Israel views on the Upper East Side.
“I actually gave him a report card last year because he spent so much time here,” joked Krauss, the principal. Krauss said he’s been to Israel with Torres twice, including a 2024 trip with a group of Bronx leaders during which they met with Yoav Gallant, then the defense minister.
Torres has consistently voted on pro-Israel positions in Congress, and in January 2024, he left the Congressional Progressive Caucus as his identification with Israel made him increasingly an outlier on the left.
Dinowitz, who represents Riverdale, Kingsbridge and a few adjacent Bronx neighborhoods, is the Chair of City Council’s Jewish Caucus, and left the Progressive Caucus in February 2023.
“With someone like Ritchie in Congress, a lot of us do feel safer, knowing that someone’s not going to shy away from their support of the Jewish community because it may be politically convenient at this time or that time,” Dinowitz said.
Thomas Gardner, the senior rabbi of the Reform synagogue Riverdale Temple, said everyone he’s spoken with has “been very positive about Ritchie Torres.”
Gardner said Torres told him that the most frequent complaint he hears walking around the district is that he supports Israel despite the war in Gaza. Gardner pointed to Torres’ criticism of Netanyahu — that Netanyahu has done “irreparable damage” to Israel’s support among Democrats — as a sign of his alignment with a number of constituents.
“My personal feeling is that his statements were very much along the lines of what most of my congregants think,” Gardner said. “They’re very pro-Israel but they’re not pro-Netanyahu. They believe in Israel and hope that it is strong and exists. But they also hope that the Palestinians don’t suffer. Palestinians need better leadership. The Palestinians need peace.”
For many of Torres’ critics, simply being anti-Netanyahu falls short of the mark.
Jose Vega is taking a Michael Blake-like approach to capture those critics’ attention, having launched his campaign at a town hall called “The Bronx is ‘Gaza West’: Rebuilding Starts Here — and There.”
Vega is part of the LaRouche movement, which follows the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche, who reportedly said that only one and a half million Jews died in the Holocaust, and that the Ku Klux Klan was founded on behalf of B’nai Brith. Vega has made a point of centering Torres’ views on Israel, and even confronted him in a Bronx restaurant about them.
“You are responsible for the death of thousands of Palestinian children, thousands of Ukrainian children — you love funding war,” Vega declared in a video that he took of the confrontation.
Vega posted another video on X of a billboard in the Bronx that featured a photo of Torres and the message, “For every Palestinian child that’s murdered… your Congressman, Ritchie Torres, gains a profit. Let the Palestinian children live.”
Vega said the video was sent to him by a “Torres hater,” though JNS reported that the billboard’s message may have been AI-generated. (Torres called the message “lies and libels that are meant to incite political violence,” in a statement.)
A couple of weeks later, Vega appeared on a video podcast called the Jimmy Dore Show, and said with a smile that he “will not confirm or deny” whether he, in fact, took the video himself, though he did firmly state that “it’s not artificial intelligence, because I hate AI.”
Vega was endorsed by the Anti-Zionist America PAC, a non-partisan group that has endorsed a range of candidates including Democrats, Libertarian independents and America First Republicans calling for mass deportations, on the basis of their anti-Israel views.
His recent remarks about Riverdale Zionists controlling Torres and the district, which came during an interview with anti-Israel influencer Erik Warsaw, drew strong reactions from Jewish leaders such as Krauss, who said he was “sickened,” and Dinowitz, who called the video “frightening.”
“I mean, he wasn’t even trying to hide his antisemitism,” Dinowitz said.
There is no polling data yet for the race, and Vega, whose campaign has received about $101,000, is the only challenger to have reported receipts to the Federal Election Commission. Torres, meanwhile, has $14.3 million in cash on hand, rolled over from previous elections.
Dalourny Nemorin, a public defense attorney and DSA organizer, is running on domestic issues like housing, healthcare and immigrants’ rights, though she also criticized Torres for his AIPAC support in an interview with the Bronx Times.
His funding from AIPAC and pro-Israel views, she said in November, have led him to “deny the existence of genocide in Palestine, while we watch in real time as people starve to death.”
When asked by a Reddit user why her campaign site doesn’t emphasize her position on taking AIPAC money, Nemorin said she “wanted to highlight the issues Ritchie was ignoring and not further platform they [sic] people who keeps him preoccupied.”
Meanwhile, music TikToker Jon LaTona has said little about his candidacy. He has worn what appears to be a keffiyeh in unrelated videos, indicating an opposition to Torres’ pro-Israel stance, though the TikTok account for his campaign has been taken down.
The post Ritchie Torres’ challengers are testing how Israel plays in the Bronx — and taking aim at ‘Zionists’ in a Jewish neighborhood appeared first on The Forward.
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Lawn signs for Abdul, door knocking for Haley: Michigan Jews split in Senate Democratic primary
(JTA) — OAK PARK, Michigan – Karen Bick has spent the days leading up to Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary fielding calls from Jewish friends urging her to vote for U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens.
Despite the pressure, Bick, 69, said she plans to sit out the race altogether. As much as she is compelled by the campaign of Stevens’ progressive opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, his accusations that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza have kept her from voting for him. Stevens’ campaign, she said, hasn’t given her enough reason to vote for her instead.
“I am very pro-Israel. I’m not pro-Netanyahu, which is part of the whole thing. A lot of my friends who are Jewish have been calling me, trying to get Haley, but it’s like they’re looking at one issue,” said Bick, a Jewish resident of Oak Park, a suburb of Detroit. “I don’t think that Israel should take precedence over all the other issues just because somebody’s pro-Israel.”
Bick’s ambivalence reflects a divide among Michigan Jews in a primary where Israel has emerged as one of the sharpest contrasts between the candidates. Stevens has served in the House since 2019 as a reliable supporter of Israel, while El-Sayed, a former county health official, has made opposition to U.S. support for Israel and AIPAC’s spending in the race a hallmark of his campaign.
That doesn’t mean El-Sayed is without Jewish supporters.
Barbara Weinberg Barefield, a longtime Detroit resident who helped found the city’s Jewish Voice for Peace chapter, has been campaigning for El-Sayed since the beginning of the race, including organizing fundraisers, phone banking and canvassing. She also helped organize “Jews for Abdul,” a group of Jewish supporters working to elect him.
Weinberg Barefield, 76, said that El-Sayed’s use of the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza was an essential component of her support for him.
“We are trying to let people know that there are many Jewish people that support Abdul and support his objectives and support his voice,” Weinberg Barefield said. “Justice, equality, and freedom are part of the fabric of me being a Jew and the message that we put forth for ‘Jews for Abdul:’ that he is a candidate that represents our morality, our ethics, and frankly, I think these are the things that most people in this country want.”
Suzanne Levin, an 83-year-old Jewish Michigander, initially supported Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow, whose withdrawal from the race left progressive Jews in the state facing a political dilemma.
For Levin, the choice quickly became clear. She got an El-Sayed lawn sign and “Jews for Abdul” t-shirt and threw her support behind his campaign.
In doing so, Levin has rejected accusations from Stevens and some Jewish Democratic leaders in the state that El-Sayed’s rhetoric and associations have crossed the line into antisemitism.
“They believe all this crap about El-Sayed, that he’s antisemitic, and I have listened to so many of his talks, and when they ask him ‘should there be an Israel,’ he says there should be a place where people could all be safe and and people should be okay,” Levin said.
Other Jewish Democrats have reached a starkly different conclusion about El-Sayed, who has said the Israeli government is as “evil” as Hamas and often accuses Israel of committing “genocide” in Gaza while advocating that U.S. aid to Israel be diverted to domestic priorities.
Halie Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, which has endorsed Stevens, said that she had been “concerned” by El-Sayed’s response following the March attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan.
At the time, El-Sayed sparked outcry by putting out a statement that discussed Israel’s war in Lebanon, where the attacker’s brother was killed. Soifer said she believed El-Sayed “equivocated and provided a justification for a situation, which there was no justification.”
“If he wants to be senator of a state that has such a large Jewish population, he must demonstrate an ability to stand with that community as we face the rise of antisemitism,” Soifer said. “On that issue in particular, Haley has been a leader in Congress.” The state has close to 130,000 Jews.
Soifer said her group’s volunteers had put out close to 10,000 calls to Michigan voters urging them to back Stevens.
Zach Nessel, a 23-year-old Michigan State University graduate and the secretary of the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus, shared many of Soifer’s concerns as he knocked on doors for Stevens in Oak Park Monday.
“I’m absolutely concerned about his rhetoric,” said Nessel, whose mother is Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel. “I think he’s spending more of his time trying to ostracize pro-Israel Democrats than he is looking to fight Trump, and that’s what I see amongst a lot of his allies.”
Nessel said he had been especially concerned by El-Sayed’s campaign event at his alma mater in April alongside Hasan Piker, an anti-Israel streamer whose rhetoric has been called antisemitic by many Jewish groups and leaders.
“The fact that my former Dem Club is hosting an antisemite that has positive things to say about Hezbollah, a U.S. designated terrorist organization that has killed Americans, that’s horrifying,” Nessel said. “And the fact that you know Abdul is campaigning with someone like that is insane.”
Nessel said that he had visited over 500 homes across the Detroit area to champion Stevens. During his visits, he said voters rarely brought up Israel or AIPAC on their own.
But Nessel said he worried that a potential El-Sayed victory Tuesday could encourage other candidates to adopt similar tactics, with consequences for Jewish participation in the Democratic Party.
“Most people, they want to fight Trump and they want to make things more affordable,” Nessel said. “And if this sort of commotion is successful, then they’ll keep on doing it, and that’ll make it hard for members of the Jewish community to continue to participate in our party.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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In a world of AI run amok, Yiddish folktales are making these theater wizards ‘cranky’
A unique theatrical performance inspired by Yiddish folk tales features dead Jews dancing at a cemetery, a prophet appearing in the form of a bunny rabbit and a stone-munching worm named Shamir. It all takes place within the confines of a 2’ X 4’ box known as a cranky and it’s coming to New York later this month as part of the International Puppet Fringe Festival.
For those unfamiliar with the decidedly low-tech medium, crankies are portable stages through which a panorama is scrolled by cranking a pair of wooden dowels. The characters and scenery on the scroll are usually accompanied by narration and music, in this case a live klezmer trio. In backlit crankies, shadow puppets can also be used for characters.
The cranky performance of Shterna and the Lost Voice was created by the Magid Ensemble, a far-flung interdisciplinary collective that includes a storyteller, a graphic artist and three former members of the Boston klezmer band Mamaliga. The members met when they were all living in Northampton, MA, which was described in one review of the ensemble as a “queer Yiddish diasporic hub.”
The decision to create a cranky grew out of the group’s frustration when they tried to keep performing a silent Yiddish film score they had composed. The score was played at a Toronto Jewish Film Festival screening in 2023. The cost for the rights to subsequent screenings of the silent film was prohibitively expensive, so the ensemble decided to create its own show. Accordion player Mattias Kaufmann said they really wanted to do a multimedia project that combined a concert, storytelling and visuals. Kaufmann had worked on some crankies years earlier and saw them as an exciting way to tell a story.
“I feel like they’re really powerful, especially the backlit crankies,” said Kaufmann, who composed the music for Shterna. “It’s not really full-fledged theater, but in many ways it is. It’s a cool in-between space of performance.”
Artist Kiah Raymond had done several crankies and violinist Rachel Leader had seen some.
“I just loved their portability,” Leader told me. “They’re quite small and we can travel with them.”
And travel they have. Shterna and the Lost Voice has been performed more than 50 times around the U.S. and Canada since April 2024. Many of the shows have been sold-out.
Into the cranky-verse
Painted moving panoramas date back many centuries but emerged as a popular form of entertainment in the 1800’s. They were constantly on tour in the U.S. and a number of European countries. The cranky is a smaller scale version of the panoramas and its revival in America is traced back to the mid-2010’s. Vermont’s Bread and Puppet Theater is widely credited with sparking the resurrection of the cranky.
Jenny Romaine, a Bread and Puppet alumnus who works with the Great Small Works theater collective in New York, praised the work of the Magid Ensemble.
“They’re taking the crafts of performance and visual theater and puppetry to new heights,” Romaine said. “I love their work.”
To consider how the cranky craze has spread in recent years, consider the Seattle-based cranky maker Sue Truman’s experience joining a Facebook group devoted to crankies in 2014. There were 30 people in the group at the time. It now has 4,500 members worldwide. Truman, who teaches people how to make crankies and runs the Crankie Factory website, estimates there are currently between 15 and 20 cranky festivals in the U.S. every year.
“It’s incredible how it has exploded,” she told me. “I get emails every week from people all over the world.”
As if to illustrate how quirky the cranky universe is, Truman is collaborating with a couple of Seattle’s old-timey musicians on a piece about a meteor storm in 1833 and its impact on quilters in the Pacific Northwest.
Or there’s Katherine Fahey, one half of the Baltimore cranky team known as The Lantern Sisters. which did a show about Baltimore’s horse-drawn street peddlers known as Arabbers.
Fahey ran into the Magid Ensemble at a cranky festival in New Jersey where each performer had ten minutes to strut their stuff. She was impressed with the excerpt of Shterna they presented.
“Their narrator was such a good storyteller,” Fahey told me in a phone interview after returning from a performance in Ohio. “And I liked how they kept the artwork simple. Just did paper cuts, all one color on the scroll. They told the story in this straightforward, beautiful way. I thought it was really lovely.”
A talent for cranking
Kiah Raymond, a Portland, Oregon-based tattoo artist and muralist, made the cranky for Shterna and the Lost Voice on a long roll of 24” wide butcher paper. It took them between four and six months to cut the characters and scenery into the paper and laminate the finished cuts with clear packing tape. Raymond pulled designs and patterns from a book about traditional Jewish paper cuts and used them as borders and backgrounds. Additional inspiration came from ketubas.
Raymond operates the cranky during the performance, which involves a lot more than just mindlessly cranking the two scrolls.
“You’re holding it taut but turning it at the same time,” Raymond explained. “You turn it faster or slower, depending on what’s happening in the story.”
There’s another quirk to cranking: At times you’ll be turning one hand considerably faster than the other, depending on where in the scroll the story is.
The lost voice in the Shterna story belongs to a man whose beautiful davening is cherished in his shtetl. After he loses the ability to daven, a woman named Shterna goes on a quest to retrieve it. Her sojourn takes her through the physical world, the underworld and the heavens.
A.C. Weaver, a scenic carpenter and Yiddish translator based in Northampton, came up with the story in collaboration with the ensemble’s members. Weaver narrates the show.
Weaver said their connection to traditional Jewish storytelling is thanks to their childhood rabbi, Steve Sager, at Beth El Synagogue in Durham, NC. Weaver said the late rabbi was an “incredible extemporaneous storyteller.”
The story line for the cranky emerged, Weaver said, during the COVID pandemic’s dark days when a lot of friends and neighbors were becoming sick or disabled.
“I felt motivated to make up a story having to do with disability and what it means to lose something around which a lot of your identity is based,” Weaver told me.
Storytellers and teachers
The word magid can mean storyteller, itinerant teacher or preacher. The role of the magid has been documented as far back as the 16th Century and there have been some major magids, including the Dubner Maggid of the late 18th Century and the Kelmer Maggid, who was a big macher in Musar, a spiritual practice focused on living a meaningful and ethical life.
The Magid Ensemble likes to define the word magid as “storyteller,” but the group also serves as a teacher and preacher to some degree.
Though not overtly political, Shterna does project values with a distinct world view: a woman as the hero and a nod to compassion for the disabled. The ensemble has also raised funds for a family from Gaza.
The production was created with start-up funding from the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Boston and local cultural councils in Massachusetts. Leader said that altogether around $15,000 came in, including a $3,000 New England States Touring grant.
Analog in a digital world
Many in the cranky scene say one of the medium’s appeals is its analog nature at a time when so much of our entertainment is digital — and increasingly AI-generated.
More than one practitioner has likened cranky performances to “telling stories around a fire.” It’s an immersive experience, said Raffi Boden, a Brooklyn-based cellist in the ensemble.
“I think that there’s something really beautiful about seeing everything happening before your eyes’” he told me. “I think people are moved by witnessing something that comes together created in front of them in this beautiful, complete way.”
The immersion that audiences experience is likely why children as young as preschoolers have sat and watched the entire 50-minute show without interruption.
“I was a little worried going in because I was wondering, what if everybody starts screaming after 10 minutes because they’re bored?” Boden said.
Despite the embrace of the crankies’ intrinsic analog nature, more and more cranky festivals are providing live video projection if the performance is taking place in a big hall. It’s counterintuitive, concedes Truman, but on the other hand, “If you can’t see it, that’s not good. In the festivals where I’ve performed, nobody is complaining about them providing live video projection.”
Shterna and the Lost Voice will be performed during the International Puppet Fringe Festival August 13, 15 and 16 at Teatro LATEA on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
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Cori Bush promised to bury AIPAC. Her rematch with Wesley Bell in Missouri tests that.
(JTA) — Missouri primary voters will travel back two years when they head to the polls on Tuesday. There they’ll confront a rematch of two candidates whose previous face-off was largely defined by an influx of AIPAC cash that helped oust one of Israel’s most ardent critics in Congress.
In 2024, AIPAC “demonstrated its clout,” in the words of The New York Times, with a massive contribution that knocked out incumbent U.S. Rep. Cori Bush in favor of challenger Wesley Bell. In her concession speech, she promised revenge.
On Tuesday, Bush is seeking to make good on the pledge. But while she is competing against the same candidate, the political landscape around them has changed dramatically.
Since Bush’s loss in the district representing the St. Louis metropolitan region, AIPAC has become a bogeyman in the Democratic Party and Israel a major campaign issue. Other anti-Zionist members of the Democratic Socialists of America have been racking up victories in blue districts across the country throughout the 2026 primary season.
The changing winds might have given Bell incentive to shift to the left instead of leaving himself vulnerable to a challenger whose background and political stances are otherwise similar. But Bell has held firm in his support for Israel, enjoying the backing of mainstream Democrats and a continued financial infusion from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to the tune of more than $1 million this cycle.
As a result, Tuesday’s rematch is one of the most striking tests of whether AIPAC still has traction in Democratic strongholds or whether Bush and other DSA candidates have subdued the once-powerful lobby.
“The war is a lot different today than it was two years ago,” Braxton Payne, a St. Louis-based Democratic strategist, told JTA, referring to the Israel-Gaza conflict that unfolded following Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing war. “Sentiment inside the Democratic Party, even among the establishment, has changed.”
In the past few years, the AIPAC has faced growing hostilities from ultra-left-wing politicians, who have denounced Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, particularly in the aftermath of Oct. 7.
“AIPAC is now a household name in Democratic politics,” Payne noted.
But heading into Tuesday’s primaries, it wasn’t clear that the anti-AIPAC activism had moved the needle for St. Louis voters. While the polymarket prediction platform has given Bell a 66% chance of winning, compared to Bush’s 34%, there’s a dearth of nonpartisan polling. Bush’s campaign commissioned one of the few publicly available survey results, an April HIT Strategies poll that declared the candidates “statistically tied,” with Bell in the lead at 44% and Bush at 40%.
On paper, the two candidates have much in common. Born in Missouri in the mid-1970s, Bell and Bush are both Black progressive Democrats who entered politics following the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in the city of Ferguson.
After protests for police reforms surged across the area for about a year, Bell won a seat on the city council and worked on enacting such changes. In a 2018 race for St. Louis County prosecutor, he defeated Bob McCulloch, a 27-year incumbent who had come under national scrutiny for failing to prosecute the officer who had killed Brown. Bell is now serving his first term in Congress.
Bush, meanwhile, first became engaged in politics as a participant in the Ferguson protests. Though she lost Democratic primaries for the U.S. Senate and House in 2016 and 2018, success in 2020 led her to serve Missouri’s 1st Congressional District for two terms. But in 2024, Bush fell short, losing in the primaries to Bell by more than 5 percentage points.
The candidates agree on most of their political platforms, both of which prioritize issues like reproductive freedom, gun violence prevention and the dismantling of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as reducing the costs of housing, utilities, healthcare and prescriptions. But they diverge when it comes to the Middle East, with Bush’s campaign promising to “stand for justice in Palestine.”
Like other DSA candidates in New York, Colorado, Wisconsin and Michigan, Bush’s campaign accuses Israel of carrying out a genocide in Gaza with the backing of “U.S. weapons and U.S. dollars.”
Following her loss to Bell in 2024, Bush threatened to tear down AIPAC’s “kingdom” after it spent nearly $9 million on her takedown, in one of the most expensive House races in U.S. history. Federal Election Commission records show that of that total, AIPAC invested about $3.4 million in support of Bell and about $5.2 million in opposition of Bush, through the lobby’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project.
“People are beginning to understand that — much like the crypto industry, AI, Big Oil, and Big Pharma — AIPAC has become yet another way for MAGA-donors to divide the Democratic base by meddling in primaries,” Bush told JTA in a written statement.
“In St. Louis and across the country, people know that our fight against antisemitism means fighting against the far-right’s effort to divide us,” Bush added.
Throughout her current rematch against Bell, Bush has gone after her opponent for his ties to AIPAC.
“Wesley Bell is a former Republican campaign manager who is bought and paid for by AIPAC,” Bush posted last month on X. Bush was referring to a 2006 period when Bell served as campaign manager for a conservative, which he has maintained was no more than a favor for a friend.
“We’re going back to DC, and we’ll do it with no corporate cash or AIPAC funded-trips,” Bush added, referencing Bell’s trip to Israel with the lobby group last year.
Yet compared to 2024, AIPAC has spent much less on the current race. Through its UDP super PAC, the lobby has invested in the neighborhood of $3 million in the rematch, with the vast majority spent opposing Bush, according to FEC data. Overall in this race, the candidates themselves have also raised fewer funds than they did two years ago, according to the FEC. Bell has secured $3.6 million and Bush $1.3 million, as opposed to $5.4 million and $4.2 million, respectively, in 2024.
Deryn Sousa, spokesperson for AIPAC, told JTA in a written statement that his group was proud to support Bell’s campaign.
“Bell is a principled fighter for the people of St. Louis, while Cori Bush spent her time in Congress missing votes and demonizing a key democratic ally,” Sousa added.
Bell did not respond to a request for comment from JTA.
However, on the campaign trail, Bell said he was “proud to stand with our Jewish brothers and sisters, and support Israel, particularly in a time that has been very tumultuous,” in a March video posted by AIPAC.
“When we see what has happened in the last few years, I think it’s even more apropos to stand with our friends and one of our greatest allies,” he continued. “Oftentimes, what gets lost is yes, we support Israel, but Israel also supports us.”
And in Congress, Bell voted last month against an amendment that aimed to cut military aid to Israel. He has also previously co-sponsored a bill to increase defense partnerships with Israel, while also voting in favor of legislation that would have sanctioned the International Criminal Court for seeking to arrest U.S. allies, including Israeli officials.
David Cohen, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of St. Louis, which does not endorse candidates, said the recent Iran war transformed “a national conversation about the Middle East into something more common.”
“The sheer number of conversations on this topic compared to the last race look different,” Cohen said. “The confluence of conspiracy theorists from the left and the right have blown out of proportion since the war started.”
Within these national conversations, which he described as “catchy” talking points and “black and white” discussions about AIPAC and Israel, Cohen warned that certain campaigns are “playing that dangerous game of demonizing Jews.”
Cohen said he believes that Bush’s campaign decided to focus on Israel because “they thought it would get her traction,” as opposed to focusing on the “many issues that people in Missouri care about.” Payne echoed Cohen’s sentiments, stressing that he “wouldn’t consider the Israeli-Hamas conflict as the top issue” at the ballot box amid higher-priority concerns like the “insane” cost of living. He noted that Bush’s “central campaign issue is AIPAC money,” a message that “motivates her base” but might not sway the everyday voter.
Jewish leaders and activists in the state have followed the race closely. Rabbi Ze’ev Smason, president of the Coalition for Jewish Values – Missouri, told JTA in an email that his organization also doesn’t endorse candidates. But the difference between Bell and Bush, he said, was obvious to his regional chapter of a national Orthodox rabbinic group.
While Bell “supports Israel’s right to self-determination” and to exist as a Jewish nation, Bush has “established an adversarial relationship with Israel abroad, as well as with the overwhelming majority of her Missouri constituents,” according to Smason.
“At home in her district, Cori Bush was a ‘no-show’ for her Jewish constituents,” Smason stated. “She regularly refused requests for interviews from the local Jewish press, and was shockingly absent from the dedication ceremony of the Holocaust Museum and Learning Center, with no explanation.”
Cohen, whose JCRC branch serves 36 Jewish groups from “liberal to Conservative to Orthodox,” said that “almost none of them believe what Cori Bush believes about Israel.” Jews made up 4.1% of the population in the district as of 2024, according to the Berman Jewish DataBank.
On the other hand, Michael Berg, a volunteer for St. Louis Jewish Voice for Peace, which is not a JCRC member, is among a minority of organized Jewish voices who oppose Bell due in large part to the candidate’s support for Israel. It was upsetting, Berg said, that Bell was “perfectly willing to take $15 million from the interests of a foreign government that’s committing a genocide.”
For Berg, the Israel-Gaza conflict is by no means a fringe concern. He praised Bush for her “unwavering advocacy” for a Gaza ceasefire and support for “multi-ethnic democracy,” as well as her refusal to accept corporate funds, her commitment to fighting climate change and her history of standing up for the interests of St. Louis’s people.
Bush has also earned the support of a second local Jewish group, Progressive Jews of St. Louis, who described her as “a champion for our St. Louis community and a brave leader in the fight for justice and peace for all people, regardless of where they call home.”
Out-of-state Jewish groups have also been vocal about their stances on this race, with the vast majority backing Bell, but some groups, like the IfNotNow movement, advocating for Bush. The Washington, D.C.-based IfNotNow, which calls for “a thriving future for all Israelis and Palestinians,” praised Bush for leading “the call for a ceasefire in Congress.”
In contrast, Jacob Spiegel, communications director of the Washington-based Jewish Democratic Council of America, recounted his organization’s grassroots action in favor of Bell. A network of volunteers, he explained in an email, is working to “elect the candidate we believe aligns with our Jewish values.”
Nonetheless, Berg maintained that even if Bell wins this race, the future “of the Democratic Party is only going in one direction,” which he said is the “direction of Democratic socialism.”
“The United States is increasingly becoming an anti-Zionist country,” Berg said. “The people understand they do not want the United States to continue to fund and support an ethno-national state in the Middle East that oppresses half of its people.”
Regardless of who is victorious, Payne predicted that the outcome would give “fodder” to the triumphant side. Payne, who noted his position as a non-Jewish “outsider,” said he believes that a fear of antisemitism will be motivating many Jewish voters as they head to the polls.
“To be frank, I think it’s a fear that it’s not ill-placed or unfounded,” he added.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Cori Bush promised to bury AIPAC. Her rematch with Wesley Bell in Missouri tests that. appeared first on The Forward.
