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Scott Wiener, Jewish Democrat and critic of Israel’s war in Gaza, vies for Nancy Pelosi’s seat
Scott Wiener grew up helping his mother fold the newsletter for the tiny Conservative synagogue his parents built in rural New Jersey — a congregation so small it borrowed space from a Lutheran church. Half a century later, the California state senator is running for Nancy Pelosi’s seat, bringing a Jewish story rooted in survival to a political moment defined by division.
His view of Israel, shaped by family history and moral discomfort with the Gaza war, puts him at odds with an older generation of Jewish Democrats.
In an interview on Thursday, just hours after Pelosi announced she would step down following four decades of service in Washington, Wiener said his Jewish identity and stories of his ancestors escaping pogroms and fascism in Eastern Europe guide him to take a more human-centered approach to the Israel-Palestinian conflict — one that is often critical of Israel and reflects a broader realignment among Jewish Democrats in recent months.
“I care deeply about Israel as the home of one half of all Jews on the planet,” Wiener said. “And I want to recognize the basic humanity of both Israelis and Palestinians living there to a peaceful existence.”
Wiener, 55, is expressing a growing view among Democratic incumbents and candidates now running for office when speaking about Israel. He was an early supporter of a bilateral ceasefire, called the war in Gaza “indefensible,” and said he would back congressional measures to halt the sale of offensive weapons to Israel to protest the country’s leadership. “In my view, it’s a moral stain” on the U.S.-Israel alliance, he said about Israel’s conduct of the war.
And like Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, who recently announced a primary challenge to Sen. Ed Markey, Wiener has promised not to take contributions from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which has become increasingly unpopular among some mainstream Democrats in recent years. “I’m not seeking AIPAC’s support because I have policy differences with AIPAC,” he said.
Wiener insisted that his view reflects that of the “large majority of Democrats in Congress” who don’t want to sever ties with Israel. “I strongly support the U.S.-Israel relationship,” Wiener said about his position. “I want Israel to have a government that is committed to democracy and to peace and a Palestine that is not being run by Hamas.”
At least six candidates have registered to compete in the June 2026 Democratic primary to succeed Pelosi in California. The field includes Saikat Chakrabarti, a former chief of staff to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who has called the war in Gaza a genocide.
Who is Scott Wiener?
Born in Philadelphia, Wiener grew up in Turnersville, a rural town in southern New Jersey that he described as being conservative and Christian. When the family moved there in the early 1970s, their neighbors asked why they didn’t have horns, Wiener recalled.
In the 30-minute phone interview, Wiener said his ancestors fled pogroms and state-sponsored antisemitism in the early 1900s from Lithuania, Romania, Russia, and the borderlands of Belarus and Ukraine, arriving in Philadelphia between 1903 and 1909.
His childhood revolved around Judaism. His parents — a small business owner and a teacher — gathered a dozen Jewish families from nearby areas and founded a small Conservative congregation, B’nai Tikvah. At first, the group met in a Lutheran church, draping a sheet over the cross during services.
Rabbi Leonard Zucker, an Orthodox rabbi from Cherry Hill, would come to town each Friday before sundown and sleep at the Wieners’ home for Shabbat so he could walk to the synagogue. Wiener would help his mom, who was the treasurer, fold, stamp and mail the monthly newsletter to members. Within 15 years, the congregation grew to 150 families and moved into its own building.
“I did not have any friends outside of the synagogue until I was in 10th grade,” Wiener said. In public school, he experienced what he describes as a “fair amount of antisemitism.” He said kids called him a kike and a Christ-hater; someone tried to burn a cross on their lawn. He said his sixth-grade history textbook had a chapter about how the Jews begged the Romans to kill Jesus. In high school, he helped form a committee to address religious intolerance after a Christian minister delivered a sermon at a graduation.
Wiener came out as gay while at Duke University, and was elected president of his fraternity.
After college, he spent a year in Santiago, Chile, on a Fulbright scholarship, finding there a local synagogue where he could attend High Holiday services. He later moved to San Francisco to work as a litigation attorney at Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe before becoming a deputy city attorney. He served on the Board of Supervisors for six years before being elected to the state Senate in 2016. At 6-foot-7, Wiener likes to note that he’s the tallest elected official in the California Legislature. He also co-chairs its Jewish Caucus.
His childhood memories shaped one of his signature legislative victories: a law requiring that antisemitism be explicitly addressed in the state’s ethnic-studies curriculum. The bill, signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom last month, builds on existing civil rights protections to ensure that students of all faiths and backgrounds can participate in public education free from harassment, bullying or bias.
Wiener said he doesn’t consider himself very religious. He rotates between various San Francisco synagogues — Congregation Emanu-El, Sherith Israel and Sha’ar Zahav — on the High Holidays and special occasions.
Wiener’s views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
In his statement days after Oct. 7, Wiener declared that “Hamas must be entirely eliminated,” and condemned the subsequent pro-Palestinian protests, one of which disrupted a Halloween pumpkin carving event he hosted in 2024.
But as Israel’s military campaign in Gaza intensified, his rhetoric shifted. Weeks into the war, he had already called for a negotiated ceasefire.
By mid-2025, he was calling the bombardment of Gaza “indefensible,” and in September of this year, he said the Israeli plan to invade Gaza City was “abhorrent and unacceptable.”
In the interview, Wiener said the war in Gaza went “far and beyond self-defense” and rooting out terror. “The obliteration of Gaza and the scale of death among Palestinians,” he said, “is an immoral thing.”
The post-Pelosi test
Pelosi, who often spoke of her pride in her Jewish grandchildren and her father’s early support for Israel’s founding, represented a generation of Democrats for whom unwavering pro-Israel support was a given. Wiener’s bid to succeed her could signal the start of a different era.
In a fundraising email sent Wednesday, the day after Zohran Mamdani, a critic of Israel, was elected New York City’s first Muslim mayor, AIPAC warned that “anti-Israel forces in America are energized, mobilized, and taking the fight directly to us.” The race for Pelosi’s seat could become a key test of how Congress approaches Israel in the years ahead.
Support from Jewish Democrats, including Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland and retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, for a bill restricting offensive arms sales to Israel highlights the growing divide within the party over how to back an ally.
Wiener said his support for restricting U.S. arms sales to Israel would apply only under a right-wing government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “We have to ensure that U.S. taxpayer dollars are not being used to do what Israel just did in Gaza,” he said. “We need to be able to strike that balance and have that kind of relationship where it’s not just a blank check.”
“I hope that changes,” he added. “I hope the conversation can be led by the broad middle — by people who simply want peace.”
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Capers Funnye wasn’t a ‘Black Jew’ — he was a good Jew
This morning, when I woke up, it was the first time in my entire life that my spiritual leader, my rabbi and my friend, was gone. People are born and die every day, and we live totally oblivious to that fact, but I feel the absence of this one human being almost on a cellular level. And the very person I would call to help me make sense of a time like this is the one who is gone.
Rabbi Capers Funnye wasn’t your typical rabbi. How could he be, though? After all, his congregation was full of Black folks and people of color. There were also some white congregants, but for the most part, his temple was a place created for people like me to have somewhere to go and practice Judaism freely without suspicion or judgment. Beth Shalom was established over one hundred years ago by Black Jews who knew at that time that they could actually be arrested here in America, in Chicago, for daring to say out loud that they were Jewish. I know that sounds unthinkable, but it’s a historical fact: It used to be illegal in Chicago for Blacks to claim that they were Jewish.
Rabbi Funnye dedicated his life to ensuring that Black Jews wouldn’t have their Jewishness questioned.
White Jews love to reminisce about the Civil Rights Movement and their close relationship to the Black community, and this coalition brought about monumental changes to American society. But those same white Jews who marched in Selma and rode buses to Mississippi had little to no interaction with Black Jews. We were nonexistent. A myth, if you will. Some people had heard that there were Black people who called themselves Jews, but no one had actually ever seen one or met one.
We were there, but just as other Jews had hidden before, we were hiding too. We worshipped in basements, living rooms, and the backs of storefronts. We were in the shadows until Rabbi Funnye came along. He was born to leave the world a better place than he found it, and that’s exactly what he did.
Rabbi Funnye was supposed to be an AME pastor, but the church didn’t need him. The synagogue, the Jewish people, did.
I used to joke with him that I’d known him so long I could remember when he had a full head of black hair. And I did. I can remember going to services and seeing him on the bimah on Shabbat. Even as a little kid, I recognized he was different. He had a voice that could command the attention even of a pew full of antsy five-year-olds. But he also had a smile so warm that we never felt scolded. When he spoke, people couldn’t help but listen, and eventually he started saying what people wanted and needed to hear.
I watched him rise from assistant rabbi to leader.He could teach Torah in a way that held the congregation’s interest, imparting important lessons while adding levity with razor-sharp wit and perfectly timed humor.
If I’d been born male, I probably would’ve wanted to be a rabbi my whole life. I wanted to be like him. But I was a girl, and that was unthinkable.
But he made me believe I could do things.
I can remember when he started to integrate the Chicago Jewish community. When we’d go to events like Shabbat dinners or Black and Jewish seders, he was unfazed by the whispers and stares when he’d ask where the tables were for those who were both Black and Jewish. While this made the rest of us uncomfortable and, for some, unwilling to ever go back into any room where we were treated as oddities, he was undeterred.
He went back, over and over again. He would not allow the existence of Black Jews to go unacknowledged any longer. And many of us went with him. I was one. I saw how he was treated at times by white rabbis and even just by people who were white and Jewish and still felt that somehow they were better than him. It would infuriate me, but not him. He’d smile, tell a joke or one of his signature stories that would completely disarm them.
And while the behavior of some of my white co-religionists would thoroughly anger me, Rabbi Funnye understood how to deal with bigotry and hate in other ways. He grew up in it. He knew how to rise above it. Another lesson learned. He never met hate with hate or derision with derision. He met it with love.
He knew that was the only way he could move us from the shadows and out of the margins, into the mainstream. And it was also the only way that he could show white Jews we were nothing to fear or exclude.
At times, his message wasn’t popular with Black Jews who wanted nothing to do with white Jews or with white Jews who weren’t ready to accept the fact that G-d made Black Jews too.
None of that changed the fact that it was the right one.
Chief Rabbi Funnye wasn’t a Black Jew. He was a good Jew. And that is the lesson that I, and hopefully all who knew him, will learn from his life.
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All Jewish eyes are on Michigan as heated El-Sayed-Rogers Senate campaign draws to a close
(JTA) — DETROIT – The U.S. Senate race in Michigan, a deeply contentious contest that has strained Jewish relationships with the Democratic Party, drew to a bitter close Tuesday as voters headed to the polls in a race that could shape which party controls the chamber.
At its center is Abdul El-Sayed, the former county health director and Democratic nominee whose anti-corporate, Medicare For All candidacy has become a rallying cry for the national progressive movement.
His uncompromising stances on Israel have also made him a target among pro-Israel groups, including AIPAC, which has spent heavily against him in both the primary and general election. AIPAC’s rare entry into a general election race came to support El-Sayed’s opponent, Republican former congressman Mike Rogers.
One of El-Sayed’s positions on Israel — to end all U.S. military aid — was once thought a far-left pipe dream. But that has changed. On Election Day morning, Trump announced that, under his watch, nearly $4 billion in annual U.S. military aid to Israel would wind down by the end of the year. Trump said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in agreement with the need to end aid and deny Democratic critics a point of attack.
In his announcement of the plan, Trump cited El-Sayed.
“Why should we suffer the slings like lunatics like an El-Sayed when they don’t need it?” Trump said on Fox News, referring to Israel’s financial strength.
Representatives for the El-Sayed and Rogers campaigns, and for the Republican Jewish Coalition, did not immediately return requests for comment on Trump’s new pledge. It is unclear whether it will be straightforward for the White House to halt the funding by the end of 2026, given that the existing memorandum of understanding that governs it extends to 2028.
El-Sayed’s campaign has galvanized young voters and a range of other constituencies, and he pulled ahead in the polls in the race’s final stretch. But his questioning of Israel’s existence as a Jewish state and whether it or Iran posed a greater threat to the United States, as well as his prior associations with figures such as Hasan Piker, the streamer who has spread extreme rhetoric about American Jews, have sparked concern among Jewish Michiganders.
So, too, did comments the candidate made following the March terror attack on Temple Israel, a major synagogue in the state, in which El-Sayed appeared to link the attack to Israel’s war in Lebanon after reports that the attacker lost family in an Israeli strike. Hostile behavior from some of El-Sayed’s supporters toward pro-Israel Democrats, most prominently on display at the state party’s spring convention, have also alarmed Jews. El-Sayed has pledged to stand up to antisemitism.
Some Jews who had long considered themselves Democrats, including several local Jewish leaders, have cited such controversies in pledging to vote for Rogers. In some Michigan Jewish neighborhoods, yard signs proclaim that a vote for Rogers is a vote “against antisemitism.”
Accordingly, Rogers has made a play for the Jewish vote. He told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in October that his opponent is “anti-Jew,” while running ads that played up El-Sayed’s tenuous family associations with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Top Republicans have seized on the narrative, with President Donald Trump calling Jews “crazy” if they back El-Sayed, and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz calling him a national security threat. A Trump administration event to address antisemitism was held at a Michigan synagogue weeks before the election, though El-Sayed’s name was not mentioned there.
Jewish Democrats who had broken with El-Sayed found major validation in the race’s dramatic closing days. Democrat Haley Stevens, a strongly pro-Israel congresswoman who had narrowly lost to El-Sayed in the primary, flipped sides to endorse Rogers days after her Jewish fiancé, a Democratic megadonor, did the same.
The surprise move, which Jewish Democratic leaders joined many other prominent Democrats in criticizing, came after days of back-and-forth between Stevens and El-Sayed as she sought to publicly pressure him to condemn a PAC ad that had linked rising grocery prices to U.S. aid to Israel.
Meanwhile, some prominent Jewish Democrats in the state either avoided endorsing El-Sayed or did so with heavy reservations. Michigan’s Jewish Democratic Caucus, whose leadership has been deeply divided on El-Sayed, issued a statement Monday declaring the caucus would never vote for a Republican.
“Our commitment to the Democratic ticket remains resolute as we work to build a more inclusive coalition,” the caucus stated.
Throughout the campaign, El-Sayed has sought to reassure Jewish voters. He apologized for his Temple Israel comments; distanced himself from Piker; hired a Jewish outreach director; said in a recent “60 Minutes” interview that Israel has a right to exist; and sent mailers to Jewish households stating, “I am committed to protecting all Michigan Jews against hatred and injustice.” He told JTA in August that “the prerequisite of Jewish safety is never in question to me.”
More than 1,000 Michigan Jews have signed an open letter pledging to vote for El-Sayed, compared to 560 who have done the same for Rogers. Progressive Jewish figures of note have held salons throughout the state in a bid to convince on-the-fence Jews to back him.
Yet El-Sayed also has continued to stake out positions many Jews find alienating. He asserted in the campaign’s closing weeks that Israel was “not actually our friend” and declined during a debate to say whether Israel or Iran was the bigger danger to the U.S. His campaign also released an ad, designed to appeal to conservatives, that featured a brief clip of Tucker Carlson, the right-wing pundit who has promoted conspiracy theories about Israel. In addition, El-Sayed’s careful sidestepping of objectionable material about Jews and Israel from his ostensible allies, such as Piker and his uncle, left-wing anti-Israel pundit Cenk Uygur, has continued up to Election Day.
Ahead of Election Day, some liberal-leaning Zionist Jews tried to put pressure on El-Sayed to speak more directly to their concerns. A group of rabbis and other Jewish leaders launched Nonnegotiable Michigan in a bid to have him affirm what they called five core principles of Jewish participation in the Democratic Party, including “Jewish sovereignty in Israel.” After silence from the campaign, some of Nonnegotiable’s figureheads urged their followers to write in the 19th-century Jewish poet “Emma Lazarus” instead of voting for either candidate.
Michigan’s already small Jewish population, which numbers around 105,000 adults, has further splintered over El-Sayed’s candidacy. But it could prove pivotal to the outcome of a race that may determine control of the chamber. In 2024, the state’s Senate race was decided by fewer than 20,000 votes.
Either way, the race has crystallized the Democratic Party’s shifting fault lines over Israel — and many Jews’ growing uneasiness with their place in the liberal coalition.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Trump says US aid to Israel will stop at end of year
(JTA) — President Donald Trump on Tuesday morning said that the United States would halt billions of dollars in annual aid to Israel by the end of 2026, potentially ending decades of military support for one of America’s closest allies in the Middle East.
“We were giving them $4 billion. We are. But it gets cut off at the end of the year,” Trump declared during a call-in appearance on the “Fox & Friends” morning program on Fox News. Israel’s 10-year memorandum of understanding with the United States, which currently gives Israel $3.8 billion annually, runs through 2028 so it’s unclear how easy it would be for the White House to stop the funding this year.
Referencing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statement in January that he wanted to taper off aid to zero at some point in the future, Trump questioned why Republicans should have to deal with criticism from hardline pro-Palestinian Democrats like Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed when “we give them more than anybody else and they no longer need it.”
“It’s a bad talking point,” he added. His comments came as Americans across the country are voting Tuesday in midterm elections that will determine control of the U.S. House and Senate.
“We reached an agreement on that” and Netanyahu “brought it up,” Trump continued. “He said: ‘I think it would be appropriate if we do not receive aid,’ because he understands that this is one of their points of contention.”
A growing number of Democratic congressional candidates across the United States have campaigned on a platform of reducing or halting military aid to Israel during the run-up to today’s midterm elections. This April, dozens of senators — almost all of them Democrats — voted in favor of a failed motion to block the sales of certain weapons to Israel.
Yair Golan, chairman of Israel’s liberal Democrats party, slammed Netanyahu in the wake of Trump’s statement, tweeting that “precisely at a time when Israel’s defense spending has reached enormous proportions, when Israel needs to replenish its offensive weapons stockpiles, and after air defense capabilities have been depleted following such a long war—Netanyahu logs another massive failure under his name.”
“The cessation of U.S. aid is heavy damage to Israel’s security” and “a responsible prime minister would have fought to increase American aid, not eliminate it,” added Golan, whose party opposes Netanyahu’s and is trying to form a coalition to oust Netanyahu from power following Israel’s own elections last Tuesday.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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