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‘Spinning Gold’ movie departs from Hollywood stereotypes about Jewish music producers
(JTA) — In the hit show “The Sopranos,” veteran actor Jerry Adler plays mob-adjacent Jewish businessman Hesh Rabkin, who made a fortune in the music business decades earlier. In a first season episode, Hesh is confronted by a rapper seeking “reparations” for a late Black musician who he says Rabkin didn’t pay fairly for a hit record.
When Hesh responds by bragging that he wrote the hit songs he worked on back in the day, Tony Soprano corrects him: “A couple of Black kids wrote that record, you gave yourself co-writing credit because you owned the label.”
The greedy Jewish music mogul has been a common trope, from the acclaimed work of Spike Lee to the rants of Kanye West. “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story,” a 2003 parody of music biopics, made fun of the trope itself by making the record executives into Hasidic Jews, led by Harold Ramis. (They were depicted as friendly and not so greedy, and the film’s writers, Judd Apatow and director Jake Kasdan, are both Jewish.)
The new movie “Spinning Gold,” which opened in theaters last week, tells the real-life story of Neil Bogart, the founder of Casablanca Records and a top music executive of the 1970s. It breaks from the mold of most other music biopics in a couple of key ways: The protagonist is a music executive, not an artist or a group, and the music mogul character — in this case, another Jewish one — is not treated as a villain.
The Jewish Brooklyn native whose given name was Neil Scott Bogatz helped promote bubblegum pop and early disco, signing artists such as Donna Summer, Gladys Knight, Cher and the Village People. A notable rock signing was Kiss. In one scene of “Spinning Gold,” the Bogart character (played by Jewish actor Jeremy Jordan, who starred in the Broadway hit “Rock of Ages”) implies to Kiss’ Gene Simmons that he signed the band, in part, because Simmons’ and guitarist Paul Stanley’s real names are Chaim Witz and Stanley Eisen. He relates to them, the film argues, as fellow Jewish guys who hailed from the outer boroughs of New York City. Bogart died of cancer in 1982.
The movie covers a long span in Bogart’s life and career, and it shows him struggling for many years before striking gold by shepherding Donna Summer’s single “Love to Love You Baby” to hit status. Timothy Scott Bogart, the mogul’s son and the film’s director, did not want to depict Bogart as an unambiguous hero. In the story, the elder Bogart is shown cheating on his first wife with the woman who would become his second, and the film also makes clear that his record label was heavily in debt for many years. It does sometimes show him at odds with the talent, such as when the members of Kiss complain to him that their career hasn’t taken under Bogart’s tutelage.
“I don’t know that I looked at it as protagonist or antagonist, I think he was a bit of both,” Timothy Scott Bogart told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“But I do think the character of the executive, in general, has been a much-maligned character… certainly in the music biopic world,” he added. “And that’s not who Neil Bogart was.”
He added that the personal relationships between his father and the label’s artists were always valued. He remembers his family going on vacation with Donna Summer, and Gladys Knight and members of Kiss being at his home.
The younger Bogart, who previously produced the 2019 Vietnam War drama “The Last Full Measure,” said that rather than relying on any book or article, he constructed the film based on interviews he did with his artists, executives and others involved in the story over several years.
Jews have been part of the business side of the American music industry for most of its existence, in part because of the way they were shut out of many professions in the first half of the 20th century. Music executive Seymour Stein, who passed away this week after a long career of working with the likes of Madonna and The Ramones, said in a 2013 interview that “music is something Jews were good at and they could do. All immigrants into America tried their hand at show-business.”
Some executives in the early days of the music industry — Jewish and non-Jewish — did exploit their artists, doing everything from underpaying Black artists to denying them songwriting credits or royalties. Moguls of the past with reputations for doing so included Herman Lubinsky of Savoy Records. Others, like the recently deceased Stein and Milt Gabler of Commodore Records, had better reputations. Historians have differing opinions on specific individuals.
Neil Bogart is shown with The Isley Brothers in June 1969. (Don Paulsen/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
“There is a scholarly controversy between those who look at the moguls and say that they exploited the [Black] musicians and those who say that they encouraged and made possible Black success in music,” said Jonathan Sarna, the professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University. “Both use the same data, but some point to the money Jews made and others point to the musicians that Jews discovered and promoted.”
Spike Lee drew fire for his depiction of fictional Jewish music executives Moe and Josh Flatbush (played by John and Nicholas Turturro) in his 1990 movie “Mo’ Better Blues.”
“In the history of American music, there have not been Jewish people exploiting black musicians?” Spike Lee said in his defense to New York Magazine in 2006. “In the history of music? How is that being stereotypical?”
Other “bad guy” examples include Paul Giamatti’s Jerry Heller in 2015’s “Straight Outta Compton” and David Krumholtz’s Milt Shaw in 2004’s “Ray.” “Cadillac Records,” from 2008, starred Adrien Brody as Leonard Chess, the Jewish founder of the legendary Chess Records who, the film implied, gave his mostly Black artists Cadillacs, but not always the money they were owed. “Get On Up,” the 2014 biopic of James Brown that starred the late Chadwick Boseman, cast Fred Melamed as famed Cincinnati mogul Syd Nathan (a mentor to Seymour Stein); journalist RJ Smith criticized the film for depicting Nathan as a “bumptious racist.”
Actor Seth Rogen discussed the trope in his 2021 memoir “Yearbook.” He tells the story of running into comedian Eddie Griffin, who at a late point in his career had been struggling to get movie roles. Griffin told Rogen to “tell your Jews to let other people make some movies!”
Rogen called this “insane because he’s really ignoring the fact that if there’s one thing that Jewish people are NOT above, it’s making money producing things that are fronted by Black people. Anyone who’s ever seen a biopic of any Black musician knows the character I’m talking about, and he’s usually very appropriately played by my dear friend David Krumholtz.” (Krumholtz played one of the Hasidic producers in “Walk Hard.”)
“It’s certainly true that, in the post-war U.S. music industry, Jews were more likely to be producers and impresarios than performers. And, given the importance of African-Americans in the post-war U.S. music industry, that inevitably created a particular kind of relationship with certain Jews in the music industry,” sociologist and music critic Keith Kahn-Harris told JTA.
“That relationship starts to be put under scrutiny and under strain from the late 1960s, as the civil rights coalition started to fall apart and people of color began to assert their agency,” he added. “It’s also true that the post-war music industry was an unregulated space with an almost-normative pattern of exploitation of performers. Put all that together and you have all the ingredients for significant African-American-Jewish tension. Plus, the rapacious Jewish impresario sits easily with ingrained antisemitic stereotypes.”
“Spinning Gold” isn’t the only counterexample to the trend in film. In last year’s Whitney Houston biopic “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” the Jewish label honcho character, Clive Davis (played by Stanley Tucci), is treated as a benevolent guiding light. In that case, Davis was among the producers of the movie.
“Jewish promoters, like all music promoters, were and are first and foremost business people selling a product. Their goal: promote a performer to reap income. The performers have obviously a different stake in the transaction, although both depend on the other,” said Hasia Diner, an American Jewish history professor at New York University.
“If the hero of the film is the performer then her/his perspective is the focus and almost by definition the promoter’s perspective has to reflect the antagonist encounter. Does that merit being called antisemitism? Not in my estimation. By doing so it undermines real antisemitism. It also ignores the inherent business transaction involved,” Diner said.
How can filmmakers navigate this?
“With great care,” Kahn-Harris said. “It does mean paying attention to how such a portrayal can be accurate and not feeding on deeper antisemitic stereotypes. There’s no one way of doing this. It requires care and attention to the historical record.”
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Israel is dominating Democratic politics. How did we get here?
For decades, American politicians considering a presidential run have traveled to Iowa cornfields and New Hampshire town halls to introduce themselves to voters before launching their campaigns.
Last week, two potential 2028 presidential contenders chose a different route.
Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor and Barack Obama’s White House chief of staff, traveled to Tel Aviv, where he delivered a speech defending the U.S.-Israel relationship but also cautioning about the growing erosion of Democratic support for the Jewish state in the wake of the Gaza war and amid settler violence.
A tiny fraction of the target audience was in the room. The majority was back home in the U.S., considering who in their party could possibly win as their party’s White House nominee — and more immediately how to use their votes this year to regain power.
Meanwhile, Rep. Ro Khanna, a leading progressive Democrat from California, took a high-profile trip to the occupied West Bank, where he was caught in an altercation with armed Israeli settlers who blocked his route to an elementary school that extremist settlers had destroyed. Khanna said he plans to share what he witnessed firsthand about the Palestinians’ “injustice” on the campaign trail if he runs.
The contrasting trips reflected a trend already reshaping Democratic politics. Graham Platner, the Maine Senate nominee who was forced to withdraw from the race following allegations of sexual assault, made opposition to Israel and AIPAC one of the defining themes of his campaign. His defiant parting message — in which he denied the allegations — included a vow to keep working to “end the genocide.”
On Tuesday, House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, hoping to become speaker after the midterm elections, added his voice to the mix. In guidance issued to his members ahead of a vote to cut off aid to Israel — introduced by Republican Rep. Thomas Massie from Kentucky and co-sponsored by Khanna — Jeffries said that while he’ll oppose the measure, “given the strongly held views throughout the Caucus in this important area of foreign policy, we are not whipping this vote” against it. He added that going forward, “a meaningful change in direction is needed.”
The episodes in the past week highlight how quickly and powerfully the U.S. relationship to Israel — which has been receiving $3.8 billion annually under a 10-year memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Israel, which runs through 2028, plus additional billions in arms sales — has come to dominate Democratic Party politics.
A stew of different factors are in the mix — ranging from President Donald Trump’s fateful decision to wage war on Iran alongside Israel, the success of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America in showing how to mobilize voters on the issue, and voter backlash against massive spending on elections by U.S. supporters of military aid to Israel, all against the backdrop of the Gaza war and Israel’s continued military action in the region.
Sudden shifts
Israel’s role in Democratic politics this year signals a major shift — especially after a wave of insurgents who made condemning Israel central to their campaigns beat mainstream Democrats in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Colorado primaries.
The Democratic revolt is not entirely new. In the 2024 presidential race, the conflict in Gaza spurred some voters to stay home rather than cast ballots after the “uncommitted” movement blamed President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for civilian deaths — missing voters who may have swayed the results in Michigan, a swing state with a large Arab-American population. Activists said Democratic National Committee officials acknowledged that the Biden administration’s support for Israel contributed to Harris’ loss to Donald Trump.
But the protest movement has since swelled to include a bigger constituency — one not content to sit out elections or confined to moments of war. For many progressive candidates, challenging the U.S.-Israel alliance and advocating for Palestinian rights have become a marker of ideological identity and the party’s future.
Bill de Blasio, who himself evolved from a staunch supporter of Israel and an ally of AIPAC after he left office as New York City mayor and mounted an unsuccessful campaign for Congress, said in an interview that the shift reflects a deeper emotional connection to the conflict that is driving the engagement and organizing. Disaffected voters feel personally implicated by U.S. support for Israel, de Blasio said: “It’s a sense that this was done with our weapons and our money.”
In some districts with entrenched incumbents, such lines of attack by challengers went nowhere in Democratic primaries. But in some districts where the grassroots Democratic Socialists of America endorsed candidates and mobilized voters, they have scored significant upsets.
The result is a growing wave of democratic socialists and progressives winning Democratic primaries, portraying support for Israel as incompatible with progressive values.
Matt Duss, a former senior foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, said Gaza became a breaking point for many Democratic voters because of its human toll, but added that the political shift runs deeper. “It has come to stand for an issue of the establishment versus the insurgent populist left,” Duss said. Gaza, he added, “created this breaking point” where the “floodgates opened” to challenging the pro-Israel consensus that has dominated American politics for so long.
The Mamdani model
Zohran Mamdani’s left-field victory last year as New York City mayor showed candidates nationally that running against Israel could energize voters even in a local election. Mamdani, a young democratic socialist, rose to power by embracing pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel activism in a mayoral campaign otherwise focused on economic justice and progressive reform. Mamdani defeated establishment candidates despite refusing to scale back on his support for boycotts and declining to condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada” even as many Jewish voters heard it as a call to violence. Public opinion polls showed that Mamdani’s unapologetic criticism of Israel resonated with a majority of New York City voters.
The wins of three candidates endorsed by Mamdani in congressional primaries last month reinforced running against Israel as a winning strategy in progressive-leaning districts. Brad Lander, the former city comptroller allied with Mamdani, defeated two-term incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman by labeling Goldman as insufficiently activist on Israel, even as both — identifying themselves as liberal Zionists — touted similar views on addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Lander was the first Jewish candidate to call for an end to U.S. aid to Israel.
In Upper Manhattan and the Bronx, Rep. Adriano Espaillat, chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, lost to Darializa Avila Chevalier, a former organizer of the pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia. Avila Chevalier drew backlash for inflammatory comments about Israel and for attending a Times Square rally on Oct. 8, 2023, widely condemned for celebrating Hamas — but won anyway.
And in Brooklyn, Assemblymember Claire Valdez beat the establishment favorite for an open House seat. Her supporters condemned her opponent, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, for refusing during much of the campaign to call the Gaza war a genocide and for taking a 2015 trip to Israel.
The AIPAC factor
The trend is not limited to New York. Across the country, Israel has become a defining issue, even in races with relatively small Jewish electorates or where foreign policy would once have played little role. In Colorado, Melat Kiros, a democratic socialist, unseated a 15-term incumbent using Israel as a wedge throughout the campaign.
In California, State Sen. Scott Wiener, a candidate for Congress who is one of the leading Jewish Democrats statewide, has found himself navigating intense pressure and confrontations from progressive activists even after he capitulated to demands that he characterize Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as a genocide.
According to data compiled by Milan Singh, a fellow at The Argument, a liberal opinion-focused media publication, insurgent progressive candidates for Congress mentioned Israel in 48% of their fundraising emails.
Opposition to AIPAC and criticism of the Israeli government have increasingly become shorthand for challenging “entrenched power, big money politics and the party establishment,” said Democratic strategist Lis Smith.
Nowhere is the changed climate being tested more vigorously than in Michigan’s open Senate race. The Aug. 4 primary between Rep. Haley Stevens and former Wayne County health director Abdul El-Sayed has become one of the most expensive races in the country this year.
Like other candidates who have run campaigns with Israel front and center, El-Sayed has focused heavily on condemning AIPAC, the campaign group backing congressional candidates who support U.S. military aid to Israel.
AIPAC has returned the favor with massive spending to attempt to defeat El-Sayed. Its super PAC, the United Democracy Project, has already spent $14.9 million backing Stevens. AIPAC also raised several million dollars for Stevens by directing its donors to online portals that funnel money directly to the candidate’s campaign.
Until this year, AIPAC was obscure to most voters. But its massive spending to support favored House and Senate candidates has been matched by progressive opponents using it to rally voters to shun those candidates.
In primaries this year, AIPAC and -aligned groups are pushing back against candidates who made Palestinian rights and support for restricting offensive arms sales to Israel a theme of their campaigns. AIPAC is also spending heavily to defend a seat in St. Louis, Missouri, that it helped win in 2024.
Duss said the politics surrounding Israel increasingly functions as a broader test of credibility for candidates seeking to dislodge Democratic Party leaders seen as holding back progress — not just on Israel, but also on such goals as Medicare for All. “It’s become an issue that you could speak out on if you want to demonstrate your anti-establishment bona fides,” he said.
In Michigan, voter scrutiny has broadened beyond just Israel to the question of why powerful interests are aligned with Stevens.
The changing politics is beginning to impact how incumbents are voting in Washington. In April, 40 Senate Democrats voted to block $295 million for the transfer of bulldozers — used by the Israeli military to demolish homes in the West Bank and Gaza — and 36 of them also supported a measure to block the sale of 1,000-pound bombs to the Jewish state. Those counts shattered a previous high of 27 Democrats who backed a similar pair of resolutions last year.
The governing challenge
The electoral victories may only be the beginning. The real test will come should the Democrats regain control of the House in November.
Matt Bennett, executive vice president at the centrist Democratic group Third Way, said that Israel “has exploded as a divisive issue in democratic politics” at a moment when Democrats have no power, as the minority in both the House and Senate, to shape the foreign policy of the United States. “It’s remarkable how anger is being directed at people who have no agency over these questions.”
If they win back the House, he said, those divisions will become much harder to avoid.
Whether driven by outrage over Gaza, frustration with the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or broader resentment of political institutions, Israel has become a defining issue — something few Democratic strategists expected even a few years ago.
Smith, who advises political organizations Majority Democrats and the Bench, called the events of the 2026 primary seasoin a “turning point” in the Democratic Party’s stance toward Israel. “I think that relationship is going to be strained for the foreseeable future,” she said.
The combination of Netanyahu’s actions in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank, and Trump’s actions in the war on Iran, are going to have a “lasting impact on our politics,” said de Blasio. “I don’t think that it can be put back in the bottle.”
Israel’s election crossroads
Throughout the debate over Israel, mainstream Democrats have tried to direct their criticism at Netanyahu and his far-right partners. Even Bernie Sanders, the elder in the progressive caucus, framed the charge for ending U.S. military aid as opposition to the “extremist Netanyahu government.”
Israelis will get a chance to change leadership in the upcoming Oct. 27 Knesset election. Recent polls show that Netanyahu, seeking a seventh term in office, is trailing an opposition bloc led by two contenders for premier — former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot.
If Netanyahu loses, some centrist Democrats believe a different Israeli government will help ease tensions.
“The intense emotion surrounding the issue could lessen somewhat,” said Matt Bennett of Third Way. Though the next Israeli leader will not dramatically break with Netanyahu’s policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or Gaza, “not having Netanyahu there would matter a lot because he has become he has inserted himself into partisan politics in the United States to such a degree that he has become the face of these campaigns,” he added.
Progressives are less convinced. They see the shift and generational reassessment of the U.S.-Israel relationship as a larger challenge. “If you had a different figure, one who is not so odious, that would give an opportunity to change the relationship,” Duss said. “But I don’t think it’s going back because the differences here are not just about one person; they are systemic.”
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UK lawmakers press government on why West Bank imports haven’t yet been banned
(JTA) — British lawmakers from across the political spectrum are pressing the government to ban imports from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, saying that explanations for why such a ban has not yet been imposed were inadequate.
During a three-hour House of Commons debate on Thursday, lawmakers argued that Britain’s long-standing position that the settlements are illegal under international law means it should fall in line behind other countries advancing bans, particularly at a time of rising settler violence and efforts to expand Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
The debate — the latest in a number of formal discussions about a potential ban in Parliament — was led by Abtisam Mohamed, a politician from the governing Labour Party who is the first Arab woman and first Yemeni member of Parliament. She was denied entry into Israel in 2025, a year after being elected.
“I want to pose a simple question to the government today, a question that sits at the heart of this debate,” Mohamed said in opening the session. “If settlements are illegal, why have we not made an outright ban on trade? What exactly is it that we’re waiting for?”
Lawmakers from other parties piled on.
“There is no excuse that we have to wait for other countries to move because they’ve moved ahead of us,” said Ellie Chowns from the left-wing Green Party, which has made opposition to Israel part of its platform. “There is no excuse that this is too technically difficult because the legal framework already exists.”
And a member of the Conservative party, which has traditionally favored strong ties with Israel, said he was unconvinced by the argument, made recently by a government official, that other measures that are potentially less complicated to administer could achieve the same pressure on Israel.
“We’ve done everything except the obvious, which is just the ban,” said the lawmaker, Kit Malthouse. “The question I’m left asking is, why? Why the reluctance? Why the hesitation? Nobody’s buying the complexity argument.”
On Monday, EU foreign ministers met to discuss a ban on products from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, in order to gauge if there is enough support for the move. The EU’s foreign minister said a ban on imports was the most popular option under discussion and said she expected that the conversation would soon advance.
The discussion in the House of Commons comes as the British Labour government is in flux, with a new prime minister set to take over from Keir Starmer next week. It also comes as the government is taking steps to reassure a Jewish community that has been rattled by a number of violent incidents. This week, the government both allocated more than $300 million in security funding for Jewish institutions while also formally declaring Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, seen as tied to many of the attacks, to be a terrorist group, in a move that enables more intense prosecution.
In an appearance before the Foreign Affairs Committee earlier in July, the government’s top Middle East minister fended off allegations that the Labour government was slow-walking pressure on Israel. Hamish Falconer also noted that British Jewish leaders are urging against an import ban.
“There are legitimate and reasonable concerns from the British Jewish community that if we were to take steps which were crude, which were untargeted, could have unintended consequences on the lives of the community who are already under considerable pressure,” he said. “I do take that seriously for obvious reasons.”
The Board of Jewish Deputies, an umbrella organization for almost 200 Jewish groups in Britain, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that it was reluctant to comment on a potential ban on West Bank imports before a new prime minister is installed. But the group has previously weighed in strongly against efforts to boycott Israel, arguing in a 2017 report that “to hasten a solution to the settlements would be to assist the chances of negotiations through promoting peace, rather than the problematic boycott campaign.”
Falconer also signaled that all bets could be off if the Israeli government moves forward with a settlement project known as E1, telling the Foreign Affairs Committee, “I have said repeatedly that no one should benefit from a profit made on land that has been unlawfully procured.”
The E1 initiative would expand Jewish settlements on a stretch of land east of Jerusalem, bisecting the West Bank, and is seen by both its proponents and critics as a bid to undercut a potential future Palestinian state. The current right-wing Israeli government has moved the E1 project significantly toward actualization, approving it formally.
If the project proceeds further, Falconer told lawmakers, “then we and our friends and allies would take tangible action in response.”
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Cori Bush to fellow progressives: My reelection would be ‘the knockout’ punch to AIPAC
(JTA) — Cori Bush told fellow progressives during a virtual rally on Monday night that she intends to deliver a “knockout” punch to AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, by winning her congressional primary next month.
When Bush, the two-term progressive Democratic congresswoman, was defeated in a bruising primary two years ago, both she and her adversaries attributed the loss in part to AIPAC.
The group’s PAC spent more than $4 million to defeat Bush, who was one of two members of Congress to vote against a measure to deny entry to the United States to Hamas terrorists who perpetrated Oct. 7, and declined to call Hamas a terror group on the campaign trail.
Now, as AIPAC has rapidly transformed into a radioactive bogeyman among Democrats and Bush’s fellow progressives have mounted an ascent across the party, Bush is out for revenge.
“Jamaal Bowman says it best: He said that Chris Rabb gave a jab to AIPAC. He says that Darializa and Claire … they gave uppercuts to AIPAC,” Bush said. “But then when I win, that will be the knockout.”
Bush is currently running against Missouri incumbent Rep. Wesley Bell in a field with three other candidates. In 2024, Bell defeated Bush 51.1% to 45.6% in a field of four candidates. A February poll sponsored by Bush’s campaign had Bell and Bush tied, with Bush receiving 44% of the votes, while Bell had 40%. (The survey had a margin of error of 5.4%.)
Bush was referring to a list of prominent progressives, including one, Bowman, who like her was primaried out of Congress in 2024, and three who won primaries decisively in Pennsylvania and New York this year. She was speaking at an online rally organized by Our Revolution, the group formed by Sen. Bernie Sanders to advance the progressive movement.
The rally came as the movement tries to move past a setback in Maine, where Graham Platner, a progressive and staunch critic of Israel, withdrew after winning the Democratic Senate primary amid allegations of sexual assault. One of the candidates vying to replace Platner on the ticket, Troy Jackson, joined other leading progressives including Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and California congressman Ro Khanna in taking the virtual stage.
Jackson did not mention Israel or AIPAC in his comments, even after announcing in recent days that he believes Israel committed genocide in Gaza. Instead, he listed an array of other issues animating left-wing voters.
“I know that there’s real pain, anger, and disappointment, and I’m not going to try and minimize that. But look, this movement has always been bigger than one person,” he said, alluding to Platner’s exit. “It’s about taking on a system rigged against working people, fighting for Medicare for all, strong unions, higher wages, reproductive freedom, and an economy where billionaires and corporations finally pay their fair share.”
Other candidates took aim more squarely at Israel and its supporters. El-Sayed, who in recent days has taken to calling Israel a “rogue state,” noted that AIPAC and its allies have spent more than $40 million to defeat him. (AIPAC has spent nearly $15 million on the race to date.)
“Donald Trump is not himself the disease in our politics; he’s the worst symptom of the disease of our politics,” El-Sayed said. “The disease is the system that allows big corporations, billionaires, special interest groups like AIPAC, to buy and sell politicians in ways that leave them rigging the system against us.”
El-Sayed also took aim at foreign military aid in his remarks, telling those gathered, “It shouldn’t be this hard to pay your taxes and know that that money is going to be spent on you and your kids rather than to annihilate somebody else and their kids.”
Minnesota congressional candidate Kaela Berg similarly cast her refusal to accept AIPAC money as part of a broader rejection of corporate influence in politics.
“We are the revolution, we are bringing that working class voice, that lived experience, two and a half decades of fighting the bosses, being people in Congress who cannot be bought, being the antidote to corporate Democrats and to Republicans,” Berg said. “I do not take AIPAC money. I do not take corporate money.”
Khanna, fresh off a trip to the Middle East during which he claimed that Israeli soldiers took the side of armed settlers who detained him in the West Bank, used his remarks during the town hall to shift attention from his detention to the treatment of Palestinians.
“Yes, people know I was detained, but if there’s one obligation, I feel I want to tell in every part of this country the story of apartheid in the West Bank,” Khanna said. “The story of these Palestinians who are being treated in an inhumane, undignified way, and if we can tell that story, I believe we will finally get change.”
Khanna, who has emerged as one of Israel’s fiercest critics in Congress since Oct. 7, also told attendees that the progressive wins across the country reflected growing support for the movement’s policy positions, including its opposition to Israel.
“We are winning, and we’re winning not because of candidates,” Khanna said. “We’re winning because we stand for Medicare for all. We stand against the genocide. We stand against foreign wars.”
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