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The Army’s only airborne rabbi finds his congregation wherever he lands
FORT BRAGG, N.C. — At dawn on Friday, two soldiers showed up for physical training. Their rabbi was already waiting.
Black T-shirts. Gold ARMY across the chest. Nothing to set them apart. They blended into the formation — hundreds of soldiers under the pine trees as reveille cut through the morning. The flag rose. They saluted, stretched, climbed ropes, ran into the dark.
For 30 minutes, they were indistinguishable. Then everything shifted.
The three men walked into a meeting room inside a battalion headquarters, their shirts still damp with sweat. One soldier held out his left arm. The other draped a camouflage tallit over his shoulders. Rabbi Scott Klein reached into his backpack, removed a pair of black leather tefillin, and began wrapping them around a soldier’s arm — seven times, the way it’s always done, the leather biting just enough to remind you it’s there.
At 36, Klein serves one of the most unusual pulpits in American Judaism. He is one of 140 chaplains at Fort Bragg, the world’s largest military base. And he is the Army’s only Jewish chaplain assigned to an airborne unit — which means that jumping out of an airplane, for him, is not a metaphor for faith. It’s a job requirement.
One of the men praying beside him that morning was Jacob Abrams, 24, a specialist from Manhattan, Kansas. He found out about Jewish life on the base by accident, in the commissary, on a flyer for a challah-baking workshop stapled near the cereal aisle.
“Scott instantly made me feel included in the community,” Abrams said.
On Friday mornings, the two wrap tefillin together after physical training. On Friday nights, they welcome Shabbat together. But the relationship doesn’t end at the chapel door. Klein joins field exercises. He sleeps in tents. He paratroops into combat zones.
“There are days — many days — where you just don’t want to be there,” Abrams said. “Having your chaplain out there, who’s also embracing the suckiness with you, it makes it a lot easier to get through.”
It is an old idea, dressed in new camouflage: that you do not minister from a distance. You jump first.
A congregation with no walls
Later that morning, Klein climbed into his car and began driving across Fort Bragg.
The base stretches for miles, a city unto itself — schools, supermarkets, banks, gas stations, a Chipotle, three Starbucks, all of it sitting inside roughly 250 square miles, a map Klein has long since stopped needing to consult.
As he drove, he pointed things out the way someone points out a childhood neighborhood: the headquarters of the 82nd Airborne Division, the parade fields, the training grounds where soldiers prepare to leave for places he has already been.
He grew up nearly 900 miles from here, in Skokie, Illinois, where his world, for a while, stayed small. After college, he joined his father’s accounting firm, dedicating himself to fostering local economic development and helping small businesses scale. The work paid the bills, but what he loved most was driving community entrepreneurship from the ground up — the Jewish networking events he organized for young professionals, the restaurant back rooms he’d reserve, the texts he’d send to make sure people showed up, and the strangers he introduced who became business partners, then friends.
“I realized that when you connect people, you aren’t just building networks—you’re building the infrastructure of a community,” he said.
Then, in his late 20s, an Army recruiter asked if he had ever considered serving. Klein had always thought of himself as deeply patriotic. He served on Skokie’s Fourth of July parade committee, loved civic life and believed, as an American Jew, that serving his country was a responsibility.
“If I have the opportunity to serve my country,” he recalled thinking, “I can’t let the door slam shut.”
The United States is marking this week its 250th birthday, what Klein called a “monumental” moment in the life of the “American experiment.”
He spoke of Francis Salvador, the first Jewish soldier killed in the Revolutionary War; Haym Solomon, who helped finance the Continental Army; the Civil War, which produced the country’s first official Jewish military chaplain, Rabbi Jacob Frankel, commissioned by Abraham Lincoln in 1862; the half a million American Jews who served in the two world wars that followed.
“We aren’t passive observers of this 250-year history,” he said. “We are foundational stakeholders.”
Klein commissioned into the Army Reserve. What followed reshaped his life.
During deployments across the Middle East, he became what the military calls a lay leader, the person responsible for holding Jewish life together in places where no chaplain existed to do it. On Friday nights, that meant leading Shabbat services in Jordan, Iraq, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia.
During one deployment, he led a Passover Seder in Egypt for soldiers and diplomats, retelling the story of the Exodus on the banks of the river where it happened. He led High Holiday services at Guantanamo Bay. In Iraq, he lit a Hanukkah menorah inside one of Saddam Hussein’s former offices — a small, stubborn flame in a room built for someone who would have extinguished it.
Eventually, the distinction between lay leader and rabbi stopped making sense to him. Klein enrolled in rabbinical school while still in uniform, attending classes online from bases scattered across the Middle East — studying the Talmud in the region where rabbis first argued over its pages, sometimes logging in from bunkers, sometimes losing the connection mid-lesson, the line between ancient text and unreliable internet blurring into one continuous feed.
He was ordained in 2024. Soon afterward, he joined the ranks of more than 100 Jewish chaplains serving across the U.S. armed forces, which have roughly 10,000 active-duty Jewish military personnel. (Out of that total force, Klein is one of only about 10 to 15 Jewish chaplains serving on active duty in the U.S. Army). The Army sent Klein to Fort Bragg. There, he began building something more permanent.
‘Never plateau’
Klein pulls into the parking lot of one of the base’s supermarkets.
Inside, it looked like a large grocery store anywhere in America — wide aisles, fluorescent light, shoppers pushing carts past the produce and the canned goods. Klein headed straight for the bakery.
“See this?” he said, pointing to a stack of challah. “We didn’t have this before.”
When he arrived at Fort Bragg, it wasn’t something easy to find on base. Klein worked with the store manager to bring it in. Today, it helps sustain Shabbat for the more than 200 Jewish soldiers and their families who are stationed here.
He walked a few aisles over to the meat department and pulled open the door to a large refrigerated case with a “Kosher” sign taped to it: brisket, ribeye, ground beef, stew meat for cholent. Before Klein, the options were thin. Now the case stays stocked. When the meat comes in, he posts to a WhatsApp group and a Signal chat, and Jewish soldiers from one end of Fort Bragg to the other know to come get it before it’s gone. It is a community built less on sermons than on supply chains.
None of that, on its own, is unusual for a chaplain. But for Klein, it is not enough.
For the past two years, he has also served as the interim rabbi at Beth Israel, a century-old congregation in Fayetteville, about 15 minutes off base. The synagogue has around 100 members and an active Sunday school. A permanent rabbi has been hired and will move into the parsonage on its 10-acre property in August.
Klein also volunteers his time as a chaplain for the Fayetteville Police Department. He teaches “Torah on tap” classes at a local brewery. He recently finished a two-year fellowship for rabbis serving small-town Jewish communities, the kind of program built for people without a colleague down the hall to ask for advice.
He travels to rabbinical schools to recruit students who assume the only pulpit worth having is a sanctuary, showing them that there’s another version of the job — one that jumps out of airplanes, sleeps in tents, and answers a 3 a.m. phone call that no synagogue board ever will.
He is already a qualified paratrooper and recently earned his Air Assault wings — rigorous tactical credentials rarely held by military chaplains. Later this summer, he takes that same drive to a special operations unit.
“I set a goal for myself a long time ago to never plateau,” he said. “I’m in the right organization, because the Army has that culture: ‘Great, you’ve achieved this. What’s next?’ Even at 36, I feel like I’m just getting started.”
And it isn’t only about rank or certifications. “I want to continue learning in Judaism, in Torah,” he said. “But also just as a human. I have this itch to keep doing more.”
From phone calls to a first meeting
In the afternoon, Klein returned home.
On base, the houses are nearly identical — modest homes lined up along quiet streets, indistinguishable from one another unless you know which door to knock on. Inside, the living room was sparsely decorated, the furniture simple and functional. Klein shares the house with his wife, Eli, who teaches special education at a school on base, and Buddy, their 11-year-old goldendoodle, who curled up on a chair.
On the couch sat Paul Kenul, a 69-year-old retired U.S. diplomat who had flown in from Europe. Raised Catholic, he was now studying to become a Jew.
Klein balanced a laptop on his knees, scrolling through a passage from Pirkei Avot, a tractate devoted to ethics and moral teachings. Kenul leaned forward, listening closely, a pen in one hand and a notepad in the other.
Kenul grew up on Long Island, in a neighborhood that was almost entirely Jewish, except for him. He spent a career bouncing between Alaska and Heidelberg and Addis Ababa before landing, almost by accident, in Tel Aviv, working at the U.S. embassy. “I felt like I was home,” he said.
He lives in Poland now, with his wife, in a house with an Israeli flag flying in the garden.
For the past year, every Sunday, on the phone, the two men have worked their way through the Torah cycle. The first few months, Kenul said, he was “high” learning with Klein, mesmerized by a tradition he wished he’d found as a teenager.
For Kenul, the lessons had begun to feel like something more. “When I study with the rabbi,” he said, “I feel like I’m feasting.”
This week, for the first time, he flew in to meet Klein in person. “We hugged, and we just kept talking,” Kenul said matter-of-factly.
He talks now about the Torah’s cast of men who failed and were forgiven and failed again the way other people talk about relatives. “They feel like my ancestors,” he said. “They made so many mistakes. I can relate to that.”
Borrowed space, sacred time
The Watters Family Life Center for Counseling and Resiliency does not look like a synagogue, because it isn’t one. It’s a building the Army built for chaplains of every faith to share, and on Friday nights, for about an hour, it becomes one.
Past the kitchen, a walk-in storage room held boxes of Streit’s potato kugel, bottles of grape juice, a stack of siddurs, and “Shabbat in a box” kits donated by a Connecticut nonprofit — a Kiddush cup, a havdalah candle, a challah cover, and, inexplicably, a deck of playing cards. In the corner, leaning against the wall, rests a blue pop-up sukkah.
Klein passed out camouflage kippahs at the door.
About 15 people sat in folding chairs, more arriving until someone had to grab extra seats. Klein stood behind a small pulpit, a menorah on the stage behind him between an American flag and the Army Chaplain Corps flag. He’d traded his fatigues for a gray suit, no tie. The service moved through Hebrew and English, everyone following along in camouflage-covered siddurs.
It was the Shabbat before the Fourth of July, and the week’s Torah reading happened to be Klein’s own bar mitzvah portion — a text that describes the sudden death of Miriam. For Klein, the connection was heartbreakingly close; his own sister, Miriam, had passed away suddenly just a month prior.
He shared with the room how the Torah handles the loss with a striking, quiet brevity, offering no drawn-out account of public mourning. Instead, Jewish tradition teaches that a miraculous well of water traveled with the Israelites through the dry wilderness for as long as Miriam lived — and vanished the moment she died.
Klein’s sister moved through the world with that same quiet, life-giving impact, he said. “She didn’t need the spotlight; she just brought sustenance and life to everyone around her,” he reflected. “She never would have wanted a loud, public display of grief. She would want us to keep moving forward through the desert.”
Then he recited the Mourner’s Kaddish.
A chaplain’s job, as the Army defines it, comes in three parts: nurture the living, care for the wounded, honor the fallen.
The first happens every day — soldiers walking in with money trouble, a marriage coming apart, the slow pressures that build until someone needs to talk to a person who won’t repeat what’s said.
The third comes without warning. When a soldier dies, in training or in combat, the call goes to the chaplain. Klein has stood with families the moment they find out. He has escorted remains across state lines, sometimes across continents, making sure both military protocol and Jewish tradition are followed at every step. At Dover Air Force Base, where the country’s dead return home first, chaplains are often the ones waiting on the tarmac.
“Escorting a fallen service member home is the most sacred, heavy duty we have,” he said. “It is the ultimate expression of our promise never to leave a fallen comrade.”
After the prayer for peace and a prayer for the country’s soldiers, the room sang Shalom Aleichem and Klein poured Kiddush into plastic cups. There was babka, black and white cookies, and fresh challah baked by a soldier’s wife, still warm when it reached the table.
There was also cake: carrot cake left over from his shloshim service for Klein’s sister, and a cookie cake for the country’s 250th — grief and birthday cake sharing a tablecloth. It was the whole evening in miniature: whatever needed holding, the room found a way to hold it.
The post The Army’s only airborne rabbi finds his congregation wherever he lands appeared first on The Forward.
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Looking for a Yiddish-related event?
The Forverts website now includes a new feature. Each week, you’ll find a listing of upcoming events related to the Yiddish language or culture, both online and in person.
The list will include lectures in English or Yiddish; concerts; plays; day trips; conversation groups and reading circles.
If you know of a Yiddish-related event coming up, let us know by emailing schaechter@forward.com.
Sunday, Nov. 1, 2 p.m. ET. In this Zoom event, L.A. Yiddish culture activist Miri Koral will discuss a unique translation project of 160 works written by diverse masters of Yiddish poetry who perished in the Holocaust. Poet and Holocaust survivor Binem Heller compiled the anthology in 1951 to ensure that the works of these wonderful poets aren’t forgotten, and Koral is determined to get them all translated into English, opening them up to a much wider audience. The program will be in Yiddish. Register.
Sunday, Nov. 1, 2 p.m. ET. Some of the most passionate Yiddish love poetry and prose was written about Crotona Park in the Bronx, an area that fell off the beaten track in the last century. In this on-site tour in Yiddish, scholar Eve Jochnowitz will guide us as we explore the neighborhood and the literature it inspired. The event is free but a donation of $18 is suggested. The group will meet at the corner of Charlotte Street and Crotona Park East. Register.
Sunday, Nov. 1, 2 p.m. ET. Come shmooze in Yiddish with people all over the world at the shmueskrayz hosted by the Parizer yidish-tsenter. The atmosphere is friendly and relaxed. Feel free to sip coffee or a glass of wine. No registration necessary. Zoom link here
Thursday, Nov. 5, 7 p.m. ET. In this Zoom event, we’ll hear an English translation of detailed Yiddish letters written by Shlomo Vorobeichic, a Jewish man in Vilna before the war, to his siblings who had settled in the U.S. Although Shlomo, his wife and two children perished in the Holocaust, two children survived and kept the letters. One of them, Moi Ver, became a well-regarded photographer. In the 1990s, Moi Ver’s daughter Lilian Falk translated her grandfather’s letters into English, giving us a vivid view of Vilna in the early 20th century. Register.
Friday and Saturday, Nov. 6-7. Stockholm khevre: Attend a Yiddish film festival that includes contemporary Yiddish works like the 2026 film Moishe Badkhn (Moishe the Wedding Entertainer); Welcome to Yiddishland (2024), and the Yiddish-Ukrainian film SHTTL (2023). All films are subtitled in English. Tickets.
Sunday, Nov. 8, 3 p.m. ET. Folks in the DC/Maryland/Northern Virginia area: Join the DMV Jewish Labor Bund for a bimonthly Yiddish song circle at Maryland Meadworks. All levels of Yiddish and singing ability are welcome.
Tuesday, Nov. 10, 3 p.m. ET. Toronto folks: Yiddish studies scholar Sonia Gollance will discuss and read excerpts of Tea Arciszewska’s Yiddish play Miryeml, which Gollance translated as part of her project to uncover Yiddish plays by women. The play is often described as a powerful memorial to the 1.5 million children murdered in the Holocaust. The in-person lecture will take place at the University of Toronto and will be in Yiddish. More info.
Wednesday, Nov. 11, 7 p.m. ET. Attend an in-person staged reading of Sh. An-ski’s legendary folk drama, The Dybbuk, directed by Mikhl Yashinsky. The play, originally written in Russian between 1913 and 1916, was translated into Yiddish by An-ski himself and inspired countless film, opera, and ballet adaptations. Register.
Thursday, Nov. 19, 7 p.m. ET. Learn what makes Quebec an essential place on the world map of Yiddish culture historically and today in this Zoom talk between the Yiddish Book Center’s director of special projects, Sebastian Schulman, and Brian Calvert from Jewish Heritage Travel. The discussion will feature a sneak peek at the Center’s upcoming group tour to Montreal and Quebec City. The trip is a unique chance to experience Yiddish-Quebecois culture—its history, art, music, cuisine—as well as Montreal and Quebec City as historic and contemporary centers of Jewish life and creativity. Register.
The post Looking for a Yiddish-related event? appeared first on The Forward.
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These rivals in a close House race agree on Israel. They’re fighting over who Jewish voters can trust.
Israel and antisemitism have emerged as central issues in several closely watched midterm races. But in New York’s 17th Congressional District, where Jewish voters could help decide one of the country’s most competitive House contests, the two candidates have more in common on those issues than their campaigns suggest.
Cait Conley, the Democratic challenger to incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Lawler, is not a progressive Democrat who Republicans have been warning Jewish voters about in recent campaigns. An Army combat veteran and former national security official, she strongly supports Israel, opposes additional conditions on U.S. military aid and rejects accusations that Israel committed genocide in Gaza. She has also criticized New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani over his statement marking the third anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack and has vowed to confront antisemitism within her own party. But that may not be enough to win Jewish votes from Lawler, who is popular with Jewish voters.
The district includes Rockland and Putnam counties and parts of Westchester and Dutchess. It has one of the largest Jewish populations in the country, with Jews making up an estimated 19% of its population, according to a 2024 study. It is one of the key House races where Jewish voters could make the difference in a closely contested election that will determine which party controls Congress.
Kamala Harris carried the district by a narrow 50-49 margin in 2024, and it voted for Joe Biden by a 59-39 margin before that. The late Jewish congresswoman Nita Lowey, a Democrat, represented the district for three decades until her retirement in 2020. Her successor, former Rep. Mondaire Jones, chose not to run in the redrawn district in 2022 and instead lost a bid for a House seat representing parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn. During his unsuccessful 2024 campaign against Lawler, Jones had to delete a social media post that some deemed insulting to Orthodox Jews after he remarked that the former Republican House Speaker’s meeting with Rabbi David Twersky, the 86-year-old spiritual leader known as the Skverer Rebbe in Rockland County, “was a waste of everyone’s time.”
Conley, 31, faces a difficult challenge in her bid to unseat Lawler, who has deep relationships with Orthodox and Hasidic voters since he first won his seat in the 2022 midterms by a narrow margin of about 2,000 votes, thanks in part to strong support from the large Hasidic communities in Monsey, New Square and New Hempstead in Rockland County.
That makes the race a test of whether a moderate, pro-Israel Democrat can win back Jewish voters who have grown concerned about the growing influence of progressives within the Democratic Party.
In separate interviews with the Forward, Conley and Lawler both stressed their support for Israel and commitment to fighting rising antisemitism. To draw a contrast, Lawler, 40, questioned whether Conley would stick to her positions if elected, while Conley accused him of using his ties to Jewish voters to distract from his support for President Donald Trump’s agenda.
A Democrat who rejects conditions on Israel aid
Conley, a West Point graduate and 16-year Army combat veteran who later served as counterterrorism director on President Joe Biden’s National Security Council and oversaw election security efforts at the Department of Homeland Security, occupies a different position on Israel than many progressive Democrats.
She supports Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state, backs continued U.S. military assistance and opposes imposing conditions on that aid, including on offensive weapons.
“I do not believe that what is going on in Gaza is a genocide, and I do not believe in further conditioning assistance to Israel, so it continues to have the means to defend itself against the very real threats that are posed,” Conley said in an interview. “I will be an effective and strong advocate for the Jewish community and assistance to Israel in the Democratic Party.”
Conley said her experience serving in the Middle East shaped her understanding of the threats Israel faces, particularly from Iran and terrorist organizations.
At the same time, she supports a two-state solution and believes American politicians should be able to criticize Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or other Israeli leaders without questioning Israel’s legitimacy. She expressed concern, though, that criticism of Israeli government policies can sometimes become an excuse for targeting Jews. Conley also supports expanding federal security grants for synagogues and other religious institutions.
Conley said she supported the targeted American strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in 2025, but opposes Trump’s war with Iran because she believes it has made the United States less secure and increased energy prices.
Lawler isn’t buying Conley’s pro-Israel pitch
Lawler dismissed the suggestion that he and Conley hold essentially the same positions on Israel and antisemitism.
“That’s laughable on its face,” he said in an interview.
His central argument is that Conley may sound like a moderate on the campaign trail but would ultimately follow Democratic leaders in Congress, as support for Israel becomes increasingly divisive within the party.
“She’ll be a rubber stamp on whatever the majority of the Democrats want to do,” Lawler said, citing the July vote to eliminate the $3.3 billion in annual military assistance to Israel. A record 103 of 212 Democrats supported the measure. Another 10 Democrats abstained. Conley “is not going to stand up and be a lone voice on these issues,” he said.
“At the end of the day,” Lawler added, “I have a very clear record of delivering on these issues, and there’s staunch differences in approach.”
A Republican who speaks the community’s language
Lawler’s relationship with Orthodox and Hasidic voters goes beyond his positions on Israel. A practicing Catholic, Lawler has made those relationships part of his political brand, going back to his election to the State Assembly in 2020. He has taken credit for lowering the temperature in Rockland County after local GOP officials in 2019 posted a video widely criticized as antisemitic. He regularly attends community celebrations and has helped arrange meetings between local rabbis and religious leaders, President Donald Trump and Republican leadership.
Earlier this year, William Paul, the son of Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, confronted him in a Washington bar, believing the New York congressman was Jewish. Paul later apologized and said he has a drinking problem for which he is seeking treatment.
His presence in the community has become so familiar that his campaign even has Yiddish materials and songs promoting his reelection. The songs are shared in popular WhatsApp groups, played at weddings and blasted from trucks driving through Hasidic neighborhoods to encourage people to vote.
Lawler’s campaign is aiming to surpass the 22,000 votes he received in Hasidic neighborhoods in 2022 and 26,000 votes in 2024, as polls show the race is a dead heat. In an interview with Punchbowl News, he predicted 30,000 Orthodox votes, arguing that the community’s participation is difficult for pollsters to capture.
In his interview with the Forward, Lawler said his popularity comes from a simple strategy: showing up.
“I am really the first elected official that has shown up, you know, consistently and publicly in this community, and not just to see the leadership of the community, but to meet the people,” he said. Lawler has even picked up some Yiddish vocabulary along the way. Asked what word he had learned, Lawler quipped, “I love the word shanda to describe Chuck Schumer,” using a Yiddish term for disgrace about the Senate Democratic leader, who is Jewish.
Lawler believes his efforts have helped build support beyond the Orthodox and Hasidic communities, including among Reform and secular Jews who might otherwise vote Democratic but are concerned about their party’s direction on Israel. “Democrats have effectively abandoned Jewish Americans,” he said.
Conley acknowledged Lawler’s visibility in the community but questioned whether it is matched with policies that benefit Jewish families. “Mike Lawler shows up for the photo op, but when it comes to acting, he turns his back on the community every time,” she said. Conley pointed particularly to his support for Republican-led legislation cutting Medicaid spending and other federal benefits.
A fight over antisemitism in politics
Conley said her own outreach has focused on convincing Jewish voters that she understands their security concerns and shares their commitment to Israel, even as she disagrees with Lawler on domestic policy.
She also spoke of a personal connection to the Jewish community as a member of the LGBTQ community, recalling how Jewish Americans stood up for LGBTQ rights. “That’s why I proudly stand beside them and let them know that there are people who deeply care and will proudly stand shoulder to shoulder with them and fight back against antisemitism,” she said.
As Lawler highlights his ties to Jewish voters and questions whether Conley would stand up to anti-Israel voices in the Democratic Party, Conley accuses him of associating with Republicans who have faced accusations of antisemitic rhetoric and ties to white nationalists.
She said Lawler had a double standard: condemning antisemitism among Democrats while supporting Republicans who have faced accusations of antisemitic rhetoric or associations with white nationalists. “He is the biggest hypocrite,” she said of Lawler. “He is a political operative who will do whatever is politically convenient for his political ambition.”
Conley cited, for example, Peter Oberacker, a Republican state legislator running against Democratic Rep. Josh Riley in the neighboring 19th District, who came under fire after a Facebook post from Veterans Day 2015 resurfaced in which he paid tribute to his grandfather who served in the Nazi-German military during World War II. Lawler attended Oberacker’s campaign launch last year and praised him. Lawler also contributed $5,000 to his campaign.
Conley described Oberacker as an “overt Nazi sympathizer” and said Lawler’s support for him undermined his claim to be a defender of Jewish Americans. Conley also pointed to Lawler’s past connections with members of the New York State Young Republicans, whose group was disbanded following a Politico investigation exposing racist and antisemitic messages. Lawler condemned it and called for those involved to resign from leadership positions.
Asked directly about the criticism, Lawler defended Oberacker. “He’s not an antisemite,” Lawler said, adding that Oberacker represents Jewish constituents in the state Senate. He dismissed Conley’s accusations as an attempt to distract from her own political alliances. “I think Cait is grasping at straws,” he said.
Lawler pointed to Conley’s decision to run on the Working Families Party ballot line, a progressive party that endorsed Mamdani in last year’s mayoral primary and has accused Israel of genocide. He also noted her remarks in a September interview, when she said that she “respects” what Mamdani represents to many New Yorkers. “I don’t respect antisemites,” Lawler said.
Lawler was the lead sponsor of the bipartisan Antisemitism Awareness Act that would require the Department of Education to use the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism — which classifies most anti-Zionism as antisemitic — when investigating allegations of discrimination. It passed in the House in 2024 by an overwhelming majority of 320-91, but was stalled in the Senate due to resistance over constitutionally protected free speech. It was reintroduced in the House last year.
More recently, Lawler partnered with Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a Jewish moderate Democrat from New Jersey, on a bipartisan House resolution condemning antisemitic rhetoric from online personalities including Hasan Piker and Candace Owens.
Conley said she recognizes the rise of “extremism and antisemitism in both parties” and has heard from Jewish voters who feel abandoned by some of the same political allies they once supported. By speaking out on these issues and committing to confront them within her own party, Conley is aiming to convince these voters that they do not have to support a Republican to feel protected.
“The Jewish community knows they have a home in the Democratic Party. Period,” she said.
The post These rivals in a close House race agree on Israel. They’re fighting over who Jewish voters can trust. appeared first on The Forward.
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Rift between Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens puts Michigan Jews on edge
(JTA) — ANN ARBOR, Michigan — An 11th-hour public feud between Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and his pro-Israel former primary rival is further exacerbating tensions between Jewish voters and the nominee ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections.
U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens, who this summer narrowly lost the race for the Democratic nomination to El-Sayed, had previously endorsed her former competitor and was set to join him at a rally Sunday in the crucial final days of campaigning. Michigan is locked in a tight race that could help determine which party controls the Senate.
Instead of a show of unity, Stevens is now forcefully criticizing El-Sayed for his recent criticism of Israel and for not condemning a PAC ad, made by an outside group to boost his campaign, that blamed Israel for rising grocery prices. El-Sayed has shot back, invoking Stevens’ close relationship with the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC.
Stevens, who represents a large Jewish district in suburban Detroit, unloaded on El-Sayed Friday in a series of interviews with the New York Times published early Saturday morning.
On social media Friday, Stevens had said she expected El-Sayed to shortly condemn the ad, paid for by Rebellion PAC, a project of far-left commentator Cenk Uygur. El-Sayed had earlier distanced himself from the ad but had not commented on its content.
“We are not going to say that the cost of groceries is because of Jews and the Jewish state,” Stevens told the Times, adding, “Maybe it is what you want people to believe.” She stopped short of formally rescinding her endorsement of El-Sayed.
The feud comes at a moment when much of the Democratic establishment has coalesced behind El-Sayed in the key Senate race, even as deep concerns remain among many traditionally Democratic Jewish voters. Stevens’ own fiancée, Jewish Democratic megadonor Jason Turkish, said this week he would be voting for Republican nominee Mike Rogers. Stevens told the Times she had met with a rabbi in advance of their wedding and was mulling converting to Judaism.
In a statement sent to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and other outlets Friday, El-Sayed accused Stevens of “relitigating a primary that ended three months ago.” He also said he had already “defeated” spending “from outside corporations and AIPAC” on behalf of Stevens.
El-Sayed did not mention the Uygur ad, nor another ad — this one produced by his campaign — that featured a brief clip of far-right commentator and anti-Israel voice Tucker Carlson announcing he wouldn’t vote for Rogers. Stevens had publicly urged El-Sayed to take down the Carlson ad, which the campaign had aired on conservative TV channels.
The El-Sayed campaign has dropped Stevens’ name from its description of Sunday’s planned Detroit church event, which is now scheduled to feature Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina and Sen. Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland. USA Today and other outlets have reported that El-Sayed’s campaign has asked Stevens to stay away from all future events.
Stevens and Turkish did not return a JTA request for comment.
In her social media statement Friday prior to El-Sayed’s response, Stevens had outlined Jewish constituent concerns about El-Sayed, noting that he himself has used rhetoric akin to blaming Michigan’s financial ills on Israel.
“The ad did not invent its argument; it dramatized one Dr. El-Sayed has made in his own words throughout this campaign: that Israel is the reason Michigan cannot afford schools, health care, and child care,” Stevens wrote. “Abdul promises to get money out of politics. He can begin by getting Israel out of his explanation for everything Michigan cannot afford.”
Both Turkish, in an earlier JTA interview from a Rogers event, and Stevens, to the Times, said their final breaking point with El-Sayed came after a recent debate in which the nominee had declined to say whether Israel or Iran posed a bigger threat to the United States.
El-Sayed on Friday did condemn a separate comment from anti-Israel streamer and former campaign ally Hasan Piker, who is Uygur’s nephew. In a stream this week, Piker had compared the heavily Jewish Detroit suburb of West Bloomfield to a “KKK neighborhood,” adding, “The supremacist attitude underlying their worldview is identical.”
In a statement to Jewish Insider about Piker’s comments, El-Sayed noted he grew up near West Bloomfield and stated, “Comparing Jewish Michiganders to the Ku Klux Klan is utterly inappropriate and flat out wrong.”
Meanwhile, Republicans are jumping at the Jewish divide. Rogers, a former congressman, has seized on the intraparty feud to appeal to Jewish voters who had supported Stevens in the primary. Earlier this week, President Donald Trump called Jews who back El-Sayed “crazy,” leading to condemnation from some Jewish leaders.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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