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The sequel to the Holocaust novel ‘Boy in the Striped Pajamas’ is here. Its author has no regrets.
(JTA) – At one point in John Boyne’s new novel “All The Broken Places,” a 91-year-old German woman recalls, for the first time, her encounter with a young Jewish boy in the Auschwitz death camp 80 years prior.
“I found him in the warehouse one day. Where they kept all the striped pajamas,” she says.
The woman, Gretel, quickly realizes her mistake: that “this was a phrase peculiar to my brother and me.” She clarifies that she is referring to “the uniforms. … You know the ones I mean.”
Boyne’s readers are, in fact, likely to know what Gretel means, as “All The Broken Places” is a sequel to Boyne’s 2006 international bestseller “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.” At a time when other Holocaust books intended for young readers have been challenged or removed from some American schools, the enduring popularity of “Striped Pajamas” has conjured up love and loathing in equal measure for its depiction of Nazi and Jewish youths during the Holocaust. It has sold 11 million copies, appeared in 58 languages and in major motion picture form, and been the only assigned reading about Jews or the Holocaust for countless schoolchildren, mostly in Britain. Yet Holocaust scholars have warned against it, panning it as inaccurate and trafficking in dangerous stereotypes about Jewish weakness.
Speaking to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency from his Dublin home on Tuesday, the day “All the Broken Places” hit U.S. shelves, Boyne said he hoped readers would take his new book on its own terms — as a more sophisticated meditation on guilt, culpability and evil, for an adult audience rather than children this time. But he also wants to defend the original work that made him famous.
“I do feel it’s a positive contribution to the world and to Holocaust studies,” said Boyne, who estimates that he has personally spoken to between 500 and 600 schools about “Striped Pajamas.”
Not everyone agrees. A 2016 study published by the Centre for Holocaust Education, a British organization housed at University College London, found that 35% of British teachers used his book in their Holocaust lesson plans, and that 85% of students who had consumed any kind of media related to the Holocaust had either read the book or seen its movie adaptation.
That level of widespread familiarity with the book led many students to inaccurate conclusions about the Holocaust, such as that the Nazis were “victims too” and that most Germans were unaware of the horrors being visited upon the Jewish people, the study found.
A promotional image from the 2008 film adaptation of “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.” (Miramax)
As overall awareness of the Holocaust has decreased among young people especially, Boyne’s novel has become a casualty of its own success. Holocaust scholars in the United Kingdom and United States have decried the book, with historian David Cesarani calling it “a travesty of facts” and “a distortion of history,” and the Holocaust Exhibition and Learning Centre in London publishing a long takedown of the book’s inaccuracies and “stereotypes.”
“With the rise in antisemitism, such as it is in this country, and that so often manifests through trivialisation, distortion and denial of the Holocaust, this book could potentially do more harm than good,” Centre for Holocaust Education researcher Ruth-Anne Lenga concluded at the end of her 2016 study.
Boyne came to the Holocaust as subject matter purely on his own, having never been taught about the history growing up in Ireland. (He attended a Catholic school, where, as he has recounted publicly, he was physically and sexually abused by his teachers.) Reading Elie Wiesel’s “Night” as a teenager, Boyne said, “made me want to understand more.”
He would read many more Holocaust books during his twenties, from Primo Levi to Anne Frank to “Sophie’s Choice,” fascinated by the sheer recency of the atrocity. “How could something that seems like it should have happened, say, 1,000 years ago — because the death count is so enormous and so horrifying — how could that happen so close to the time that I’m alive in?” he thought. “And if it could, then what’s to stop it happening again?”
That fascination led to the publication, when Boyne was 33, of “Striped Pajamas,” which he’d always conceived of as a children’s story. In the book, Bruno, the 9-year-old son of a Nazi commandant, befriends Shmuel, a Jewish concentration-camp prisoner of the same age; it ends with Bruno donning the “striped pajamas” and following his friend into the gas chambers. Further driving home the fable conceit, an initial draft included a framing device of Boyne as a character reading the story to an audience of children, before an editor advised him to cut it.
During his writing process, Boyne said he was concerned with “the emotional truth of the novel” as opposed to holding to historical accuracy, and defended much of the book’s ahistorical details — such as moving the Auschwitz guards’ living quarters to outside the camp, and putting no armed guards or electric fences between Bruno and Shmuel — as creative license. A common critique of the book, that the climax encourages the reader to mourn the death of Bruno over that of Shmuel and the other Jews in the camps, makes no sense to Boyne: “I struggle to understand somebody who would reach the end of that book and only feel sympathy for Bruno. I think then if somebody does, I think that says more, frankly, about their antisemitism than anything else.”
He also justified his decisions by reasoning that a novel like his shouldn’t be the basis for Holocaust instruction.
“I don’t think that it’s my responsibility, as a novelist who didn’t write a school book, to justify its use in education when I never asked for that to happen,” he said. “If [teachers] make the choice to use a novel in their classrooms, it’s their responsibility to make sure the children know that there is a difference between what happens in this novel and what happened in real life.”
Boyne added that he was “appalled” by a recent JTA report about a Tennessee school district removing Art Spiegelman’s graphic Holocaust memoir “Maus” from its curriculum. If teachers are choosing between teaching the two books, he said, “‘Maus’ is better, no question about that. And a much more important book.” (Earlier this year, Spiegelman himself took a swipe at “Striped Pajamas” by telling a Tennessee audience that no schools should read Boyne’s novel because “that guy didn’t do any research whatsoever.”)
“The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” John Boyne’s 2006 bestseller, has been critiqued for the way it presented the Holocaust to children. (Illustration by Grace Yagel)
For the first decade of his book’s release, Boyne would frequently receive invites to speak at Jewish community centers and Holocaust museums. He met with survivors who shared their stories with him.
Over the years, more research has been published about the book’s popularity in the classroom, which has led to more scrutiny of its factual inaccuracies. Other authors, Holocaust researchers and some educators have come out forcefully against the book’s use in the classroom. At the same time, Boyne said, his invitations to Jewish venues dried up.
The author has also been known to exacerbate the issue by sparring with his critics, even when they are respected institutions. Most infamously, in 2020, Boyne got into a Twitter feud with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, which said his Auschwitz-set book “should be avoided by anyone who studies or teaches about the history of the Holocaust.”
The back-and-forth was provoked after Boyne criticized what he saw as the crassness of more recent Holocaust novels, such as “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” by Heather Morris. Reflecting on the spat, Boyne said of the Auschwitz memorial, “I hope that they do understand that, whether my book is a masterpiece or a travesty, that I came at it with the very best intentions.”
Boyne conceived of the sequel shortly after finishing “Striped Pajamas.” It follows Bruno’s older sister Gretel as she lives in hiding after the war and successfully conceals her Nazi upbringing all the way into the present day. A preteen during the Holocaust, Gretel becomes gradually more aware of its horrors after seeing newspaper articles and documentaries and encountering former Resistance members and Jewish descendants of survivors (including one, David, who becomes her lover without knowing her true background).
Unlike “Striped Pajamas,” “All the Broken Places” is intended for adults. It’s filled with sex, violence, suicide attempts and bad language — and also some of the details of the Holocaust that were omitted from the first book. It mentions the Sobibor death camp by name, for example, and also takes the time to correct Bruno’s childish assumptions about the death camps being a “farm.”
But it tells the story from the perspective of a German who was directly implicated in the Holocaust. Throughout, Gretel reflects on her complicity in the Nazi regime, and her self-interest in hiding from authorities in the following years rather than trying to bring people like her father to justice. Missing from the book is any serious discussion of antisemitism as an ideology, and to what extent Gretel ascribes to it — though there is plenty of hand-wringing over postwar anti-German sentiment. In one shocking moment, a former S.S. lieutenant in hiding presents Gretel with a pair of Hitler’s eyeglasses and urges her to try them on; she is terrified to discover that this excites her.
The book’s reception has been mixed. While praised by publications including Kirkus Reviews (“a complex, thoughtful character study”) and the Guardian (“a defense of literature’s need to shine a light on the darkest aspects of human nature”), the New Statesman took Boyne to task for writing an “immoral” and “shameless sequel” that further erodes the “Jewishness” of the Holocaust.
At the behest of his publisher, Boyne has included an author’s note with “All The Broken Places” alluding to criticisms of “Striped Pajamas.” “Writing about the Holocaust is a fraught business and any novelist approaching it takes on an enormous burden of responsibility,” he tells the reader. “The story of every person who died in the Holocaust is one that is worth telling. I believe that Gretel’s story is also worth telling.”
Still, “Striped Pajamas” has its Jewish defenders. One, the 24-year-old composer Noah Max, is behind a new opera adaptation of the book, to be titled “The Child in the Striped Pyjamas.” It will debut in London in January; a recent story by the U.K. Jewish Chronicle helped convince the film’s rights holder Miramax to waive a $1 million licensing fee for the project.
A great-grandson of Jews who fled Vienna when the Nazis arrived, Max told JTA he’d initially read the book “years before I was capable of absorbing testimony,” and that it inspired him to seek out actual survivor testimonies and to begin composing the opera at the age of 19. He compared its message to Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ writings on moral relativism.
“Ultimately, the book motivated me to write an opera about the Shoah and integrate Holocaust education into my music,” Max said. “Any book capable of that is worthy of attention.”
Composer Noah Max (center) rehearses for his upcoming opera adaptation of “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” to premiere in January 2023. (Courtesy of Noah Max)
Max’s passion for “Striped Pajamas” inspired at least one Holocaust group to change its mind about its educational merits. The Holocaust Educational Trust, a London-based group that advocates British educators on how to teach the Holocaust, had as recently as 2020 declared that “we advise against using” the book in the classroom.
But following what Max described as “richly fulfilling conversations” about “the story’s symbolic and artistic worth,” the trust fully endorsed the opera and, he said, has begun to rethink its view of the book. (The group did not respond to a JTA request for comment.)
Even with 16 years of hindsight and the chance to rethink his bestseller, Boyne said he wouldn’t change anything. Reflecting on his youthful audience, he said, “If they weren’t reading ‘Striped Pajamas,’ it’s more likely they would be reading something that has no relevance to this subject at all.”
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The post The sequel to the Holocaust novel ‘Boy in the Striped Pajamas’ is here. Its author has no regrets. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Aristotle, Jewish ethics and the vexing case of Graham Platner
In last Tuesday’s Democratic Senate primary in Maine, nearly three quarters of voters decided that Graham Platner — Iraq War veteran, oysterman, Reddit misogynist and SS tattoo bearer — was their best hope to defeat the Republican incumbent, Susan Collins, come November. While the result was wildly cheered by his supporters, other Democrats and independents were left deeply uneasy.
There are good reasons, philosophical no less than political, for this disquiet. For some Democrats, the winning approach to the election is not necessarily one that leads to victory, but instead one that leads from virtue.
Much attention has been given to the political issues raised by Platner’s candidacy. His embrace of economic populism and excoriation of our country’s oligarchy, his denunciation of forever wars and defense of the common man were and remain compelling stances. That Platner speaks his own mind, and does so simply but rarely simplistically, rather than from a script bolted together by handlers, is clearly a plus as well.
But the matter of his character also raises a serious ethical issue not just for Platner, but also for those who voted for him this spring and plan to do so again this fall. It is less a matter of achieving a good result, than of affirming the good itself.
Moral philosophy comes in three flavors: consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. For reasons of space, let’s focus on the first and last. As the name suggests, consequentialism focuses not on the means but instead on the ends. But this does not mean, as some think, that any end can justify any means. Instead, philosophical consequentialists argue that acts must be judged by a simple measure: seeking the greatest good at the least moral cost.
For a hypothetical example, say I have a student who is floundering in one of my classes. They are doing their best, but for various reasons their best will probably not help them avoid a failing grade. Afraid to disappoint or depress the student, I allow them to continue in the class. Consequently, the student sinks rather than swims by semester’s end. Or, instead, I can sit down with the student earlier in the semester and suggest that they withdraw today and try again a later day when they are better prepared. The result is the least cruel and most good: some suffering in the short term rather than greater suffering in the long run.
Yet, consequentialism can be complicated. Consider the election of John Fetterman to the Senate in 2022. Faced by the prospect of voting for the Republican candidate, Democrats and independents gave Fetterman the winning margin despite a stroke he suffered during the campaign, one that raised serious questions about his capacity to hold the office. For reasons that are hard to parse, Fetterman has since broken with his fellow Democrats on several vital issues.
Rather than realizing the greater good, some Pennsylvania voters may now realize their reasoning was misplaced.
This brings us to virtue ethics, which is now enjoying a second wind among moral philosophers. Inspired by Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, virtue ethicists are less concerned with actions than they are with character. As the philosopher Todd May writes in his book The Decent Life, the key question for consequentialists (and deontologists) is “How should I act?” But for those who promote virtue ethics, the question is “How should I live?”
By this, they mean what Aristotle seems to have meant: how can we live a happy or flourishing life? The answer is by living that life in accord with virtue.
Simply put, virtues are those traits of character — think bravery and constancy, sagacity and generosity—crucial to human flourishing. And to flourish as humans requires a deep disposition to see and feel, choose and respond to the world and others in ways that align with those virtues. In the words of the late Alasdair MacIntyre, the philosopher who reintroduced virtue ethics to modern readers, “The exercise of the virtues is itself a crucial component of the good life for man.”
Inevitably, just as with the other ethical theories, there are problems with virtue ethics. But there are also advantages, principally that it seeks to build character rather than build a calculus of the highest good. This brings us back to Graham Platner. What is at issue with his campaign is not just the character of the candidate, but the character of the nation we wish to realize. The unavoidable question is not whether the ends justifies the means, but whether the means justifies the end—in this case, a nation dedicated not to winning a Senate majority, but to one dedicated to reversing the waning of virtue. Even if this means giving Susan Collins 6 more years.
Modern Jewish thinkers find ties between pagan and Jewish ethics. Yonatan Brafman, who teaches at the Jewish Theological Seminary, points to fascinating parallels between the writings of Aristotle and the medieval philosopher Moses Maimonides. The latter, Brafman suggests, sought various ways to encourage the practice of generosity. “Fulfilling the commandment of matanot le-’evyonim (gifts to the poor) and even prioritizing it over other commandments both expresses and fosters the virtue of generosity,” Brafman writes. “Moreover, in Maimonides’ view, this virtue is central to human flourishing. Generosity enables an individual to achieve divine joy.”
Of course, the exercise of generosity should apply to Platner, a man who insists that he has changed. Come November, we will learn whether this is true for our nation. As for Platner, who insists he has changed, it may take much longer for all of us to know.
The post Aristotle, Jewish ethics and the vexing case of Graham Platner appeared first on The Forward.
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What does it say that Gwyneth Paltrow is advertising luxury Israeli real estate?
What does Gwyneth Paltrow have to do with a new luxury apartment building in Tel Aviv suburb Herzliya?
Not much, it seems, judging from a new ad that dropped this week. It features Paltrow going on a morning jog in the city — New York City, that is. She wakes up, voices some pat complaints about why “mornings have to be so early” and how her “coffee needs a coffee,” before she heads to Central Park. She comes home, showers, then asks her driver to take her to 51 Park.
Her driver asks if she means New York. “Herzliya, Israel,” she clarifies, smiling into the camera, as though the black SUV can drive across the ocean.
The ad makes so little sense that my first instinct was to think that it must be some sort of AI rendition of Paltrow. But a LinkedIn post about the project, from Gabi Attal, the CEO of the ad agency Why Worry, which made it, says that they did indeed shoot the ad in real life, in New York City, and that Paltrow is the face of the ad campaign behind a luxury apartment building called 51Park in Herzliya.
51Park is the name — though seemingly not the address — of an enormous new apartment complex that does not appear to exist yet; the website for the building is written in future tense. In renderings, two 51-story glossy towers, with — depending on which part of the website you read — either 636 or 733 apartments total, shine over a park. The neighborhood, it promises, is about to become the beating heart of Herzliya, bounded by highways, the light rail and Herzliya Park.
Paltrow, who is Jewish, has hawked a lot of weird products in her time — vagina-scented candles, anyone? And in some ways, the luxury building makes sense as a product for the actress, who has often flaunted her wealthy lifestyle. But everything else about the 51Park campaign places it back into Paltrow’s stranger offerings.
First off, of course, is the simple setting of the ad, which is nowhere near the apartment building Paltrow is lending her face to.
“To bring this architectural masterpiece to the Israeli audience, we needed a figure who effortlessly embodies international elegance, a premium lifestyle and uncompromising quality,” Attal wrote in the LinkedIn post about the ad.
No one behind the ad responded to my questions about how Paltrow was selected except the director’s agent, Tal Nathan, who said that he couldn’t comment beyond saying the actress “looks absolutely fantastic.” Still, Paltrow certainly embodies a certain kind of “premium lifestyle” — her lifestyle brand, Goop (tagline: “beauty as wellness”), sells such wealth signifiers as a $425 black tank top and a $55 “sex oil,” and also partners with other luxury brands to market expensive jewelry, clothing, and wellness accessories via Paltrow’s own website as “Gwyneth’s picks.” (These include a $225 “eyelift bioremodeling peptide matrix” and a cream for “mindfulness and intuition.”)
The actress has made her name, at least since her Oscar win in 1999, by defining an ideal of minimalist, luxurious perfection — one with little care for qualities like accessibility, approachability or reality. (She had to pay a fine after Goop sold bespoke jade eggs promising questionable health benefits for one’s “yoni.”) In fact, part of her allure is her lack of those values. Her aesthetic seeks to soar above plebian concerns like pragmatism or cost. Who cares if that $491 pewter cocktail strainer requires regular polishing to maintain its silver sheen? It’s covetable. Similarly, who cares where your luxury building is, the 51Park ad seems to say; the important part is the luxury.
Still, it seems odd to market the building to Israelis via an ad filmed in New York City, in English. Sure, New York might signify wealth and luxury in the international market. But the ad doesn’t highlight the amenities 51Park actually offers, such as proximity to Herzliya Park; it shows Paltrow in a luxury apartment in New York with convenient access to a different, and more famous, park: Central Park.
Instead, it feels as though the ad is directed at Americans, selling the idea that New York City and Herzliya are the same. That’s patently absurd though — even if we were to equate Tel Aviv and NYC, which are really not very similar outside of being their respective countries’ most cosmopolitan cities, Herzliya is neither; it’s a separate, much smaller city. Which means Herzliya is, at best, Hoboken. Perhaps that’s why Paltrow didn’t even bother flying to Israel to film the ad.
Marketing an Israeli home to Americans, however, is a controversial proposition. Over the past couple of years, Israeli companies selling homes and land to Jewish Americans, often at fairs held in synagogues, have been a target for protests. Sure, Herzliya is not in the West Bank. But for an actor to wade into obvious controversy like this, especially when she has a new major project coming up — starring as Belle Burden in an adaptation of the heiress’ best-selling memoir Strangers — is a confusing choice.
The ad was reposted by viral celebrity gossip account PopBase, leading to thousands of retweets and comments accusing her of supporting, as many commenters put it, “gwynocide.” Others said it was tone deaf to market luxury apartment buildings only a few hundred miles from razed apartments in Gaza, and compared her to the Nazi wife who enjoys her garden outside Auschwitz in the Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest.
Yet, in the ad, Paltrow seems blissfully unaware of all that, or at least doesn’t betray the slightest political statement. It’s not the first time Paltrow has been impressively out of step with public opinion — for example, saying that being a mother while working on movie sets is harder than being a “regular” working mother who is not extremely wealthy and famous, or that she would rather die than let her child eat a “Cup-a-Soup” and would rather do crack than eat cheese out of a tin.
Paltrow’s serene smile in the ad implies she can just float above the political realities tied to Israel without touching them. The idea that one can move to Israel and live a life indistinguishable from the one you once had on Park Ave in NYC, is fundamentally a political statement, of course; not everyone has that freedom of movement, whether due to financial or political realities. But Paltrow has not responded to criticism online or to journalists reaching out to ask what she meant to say with the ad. Though she voiced support for the hostages after Oct. 7, she hasn’t implied that her ad for 51Park is any kind of statement. In fact, she’s carefully avoided making one.
Instead, Paltrow — as is so often the case with the actress famed for her snobbery — has demonstrated that she is not as interested in Israel, Gaza, the war, or Judaism as she is in the disembodied ideal of luxury. As she once said, she “can’t possibly pretend to be someone who makes $25,000 a year.” The rest isn’t important; she can ignore it.
The post What does it say that Gwyneth Paltrow is advertising luxury Israeli real estate? appeared first on The Forward.
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Abdul El-Sayed is courting Jewish voters — without moderating his views on Israel
Michigan senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed isn’t toning down his rhetoric to win over Jewish voters.
He’s called Israel’s action in Gaza a genocide, wants to withdraw both offensive and defensive military aid to Israel, called the Israeli government “evil” like Hamas, has rebuffed questions about whether Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state, and in an interview with the Forward, doubled down on his decision to campaign with controversial Twitch streamer Hasan Piker and his response to the attack on a Michigan syangogue in March: “Hurt people hurt people.”
Yet at a progressive synagogue and events hosted by Michigan’s Jewish Democratic caucus, El-Sayed, who is Muslim, is finding Jewish voters willing to hear him out — and a constituency of Jews who support his candidacy even when they disagree with him on Israel.
It’s a playbook New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani employed to deflect allegations of antisemitism: Don’t soften on Israel or what rhetoric crosses a line, but speak with the Jewish press, meet with Jewish organizations and demonstrate a cultural fluency with Judaism beyond the politics of the Middle East.
The race, which could determine which party controls the Senate, is also a test of Israel politics in a swing state home to the nation’s highest concentration of Arab Americans.
The three leading candidates occupy distinct positions on the issue: El-Sayed has made criticism of Israel and AIPAC a central plank of his campaign. On the other end of the spectrum, Rep. Haley Stevens describes herself as “proud pro-Israel Democrat” and is backed by AIPAC. And in the middle, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow has won the endorsement of J Street, the liberal Zionist advocacy group that supports a two-state solution.
El-Sayed, who currently leads in the polls, maintains his candor has helped him build a Jewish coalition of his own.
“There’s going to be things that they disagree with, but at least they know I have the courage to say where I stand,” El-Sayed told the Forward. “I say it everywhere to everyone, and my positions are based in principle, not just political calculus.”
Jews for Abdul
While a number of Jewish organizations have expressed alarm at El-Sayed’s campaign, one synagogue welcomed him inside.
Congregation T’chiyah, a Reconstructionist synagogue outside Detroit that describes itself as progressive, hosted El-Sayed for a Passover Seder in April. Many of its congregants support El-Sayed’s campaign and are volunteering with a group dubbed “Jews for Abdul.”
One of those volunteers is Lex Eisenberg, a T’chiyah congregant who also organizes with the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace.
“As progressive Jews, we’re all too familiar with the way that people who speak out for Palestinian freedom are smeared and attacked the way some are smearing Abdul right now,” Eisenberg said. “So the idea is that we want to be outwardly and publicly Jewish and supporting Abdul.”
El-Sayed’s campaign has also attracted some prominent progressive Jewish voices. Former Michigan congressman Andy Levin — who previously served as president of Congregation T’chiyah — endorsed El-Sayed alongside Bernie Sanders, the progressive Jewish senator from Vermont. (El-Sayed has called Sanders his “favorite Jewish uncle.”)
Levin, who identifies as Zionist, sees echoes of his own political battles in El-Sayed’s campaign. He lost his House election against Stevens in 2022 after AIPAC poured millions into defeating him, displeased with his support for a bill that backed a two-state solution and restricted use of U.S. taxpayer funds to expand settlements in the occupied West Bank.
“So many young Jewish people are active in Abdul’s campaign,” Levin told the Forward. “And it’s their Judaism that leads them to that position, because their Judaism teaches them that the way to fight antisemitism isn’t to circle the wagons and shut off the world, but to build alliances with other oppressed people.”
Welcoming leftist politicians is not unusual for Congregation T’chiyah: Its rabbi, Alana Alpert, was the founding director of the progressive political advocacy group Detroit Jews for Justice, and she has been honored by Rashida Tlaib, the Palestinian-American Michigan congresswoman censured by the House over her comments about Israel. (Alpert did not respond to the Forward’s request for an interview.)
“T’chiyah, of course, is a congregation that is focused on uplifting social justice around the idea of tikkun olam,” El-Sayed said.
Yet El-Sayed’s coalition also extends to those with complicated relationships to the Jewish state.
Roslyn Abt Schindler, a retired professor who taught Holocaust studies at Wayne State University, has been a member of Congregation T’chiyah for 48 of the synagogue’s 49 years. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Schindler plans to vote for El-Sayed and agrees with his characterization of Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide.
But she also supports a two-state solution — a position El-Sayed has not endorsed, and one she wishes he would.
Schindler said the issues that matter most to her are affordability, campaign finance reform, environmental protection and Medicare for All. El-Sayed’s visit to her synagogue and Levin’s endorsement of him, she said, sealed the deal.
“His outreach to Jewish voters has been genuine and thoughtful,” Schindler said.
Decky Alexander, chair of the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus — which endorsed Stevens last week — agreed that El-Sayed has engaged Michigan’s Jewish community. He participated in a candidate forum co-hosted by the Jewish caucus, and he attended the organization’s “Summer Simcha,” the caucus’ annual fundraiser that draws Jewish leaders from across the political spectrum.
Alexander said she doesn’t personally support El-Sayed, but she believes the Jewish caucus could work with him and trusts that he takes antisemitism seriously. After the recent attack on Temple Israel, El-Sayed was the first politician to text her with a message of support.
“He’s present and showing up,” Alexander said. “And not just showing up to really left-leaning communities that are Jewish, but across the board.”
‘Hurt people hurt people’
Other Jews say that outreach has done little to quell concerns about El-Sayed.
“When a public figure is struggling to affirm Israel’s right to exist, many Jews are going to see that as a challenge to Jewish self-determination, not simply a policy disagreement,” said Amy Sapeika, community director of American Jewish Committee Detroit.
The other candidates, meanwhile, have for the most part only hinted at their differences with El-Sayed when it comes to Israel and antisemitism — a polite tenor Alexander partly chalked up to a culture of “Midwest nice.”
Stevens, seen as the Democratic establishment pick, has touted her record of speaking up against antisemitism “in all its forms” and described herself as a lawmaker who is “leading on combating antisemitism in a bipartisan way.”
McMorrow has walked a middle ground, saying that Israel’s military offensive in Gaza meets the critera for genocide while also dismissing definitional debates as semantic. She has also said the Democratic Party has an antisemitism problem, citing an antisemitic slur yelled at her Jewish husband during this year’s Democratic Party convention in Detroit.
The National Jewish Democratic Council of America issued a rare dual endorsement of Stevens and McMorrow — explicitly drawing contrast with El-Sayed.
“There are two candidates who stand with our community on issues of importance to Jewish voters, and there is one who does not,” CEO Halie Soifer said in a statement.
Those tensions came to a head after a man rammed a truck into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield in March with the stated intent of killing as many people as possible. El-Sayed issued a four-minute video condemning the attack, while also noting that the perpetrator had four family members killed in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon, including two children.
“Hurt people hurt people,” he said.
The response drew a public rebuke from Temple Israel’s Rabbi Jen Lader, who wrote in a Free Press op-ed that El-Sayed was “suggesting that violence against a synagogue in suburban Detroit could be understood through the lens of Israeli actions,” which she deemed “offensive.”
El-Sayed rejected the premise that linking the two events amounted to excusing violence.
“It’s unserious when you want to decontextualize violence, and then say you want to stand against violence,” he told the Forward. “I will never be the kind of policymaker who doesn’t want to understand why things happened if I’m serious about stopping them from happening.”
About a month after that attack, El-Sayed hosted a campaign event with Hasan Piker — a Twitch streamer often called the “Joe Rogan of the left” who has likened liberal Zionists to “liberal Nazis,” said he doesn’t have an issue with Hezbollah, and also said that “Hamas is 1,000 times better” than Israel, among a slew of other controversial statements.
The event drew condemnation from Michigan State Hillel and the Anti-Defamation League, which called the decision to campaign with Piker “absolutely shocking.”
It also drew the most direct rebukes to date from both opposing campaigns. Stevens told Jewish Insider Piker is “the exact opposite of someone I’d be campaigning with,” and McMorrow critiqued El-Sayed for hosting the event “at a moment when there is clearly a lot of pain and trauma across our state.”
“How do you bring everybody together, especially when there are difficult conversations, where there aren’t easy answers? You don’t fan the flames and stoke division just to get attention,” McMorrow said.
El-Sayed told the Forward that he would not defend Piker’s most extreme remarks but argued that politicians should engage with a broad range of people, adding that he wanted to “reach out to the 3 million people who follow him, many of whom feel locked out of our politics.”
More broadly, El-Sayed argues that his critics conflate the Israeli government with the Jewish people. He often points to his experience as a Muslim in helping him understand the experience of a religious minority, framing antisemitism and Islamophobia as related threats.
“I know intimately what it’s like to be discriminated against for how I pray, and I don’t want anybody to experience that, be it because they are Jewish or because they are Muslim, or because they don’t pray at all,” he said.
It’s difficult to gauge how El-Sayed’s messaging is landing with Jewish voters; unlike in New York City, Michigan races do not have polling by religious affiliation. In any case, he may not need Jews’ support to take office: Jewish voters make up just 1.4% percent of the electorate in the state.
Still, El-Sayed said he is looking to connect.
“I’m open to engage with any and all communities,” El-Sayed said. “As I’ve always said, if you invite me, I’m going to come.”
The post Abdul El-Sayed is courting Jewish voters — without moderating his views on Israel appeared first on The Forward.
