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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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These Michigan rabbis couldn’t get El-Sayed’s attention. Now they’re going national.
(JTA) — ANN ARBOR – Shortly before an Oct. 24 rally featuring Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and former President Barack Obama in Detroit, 250 rabbis from across the country urged them both to take their concerns more seriously about El-Sayed’s position on Israel.
The rabbis were speaking on behalf of a group called Nonnegotiable Michigan, and they require El-Sayed to commit to their five demands before they will support him. In this case, they wanted him to vocalize support for “Jewish statehood in Israel” and a commitment to safety for “Zionist Jews” — and to do it onstage.
To their disappointment, neither headliner mentioned the movement or its demands — and El-Sayed will soon wrap his campaign, likely without having done so at all. Now the nascent movement is facing criticism from Jews to its left that the tactic backfired and made Jews more vulnerable.
In the campaign’s final days, Nonnegotiable’s attempt to find a voice in the race has also been overshadowed by pro-Israel Democratic congresswoman Haley Stevens’ endorsement of El-Sayed’s opponent, Republican former congressman Mike Rogers.
Still, the letter was the biggest rabbinical foray into U.S. politics since more than 1,100 clergy signed an open letter last year condemning “rising anti-Zionism and its political normalization” shortly before the election of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. The Michigan letter also signaled that even beyond the state, a sizable cohort of Jews are trying to state their principles amid shifting faultlines in the Democratic Party.
The organizers of Nonnegotiable are undeterred by the party’s silence. They are seeking a new national platform for liberal Zionist Jews to assert their priorities in politics.
“I do think it’s a template for a national model,” Rabbi Aaron Starr, one of Nonnegotiable’s co-founders, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “I’m certainly looking beyond this election. In two years there will be a presidential election, and another slate of candidates for elected office.”
Starr, of the Conservative Congregation Shaarey Zedek in Southfield, a Detroit suburb, said Nonnegotiable’s biggest goal was to “name the priorities that were most core to mainstream American Jews.” He believes they have accomplished that.
As Israel seems sure to remain a hot-button topic for the American electorate in the 2028 presidential race, Starr sees the need for Jews to assert their priorities as urgent.
“Everyone recognizes the growing extremism among political parties and politicians these days,” he said. “Everybody, and especially rabbis, recognizes that extremists could pop up in their own districts and their own states. So they want a forum to be able to communicate ways by which we reject extremism.”
National spotlight
Nonnegotiable’s organizers told JTA they have gathered 1,900, mostly anonymous, signatures to date within Michigan. That figure would be larger than the combined totals of named Michigan Jews who have signed open letters pledging to vote for El-Sayed (1,000) and Rogers (560).
Nationally, the organization says 4,560 people have signed the petition, including the rabbis from out of state who have joined up with the movement in its final days. The other clergy were sourced from rabbinical networks on social media, and come from 34 different states and Washington, D.C. A good chunk of them serve active congregations.
Many are from liberal or swing states, including Rabbi Samuel Stern of Temple Beth Sholom in Topeka, Kansas, where another close Senate race is unfolding. Stern told JTA he signed in order to call out “the anti-Zionist hatred that we see coming out of different political sides and candidates.”
For the rabbis on the letter, El-Sayed’s rhetoric in Michigan looms large in their states, too — in some cases, larger even than more local antisemitism controversies.
At a recent rally in Kansas, President Donald Trump used the term “Shylock,” widely considered to be an antisemitic slur, when referring to a controversy involving the GOP incumbent senator suing patients with medical debt.
Stern, though, said that his Kansas congregation was generally more concerned about El-Sayed’s rhetoric on Israel several states away than Trump’s remarks closer to home.
“It really didn’t play that much here,” the rabbi said, of Trump’s comment. “I don’t know what that means for us, or for any of the other Jewish communities, but it wasn’t as prevalent here. We’ve heard more about what Dr. El-Sayed has said, his anti-Zionism, and been more concerned about that, than about the offhand comment by President Trump.”
Nonnegotiable has also expanded onto college campuses, with an organizing campaign that has quickly formed at the University of Michigan. Around two dozen Jewish students have publicly added their names to the letter.
“I really resonated with what Nonnegotiable stands for,” student organizer Jacob Reich, who is involved in various Democratic Party initiatives on and off campus, told JTA. “I felt torn between both my Jewish identity and my identity as a Democrat.”
Among Reich’s biggest concerns about El-Sayed, he said, was the candidate’s widely criticized “hurt people hurt people” remark made after a March attack on the state’s Temple Israel. The attacker’s family members were killed in Lebanon in an Israeli strike.
El-Sayed has since apologized for those comments, and his campaign has sent mailers to Jewish households in which he pledges to fight antisemitism. Reich said he appreciated the letter, but added, “I don’t think it went far enough to address a lot of the missteps that he’s taken.”
Whose nonnegotiables?
Rabbis friendlier with El-Sayed have argued the movement is ineffective at messaging; could boost Republican policies most Jews strongly oppose; and ignores ways in which the candidate has sought to improve his relations with Jews.
Some have aired those grievances to the movement’s leaders directly.
“Nonnegotiable describes itself as an invitation rather than an ultimatum,” Rabbi Alana Alpert, of Detroit-area Congregation T’chiyah, wrote privately to the campaign’s organizers in an Oct. 8 letter. “It has had the opposite effect, driving a wedge between the campaign and Jewish interests.”
In her previously unpublicized letter, which she recently shared with JTA, Alpert compared Nonnegotiable to Uncommitted, the 2024 activist campaign in Michigan that sought to pressure then-President Joe Biden on Gaza by withholding primary votes for him. The Uncommitted movement later refused to endorse replacement nominee Kamala Harris. Trump went on to win Michigan, and the general election.
The two campaigns used “similar language,” Alpert wrote. She told her fellow rabbis that they were now “dealing with the choices, coalitions, and consequences of an actual general election with far-reaching implications.”
Rabbi Nate DeGroot, who heads the progressive Shalom Center and serves two Michigan synagogues, laid out 10 alternative “nonnegotiables” of his own that he argues “Michigan Jews care just as much about.”
In an essay shared with JTA in advance of its publication, DeGroot’s own nonnegotiables include “fierce condemnation of Christian nationalism”; support for abortion rights and trans rights; and a “commitment to beating swords into plowshares,” a phrase originating in the bible that DeGroot said should also apply to opposing the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran.
Rogers would fail to meet those criteria, DeGroot wrote. Both he and Alpert are supporters of Michigan Jews for Democracy, an ad-hoc group organizing for El-Sayed.
One argument Nonnegotiable’s critics have made is that the movement has had the net effect of benefitting Rogers, who has made an aggressive play for the Jewish vote while employing campaign language about the Muslim Brotherhood that many have argued embraces Islamophobic tropes.
Organizers have expressly denied that their cause is partisan, though some of the big names who signed the Nonnegotiable letter have since cast their ballots for Rogers.
At a recent Republican Jewish Coalition event staged for Rogers, some speakers directly referenced El-Sayed’s refusal to engage with Nonnegotiable as part of the reason not to vote for him.
“When rabbis and Jewish leaders within El-Sayed’s own party came to him with five basic, nonnegotiable commitments, fundamental principles of Jewish safety, identity, and self-determination, they asked him to affirm these commitments clearly and unequivocally,” Lauren Slutsky, a parent of a Temple Israel preschooler, told the crowd. “Weeks later, we’re still waiting.”
She argued, “If a candidate cannot clearly say that Jewish safety, including the safety of Zionist Jews, is nonnegotiable, why should our community or anyone in our community give him our vote?”
Accusations flying
Nonnegotiable’s organizers have denied that their group is affiliated with any Jewish cause but their own. Zioness, which bills itself as a progressive Zionist group, is boosting them.
Yet some Jews see in the movement an echo of more hardline pro-Israel sentiment.
J Street, the national liberal Zionist lobby, seized on a video accidentally posted to Nonnegotiable’s Instagram account that showed the account holder texting with David Victor, a former president of AIPAC and a Michigan resident. The pro-Israel lobbying giant has spent millions against El-Sayed in both the primary and the general election.
The gaffe, J Street vice president of political and digital strategy Tali DeGroot told JTA, was potential evidence that Nonnegotiable’s organizers were coordinating with AIPAC-aligned figures.
“Our fear from the start with Nonnegotiable is that it plays directly into the hands of Republicans who are cynically using the issue of antisemitism for their own political gain,” DeGroot, who has no relation to Nate DeGroot, told JTA. The texting, she insisted, “just validates that fear even more.”
J Street has not formally endorsed El-Sayed, but the lobby is generally supportive of his campaign and is spending against other AIPAC-aligned candidates this midterm cycle. Neither AIPAC nor Victor responded to JTA requests for comment.
Nonnegotiable organizers, however, dispute this account and have expressly denied any involvement from AIPAC in the group.
“If I had been aware of any of the establishment forces being involved in this, or if there was a whiff of partisanship, I would not have gotten involved,” Matt Zerwekh, an initial signer of the letter who leads Temple Emanu-El in the Detroit suburb of Oak Park, told JTA.
Some have even vocally opposed the powerhouse lobby. One of Nonnegotiable’s co-founders, Rabbi Josh Whinston of Ann Arbor’s Temple Beth Emeth, published an op-ed in the Detroit Free Press on Friday condemning AIPAC for quoting him in anti-El-Sayed mailers distributed to Jewish households.
On Sunday afternoon, hours after Stevens’ endorsement of Rogers, Nonnegotiable gathered again on Zoom with guests including Zionist pundit Hen Mazzig and Michigan U.S. Rep. Hillary Scholten.
At the exact same moment as the call, pro-Israel congressional candidate Jeremy Moss was joining a cohort of Democrats castigating Stevens for her endorsement. Nonnegotiable leaders saw it differently: Starr praised Stevens for her “bravery.”
Others, such as Scholten, didn’t raise the subject at all. The congresswoman instead praised the U.S.-Israel relationship and the Iron Dome defensive system. “I’m so proud to stand as a friend and ally of our Jewish community right now,” she told those on the call.
The real purpose of the call, though, was for Nonnegotiable to suggest that Jews could write in a candidate instead of voting for either nominee.
Their top write-in pick: Emma Lazarus, the 19th-century Jewish poet best known for having her work engraved on the Statue of Liberty.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post These Michigan rabbis couldn’t get El-Sayed’s attention. Now they’re going national. appeared first on The Forward.
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Ohio Senate race between Israel supporters becomes proxy battle for AIPAC versus J Street
(JTA) — A tight race in Ohio may play a pivotal role in determining which party controls the U.S. Senate, with the two campaigns serving as a proxy battleground for two Israel lobbying groups with different ideologies.
While Republican Sen. Jon Husted is technically the incumbent, in the eyes of many voters, so is Democrat Sherrod Brown. Husted was appointed by Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine to fill the seat vacated by JD Vance when he became vice president in January 2025. He is now running to fulfill the remaining two years of that term. Brown, meanwhile, served three terms in the Senate before losing Ohio’s other Senate seat to Republican Bernie Moreno in 2024.
In the background of this close race are two pro-Israel lobbying forces: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful pro-Israel lobby supporting Husted, and the liberal J Street, a frequent critic of the Israeli government that backs Brown.
For this general election cycle, Husted has earned more than $544,000 in individual contributions earmarked for him through AIPAC, according to FEC filings. During the May special primary election, he amassed more than $306,000 in such contributions.
Husted received a direct $5,000 contribution from AIPAC’s political action committee in April, according to both FEC filings and a federal lobby disclosure. Another $5,000 in February was earmarked through AIPAC, meaning that the lobby forwarded a third party’s contribution to the campaign. Husted also received a $5,000 donation from the Republican Jewish Coalition PAC.
Asked why Husted received AIPAC’s backing, Deryn Sousa, a spokesperson for the organization, wrote that “Husted is endorsed because of his support of the U.S.-Israel relationship.”
During his short time in the Senate, Husted has voted against measures to block arms sales to Israel and joined efforts to combat antisemitism.
In April, he voted against advancing two resolutions proposed by Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, seeking to restrict sales of certain military equipment – including 1,000-pound bombs and bulldozers – to Israel. That same month, he joined the Senate Bipartisan Task Force for Combating Antisemitism, and a year before, he questioned university leaders about the safety of Jewish students on campus.
Brown has likewise been a staunch supporter of Israel and Jewish Americans, voting against advancing a previous resolution to restrict arms sales, proposed by Sanders in 2024.
In 2018, Brown sponsored the United States-Israel Security Assistance Authorization Act, which would have authorized military assistance for Israel through fiscal year 2028. He also spoke out on behalf of Jewish students amid campus protests in 2024 and warned of the dangers of antisemitism after a 13-year-old was charged with allegedly planning a mass shooting at an Ohio synagogue in 2023.
Brown has been “one of the biggest recipients of J Street bundled funds for this cycle,” according to Jordan Steinberg, a spokesperson for the group. Describing Brown as “a long-time J Street champion,” Steinberg told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the Democrat has received more than $800,000 from supporters of J Street in this race.
The biggest chunk of the funds, Steinberg continued, came via JStreetPAC, which operates as a conduit for individual donors who make contributions to candidates on J Street’s website. These contributions are then reported to the FEC as donations from individuals. The group also has a super PAC, J Street Action Fund, but Steinberg said that most donations come from individuals who contribute through the traditional PAC.
J Street in September announced that it would be stepping up lobbying efforts, investing $3 million to defeat certain Republican candidates backed by AIPAC.
“He is one of the top three recipients of our bundled dollars, and we couldn’t be more invested organizationally in his victory in November,” Steinberg added. “Brown has been a longtime champion of pro-peace, pro-democracy values, and we’re proud to stand with him this cycle.”
Other differences in financing have separated the two rivals, with each campaign accusing the other of linkages to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Brown has run ads slamming Husted for taking more than $116,000 from Ohio billionaire Les Wexner, a financial client of Epstein, with the most recent $3,500 gift occurring in July 2025, according to the Federal Election Commission.
A campaign spokesperson for Husted, Tom Evans, told JTA in a statement that “the Wexners have given to dozens of candidates from both sides of the aisle – including Sherrod Brown.” Evans noted that Husted’s campaign donated all available funds, totaling $34,000, to an anti-human trafficking charity, adding that the senator voted to release the Epstein files.
While Husted did support such legislation passed in November 2025, he supported tabling an amendment requiring disclosure of Epstein file documents to the public in September 2025.
Following Brown’s attack ads, Husted fired back with allegations that his opponent took contributions from people whose names appeared in the Epstein files. Those people included Wexner’s wife Abigail, former Harvard president and U.S. Treasury secretary Larry Summers and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. FEC records show, however, that Brown never took money from Wexner himself.
The Husted campaign has accused Brown of taking more than $150,000 from a dozen people listed in the Epstein files. Evans deemed the Democrat’s ads “hypocritical,” slamming him for sitting on the files while serving in Washington for 32 years.
The Brown campaign did not respond to JTA’s request for comment.
Apart from the clashes over contributions to each campaign, the Ohio Senate race has also included a controversy over a Husted campaign hire. The former staffer, Stephen Woytek, once used a photo of SS soldiers as his Facebook profile picture and added a playlist celebrating Rhodesia, a former white-minority-ruled state often used as a symbol by white nationalists, The Washington Post reported in September. Woytek at the time told the Post that he rejects “the racist and antisemitic ideology the SS and Nazi Germany represented,” adding that although he participates in historical reenactments for educational purposes, he should have “exercised better judgment.”
After the Post contacted the campaign about the posts, Husted reportedly dismissed Woytek.
Following the Post’s report, Ohio Democratic Party leadership said that Jewish and Black community leaders joined hands in condemning the senator “for hiring a Nazi enthusiast as a member of his senior campaign team.”
“Jewish Americans and our allies need to take action to combat the rise of antisemitism and hatred and defend our values,” Adam Rosen, Ohio chapter leader of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said in a statement.
Rosen accused Husted of showing “poor judgment” in hiring Woytek, raising doubts as to whether Jewish Ohioans should trust his judgment “when he can’t choose people for positions of power who aren’t Nazis.”
Evans, Husted’s campaign spokesperson, cited Woytek’s service in the U.S. Army and described him as a student of military history who “routinely reenacts historical battles.”
“While he denies negative intent, his social media activity displays a complete lack of judgement and disregard for its impact on others,” Evans added. He stressed that Husted “demands better of those who represent him,’ noting that the senator “made the immediate decision to part ways.”
Addressing this incident, Josh Kramer, president and CEO at Ohio Jewish Communities, emphasized that “Ohio Jewish Communities has a long history of working constructively with both sides of the local aisle, and we’re fortunate to have relationships with both Senator Husted and former Senator Sherrod Brown.”
“The controversy surrounding the former member of Senator Husted’s campaign is troubling,” Kramer added, noting, however, that “Husted acted to remove the individual once the matter was brought to his attention.”
Overall, Kramer said he believes that “Ohio has demonstrated itself to be a more moderate state, or less open to extremism, than other states.”
Looking at the election from a broader perspective, Ohio Jewish Communities’ Kramer said he was grateful that Ohio’s Jewish community has long worked with both Democrats and Republicans. While he recognized a rising tendency to link antisemitism to partisan politics, Kramer said that this race is “an opportunity for candidates to demonstrate their commitment to the safety and well-being of Ohioans, including the state’s Jewish population.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Ohio Senate race between Israel supporters becomes proxy battle for AIPAC versus J Street appeared first on The Forward.
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Haley Stevens shocks Democrats by endorsing Republican Mike Rogers. Her move could sway Jewish voters in Michigan.
Rep. Haley Stevens, a Michigan Democrat who lost a heated Senate primary to progressive Israel critic Abdul El-Sayed, endorsed his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, on Sunday in a stunning break with her party just two days before Election Day. The move could shake up one of the country’s most closely watched Senate races.
The endorsement came after a weekend of growing tension between Stevens and El-Sayed, whose fierce criticism of Israel and association with online personalities accused of antisemitism alienated some Jewish Democrats. If elected, El-Sayed would become the first Muslim in the U.S. Senate.
Stevens, a staunch supporter of Israel who received significant backing from AIPAC during the primary, had been snubbed by El-Sayed amid efforts to unite Democrats ahead of Tuesday’s election. Just last week, she told CNN she would vote for El-Sayed and was scheduled to join him at a unity rally Sunday.
But a feud escalated over the weekend after El-Sayed refused to condemn the content of an ad from a PAC supporting his campaign that blamed U.S. aid to Israel for rising grocery prices. El-Sayed, in return, accused Stevens of “relitigating a primary that ended three months ago” and again mentioned the support she received from AIPAC.
“Our Democratic nominee for Senate said I was no longer welcome in his campaign and that I should stay away,” Stevens said in a video posted on X after attending church services in Detroit with Rogers.
Speaking to the media alongside Rogers, Steven also referenced Hasan Piker, a popular left-wing pundit who has been accused of antisemitism and has campaigned alongside El-Sayed. “I don’t belong in Abdul’s campaign,” she said. “I do not stand with Hasan Piker, who gets trafficked on our college campuses.”
The surprise endorsement could influence Jewish Democrats who have struggled with whether to support El-Sayed despite their concerns about his rhetoric on Israel and antisemitism. After the March attack on Michigan’s Temple Israel, El-Sayed said, “Hurt people hurt people,” referring to the attacker having lost family in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon. He later apologized for the comment.
Some Jewish Democrats had considered leaving the Senate race on the ballot blank, similar to what the pro-Palestinian “uncommitted” movement did in the 2024 presidential election to protest the Biden-Harris administration’s support for Israel in the war against Hamas in Gaza.
Jewish voters make up just 1.4% of the electorate in the state. However, in a race so close, they could make the difference. The latest YouGov poll of likely voters in Michigan has El-Sayed up by 4 points.
Trump carried the swing state in 2024 by about 80,000 votes. In the Senate race that same year, Democrat Elissa Slotkin defeated Rogers by fewer than 20,000 votes. Even before Sunday’s development, the Republican Jewish Coalition had spent $2 million to target approximately 50,000 Jewish voters, primarily in Oakland County, who backed Stevens in the primary.
The divisions have also become personal for Stevens, who is considering converting to Judaism. Her Jewish fiancé, Jason Turkish, attended a RJC forum last week and said he would vote for Rogers.
AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, sent direct mailers to 130,000 identified Jewish voters in the swing state. It also sponsored get-out-the-vote phone calls.
Democrats try to limit the damage
The development marks one of the biggest public splits among Democrats over Israel this election cycle, as the party is fighting to win control of the Senate.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official, called Stevens’ endorsement of Rogers “a despicable betrayal.”
Schumer stood by his endorsement of El-Sayed. In a statement Sunday, he accused Republicans of “racist, Islamophobic, and over-the-top false attacks” against the Democratic nominee. He did not directly address the Stevens endorsement. Stevens, who said she is “still a very proud Democrat,” said she wants to see Schumer become Senate Majority Leader.
The endorsement also sparked a firestorm within Stevens’ own office, with her chief of staff and other aides resigning in protest. Stevens did not seek reelection to the House after running for Senate, and her term ends in December.
Republicans seized on the divide.
“Wow, this is BIG!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. “Her following is huge, and the level of respect from the People of Michigan, especially our African American and Jewish populations, is virtually unparalleled. Haley said what few people are willing to say.”
Some Jewish Democrats also heavily criticized Stevens on Sunday, saying she was hurting the party and the country. “Anyone who makes an election this important about themselves, and not Michiganders and our democracy, should think hard about whether they are serving the greater good,” Slotkin, who is Jewish and who has hit the campaign trail with El-Sayed, wrote on X.
The Jewish Democratic Council of America, an organizing body for Jewish interests in the Democratic Party, had pointedly not endorsed El-Sayed during the campaign. Yet following Stevens’ announcement, its CEO Halie Soifer wrote, “A vote for any Republican in 2026 is a vote for Donald Trump.”
Nonnegotiable Michigan, a coalition of Michigan rabbis and Jewish Democrats, scheduled an online forum for Sunday afternoon to discuss their choices — whether to support the Republicans or leave the ballot blank — after El-Sayed ignored its repeated requests to engage. “Now, with voting underway and Election Day approaching, the question is no longer only what El-Sayed will do — but what Jewish voters will do,” the group said in a statement released before the Stevens endorsement.
Piker, on social media, called Stevens “a self interested striver who’s weirdly obsessed with Israel and has been paid handsomely for this strange obsession.” El-Sayed has distanced himself multiple times from Piker since they campaigned together in the primary, including this week after Piker compared a heavily Jewish Michigan suburb to “a KKK neighborhood.”
A shift in the Jewish vote on Tuesday could help decide the Senate race. It could also offer an early test of whether divisions over Israel will cost Democrats Jewish support beyond this election and heading into the 2028 presidential race.
JTA contributed to this report.
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