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Warsaw Ghetto Uprising’s 80th anniversary remembered with daffodils, 3 presidents and an 11th commandment against ‘indifference’
WARSAW (JTA) — Exactly 80 years ago, a few hundred ragtag, half-starved Jews emerged from sewers in Warsaw to battle Nazis – and held them off for nearly a month rather than surrender themselves and their Jewish brethren to the Treblinka and Majdanek death camps.
On Wednesday, thousands of Poles and international visitors, including Polish President Andrzej Duda, Israeli President Issac Herzog and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, marked the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in a stirring Holocaust commemoration festooned with daffodils, the emergent symbol of the largest Jewish rebellion against the Nazis during World War II.
“As German federal president, I stand before you today and bow to the courageous fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto,” Steinmeier told a few hundred politicians, Jewish leaders and others at the Ghetto Heroes Monument, marking the first time a German president has joined in the annual commemoration. “I stand before you today and ask for your forgiveness for the crimes committed here by Germans.”
This was also the first time leaders from all three countries came together for the official uprising ceremony to commemorate the fighters, none of whom are alive today. The last surviving fighter, Simcha Rathajzer-Rotem, also known as Kazik, died in December 2018. A handful of Warsaw Ghetto survivors who were not old enough to join the fighting remain, according to Holocaust scholars.
In another first, the three heads of state attended a commemorative service led by Poland’s Chief Rabbi Michael Schdurich at Warsaw’s Nozyk Synagogue. By the end of the ceremony, which was conducted mostly in Hebrew and featured Polish-Jewish children singing the Polish and Israeli national anthems, many attendees had tears in their eyes.
“I just thought, the leaders are here, this is something we should do, it’s part of building relationships and collective memory that partnerships are built on,” Schudrich told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Earlier in the day, Polish President Duda called the fighters “the heroes of the Jews all over the world” and “the heroes of Poland and the Poles.”
Herzog, a day after Yom Hashoah, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, praised the fighters for sparking hope during one of humanity’s most tragic times. “In a world falling apart, in the shadow of death, under conditions of humiliation, famine, and forced labor, in the ghettos… they succeeded — mothers, fathers, children, grandfathers, and grandmothers — in upholding human morality, mutual responsibility, faith and basic humanity,” he said.
From left to right: German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Polish President Andrzej Duda and Israeli President Issac Herzog hold hands before the 80th anniversary commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in front of the city’s Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, April 19, 2023. (German Government Press Office/Getty Images)
Wednesday’s diplomatic tribute, which also included speeches by World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder and Marian Turski, a Lodz Ghetto survivor whose so-called 11th commandment — “Thou shalt not be indifferent” — became the slogan for programming by the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews around the commemoration.
Eleven years ago, POLIN commissioned Jewish artist Helena Czernek to design a simple paper flower daffodil that has since been worn on the uprising’s anniversary to raise awareness of the day. The pin design was inspired by a commander of the uprising, Marek Edelman, who died in 2009. Each year he would receive a bouquet of daffodils to mark the anniversary date from an anonymous sender, and he would in turn place them on the city’s Monument to the Ghetto Heroes — a large sculpture standing at the site of the uprising’s first battle.
The daffodil marker has since changed the landscape of Holocaust memory in Poland, according to POLIN museum spokeswoman Marta Dziewulska.
“Our research shows that since we began our educational programs around this event, including handing out the daffodils, the rise in general public knowledge about the uprising has been enormous,” said Dziewulska.
This year, thanks in part to financial support from Lauder, a billionaire heir to the Estee Lauder fortune and a major Republican donor, the daffodil campaign reached far more people than ever, both in Poland and beyond. Throughout the center of Warsaw, the paper daffodil was ubiquitous among pedestrians and cafe dwellers across generations. All crew members on LOT Polish airline flights wore them.
For the first time, the daffodils were also distributed to 150,000 people in 100 Jewish communities around the world. More than 3,000 volunteers gave out 450,000 paper daffodils in six cities across Poland, and over 7,000 schools, libraries and cultural institutions participated in the museum’s daffodil campaign, which includes films and educational materials about the uprising.
Helena Czernek designed the paper daffodil over a decade ago. (Dinah Spritzer)
Krystyna Budnicka, who was 11 at the time of the uprising, told journalists about her story on Monday. The fighters of the Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB) were armed with home-made grenades and Molotov cocktails. In the end, roughly 13,000 Jews were were burnt alive or suffocated as the Nazis burnt down the ghetto to quell the rebellion, sending the remaining some 50,000 Jews to be murdered further east.
Budnicka told the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza that “as the ghetto was burning, the underground was like a bread oven.”
But Budnicka and some of her 10 immediate family members, none of whom survived the Holocaust, had one advantage. Her brothers and father were observant Jews who happened to be carpenters. They had constructed a bunker to lead to the sewers so that eventually, at least she and her brother, who later died of typhus, were able to make it out.
Budnicka was later taken in by a Catholic orphanage while the war was still raging and hid her Jewish identity, changing her last name to Kuczer. Until the 1990s, she told almost no one of her travels. But today she is the ambassador of POLIN Museum.
Her recollection of life at the time is limited, except that she had hope for survival. The fighters slept during the day in bunkers the Nazis couldn’t easily find, and came out of the sewers to fight at night. She remembers hunger, being the only girl among many boys and dreaming about what bread tasted like, a distant memory.
Many decades later, after the end of the Communist dictatorship, a “Children of the Holocaust” association was formed in Poland. For the first time, Budnicka and many others started telling their stories out loud, and at schools.
“Now I feel that I have to do it,” she told Gazeta Wyborcza. “When I mention my loved ones at meetings, it’s like I’m erecting a monument to my family. They live then. I see them. It’s in order: my mother Cyrla, father Josef Lejzor, brothers Izaak, Boruch, Szaja, Chaim, Rafał.”
Budnicka is not the only Warsaw Ghetto survivor to ask the world to remember what she endured. Helena Birnbaum, 93, who also survived by hiding in a bunker, participated in this year’s March of the Living — an annual Holocaust remembrance event that brings thousands of participants from around the world to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She told reporters at the march on Tuesday why she flew all the way to Poland from Israel to talk about her ordeal.
“The importance of knowing about the Holocaust is to know the person in all situations, on the brink of death,” she said. “The importance of knowing that the Holocaust was life within death and not everyone died at once. The individual stories matter.”
An iconic photo from the Warsaw Ghetto shows Jews being led by Nazis in 1943. (U.S. Holocaust Museum/Wikimedia Commons)
The act of international unity in display at the official uprising ceremony comes at a time when Poland’s right-wing government continues to espouse a nationalist narrative that international scholars say downplays Polish antisemitism and violence towards Jews before, during and after World War II. Multiple Polish laws connected to Holocaust rhetoric and restitution payments caused diplomatic tensions between Poland and Israel for years, and the two only resumed more full relations last month. The rapprochement came after Israel’s foreign minister announced the resumption of Israeli student trips to Holocaust sites in Poland, which now could include sites that explain Nazi violence against non-Jewish Poles.
Six years ago, some Polish Jews who rejected their government’s patriotic narrative launched their own uprising commemoration, which has grown from a group of hundreds to nearly a thousand. During the alternative commemoration on Wednesday, which featured Yiddish songs sung by school children and recitations of poetry by Polish-Jewish authors, participants laid paper and real daffodils at Warsaw Ghetto monuments such as Umschlagplatz, where the Nazis deportee 350,000 Jews by train to Treblinka.
Patrycja Dolowy, director of Warsaw’s Jewish community center, was an early supporter of what she called a grassroots alternative to the pomp and circumstance of the government’s ceremony, only a few hundred feet away.
“Jews were sentenced to death in the center of their own city and the majority of people outside the ghetto were doing nothing about this,” said Dolowy, who believes government focus on heroism should not erase inquiry into less heroic actions by Poles.
“If Jews were not treated before the war as strangers, it would have been much easier for everyone, Jews and non-Jews, to rise together and resist,” she theorized.
The counter-commemoration reflects the contrasting attitudes in Poland towards honoring Jewish and Holocaust memory. In 2017, the government passed a law that assured public schools taught history from a heroic, patriotic perspective, and in 2018 made it illegal to insult the Polish nation’s Holocaust record, condemning scholars who dared delve into historical Polish aggression against Jews.
Attendees shown at an alternative Warsaw Ghetto Uprising commemoration, which has grown in recent years. (Dinah Spritzer)
Jerzy Warman, 76, a Polish-born Jew participating in the non-governmental commemoration whose parents survived the Warsaw Ghetto, said the Polish government wants to turn the uprising commemoration into an event where “they can do a roll call of Poles who they say helped the Jews.”
Warman noted that his father joined Edelman at the Warsaw Uprising, a major Polish resistance campaign that took place year after the Ghetto Uprising. “The Jews tried to join the Polish Home Army as a group but were rejected by them,” Warman recalled his father explaining.
Moshe Kis, 22, a Jewish political science student from Warsaw whose grandmother spent two years in the ghetto, echoed Warman’s view.
“So many people here still don’t understand their own history,” said Kis, who will immigrate to Israel next year. He added, fiddling with a daffodil over coffee, “when the sirens went off today in honor of the uprising, I heard people around me saying on the street, ‘what is this for, are we being invaded?’”
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The Energy Dilemma: Will Washington Let the Iranian Regime Survive?
A fire burns at South Pars gas field, in Tonbak, Bushehr Province, Iran, in this screen grab from a handout video released on June 14, 2025. Photo: Social Media/via REUTERS
For the first time since the “Second Iran War” began its lightning-fast escalation across the Persian Gulf, a palpable chill has settled over the direct line between the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem and the White House.
While the last 24 hours have seen the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) systematically dismantle the command-and-control structures of the Islamic Republic, a new “Red Line” has emerged — not from Tehran, but from Washington.
Reports circulating early Wednesday suggest that the Trump administration has signaled a sharp hesitation regarding Israel’s planned strikes on Iran’s vital energy infrastructure, specifically the massive South Pars gas field.
As the IDF pushes for total “de-regimification,” the geopolitical friction between two of the world’s closest allies is reaching a boiling point. The question now haunts the halls of the Knesset: Will the American desire for global energy stability stop Israel from achieving a permanent victory?
The South Pars field is more than just a cluster of offshore platforms; it is the respiratory system of the Iranian regime. Holding an estimated 8% of the world’s natural gas reserves, it provides the hard currency that funds the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)’s regional proxies and its domestic oppression apparatus. For Israel, the logic is simple: you cannot kill the beast while you are still allowing it to breathe.
However, the global markets have reacted with predictable tremors. With the “Second Iran War” already pushing Brent crude toward historic highs, Washington’s reluctance is rooted in the fear of a global “energy shock” that could destabilize the US and world economy. The reported message from the White House to Israel has been one of containment– urging the IDF to “finish the job” on the military leadership. while leaving the energy faucets intact.
But for those who have spent decades analyzing the Middle East, this “half-measure” approach is a recipe for disaster.
Letting the Iranian Regime Survive to Fight Another Day
If the South Pars field remains operational, the regime retains the ability to re-arm, regroup, and wait out the current political storm. History is littered with “half-finished” wars that sowed the seeds of the next generation’s bloodshed. By drawing a red line at Iran’s energy assets, Washington is effectively offering the IRGC a lifeline just as it is gasping for air.
The strategic divergence is clear: Washington is playing a game of global economic management, while Jerusalem is fighting an existential war for the survival of the Jewish State.
The tension comes at a delicate moment. The elimination of Ali Larijani and Intelligence Minister Esmail Khatib signaled that the regime’s political “mask” had been shattered. The “Axis of Resistance” is crumbling, with even longtime “bridge-builders” like Qatar expelling Iranian diplomats in the wake of the latest missile skirmishes.
In the streets of Tel Aviv and the Jewish diaspora, the sentiment is one of “never again.” There is a deep-seated realization that if the Islamic Republic is allowed to survive this conflict with its economic engine intact, the cycle of terror — from Hamas to Hezbollah — will inevitably restart.
“We are not interested in ‘de-escalation’ for the sake of a cheaper gallon of gas,” one senior Israeli defense official reportedly said under the condition of anonymity. “We are interested in a Middle East where our children do not have to run to bomb shelters every six months. That requires the total neutralization of the threat.”
The Geopolitics of Victory
Peace only occurs when the enemy is convinced they have lost. By shielding Iran’s energy sector, the United States is signaling to the remnants of the mullahs that they still have cards to play. It reinforces the regime’s belief that they are “too big to fail” because of their grip on the world’s thermostat.
Moreover, the “Energy Red Line” risks alienating regional allies who have finally begun to pivot away from Tehran.
If the US appears to be protecting the regime’s assets, the incentive for Gulf states to fully align with the Abraham Accords framework diminishes. Why risk everything for a “new Middle East” if the old one is being kept on life support by Washington?
The Choice Ahead
President Trump, who has frequently touted his role as a “disruptor,” now faces his own paradox. He can choose the short-term stability of the global energy markets, or he can support the long-term stability of a world without a nuclear-armed, terror-funding Islamic Republic.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. We have seen what happens when the world chooses “management” over “victory.” It results in Oct. 7, 2023; it results in 1979; it results in a perpetual state of siege.
Israel is ready to finish the war. The only question remains: Will Washington let them win?
Amine Ayoub, a fellow at the Middle East Forum, is a policy analyst and writer based in Morocco. Follow him on X: @amineayoubx
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Can James Talarico’s faith-forward politics invigorate the Jewish religious left?
(JTA) — In a recent interview for his New York Times podcast, Ezra Klein asked Texas State Rep. James Talarico why the Christian right puts so much focus on abortion and gay marriage.
“I’m Jewish, but when I read the New Testament, I always come away a little bit amazed that politicized Christianity is so worried about gender and sexuality, and so unconcerned with greed,” said Klein.
Talarico, 36, answered in the religious language that has made him not just a political darling in Texas, where he hopes to do the unthinkable and flip a Senate seat from red to blue, but a national figure.
“You’re preaching to the choir,” Talarico responded with a knowing laugh. “Absolutely. Concern for the poor, concern for the oppressed, is everywhere. Economic justice is mentioned 3,000 times in our Scriptures, both the New Testament and the Hebrew Scriptures. This is such a core part of our tradition, and it’s nowhere to be seen in Christian nationalism or on the religious right.”
His response was what the Texas Tribune has called “archetypal Talarico fare”: a blend of religion and “progressive, populist politics.” It has also made him the standard-bearer for a resurgent religious left, which includes more than a few Jews, in Texas and beyond, who have longed for a liberal politician who can speak from and to the language of faith.
“We need the kind of religious values [that] tell us that we are all made in God’s image,” said Joshua Shanes, a historian at the University of California-Davis, explaining why he’s excited by Talarico’s candidacy. “Religious values tell us that the government should be there to create a social safety net and create a healthcare system that helps everyone, and progressive taxation.”
The majority of Jews have tended to consistently support such positions, and vote accordingly. What Talarico adds to the mix is the faith-first rhetoric of the budding minister – which he is, pursuing a degree in theology at a Presbyterian seminary.
While mainstream Democrats will invoke their religious faith on the campaign trail, they rarely make it a signature. When the late Rabbi Michael Lerner, in the pages of his Tikkun magazine in the 1990s and early 2000s, called for the need of a religious left as an alternative to the Christian right, he found few Jewish allies. Jews were long wary of a Christian right that seeks to erase the line between church and state, and, like many liberals, tended to favor what the writer Cynthia Ozick has called the “unadorned public square” — a politics where religion remains a private matter.
Jewish conservatives, meanwhile, had long made peace with the Christian right, sharing its views on public funding for parochial schools and uncritical support for Israel.
In polling done in 2024, however, the Pew Research Center and other surveys indicated that younger progressives are open to candidates whose religious faith motivates social justice commitments, as long as it doesn’t translate into restrictive policy.
Perhaps noting this trend, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, in his recent autobiography, centered his religious Jewish identity in describing his political philosophy. “Now more than ever, we yearn for and need a world defined by faith,” writes Shapiro. “It’s universal, this belief in others to help us through what feels unsettled, uncivil, un-American.”
Shanes, whose specialty is modern Jewish political and cultural history, counts himself among those who were once doctrinaire about a secular public square but who now think Americans crave “the transcendent,” even in their politics. He views Talarico’s political message not just as a novelty, but as a necessity.
“My goal is a humanist morality,” he said, “and I don’t think a secular version of it is going to succeed, not in America.”
Talarico similarly talks about his religion as a source of his political values, but not as a means of coercion. Last year, Talarico opposed legislation requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public school classrooms. “I found it offensive as an educator that we would impose one religious tradition onto all of our students, including students that don’t belong to that particular tradition,” Talarico, who taught language arts at a public school in San Antonio, explained at the time.
“He thinks that protections in the Constitution are good for Christianity, good for Judaism and good for all people and religion, because teaching religion is appropriate in the churches and not in the government,” said Marc Stanley, a Houston attorney, former U.S. ambassador to Argentina and prolific Democratic fundraiser.
Raised in the Austin suburb of Round Rock by a single mother, Talarico grew up attending a Presbyterian church. His grandfather was a Baptist minister. In 2018, he flipped a swing district in Round Rock, becoming the youngest member of the Texas House at 29.
Even before last month’s Democratic primary, he attracted an enormous online following (for a politician) for videos explaining his religious, liberal worldview. On TikTok, where he posts clips with titles like “Love can win” and “There is nothing more un-Christian than stealing from the poor to give to the rich,” he has 1.6 million followers.
But it was his conversation last month with Stephen Colbert that brought him national attention, and arguably led to his victory over U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett in the Democratic primary for the Senate seat. When CBS told Colbert that broadcasting the interview on “The Late Show” would violate “equal time rules,” it ran instead on YouTube, where the controversy drove over 7.5 million views.
That interview also suggests another aspect of his appeal to a religious Jewish left: He disdains Christian nationalism, a movement to codify in law and culture that the United States is a Christian nation. “There is nothing Christian about Christian nationalism,” he told Colbert. “It is the worship of power in the name of Christ and it is a betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth.”
“His entire appeal to a lot of people is that he is using scripture to come at the right-wing Christian fundamentalist element in the state of Texas,” said Art Pronin, president of Meyerland Area Democrats in a heavily Jewish part of Houston.
Talarico’s language has won over even Jewish liberals who don’t regard themselves as religious, but see in his message a necessary corrective to the politics of the Texas Statehouse and the Trump White House.
“He has succeeded in reviving a certain kind of humanism which was, going back to the Renaissance, tied to religious belief, tied to Christian values, tied to Jewish values,” said Robert Zaretzky, a historian at the University of Houston and a self-described “cultural” Jew. “And when I talk about Jewish values, what I have in mind is menschlichkeit … a kind of decency for one’s fellow man. And that is just so evident in Talarico’s words, in his actions, and in the way that he has voted in the Texas State Legislature.”
Zaretzky also sees in Talarico a connection to Jewish tradition, whether it is the prophet Micah — “Act justly and love mercy” — or the Talmudic sage Hillel: “What is hateful to you, do not do to others. All the rest is commentary.”
“That is the essence of Talarico’s message, and something that drives Texas Republicans absolutely crazy,” said Zaretzky. Indeed, many conservative Christians regard Talarico’s views as heretical, because he uses church vocabulary to promote liberal views. Angry evangelicals often refer to him as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
Of course, even a politician in such heady company as Micah and Hillel has liabilities. In December, the Jewish news site JNS reported that some Jewish leaders in Texas were “alarmed” by Talarico’s views on Israel. Among other things, he had decried “the atrocities in Palestine,” and pledged that he wouldn’t “fund these war crimes” and will vote “to ban offensive weapons to Israel.”
Talarico also said he wouldn’t accept support from AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby that has become radioactive on both the left and far right.
Pronin remembers a town hall back in December, when Talarico repeated his criticisms of Israel.
“It has set up a lot of conflicted feelings in the Jewish community on his candidacy,” he said. “On the one hand, he is a very appealing candidate on many other key issues that we would care about, like health care and the economy. Israel? Not as much.”
Stanley, a Talarico supporter, isn’t troubled by the candidate’s views on Israel, which are becoming increasingly common in the Democratic Party.
“I think that we as a Jewish community make a mistake vilifying people or casting people as anti-Israel or antisemitic because they have the nerve to criticize somebody like Netanyahu,” said Stanley.
In January, in an email to Jewish supporters in Texas, Talarico promised that if he is elected to the Senate he will vote for arming Israel with defensive weapons. He wrote that he supports a two-state solution and removing Hamas from power, and referred to Oct. 7 as “the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.”
“I think it is a very balanced and very bold position,” said Stanley.
And for pro-Israel Jews inclined toward progressive domestic politics, it may be a position that they will have to tolerate, or cede elections to Republicans who don’t criticize Israel, but disagree with them on nearly everything else.
Rabbi Nancy Kasten, the chief relationship officer at Faith Commons, an interfaith organization in Dallas, says there is “a lot of enthusiasm” for Talarico in the Jewish community. Still, she acknowledges that some of the things he has said about Israel have given critics the opportunity to pounce.
Kasten also said that some of his religious language is “jarring” for Jews, especially in invoking certain New Testament tropes.
She was looking forward to an upcoming meeting with the candidate, and hopes that he will be open to a conversation about how his language on Israel and religion lands in the Jewish community.
“Personally, I want a voice for separation of church and state, which we don’t have anymore,” she said. That said, she added, “I’m happy that there’s a different religious voice in the public square. Ceding that voice to the white, Christian, nationalist voice is harmful, and so I’m grateful that there’s somebody who seems to have the ear of people who speak that language and desire that language in politics and I’m grateful to have someone like that under the circumstances.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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JB Pritzker once sat on AIPAC’s national board. Now he says he wants nothing to do with it.
(JTA) — Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker blasted AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group, and other special interest groups that poured money into Illinois’ House and U.S. Senate races this week.
A Jewish Democrat who was once an AIPAC donor, Pritzker called the $70 million in outside spending “interference,” and said AIPAC in particular had lost its way as a truly bipartisan group.
“It became an organization that was supporting Donald Trump and people who follow Donald Trump,” Pritzker told the Associated Press. “AIPAC really is not an organization that I think today I would want any part of.”
AIPAC’s spending in a handful of Illinois congressional primaries was often at the center of the races’ coverage. The pro-Israel group claimed victory after none of the “Squad”-type, anti-Israel progressives won the nomination, though two of its four preferred House candidates lost.
Critics panned AIPAC for spending mostly through “shell PACs,” with innocuous-sounding names like “Elect Chicago Women” and “Affordable Chicago Now,” and said that was an indicator of AIPAC’s rapidly diminishing popularity among Democrats.
Pritzker, who is from one of Illinois’ wealthiest and most philanthropic families with a record of giving to Jewish causes, has a long record of supporting Israel. In 2013, he was honored at a fundraiser for Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces. He was once on the national board of AIPAC, and he spoke at a pro-Israel rally in the days following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
He is also a possible presidential candidate in party where a poll this week found that only 13% of members say they have a “positive” view of Israel, and where refusal of AIPAC support has become something of a litmus test.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, also seen as likely to run in 2028, proudly said last month that he never has and “never will” accept any money from AIPAC.
While many Democrats’ positions on Israel have shifted over the course of the Gaza war, AIPAC has remained steadfast in drawing a red line against candidates who are open to conditioning military aid to Israel. Pritzker would be one of those candidates.
Though governors do not vote on matters of foreign policy, Pritzker came out in support of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ resolutions limiting weapons sales to Israel in 2025, saying it would send “the right kind of message.”
His comments on Wednesday were not his first public criticism of the group that he was once a donor to.
“I abandoned AIPAC more than a dozen years ago,” he said in a New York Times interview earlier this month. “It was an organization that had at one time been bipartisan in nature and really all about preserving a strong relationship between the United States and Israel. But about a dozen years ago, the organization began to lean much more to the right and much more pro-Trump, who had then become a candidate for president, and that disturbed me greatly.”
Pritzker noted that AIPAC was purely a public affairs council, and not a PAC at the time, meaning that it did not give money to candidates. It began donating directly to candidates only after forming a PAC in 2021.
“But the organization became political,” he said. “They created a super PAC. They began to get involved in elections directly and choosing to support candidates who were MAGA and right-wing and Trumpy.”
AIPAC, which prides itself on supporting candidates on both sides of the aisle, has faced criticism for endorsing more than 100 lawmakers who’d voted to overturn the election results after Trump’s loss on Jan. 6, 2021.
“I just didn’t want anything to do with that,” Pritzker said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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