Following last year’s contentious assembly mired in allegations of antisemitism, the National Education Association — the nation’s largest teachers’ union — adopted new policies for its upcoming Denver convention aimed at preventing the same chaos, the NEA confirmed to Jewish Insider. 

“Leading up to this year’s Representative Assembly, we are taking significant steps to ensure all of our members are respected and supported at the event based on extensive feedback and consultation with the Jewish Affairs Caucus, Jewish members, and partners in the Jewish community,” an NEA spokesperson told JI.

Dozens of LGBTQ Jews and allies gathered Tuesday evening at Adas Israel Congregation in Washington for a Pride event hosted by the Israeli Embassy, with speakers honoring the legacy of slain embassy staffer Sarah Milgrim and reflecting on the challenges she faced in progressive spaces, despite being an ally of the community. 

The event, held as Pride celebrations concluded at the end of June, paid tribute to Milgrim, who helped lead the embassy’s outreach to LGBTQ communities before she and her partner, Yaron Lischinsky, were killed in a shooting outside the Capital Jewish Museum in May 2025.

New polling data shows that a sizable majority of Jewish voters disapprove of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s job performance and fear he is pushing the Democratic Party too far to the left, in contrast with non-Jewish voters who hold a largely favorable view of the outspoken democratic socialist.

The gap between Jewish and non-Jewish survey respondents underscores the degree to which Jewish Democrats in New York and across the country increasingly feel out of place in their party amid a rise in antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment on the far left, which has gained traction in recent state and congressional elections.

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, the Democratic nominee for governor, criticized his party’s socialist congressional nominee Melat Kiros for her refusal to describe the deadly firebombing of a Boulder, Colo., hostage awareness march last year as an act of antisemitism.

Kiros, speaking last week to 9News, a local channel, declined to call the attack antisemitic, because “I don’t know what was in the heart of the perpetrator. … I don’t know what his intentions were.”

The AIPAC-linked United Democracy Project is launching its first negative ad in the Michigan Senate race, targeting Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed, just over a month before the state’s primary elections.

According to FEC filings, the group spent more than $2 million in the initial ad buy targeting El-Sayed.

A bipartisan group of House lawmakers wrote to President Donald Trump on Thursday to “express deep concern about any effort to sell F-35s to Turkey.”

The letter comes after Trump and Vice President JD Vance publicly discussed plans to push the sale ahead at the White House last week, in spite of continued legal restrictions prohibiting such a sale, and ahead of a NATO summit in Ankara next week.

When Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ) narrowly prevailed in the Democratic primary for an open House seat in Phoenix in 2024, winning by just 36 votes in a deep-blue district, the Arizona lawmaker could attribute her success, in part, to strong backing from the local Jewish community as well as a surge of outside spending from a prominent pro-Israel group.

Many Jewish and pro-Israel leaders in the state and beyond were encouraged that Ansari, who identifies as a progressive, staked out what seemed at the time like a moderate approach to Middle East policy issues amid rising Democratic hostility toward Israel over the war in Gaza — particularly in the party’s far-left wing.

Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-MI) is facing a serious primary threat from state Rep. Donavan McKinney, a left-wing challenger backed by several anti-Israel groups including Justice Democrats and TrackAIPAC.

Those groups are riding high, coming off of a recent wave of congressional primary victories in New York City and, most recently, Colorado, which they say point to a desire for a leftward shift in the Democratic Party and, in particular, rejection of support for Israel and pro-Israel groups among the Democratic base. Thanedar is one of their next top targets.