New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani followed up his meeting with a group of rabbis earlier this week by touting a plan to battle antisemitism in the five boroughs — without committing to making changes in his rhetoric toward Israel that the group of Jewish religious leaders demanded.

“I had a candid and productive conversation with rabbis representing a wide swath of New York’s Jewish communities and affiliations, and I appreciated hearing from them,” Mamdani said after an unrelated event in Manhattan on Thursday. 

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), openly considering a presidential campaign in 2028, made waves over the weekend when she declared that “Woke 1.0 was crazy” in a nationally televised ABC News interview where she distanced herself from the most unpopular elements of the progressive movement. 

Left unsaid during the conversation is what specific policies in the party’s last activist wave does she think were crazy, and does she still agree with any of them? After all, the platform of the Democratic Socialists of America currently outlines many of the same issues that played a role in Democrats’ defeat in 2024 — from progressive candidates’ support for defunding the police to the Biden administration’s open-ended immigration policy that led to the second Trump administration’s harsh crackdown on refugees and undocumented immigrants. 

Clad in khaki uniforms and merit badges, hundreds of scouts gathered on a Saturday morning for a sight that has become increasingly rare in America: a Jewish prayer service without security and where nobody felt the need to look over their shoulder.  

At a moment when Jewish students contemplating the upcoming school year are weighing whether to wear or hide their Star of David necklaces as they return to the classroom, this summer’s Scouting America national jamboree in West Virginia offered a different message — holding a full, public Shabbat service for its Jewish scouts as part of an event organizers describe as one of the last unapologetically inclusive spaces for religious minorities in youth culture.

David Flippo, the Republican nominee in Nevada’s 2nd Congressional District, accepted a max-out donation from Robert Beadles, a prominent local GOP donor and commentator who has repeatedly promoted the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Flippo, a military veteran who is running in a district that strongly favors Republicans to replace Rep. Mark Amodei (R-NV), has positioned himself as a close ally of the Jewish community. But according to FEC records, he has received $7,000 in donations from Beadles — the legal allowable limit — in May and June of 2026, the only donations Beadles has made thus far this election cycle.

Andrew Gross arrived in his new role as the American Jewish Committee’s New York regional director on Monday with memories from the other side of the Hudson River — memories of the shattered JC Kosher Supermarket in Jersey City, where in December 2019 antisemitic gunmen killed three people before themselves dying in a firefight with police.

“I remember seeing the bullet casings and glass fragments on the ground,” recalled Gross, who had become executive director of the New Jersey-Israel Commission under then-Gov. Phil Murphy just a few months before. “As I do my job here at the AJC, I’m going to work with everyone to make sure that exact type of scenario does not happen again.”

Until recently, the political strategy of the American Jewish establishment could be summed up in two ways: Elect pro-Israel lawmakers to Congress and, at a much smaller scale, educate state and local officials about Jewish values and causes.

But a new model of Jewish political engagement is emerging to counter growing populist angst and surging antisemitism across the political spectrum: local efforts focused on school boards and city councils and statehouses. 

Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) dismissed the notion on Wednesday that campaign spending in her favor by AIPAC’s super PAC  backfired in her failed bid for U.S. Senate, and defended the pro-Israel group as Jewish Americans participating in the democratic process.

Stevens, who lost the Michigan Democratic Senate primary to Abdul El-Sayed last week, has faced scrutiny from progressive Democrats over her support for Israel and the role of AIPAC in supporting her campaign. Following her primary loss, Stevens endorsed El-Sayed, who is now facing former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) in the November general election.

The publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times penned an open letter to Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) on Wednesday pressing the senator over his repeated votes to block U.S. military sales to Israel, accusing Ossoff of failing to support Israel and of misrepresenting his positions to his Jewish constituents.

“I apologize for being blunt, but please, stop lying to me and your constituents. I hear you claim, over and over again, that you support Israel — that your support is ‘ironclad,’” Michael Morris wrote in the letter. “It is not. You vote against Israel on the Senate floor in Washington, then come home to Georgia and make this untruthful claim.”