Steve Irwin, a Democratic candidate for Pennsylvania’s 12th Congressional District, speaks to supporters at a campaign event, Saturday, May 14, 2022, in Pittsburgh.

In a matter of weeks, the race for an open House seat in Pittsburgh and its surrounding suburbs has burst onto the front lines of a high-profile Democratic civil war that has figured prominently in several recent primary battles around the country, particularly where opposing approaches to Israel have fueled tensions between the party’s mainstream and activist wings, Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel reports.

In this corner: The progressive frontrunner, state Rep. Summer Lee, has consolidated support from the activist left. Justice Democrats, the combative political group, is backing her campaign, as are the range of Squad members whose ranks she is likely to join in Congress, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). Her chief rival, Steve Irwin, an attorney and Democratic activist in Pittsburgh, stands on the opposing end of the party spectrum and casts himself as eager to build on the policy objectives of the Biden administration. Irwin, 62, has drawn overwhelming support from the Democratic establishment in Allegheny County, which makes up most of the district. Rep. Mike Doyle (D-PA), the outgoing dean of Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation, has blessed his bid.

Money matters: The United Democracy Project, a new super PAC affiliated with AIPAC, the bipartisan pro-Israel lobbying group, has invested heavily in the race. For nearly the past month, UDP has unleashed a barrage of attack ads targeting Lee. The spots, which have drawn sharp rebukes from her supporters, have upended what had otherwise been a relatively staid primary, despite some simmering tensions — not least around Middle East foreign policy matters — that had already sown division at the local level. But while UDP has recently dominated the race, the three-week period during which Irwin was on TV alone, beginning in early April, seems to have been a crucial turning point in his campaign. And it is one among many dynamics that are similar to last year’s closely watched House primary in Cleveland, where Rep. Shontel Brown (D-OH) overcame a 35-point polling deficit in her come-from-behind victory over Nina Turner in Ohio’s 11th Congressional District.

Political parallels: The Pittsburgh area shares a number of characteristics with Ohio’s 11th  District, which takes in Cleveland and the suburbs of Cuyahoga County. Like Cleveland, for instance, Pittsburgh is a heavily Democratic Rust Belt enclave with a large Black population and a sizable minority of politically active Jewish voters. Those parallels have not gone unnoticed by Jewish voters in the district, many of whom watched the Cleveland race with interest and now view Irwin’s candidacy as akin to Brown’s campaign. “I call him the Jewish Shontel Brown,” Lou Weiss, a pro-Israel activist in Pittsburgh who is supporting Irwin’s campaign, quipped in a recent interview with JI. “Why? He’s a relative unknown who’s pro-Israel, coming from behind against someone who’s a future Squad member.”

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Nida Allam

It’s as much the political season in North Carolina as it is the playoffs in professional basketball and hockey, and for TV viewers in the Tarheel State, nearly every commercial break during games features a consistent onslaught of campaign ads ahead of Tuesday’s primary. It’s all part of the big-money, high-stakes race to replace longtime incumbent David Price (D-NC), where the winner of the primary is a virtual lock to win the general election in November. But unlike similar contested Democratic primaries in congressional districts in and around Cleveland and Detroit, where Israel has emerged as a key campaign issue marking a dividing line between different flanks of the party, in the Research Triangle it’s a subtle yet strong undercurrent, reports Jonah Kaplan for Jewish Insider.

Test case: The three leading candidates vying for the nomination are state Sen. Valerie Foushee, Durham City Councilwoman Nida Allam and former “American Idol” finalist Clay Aiken, and they each offer distinct options for voters in a region dominated by college campuses including Duke University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, which are blue precincts in an otherwise conservative state and home to both older, liberal professors and more progressive-minded students and young professionals. “It’s essentially this battle for what the Democratic Party looks like in a left-leaning urban area,” Colin Campbell, editor of the North Carolina Tribune and longtime state politics reporter, explained. Last year, Allam posted videos of her marching in a pro-Palestinian rally in downtown Raleigh where protestors chanted slogans such as “Israel is an apartheid state” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” – a chant widely panned as a call to eradicate the Jewish state.

AIPAC impact: Foushee has garnered support from establishment North Carolina Democrats, including the two current members of the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-NC) and Rep. Alma Adams (D-NC). Foushee has also earned the endorsement of sheriffs, police chiefs and the state’s attorney general, among many others. Foushee’s campaign has also benefited from big spending from outside groups, including UDP, whose association with AIPAC led to the North Carolina Democratic Party’s Progressive Caucus pulling its endorsement of Foushee. The caucus’ statement cited UDP’s endorsements of other candidates, including dozens of Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 presidential election. Allam’s supporters have seized on the UDP spending for Foushee, which totaled nearly $300,000 in the last filing. Critics have also blasted Foushee’s relying on cash from another PAC, Protect Our Future, whose main benefactor is billionaire and cryptocurrency investor Sam Bankman-Fried.

Political problem: “It’s always surprising when you see a minority from Chapel Hill getting pushback from progressives,” state Rep. Robert Rieves, the House minority leader in the North Carolina General Assembly, told JI of the attacks on Foushee, who is Black. “I can understand the criticism in theory, but we built an animal in politics that can’t be fed – and that’s the money required. That makes for very difficult decisions for people. We could solve a lot of this by taking money out of politics.”

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A first-of-its-kind multifaith gathering that took place last week in Saudi Arabia and openly included a delegation of Jewish religious leaders was an extremely positive step, one of the participating rabbis told Jewish Insider’s Ruth Marks Eglash, but should not be seen as a sign that the kingdom will soon enter into any sort of normalization agreement with Israel. Rabbi David Rosen, director of international interreligious relations at the American Jewish Committee, who was the only rabbi from Israel in attendance, called the meeting “historic,” saying it was a significant milestone for a country that portrays itself as the bedrock of Islam.

Internal change: However, Rosen told JI that the unprecedented gathering in the heart of the Muslim world was more about changes taking place internally in Saudi Arabia — rather than about the diplomatic process taking place in the region that was sparked by the signing of a normalization agreement between Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in September 2020. Morocco and Sudan inked their own agreements with the Jewish state in the following months. “What they are doing is for itself and its own future,” said Rosen, who has been involved in interfaith relations for decades and has visited Saudi Arabia in the past. The Saudi leadership, he added, “would love to have a normal relationship with Israel, but unless there is movement on the Palestinian front or at least a show towards a solution, there is no chance of them joining.”

Transformation: Rosen said the conference was “a transformation” in terms of Muslim-Jewish relations, adding that such a gathering in the kingdom would have been “unimaginable in the past.” “That such a multifaith conference was hosted by Saudi Arabia, which has seen itself as a kind of Muslim Vatican and which until recently viewed any presence of other religions to be undesirable, is truly a sign of new times,” Rosen said.

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