Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ) urged voters in her district not to vote for East Brunswick Mayor Brad Cohen, one of the 17 candidates running to replace her, accusing him of being a “hardline supporter” of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Cohen, the top fundraiser in the field, was singled out for criticism by Watson Coleman, who declined to endorse a candidate in the 12th Congressional District primary, according to the New Jersey Globe.

“He’s a hardline supporter of Netanyahu, who is a despot, a corrupt leader,” Watson Coleman, a longtime critic of Israel, told the news outlet.

Cohen currently holds a substantial fundraising lead in the race to replace Watson Coleman, with $279,000 raised and $263,000 cash on hand as of the end of 2025.

Cohen told the Globe that Watson Coleman’s characterization of him is false, and that he disagrees with certain actions of the Israeli government.

“I have a lot of respect for Congresswoman Watson Coleman. She spent her first Passover at my house when she became a congresswoman, so our history goes back a long time,” Cohen said. “On most issues, we’re completely on the same page. But I think she’s mischaracterizing me when she calls me a hardliner.”

He did not respond to a request for comment from Jewish Insider.

Cohen is a prominent figure in the local Jewish community and a self-described AIPAC member, who also testified in support of legislation codifying the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism in the state legislature and pushed back against efforts to adopt a ceasefire resolution in the East Brunswick town council, according to the Jewish Link, a regional Jewish news outlet.

He and Watson Coleman clashed in 2019 after she voted against a resolution opposing the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting Israel, though he defended her from accusations of antisemitism a year later.

Cohen urged the East Brunswick public school district to investigate whether an antisemitic hate crime had occurred in 2024 when a picture of a Jewish student group was erased from the high school yearbook and replaced with a picture of Muslim students.

During a visit to Israel in 2022, Cohen signed a sister city agreement between East Brunswick and Yavne, Israel.

Other notable candidates in the race include Sue Altman, the former state director for Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ), a progressive activist who ran for Congress on a pro-Israel platform in 2024 in a neighboring district, and Adam Hamawy.

Hamawy is a physician and veteran who gained prominence as a vocal critic of Israel after he volunteered as a doctor in Gaza in 2024. He’s endorsed by Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), whose life he saved after her helicopter was shot down in Iraq, and he was Watson Coleman’s guest to President Donald Trump’s address to Congress in 2024.

Watson Coleman praised five of the 17 candidates in the race, including Altman and Hamawy, as “hardworking, good people,” but said she would otherwise not “[put] my finger on this in any way, shape, or form.”

Cohen has already faced antisemitic attacks during his congressional campaign, including an Instagram page dedicated to attacking him that portrays him with devil horns and drinking blood, and derisively characterizes him as “Israel first” and a “Zionist … destroying usa.”

House Democrats urged Education Secretary Linda McMahon not to make cuts to the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights as employees work through the backlog of cases, which includes scores of civil rights complaints from Jewish students alleging discrimination at their universities since the Oct.7, 2023, attacks on Israel. 

After Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ) accused McMahon and the Trump administration of being broadly unconcerned with civil rights, citing the Office of Civil Rights and the Education Department “being decimated,” McMahon responded: “It isn’t being decimated. We have reduced the size of it; however, we are taking on a backlog of cases that were left over from the Biden administration.”

Asked why she’d reduce resources to the office given the backlog from the previous administration, McMahon replied, “Because we’re working more efficiently in the department.”

Rep. Lois Frankel (D-FL) similarly urged McMahon not to make cuts to OCR “if you are sincere about fighting antisemitism and also all kinds of unlawful discrimination.” Frankel also referenced several other programs she wanted McMahon to protect, a number of which McMahon expressed openness to considering. 

After recounting an experience of a Jewish friend who took their children out of the Washington, D.C., public school system due to its unwillingness to address concerns about antisemitism, Rep. Stephanie Bice (R-OK) offered McMahon an opportunity to speak about the rise of antisemitism in primary and secondary education. 

“Certainly the president has made it very clear that he does not condone any kind of discrimination — racial and especially, we’ve seen religious, we’ve seen it across our college campuses, some of the most elite in the country. We took very strong and very decisive action against those universities who clearly were not protecting Jewish students against antisemitism,” McMahon told the committee. 

“When you see students barricaded in a library, and others pounding on the glass going, ‘Death to Jews. Death to Israel. Death to United States,’ that is unacceptable at our college campuses. And we reacted,” she continued.

McMahon went on to discuss her engagement with Columbia University, praising its acting president, Claire Shipman, for her response to student protesters involved in the takeover of the school’s main library earlier this month.

“We reacted to Columbia first. This incident happened at Columbia, and I met with the president of Columbia. I’ve had two conversations now with the current president of Columbia. We’ve talked about things that we need to do at those universities. We want to be able to be supportive, but those universities, albeit they’re private, do receive federal funding. We have leverage to withhold some of that federal funding or to cancel some of the grants, and we would do that unless it could be proven that these colleges and universities are going to respect all rights and set their policy in place and enforce them,” McMahon said.

“I was complimentary to the acting president now at Columbia, Claire Shipman, when I talked to her last week, and I said, ‘You reacted just as you said you would to the recent uprising on campus. You were looking at whether or not– you’ve suspended students, are you going to expel them?’ And that’s still what she’s looking at. So we’ve seen that that kind of action can deliver results,” she continued.