HORNS AND HATE

Jewish Colorado AG targeted with campaign poster depicting him with devil horns

Phil Weiser, a Democrat, is the party’s nominee for governor

Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images

Colorado gubernatorial candidate, state Attorney General Phil Weiser speaks at an election-night watch party after winning the Democratic primary, at Ace Eat Serve on June 30, 2026 in Denver, Colorado.

By

Marc Rod

August 4, 2026

A campaign poster circulating among Colorado Republicans depicts Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, who is Jewish and whose family members are Holocaust survivors, with devil horns, which critics say invokes a classic antisemitic trope.

Weiser is the Democratic nominee for governor of Colorado.

The poster promotes, but was not created by, Victor Marx, the GOP gubernatorial nominee, who has a bizarre and extremist history, including claiming to have killed and exorcised several people. It describes Weiser, depicted in front of a menacing background, as “the next threat to Colorado” and “radical,” “extreme” and “dangerous.”

Montrose County Commissioner Sean Pond, who created the image, told KUSA-TV’s Kyle Clark, who first reported on it, that he did not know Weiser is Jewish, that the poster did not have any religious message and “Weiser does not receive immunity from political satire because of a personal fact I did not even know.”

In promoting Marx, one version of the poster makes multiple references to Marx’s “faith,” including depicting him alongside an icon of a cross. Marx is the founder of a Christian humanitarian organization.

Marx responded supportively to an X post by Pond calling for unity among Colorado Republicans, which included a version of the devil horns image.

“We get one shot[,] one. If Republicans spend the next few months attacking each other instead of presenting a united front against Phil Weiser, we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves if we lose,” Marx said in his comment. “We don’t have to agree on every issue or every decision, but we do have to remember what’s at stake. Colorado can’t afford more division. It’s time to unite, stay focused, and win.”

Many Republicans in the state have kept Marx at arm’s length since his primary win, owing to his strange and controversial history, declining to endorse his campaign. During the GOP primary, his Republican rivals said they would not support him if he became the nominee.

“Depicting Jews with horns is a centuries-old antisemitic trope. Victor Marx and Colorado Republicans should reject and condemn this graphic and call it what it is — antisemitism,” Weiser said in a statement to Jewish Insider. “These images have no place in our state. Hate against any group must be treated as hate against all of us. Coloradans deserve a governor who will always fight back against bigotry and for the rights and freedoms of all.”

Marx’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

The Colorado Democratic Party called the poster “antisemitic and disgusting” and demanded that Marx and other Republicans condemn it.

Melat Kiros, a far-left Democratic congressional nominee in the state who herself has faced criticism for refusing to describe the firebombing of an Israeli hostage awareness march in Boulder, Colo., in which a Holocaust survivor died, also condemned the post.

“This is a shameful characterization that perpetuates antisemitic conspiracy theories and there is no room for this bigotry in our politics,” Kiros said.

ON SECOND THOUGHT

Melat Kiros backtracks from conciliatory tone on Israel, antisemitism after far-left backlash

Kiros said she ‘fumbled’ an interview where she had called on progressives to formulate a stance on Israel that doesn’t traffic in antisemitism

Screenshot

Congressional candidate Melat Kiros on 'Firing Line with Margaret Hoover'

By

Danielle Cohen-Kanik

August 2, 2026

Far-left Colorado congressional candidate Melat Kiros backtracked on Sunday from her conciliatory tone in a PBS interview on the need for progressives to formulate a policy on Israel that does not engage in antisemitism.

Appearing on “Firing Line with Margaret Hoover” on Saturday morning, Kiros, who ousted incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO) in a Denver-area district in June, said her “greatest concern right now is that the State of Israel is losing support all across the political spectrum” and that progressives are “leaving a vacuum” for far-right commentators like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens to fill by “pretending to care about Palestinian safety when really it’s just masking their overt hatred for Jewish people.”

“If we are not presenting our vision of what we believe in with our democratic values — that extends not to the Palestinian people but to the Israeli people and the Jewish people — you know, that land has a distinctly Jewish character, a distinctly Christian character, a distinctly Muslim character,” she said. “We, I think, are doing a disservice to the people of that region by not offering our progressive vision in a way that isn’t immediately swatted down as, you know, bigoted or antisemitism.”

Kiros’ comments marked a short-lived departure from her stances on the campaign trail, where she had been vocally critical of Israel and was criticized for refusing to deem the 2025 firebombing attack on a march raising awareness for Israeli hostages in Boulder as antisemitic. Her candidacy came after she was fired from the law firm Sidley Austin in 2023 for writing a public letter denouncing the hundreds of law firms that signed a petition calling on law schools to do a better job addressing antisemitism on their campuses, a letter she said wrongly conflated criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

The 29-year-old doctoral student, who was backed by the Democratic Socialists of America in her campaign, quickly reversed course after the interview aired. Responding on Sunday to criticism on X from Al Jazeera producer Sana Saeed, Kiros said she “fumbled this line, plain and simple.”

“To be clear, my foreign policy priority is ending Israel’s occupation, apartheid, and genocide in Palestine. I also reject the notion that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, and it’s important that we distinguish the two in order to combat actual antisemitism,” she continued.

Kiros said she had been trying to express that as the Democratic Party “refuses to lead morally on this issue, they are letting antisemites on the right co-opt the movement for Palestinian liberation while giving fodder to AIPAC talking points.”

“But Sana is right, a movement for liberation must center the Palestinians being oppressed, occupied, and systematically exterminated — and the islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism used to justify genocide is too often ignored.”

CALLED OUT

Top Colorado Democrat criticizes Kiros for continued refusal to call Boulder attack antisemitic

Attorney General Phil Weiser, the Democratic nominee for governor, made the comments after she declined to call the Boulder firebombing antisemitic

Photo by Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images

Colorado gubernatorial candidate, state Attorney General Phil Weiser speaks at an election-night watch party after winning the Democratic primary, at Ace Eat Serve on June 30, 2026 in Denver, Colorado.

By

Marc Rod

July 2, 2026

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.”

Melat Kiros, a DSA-backed congressional candidate in Colorado, declined to call the Boulder firebombing attack antisemitic in an interview with the local channel 9News.

"I don't know what was in the heart of the perpetrator," Kiros said.

Read more: https://t.co/rtQDjet1sl pic.twitter.com/jcK9qsMhH5
— Jewish Insider (@jewishinsider) June 26, 2026

Weiser, who is Jewish, said in an interview with the same channel that he was concerned by Kiros’ comments, noting that he was personally friendly with Karen Diamond, the Holocaust survivor killed in the attack, and her husband.

“What happened on June 1 in Boulder was an antisemitic attack,” Weiser said. “We cannot look at that murder and say anything else happened than a hate crime, and so if someone isn’t going to acknowledge that I’m concerned about that, because this was tried, this was how we have a conviction” for a hate crime.

He said that he hasn’t spoken to Kiros yet, but when he does, he would raise his concerns about her comments.

“You hear it a lot in the context of Black Lives Matter — now we’re talking Jewish lives matter,” Weiser said. “Black Lives Matter, period. Black Lives Matter — Elijah McClain’s life mattered. Period. You don’t put a comma. Jewish lives matter. Karen Diamond’s life mattered. You don’t put a comma, an ‘and’ or a ‘but.’ Period.”

In a CNN interview on Wednesday, Kiros described the attack as “a horrific attack on a group of Jewish people that were engaging in peaceful protest” which “made many Jewish people … feel incredibly unsafe” but she again declined to directly call the attack antisemitic.

“The fact of the matter is, is that this conflation between the actions of the state of Israel and Judaism and the Jewish people is making Jewish people less safe. It is leading to a rise in antisemitism that’s taking place all across our country,” Kiros said. “My commitment is to protecting the sanctity and dignity of life for everyone. That means standing strong, side-by-side to our Jewish brothers and sisters and neighbors, to make sure that they are protected against this rising hate and this rising antisemitism.”

Pressed again on why she didn’t call the attack antisemitic, Kiros insinuated that Israel’s military actions in Gaza were to blame for the attack.

“What we’re talking about here is attacks that are taking place on the Jewish community as a result of the actions that are taking place in Palestine, the genocide that is taking place in Palestine, actively making Jewish people less safe in our city and across our country,” she said.

She repeated that “our commitment has to be to combating that hate, combating the conflation between the actions of the state and the Jewish people and standing against this antisemitism.”

Kiros’ campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Daily Kickoff

The socialist wave washes over Colorado

Plus, Bruce Pearl's warning to JD Vance

Photo by Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images

Democratic congressional candidate Melat Kiros speaks to supporters at an election-night watch party after winning the Colorado primary on June 30, 2026 in Denver, Colorado.

By

JI Staff

July 1, 2026

Good Wednesday morning.

In today’s Daily Kickoff, we cover the results of yesterday’s Democratic primaries in Colorado, where the momentum for far-left, anti-Israel candidates in the party continued. We talk to House Democrats about whether they think Israel’s right to exist in safety and security should continue to be a policy position of their party and highlight the division within their party over a push by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) to slash $3.3 billion in military aid the U.S. is set to provide Israel. We also report on a failed effort, which most House Democrats voted for, to block U.S. support for Israeli operations against Hezbollah. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Ellie Cohanim, Bruce Pearl and Mark Isakowitz.

Today’s Daily Kickoff was curated by JI Israel Editor Tamara Zieve and U.S. Editor Danielle Cohen-Kanik with an assist from Marc Rod. Have a tip? Email us here.

What We’re Watching

Technical delegations from the U.S. and Iran are meeting separately with Qatari and Pakistani mediators in Doha, but have no plans to meet directly. A senior Iranian official told Reuters that the focus of ‌the discussions is the release of Tehran’s frozen funds and the Strait of Hormuz, while President Donald Trump indicated on Monday that the negotiations would focus on Iran’s nuclear program.
The Wall Street Journal reveals that after Saudi Arabia blocked U.S. military access needed for Project Freedom — Trump’s operation to crack open the Strait of Hormuz — and prompted the White House to threaten to withhold missile interceptors from the kingdom, the confrontation triggered a widening rift in the U.S.-Saudi relationship, with the U.S. now considering reducing its military footprint in the kingdom. Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited the Gulf last week but skipped a visit to Saudi Arabia; the week before, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman declined an invitation to attend the G7 summit in France, reportedly in protest of the U.S.’ handling of the war with Iran.
Some of the most prominent figures in U.S.-Israel diplomacy, Israeli national security and the American Jewish community are gathering at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, to help train a new generation of leaders confronting Israel’s evolving strategic challenges, as part of a pilot program that ends on Thursday. Among the faculty is former Ambassador Dennis Ross, the veteran Middle East negotiator who advised four U.S. presidents; Howard Kohr, the former longtime executive director of AIPAC; and Malcolm Hoenlein, who for decades served as executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Read more in eJewishPhilanthropy.
The Herzliya Conference wraps up today in Israel: Among the many top national security and political officials speaking are former Prime Ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid; former Israeli Ambassadors to the U.S. Danny Ayalon and Michael Herzog; former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro; EU Ambassador to Israel Michael Mann; Yashar party leader Gadi Eisenkot; Yisrael Beiteinu party leader Avigdor Liberman; Democrats party leader Yair Golan; Ra’am party leader Mansour Abbas; and Nadav Tamir, executive director of J Street Israel.
And the Aspen Ideas Festival concludes today in Colorado. Jeff Flake, the former U.S. senator and former U.S. ambassador to Turkey; the Atlantic Council’s Ian Brzezinski; and the Stimson Center’s Emma Ashford will speak on a panel about the “next chapter of the trans-Atlantic relationship.”

What You Should Know

A QUICK WORD WITH JI’S JOSH KRAUSHAAR

Progressives in Colorado scored a number of key victories Tuesday night, including Democratic Socialists of America-aligned candidate Melat Kiros’ defeat of Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO) in the state’s 1st Congressional District.

The Colorado results suggest that, far from being contained to a few scattered congressional districts in New York City, the momentum for far-left, anti-Israel candidates is only growing within the Democratic Party, especially within urban population centers.

Kiros, a 29-year-old doctoral student, campaigned on her hostility to Israel and faced scrutiny when she declined to call the firebombing attack on a hostage awareness march in Boulder, Colo., antisemitic. DeGette, despite a long-standing progressive record in Congress, struggled to satisfy a critical mass of Democratic voters who preferred a more radical choice, especially when it came to opposing Israel.

Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) survived a scare from a little-known socialist challenger, state Sen. Julie Gonzales, but only won renomination with less than 60% of the Democratic vote. Even in the vote-rich Denver suburbs, the far-left challenger came within striking distance of the state’s well-known senator and former governor.

Former state Rep. Shannon Bird, a moderate championed by Democratic Majority for Israel, lost badly to state Rep. Manny Rutinel for the Democratic nomination in Colorado’s swing 8th District, currently held by Rep. Gabe Evans (R-CO). With most votes counted, Rutinel holds a 28-point lead over Bird, 62-34%.

Read the rest of ‘What You Should Know’ here.

PLATFORM PUNT

Top Democrats won’t commit to supporting Israel’s security in party platform

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) walks to a House Democrat caucus meeting at the U.S. Capitol on May 31, 2023 in Washington, D.C.

The official 2024 Democratic Party Platform, released by the DNC for former President Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris, stated that party leaders “believe a strong, secure, and democratic Israel is vital to the interests of the United States” and that the party’s “commitment to Israel’s security, its qualitative military edge, its right to defend itself … is ironclad.” Several House Democrats, including in leadership and top progressives, however, remain divided or noncommittal over whether Israel’s right to exist in safety and security should continue to be a policy position of the Democratic Party, Jewish Insider’s Matthew Shea reports.

What they’re saying: When asked on Tuesday whether support for Israel’s right to exist in safety and security should continue to be an official policy position of the Democratic Party moving forward, House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) instead told JI that Democrats are “continuing to focus on driving down the high cost of living, fixing our broken healthcare system and cleaning up corruption in an environment where the Trump cartel is the most corrupt administration in American history.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) also did not provide a concrete answer, telling JI she is “less concerned with slogans” and more interested in “what it would mean in terms of policy.”

Read the full story here with additional comments from Reps. Greg Casar (D-TX), Pete Aguilar (D-CA), Jamie Raskin (D-MD) and Jim McGovern (D-MA).

Breaking away: Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said she’ll no longer accept support from AIPAC, a major break with the pro-Israel group by one of the key power players in the House, JI’s Marc Rod reports.

DEM DEBATE

Democrats remain divided over push to eliminate Israel aid amid House floor gridlock

Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., leaves the U.S. Capitol after the last votes of the week on Friday, May 15, 2026.

House Democrats remain divided over a push by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) to slash $3.3 billion in military aid the U.S. is set to provide Israel in the 2027 State Department funding bill, and top Democratic leaders are continuing to keep their own positions vague, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports. Consideration of the amendment is now delayed until at least July 13, after hard-right Republicans again brought proceedings on the House floor to a halt.

Where things stand: House Democratic leaders on Tuesday declined to say how they plan to vote or advise other members to vote following a closed-door caucus meeting. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said, “Those conversations are ongoing,” while No. 3 House Democrat Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-CA) suggested that U.S. “aid and support” for Israel may not “go on forever.” Meanwhile, Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT), the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, joined colleagues on other national security committees in saying he’ll oppose the amendment, but progressive leaders maintained that many members will support the effort.

Read the full story here.

War powers play: Nearly all House Democrats voted for a war powers resolution on Tuesday that aimed to block U.S. support for Israeli operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon, though the legislation failed to secure a House majority, with nearly all Republicans and 22 Democrats voting against the measure.

RED SCARE

Democratic leaders brush off Avila Chevalier’s posts praising communism, say she’s changed

Congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier speaks at a rally at King’s Theater on June 18, 2026 in New York City.

Asked about New York City congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier’s reported past comments supporting communism, House Democratic leaders suggested this week that she had changed and moderated her views,Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.

Jeffries’s defense: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said, when asked about Avila Chevalier’s previous comments supportive of communism, that Avila Chevalier is “going to have to speak for herself in terms of what she said in the past” but said she has been “pretty clear that she’s walked away from many of the things that have been unearthed, and has pretty clearly indicated that she’s a different person, but that’s for her, ultimately, to communicate, and I’m confident that she will, as best she can.”

Read the full story here.

Party problem: New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin — the first Jewish person to hold her role — slammed a newly elected Brooklyn Democrat’s promotion of antisemitic conspiracy theories, but declined to call her commentary disqualifying, JI’s Will Bredderman reports.

BORN IN THE USA

Several Jewish groups celebrate Supreme Court ruling protecting birthright citizenship

Demonstrators rally in support of birthright citizenship outside the U.S. Supreme Court on April 1, 2026 in Washington, DC.

Several Jewish groups celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision on Tuesday to uphold birthright citizenship and strike down a Trump administration executive order that aimed to eliminate citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants and those in the U.S. on temporary visas, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.

Weighing in: The American Jewish Committee, HIAS and the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism all joined an amicus brief against the executive order with various other religious groups, and praised the Supreme Court’s decision. The National Council of Jewish Women and Jewish Council for Public Affairs also weighed in in support of the justices’ ruling.

Read the full story here.

PEARL OF WISDOM

Bruce Pearl won’t commit to backing JD Vance in 2028 unless the VP breaks from Tucker Carlson

Bruce Pearl speaks at a Christians United for Israel event.

Bruce Pearl, the veteran former Auburn University men’s basketball coach, told Jewish Insider’s Emily Jacobs that Vice President JD Vance needs to “make a decision” about his continued association with far-right commentator Tucker Carlson, warning that his support of Vance’s expected 2028 presidential bid will be contingent on the vice president severing ties with the antisemitic podcaster.

‘Enemies of the state’: Pearl, who is currently splitting his time between pro-Israel political advocacy and serving as an analyst for TNT and CBS Sports, made the comments in an interview with JI on Monday while discussing the rise of right-wing antisemitism and the prominence of Carlson, neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes and other commentators who promote antisemitic ideas within the America First right-wing movement. Pearl argued that Carlson and Fuentes “are absolutely enemies of the state. What they’re doing is treasonous, it’s disgusting and it’s not based on fact. It’s based on lies and propaganda and antisemitism. They’re bought and paid for, but they’ve got huge followings.”

Read the full interview here.

COHANIM COMEBACK

Former antisemitism official Ellie Cohanim tapped as advisor to U.N. Ambassador Mike Waltz

Luke Moon speaks onstage during the Allied to Fight Extremism panel at Unite Against Extremism on April 29, 2026 in New York City. (Photo by Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for End Jew Hatred / The Lawfare Project)

Ellie Cohanim, who served as deputy special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism in President Donald Trump’s first term, recently joined his administration as a senior policy advisor to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Mike Waltz, Waltz announced on Tuesday, Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch reports. Cohanim was born in Tehran and left Iran as a child in 1979, following the Islamic Revolution. She came with her family to New York.

Waltz’s words: “Ellie’s story is the American story,” Waltz said in a statement. “Her family fled persecution in Iran, built a life in New York, and she has spent her career looking for ways to serve America, fighting for freedom, standing with the persecuted, and calling out antisemitism wherever it hides. That is exactly the kind of conviction and courage we need at the United Nations.”

Read the full story here.

Scoop: As Washington prepares to host a weekend of July Fourth hoopla on the National Mall, senior Trump administration officials, diplomats and Jewish communal leaders will gather on Friday evening across from the Lincoln Memorial for a Shabbat dinner celebrating America’s 250th birthday.

Worthy Reads

When the DSA Came for Lander: Park Avenue Synagogue Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove penned a letter dated two years from now, published in the New York Daily News, to New York Democratic congressional nominee Brad Lander, predicting that he will be ousted by a Democratic Socialists of America-backed candidate in the next primary. “They told you it was never about being a Jew — only about being a Zionist — as if the two could be peeled apart, as if your Jewishness had nothing to do with the nation they demanded you disown. There’s an old teaching about the man who thinks he can ride the tiger and dismount whenever he likes. You didn’t tame the coalition you joined. You were, for one term, useful — until the moment it decided to disown you. You could renounce the policy, the lobby, even Zionism, but you could not renounce being a Jew.” [Daily News]

Drone Prone: Foreign Policy’s John Haltiwanger unpacks Israel’s “Hezbollah drone problem.” “After the fighting resumed in March, it wasn’t long before explosive drones were a leading cause of battlefield deaths for Israel in Lebanon. As a result, Netanyahu established a team of experts to address the issue and pledged to give the IDF an unlimited budget to address the Hezbollah drone threat. But there are no simple solutions. … In ancient Rome, gladiators used nets to entangle opponents before moving in for the kill. Today, Israeli troops are using the same primitive tool to defend against drones and intercept them before they reach their targets. The situation is indicative of how militaries have struggled to find countermeasures to drones and have been forced to adapt, particularly as the technology evolves at such a rapid pace.” [FP]

Separate But Equal: Hannah Rosenthal, former special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism under the Obama administration, argues in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency against the proposal of combining the role of the antisemitism envoy with that of the special envoy on Holocaust issues. “The office of special envoy on antisemitism and the special envoy on the Holocaust are complementary, but not duplicative. The former works to address contemporary antisemitism, hate crimes, extremism and government policy around the world. The latter focuses on historical justice, restitution, remembrance, archives and Holocaust-era accountability. The United States deliberately created separate offices because both missions are full time responsibilities.” [JTA]

Jews Turning on Israel: Actor and Jewish commentator Jonah Platt argues in a post on X against the trope of the young, “self-hating” Jew in an essay on X. “It’s maddening. It’s dangerous. It’s irresponsible. It’s shameful. But it isn’t nefarious. It isn’t Jew-hatred, it isn’t self-hatred, and honestly, it isn’t that hard to understand. These are disconnected, uneducated people, surrounded by like-minded peers, all reinforcing one another in a disconnected, uneducated worldview — one they’re not especially invested in anyway, and focus on only because progressive society says they’re supposed to.” [X]

Word on the Street

President Donald Trump is considering returning to a full-scale military conflict with Iran and has discussed the idea with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine in recent days, The Wall Street Journal reports, but has decided to continue on the diplomatic track for now…

In an analysis of the U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies found that the Trump administration is “evidently not applying [the 2015 Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act’s] requirements and restrictions to the MOU, apparently on the basis of an opinion from the Department of Justice,” but the White House and DOJ “have apparently not shared this surprising opinion, or its arguments, with either Congress or the public”…

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said on Monday that he did a “happy dance,” after Iran was knocked out of the FIFA World Cup, telling reporters that Iranian officials tried to bring into the U.S. individuals with ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and that accommodating the team while protecting national security had demanded incomparable attention…

The Terrorist Financing Targeting Center — a coalition comprised of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and the U.S. — announced joint sanctions against five entities and 16 individuals tied to Hezbollah’s financial network…

Oman has submitted a proposal to the U.S. for Muscat and Tehran to collect service fees from shipping companies seeking to transit the Strait of Hormuz, according to The New York Times. One of Iran’s deputy foreign ministers, Kazem Gharibabadi, said on Monday if Iran was unable to come to an arrangement with Oman it would move forward on its own…

A person close to the anti-Israel American Priorities super PAC told CNN many of its contributors weren’t very politically active until New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign victory, which was the “moment that inspired them and brought them into the fold”…

Former Vice President Kamala Harris called Mamdani last week, and is holding lengthy, closed-door meetings with Palestinian activists in the run-up to a possible presidential campaign, Axios reports…

Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), speaking to CNN’s Jake Tapper, warned of the “tremendous danger and fear” for American Jews as they are being “dehumanized” and antisemitism is “becoming normalized”…

Phylisa Wisdom, the liberal activist appointed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani as executive director of his Office to Combat Antisemitism, got a harsh reception at a Holocaust memorial event in Brooklyn on Sunday. Video from the event shows a small group of hecklers booing, calling Wisdom a “kapo” and shouting that she was supportive of Adolf Hitler, JI’s Will Bredderman reports…

Far-left Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed dismissed a question on CNN about the Democratic Party’s “embrace” of antisemitic streamer Hasan Piker as a “ridiculous way to think about politics”…

Adam Jentleson, former chief of staff to Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) who went on to found the center-left Searchlight Institute think tank, urged Democrats to “just say no to AIPAC,” arguing the pro-Israel organization has “evolved from a group to a ‘Group,’” in the pejorative sense…

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited southern Lebanon on Tuesday for the first time since the U.S.-brokered security agreement was signed last Friday. Netanyahu told IDF troops, “We will not leave southern Lebanon until the threat is removed”…

“Pod Save America” co-host Jon Lovett said the harassment of California state Sen. Scott Wiener at a transgender pride march last week was “as pure antisemitism as you can see”…

The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case of Daniel Grand, an Orthodox Jewish man from Ohio who was barred from holding Shabbat prayer meetings in his home without a “special use permit” and later faced harassment from city officials who encouraged neighbors to watch his home for signs of religious activity…

Haaretz tracks the carbon footprint of FIFA President Gianni Infantino as he has traveled between World Cup matches across North America on a Qatari private jet, racking up 47,337 kilometers (29,000 miles) from the tournament’s opening days through the first knockout match, after championing the body’s sustainability strategy…

Ellie Gottheimer and Larra Mullin, the children of Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, are releasing Shmoo & Ozzie Go to Washington today, a children’s book on bipartisanship. Proceeds from the book will go to support homeless children…

Mark Isakowitz, Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA)’s chief of staff, is set to release a book in January about his personal journey following the loss of his father, who immigrated to America after surviving Auschwitz, and Isakowitz’s daily practice of reciting the mourner’s prayer at a synagogue in Washington, JI’s Gabby Deutch reports…

Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner tapped Carolin Hulshoff Pol to serve as CEO of Telegraph Media Group following the German media company’s completion of its £575 million acquisition of the British publisher, ending a three-year ownership transition…

Former Israeli Air Force Commander Maj. Gen. (res.) Amikam Norkin is a leading candidate to head Anduril’s operations in Israel, as the American defense tech company explores a major expansion into the Israeli market, Calcalist reports…

The Iranian regime plans to take over St. Peter Evangelical Church, the oldest Protestant church in Iran, and evict the 20 families living there, The Free Press reports. The theocratic regime had thus far left it alone in fear of the U.S.’ retaliation, according to the outlet…

The Washington State Democratic Party adopted into its platform during its June convention an amendment blaming the “dramatic resurgence in antisemitism … in part [on] actions taken by the Israeli government,” Jewish News Syndicate reports…

Pentagon official Jason Olson has departed his position as the director of deradicalization for the Gaza Board of Peace, an official from the body told The Times of Israel, as the BoP is convening for discussions in Cyprus…

Tuesday marked the end of Steffen Seibert‘s four-year term as German ambassador to Israel. In a farewell social media video, he paid tribute to the country by listing 25 things he will miss. Seibert is succeeded by Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, who most recently served as the German Ambassador to Moscow…

Judah Gribetz, who as a top aide to Gov. Hugh Carey helped negotiate New York City‘s rescue from financial collapse in the 1970s and later devised a distribution plan for $1.25 billion in restitution to Holocaust survivors in a landmark class-action suit against Swiss banks, died Friday at 97…

Pic of the Day

Comedian Judy Gold spoke at an event hosted by the Israeli Embassy in Washington, “A Zionist LGBTQ+ Celebration,” at Adas Israel Congregation on Tuesday — a night of solidarity in memory of Sarah Milgrim, the embassy staffer murdered alongside her partner, Yaron Lischinsky, outside the Capital Jewish Museum in May 2025. Milgrim spent her time at the embassy building bridges between Israel and marginalized communities, including D.C.’s LGBTQ+ Jewish community.

Birthdays

CANNES, FRANCE – APRIL 08: Mike Burstyn attends the “The Zweiflers” Photocall during the 7th Canneseries International Festival on April 08, 2024 in Cannes, France. (Photo by Stephane Cardinale – Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images)

Television, film and theater actor, including early career roles in Yiddish theater, Michael Burstein turns 81…

Applied mathematician, statistician and physicist, professor emeritus at both MIT and Harvard, Herman Chernoff turns 103… Former U.S. assistant secretary of education and former research professor at NYU, Diane Silvers Ravitch turns 88… Nobel laureate in economics for 1997 and co-creator of the Black-Scholes model for valuing options and other derivatives, Myron Scholes turns 85… Noted British art dealer and founder of an eponymous London art gallery, Victoria Marion Miro turns 81… Born in a DP Camp to her Holocaust survivor parents, she was the first Jewish woman to serve on the Canadian Supreme Court, Rosalie Silberman Abella turns 80… Israeli-Russian businessman, with holdings in energy and international real estate development, Shalva Chigirinsky turns 77… Partner in the Encino, Calif.-based law firm of Nolan Heimann, Douglas E. Mirell… Campaign, communications and fundraising consultant, Robert Kaplan turns 69… Hall of Fame player and coach in the WNBA and now an NBA broadcaster, Nancy Lieberman turns 68… Attorney and longtime Democratic activist in Pittsburgh, he is a regional chair of the ADL, Steven D. Irwin turns 67… Senior columnist at The Forward and former CEO of the A-Mark Foundation, Rob Eshman… President emeritus of the Orthodox Union and a retired partner at Ropes & Gray, Mark “Moishe” Bane… Under secretary of state for political affairs during most of the Biden administration, Victoria Jane Nuland (family name was Nudelman) turns 65… Journalist, filmmaker and educator, he is the co-founder of Aish[dot]com, Shraga Simmons turns 65… Professor of Jewish thought at Hebrew University, Benjamin Brown turns 60… Member of the Virginia House of Delegates since 2014, Marcus Bertram Simon turns 56… U.S. senator (R-IA), Joni Ernst turns 56… Screenwriter, producer and film director known for romantic comedy films, Marc Silverstein turns 55… Los Angeles resident, Adam B. Siegel… NASA astronaut, on her 2019 trip to the International Space Station she took novelty socks with Stars of David and menorahs, Jessica Meir turns 49… Co-founder of Edgeline Films, Elyse Steinberg… Hasidic musician mixing elements of dancehall, reggae, hip-hop and R&B, known by his stage name DeScribe, Shneur Hasofer turns 44…

ANALYSIS

Progressives prevail in Colorado

In upsets for moderates, DSA-aligned Melat Kiros’ defeated Rep. Diana DeGette, and Manny Rutinel defeated Shannon Bird

(Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images)

Democratic congressional candidate Melat Kiros holds a cutout of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) as she speaks to supporters at an election-night watch party after winning the Colorado primary on June 30, 2026 in Denver, Colorado.

By

Josh Kraushaar

July 1, 2026

Progressives in Colorado scored a number of key victories Tuesday night, including Democratic Socialists of America-aligned candidate Melat Kiros’ defeat of Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO) in the state’s 1st Congressional District.

The Colorado results suggest that, far from being contained to a few scattered congressional districts in New York City, the momentum for far-left, anti-Israel candidates is only growing within the Democratic Party, especially within urban population centers.

Kiros, a 29-year-old doctoral student, campaigned on her hostility to Israel and faced scrutiny when she declined to call the firebombing attack on a hostage awareness march in Boulder, Colo., antisemitic. DeGette, despite a long-standing progressive record in Congress, struggled to satisfy a critical mass of Democratic voters who preferred a more radical choice, especially when it came to opposing Israel.

Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) survived a scare from a little-known socialist challenger, state Sen. Julie Gonzales, but only won renomination with less than 60% of the Democratic vote. Even in the vote-rich Denver suburbs, the far-left challenger came within striking distance of the state’s well-known senator and former governor.

Former state Rep. Shannon Bird, a moderate championed by Democratic Majority for Israel, lost badly to state Rep. Manny Rutinel for the Democratic nomination in Colorado’s swing 8th District, currently held by Rep. Gabe Evans (R-CO). With most votes counted, Rutinel holds a 28-point lead over Bird, 62-34%.

As an undergraduate at the University of Florida, Rutinel attended a demonstration in 2014 that was co-organized by Students for Justice in Palestine, the extreme anti-Israel group that has expressed alignment with Hamas. A Rutinel spokesperson told JI that Rutinel did not have any affiliation with SJP and said the demonstration was focused on police brutality in the U.S.

In the state’s gubernatorial primary, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, a traditional progressive who campaigned on his efforts suing the Trump administration, comfortably defeated Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO), a leading moderate on Capitol Hill whose Washington ties proved to be a vulnerability with the anti-establishment Democratic electorate. With most votes tallied, Weiser leads Bennet by a 10-point margin, 55-45%.

Weiser, who is Jewish, was opposed by the Denver chapter of the DSA because of his support for Israel. The Republican primary was still too close to call, with state Sen. Barb Kirkmeyer holding a narrow lead.

Daily Kickoff

California Dems’ antisemitism hesitation

Plus, moderates’ big Colorado test

Miikka Skaffari/Getty Images

California state Sen. Scott Wiener during the San Francisco Pride Parade on June 28, 2026 in San Francisco, Calif.

By

JI Staff

June 30, 2026

Good Tuesday morning.

In today’s Daily Kickoff, we preview tonight’s Democratic primaries in Colorado, where a wave of Democratic Socialists of America-backed challengers is testing whether even the party’s pragmatic epicenter is vulnerable to the socialist left, and report on comments by Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-WA), the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, downplaying concerns about the party’s response to antisemitism. We cover the conflicting messaging put out by the U.S. and Iran about the continuation of talks in Qatar, and report on remarks by Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) on the expected timeline for a final agreement between the countries. We also follow up on the reactions to the harassment of California state Sen. Scott Wiener at a transgender pride march, highlighting a divide between politicians who described the incident as antisemitic and those who did not. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Susie Wiles, Gen. Frank McKenzie and Luke Moon.

Today’s Daily Kickoff was curated by JI Israel Editor Tamara Zieve and U.S. Editor Danielle Cohen-Kanik with an assist from Marc Rod. Have a tip? Email us here.

What We’re Watching

White House Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner arrived in Qatar to represent the U.S. in talks with Iran, as the status of the negotiations remains unclear. The technical talks on the memorandum of understanding meant to be taking place separately are also up in the air — Iran’s foreign ministry said an Iranian technical delegation will be in Doha this week but will not be meeting with American officials. More below.
Representatives of President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace are meeting this week in Cyprus as they seek to advance plans for a committee of Palestinian technocrats to replace Hamas in governing the Gaza Strip, The Times of Israel reports. Former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, who sits on the Board of Peace’s executive board and has recently taken on a larger role in the organization, is set to participate in the “strategic workshop” being held from Tuesday to Thursday.
Colorado voters will head to the polls in today’s Democratic primaries, where moderate candidates are fearing a far-left wave. More below.
Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, will testify before the House Appropriations Committee where he is expected to address the White House’s $88 billion supplemental funding request for the war with Iran and FY2027 budget request.
The Israeli Embassy in Washington will hold a “Zionist LGBTQ+ celebration” on the last day of Pride Month in memory of slain embassy staffer Sarah Milgrim’s allyship.
In Israel, Reichman University’s Herzliya Conference kicks off, focusing this year on national security and national resilience. Israeli President Isaac Herzog will address the confab, as well as U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee; Amos Hochstein, who served as a Middle East envoy under former President Joe Biden; former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo; former Israeli National Security Advisor Tzachi Hanegbi; journalist Barak Ravid; and Aliyah Minister Ofir Sofer.

What You Should Know

A QUICK WORD WITH JI’S JOSH KRAUSHAAR

Colorado is a state famous for its moderation, with its governor (Jared Polis) and two senators (Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper) among the most pragmatic figures in Democratic politics. So if a far-left, anti-Israel wave sweeps over the Democratic Party in tonight’s statewide primaries, it will be a true wake-up call for those downplaying the rise of the socialist left.

The biggest race we’re tracking — and the one where a Democratic incumbent looks most vulnerable — is the primary between longtime Rep. Diana DeGette, 68, an influential progressive who has left an imprint on major legislation in Congress, and Democratic Socialists of America-affiliated 29-year-old doctoral student Melat Kiros, whose deep-seated antagonism against Israel is a top focus of her campaign.

Kiros is the latest example of how radical candidates running for office on their hostility toward Israel are also indulgent of the rising antisemitism around them. Her political awakening came after she was fired from the law firm Sidley Austin for writing a public letter denouncing the hundreds of law firms that signed a petition calling on law schools to do a better job addressing antisemitism on their campuses.

Kiros was angered that the law firms considered those calling for the elimination of Israel as antisemitic. In the last week, she also refused to call the firebombing of a hostage awareness march in Boulder, Colo., antisemitic. Sense a pattern?

As JI’s Marc Rod reported, Kiros’ extreme views have done little to dent her support in a progressive Denver-area district that DeGette has easily held for the last three decades. In March, DeGette barely won the 30% of the vote from party activists necessary to qualify for the primary ballot — in what could be a foreshadowing of the primary results tonight.

Read the rest of ‘What You Should Know’ here.

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

California Democrats divided over calling harassment of Scott Wiener antisemitic

State Sen. Scott Wiener during San Francisco Congressional District 11 Candidate Forum in San Francisco on Jan. 7, 2026. (Scott Strazzante/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

Elected officials in California swiftly condemned an incident last week in which protesters accosted and harassed California state Sen. Scott Wiener at a transgender pride march, with one demonstrator shouting “F*** you and your Zionist handlers. F*** you and your Israeli masters.” A divide emerged, however, between the politicians who described the incident as antisemitic and those who did not. It was the second such incident in days, after Wiener was harassed at a bar by a protester demanding he say “Free Palestine” on camera, Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch reports.

Reactions: Wiener told CNN on Monday that the incident was “absolutely” antisemitic. “There were elected officials in that march who have not taken the positions that I’ve taken, and they were left alone,” said Wiener, who is running to replace retiring Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in the San Francisco-based seat. San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie, who is Jewish, criticized the incident as “targeted, hateful and antisemitic.” San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan, Wiener’s competitor in the congressional race who is running to his left, said in a statement that she stands “firm against threats of violence and hate speech. There is no place for hate and violence in our city.” Asked whether Chan believed the specific incident targeting Wiener to be hate speech, a spokesperson for Chan declined to say.

Read the full story here with additional comments from Sens. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Alex Padilla (D-CA), Pelosi, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, the Democratic nominee for governor in California.

Leadership message: Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-WA), the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, responsible for electing House Democrats, downplayed concerns about the party’s response to antisemitism in the wake of New York City elections that elevated several far-left candidates, JI’s Marc Rod reports. “If you look across the board and talk to individual candidates, that’s not representative of where other candidates land,” she said in an interview with former NBC News anchor Chuck Todd.

Analysis

Colorado’s primary night reckoning

If a far-left, anti-Israel wave sweeps over the Democratic Party in tonight’s statewide primaries, it will be a wake-up call for those downplaying the rise of the socialist left

RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images

From left, Wanda James, Diana DeGette and Melat Kiros participate in a League of Women Voters Congressional District 1 candidate forum on May 28, 2026, in Denver, Colorado.

By

Josh Kraushaar

June 30, 2026

Colorado is a state famous for its moderation, with its governor (Jared Polis) and two senators (Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper) among the most pragmatic figures in Democratic politics. So if a far-left, anti-Israel wave sweeps over the Democratic Party in tonight’s statewide primaries, it will be a true wake-up call for those downplaying the rise of the socialist left.

The biggest race we’re tracking — and the one where a Democratic incumbent looks most vulnerable — is the primary between longtime Rep. Diana DeGette, 68, an influential progressive who has left an imprint on major legislation in Congress, and Democratic Socialists of America-affiliated 29-year-old doctoral student Melat Kiros, whose deep-seated antagonism against Israel is a top focus of her campaign.

Kiros is the latest example of how radical candidates running for office on their hostility toward Israel are also indulgent of the rising antisemitism around them. Her political awakening came after she was fired from the law firm Sidley Austin for writing a public letter denouncing the hundreds of law firms that signed a petition calling on law schools to do a better job addressing antisemitism on their campuses.

Kiros was angered that the law firms considered those calling for the elimination of Israel as antisemitic. In the last week, she also refused to call the firebombing of a hostage awareness march in Boulder, Colo., antisemitic. Sense a pattern?

As JI’s Marc Rod reported, Kiros’ extreme views have done little to dent her support in a progressive Denver-area district that DeGette has easily held for the last three decades. DeGette barely won the 30% of the vote from party activists necessary to qualify for the primary ballot — in what could be a foreshadowing of the primary results tonight.

The overall landscape in Colorado is looking similarly treacherous for other Democratic moderates, even if they end up prevailing. Sen. John Hickenlooper, once considered a shoo-in to win renomination, is facing a credible challenge from DSA-backed state Sen. Julie Gonzales. If Hickenlooper loses, it would be a political earthquake across the country, but even a close race against a fringe candidate would be a major warning sign for the health of the Democratic Party.

And well outside of Denver, another primary in a swing district is being closely watched for ideological signals of where the party is headed. Early in the cycle, Democratic Majority for Israel’s political arm rallied behind former state Rep. Shannon Bird, a moderate who has been a reliable supporter of Israel and outspoken critic of antisemitism in the state Legislature, in her race against Rep. Gabe Evans (R-CO).

State Rep. Manny Rutinel, a progressive who has attacked Bird as insufficiently liberal on immigration, has been vague on where he stands on Israel policy, but his record as a college student has raised concerns from the broader Jewish community.

As an undergraduate at the University of Florida in 2014, Rutinel attended a demonstration that was co-organized by Students for Justice in Palestine, the extreme anti-Israel group that has expressed alignment with Hamas, according to a local news story covering the event at the time. A Rutinel spokesperson told JI that Rutinel did not have any affiliation with SJP and said the demonstration was focused on police brutality in the U.S.

Neither candidate has focused much on Israel policy — a sign that opposing Israel isn’t a winning message in swing districts like Colorado’s 8th District, which also features a sizable Hispanic population.

The state’s Democratic gubernatorial primary between Bennet and Attorney General Phil Weiser will also be closely watched as a signal of voters’ discontent with Washington. Bennet was viewed by many as an early favorite, but Weiser holds a powerful statewide role that allowed him to position himself in opposition to the Trump administration by filing dozens of lawsuits against federal government policy.

Weiser, who is Jewish and told JI he blocks off Shabbat to spend with his family, is running as the progressive in the race but has kept his focus on campaigning as an anti-Trump candidate and as a Washington outsider.

The DSA chapter in Denver is opposing his gubernatorial campaign because, they write, he “remained a strong supporter of Israel despite the ongoing genocide.” (They also are opposing Bennet because of his votes for military aid to Israel.)

Daily Kickoff

‘Violence will be met with violence’

Plus, Adam Smith's about-face

Photo by Ken Cedeno / AFP via Getty Images

US Vice President JD Vance speaks during a press briefing in the Brady Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on June 18, 2026.

By

JI Staff

June 29, 2026

Good Monday morning.

In today’s Daily Kickoff, we spotlight tomorrow’s Colorado Democratic primaries as far-left insurgents target two of the state’s top Democrats, and report on the weekend clashes between the U.S. and Iran following Tehran’s violations of the MOU signed earlier this month. We look at an effort by the California Faculty Association to repeal restrictions on gatherings put into place after the wave of anti-Israel encampments on college campuses, and report on the pivot by Rep. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, to oppose a U.S.-Israel cooperation provision in the 2027 NDAA. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Scott Wiener, Mike Waltz and Robby Hoffman.

Today’s Daily Kickoff was curated by JI Executive Editor Melissa Weiss and Israel Editor Tamara Zieve, with assists from Danielle Cohen-Kanik and Marc Rod. Have a tip? Email us here.

What We’re Watching

We’re keeping a close eye on the situation in the Gulf, following Iran’s targeting of commercial vessels last week and retaliatory U.S. strikes on Iranian military infrastructure. Earlier today, Iranian state media published comments from President Masoud Pezeshkian calling the agreement with the U.S. — which will include the unfreezing of some $6 billion in Iranian funds — “a great victory for the Iranian people.”
It’s the final day of campaigning ahead of Colorado’s primaries on Tuesday. More below on the top races we’re watching.
Elsewhere in Colorado, the Aspen Ideas Festival continues today. This afternoon, Sens. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) will sit for a conversation about the role of government in the cryptocurrency market, followed by a conversation between Kim Ghattas, Karim Sadjadpour and Mark Dubowitz about Iran.

What You Should Know

A QUICK WORD WITH JI’S MELISSA WEISS

As tensions run high in the Gulf following exchanges of fire between the U.S. and Iran over the weekend, a vastly different security situation is taking shape in Lebanon, with the Trump administration’s top officials — Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio — taking responsibility for the respective outcomes.

Vance, who led last week’s negotiations with Iran in Switzerland, said upon his departure from the talks that a “good foundation” had been established between the countries. But that foundation displayed its first cracks just three days later, when Iranian drones fired on a commercial vessel in the Strait of Hormuz, prompting the U.S. to strike Iranian military infrastructure.

The vice president’s tone changed by the weekend, when he said that if Iran had “disagreements about how the MOU is being applied, they can pick up the phone. But violence will be met with violence.” The Iranians skipped technical talks slated for Sunday, saying that the U.S. had not fulfilled the condition of the MOU that would release billions in frozen funds.

Now, officials say that the U.S. and Iranian delegations have agreed to hold fire and will meet in Doha, Qatar, on Tuesday to discuss the status of the Strait of Hormuz.

In Washington, officials are meanwhile celebrating the signing of a framework agreement between Israel and Lebanon that would see Israel scale back its presence in southern Lebanon, creating two “pilot zones” for the Lebanese Armed Forces to administer.

Read the rest of ‘What You Should Know’ here.

ROCKY ROAD

Will Colorado’s primaries be the far-left insurgency’s next big wins?

From left, Wanda James, Diana DeGette and Melat Kiros participate in a League of Women Voters Congressional District 1 candidate forum on May 28, 2026, in Denver, Colorado. (RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

The wave of victories for Democratic Socialists of America-aligned candidates in New York City on Tuesday is buoying the hopes of progressives that the far left can pull off upsets against two Democratic incumbents in Colorado’s Tuesday primary elections, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.

Off to the races: Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO) is facing a challenge from Melat Kiros, whose campaign has attracted substantial national attention and backing from several anti-Israel organizations and individuals. Just this week, she declined to call the firebombing of a Boulder, Colo., hostage awareness march as antisemitic. Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) is also facing a DSA-aligned challenger, state Sen. Julie Gonzales, though her campaign hasn’t garnered as much attention as Kiros’. A local Democratic strategist said that he expects DeGette to be victorious but that the race is the most serious challenge she’s faced in her time in office. He also predicted a Hickenlooper victory.

Read the full story here.

SINGLED OUT

Scott Wiener becomes the latest progressive Jewish Democrat to face antisemitic harassment

California state Sen. Scott Wiener’s election party at his congressional campaign headquarters on election night in San Francisco, Calif. on June 2, 2026. (Gabrielle Lurie/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

California state Sen. Scott Wiener, the front-runner to succeed retiring Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in Congress, has become the target of antisemitic harassment twice in the last week in his San Francisco district, marking the latest example of a high-profile progressive Jewish politician being singled out and facing threats for his background, Jewish Insider’s Josh Kraushaar reports.

Forced out: On Friday, Wiener, on his way to participate in a Pride Shabbat service at a transgender march in San Francisco, was chased out of the event by anti-Israel activists. In a video posted by one local anti-Israel activist, the activist follows Wiener around, attacking him for “being terrible on Gaza,” adding, “You do not belong here anymore, Scott. And it breaks my f—ing heart.” Soon after the initial engagement, other even-more hostile activists start cursing at Wiener, with one calling him a “genocidal piece of sh—” and another saying, “F— you and your Zionist handlers.” Two days earlier, Wiener, while watching a World Cup game with staffers at a local bar, was berated by another anti-Israel activist who demanded he say the words “Free Palestine” on camera.

Read the full story here.

TRUCE TESTED

U.S., Iran trade weekend strikes, testing fragile peace deal

Explosions erupt following strikes at Tehran Oil Refinery in Tehran on March 7, 2026. (ATTA KENARE / AFP via Getty Images)

The U.S. and Iran traded strikes over the weekend, testing the fragile memorandum of understanding signed between the countries earlier this month. The U.S. first accused Iran of violating the ceasefire after it launched drone attacks on a Singapore-flagged oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday, Jewish Insider’s Danielle Cohen-Kanik reports.

Tit for tat: In a “powerful response” to Iran’s “unwarranted aggression,” CENTCOM said, the U.S. struck Iranian missile and drone storage locations and coastal radar sites on Friday. On Saturday, CENTCOM said Iran was “given [another] chance to honor the ceasefire agreement but elected not to” when it launched another one-way attack drone on a Panama-flagged oil tanker earlier that morning. In retaliation, the U.S. targeted Iranian military surveillance infrastructure, communication systems, air-defense sites, drone storage facilities and minelayer capabilities, CENTCOM said. By Sunday afternoon, the U.S. and Iran had agreed to cease their strikes and meet on Tuesday in Qatar to discuss the dispute over the Strait of Hormuz, Axios reported.

Read the full story here.

Policy shift: As the Trump administration moves to dismantle much of the decades-old U.S. sanctions regime imposed on Syria, the White House and lawmakers have signaled that it could soon lift its designation of Damascus as a state sponsor of terrorism, JI’s Matthew Shea reports.

WALK-BACK

Top Armed Services Democrat flips on U.S.-Israel cooperation provision in defense bill

Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, during a hearing on May 14, 2026. (Eric Lee/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, now says he plans to support efforts to strip a provision on U.S.-Israel cooperation from the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act, after arguing strenuously against similar efforts during the committee’s markup of the same bill weeks ago, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.

Breaking it down: The provision, based on the FUTURES Act, is relatively routine, creating a single official to oversee all U.S.-Israel cooperative programs in developing and acquiring defense technologies, and builds on existing programs. But critics have falsely claimed the provision would irrevocably link the U.S. and Israeli militaries and undermine American sovereignty. Smith himself said during the committee markup that the way critics have described the amendment “is simply not accurate” and that the provision should not be treated as a referendum on the U.S.-Israel relationship. In a message to constituents viewed by JI, Smith said he now supports removing the provision.

Read the full story here.

Elsewhere on the Hill: Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee are warning that an effort by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) to cut aid to Israel from the State Department’s annual funding bill could have further-reaching consequences than intended and could impact a range of other programs and issues, JI has learned.

POLICY PERSPECTIVE

At Aspen Ideas, Robert Kagan says U.S.’ Israel support was ‘never for strategic reasons’

Robert Kagan speaks at Aspen Ideas Festival on June 26, 2026. (Screenshot/YouTube)

Historian and prominent neoconservative foreign policy analyst Robert Kagan claimed the U.S. was “never supporting Israel for strategic reasons” and that American strategy in the Middle East has come “to be about defending the interests of Israel,” during a live taping on Friday of “The Long Game” podcast — hosted by former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer — at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado, Jewish Insider’s Danielle Cohen-Kanik reports.

Podcast playback: Finer, who served as principal deputy national security advisor in the Biden administration and also worked with him under President Barack Obama, asked Kagan if he believes Israel is still a democracy and if Israel is still a U.S. ally, “given [their] increasingly divergent interests.” Calling Israel “at least an imperfect democracy,” Kagan said, “Our discussion of Israel [has become] one in which we began to believe that we had a vital interest in supporting Israel. We started supporting Israel out of a sense of moral obligation. And I think that was a noble thing to do after World War II and the Holocaust, etc. But we never were supporting Israel for strategic reasons.”

Read the full story here.

REPEAL PUSH

California faculty union leads backdoor maneuver to repeal campus protest restrictions

People listen to speakers during an anti-Israel demonstration at the University of California, Irvine in Irvine, CA on Thursday, April 25, 2024. (Paul Bersebach/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images)

The 29,000-member California Faculty Association, California State University’s teachers’ union, is spearheading a backdoor legislative push to repeal the time, place and manner restrictions implemented across the state’s university system following its 2024 anti-Israel encampments, Jewish Insider’s Haley Cohen reports.

Campus beat: The California Faculty Association, which represents faculty across the 23 campuses of the California State University system, announced it would sponsor AB 2551, authored by Assemblymember Sade Elhawary. AB 2551 would repeal SB 1287 — California’s landmark campus safety and civil rights law — in its entirety by Jan. 1, 2029. Under SB 1287, which was introduced in 2024, California’s public universities and colleges must adopt and enforce rules against violence, harassment, intimidation and discrimination.

Read the full story here.

Worthy Reads

Perks for Pakistan: The Financial Times’ Humza Jilani spotlights Pakistani Field Marshal Asim Munir’s efforts to position Islamabad to financially benefit from a deal between the U.S. and Iran. “The larger hope is to ensure the country remains sufficiently relevant to its key partners in the U.S. and the Gulf to guarantee steady support and wean the country off a mountain of external debt, analysts and officials say. The relationship with the Trump administration helped position ‘Pakistan as a long-term stakeholder in West Asian security and stability, and provides a major opportunity to reap the economic dividends that will come with the role,’ said Kamran Bokhari, senior resident fellow with the Middle East Policy Council in Washington.” [FT]

Lesson From Louisiana: In The Wall Street Journal, Peter Kovacs, the former editor of New Orleans’ Times-Picayune, contrasts Democrats’ embrace of Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, whose tattoo of a Nazi totenkopf has drawn widespread scrutiny, with Republicans’ rejection of former KKK leader David Duke, the party’s candidate in Louisiana’s 1991 gubernatorial runoff. “Republicans gave up the Louisiana governorship, but they achieved something more important: David Duke faded from the scene, though he kept running for office until 2016, when he finished seventh in a U.S. Senate jungle primary. … Democrats may wish they had followed the GOP’s 1991 example. Mr. Platner could win, but Republicans and their media supporters will make [Sens. Bernie] Sanders and [Chuck] Schumer — and their party’s presidential nominees — wear that tattoo for years.” [WSJ]

Slip, Sliding Away: The New York Times’ David Halbfinger talks to Israeli officials and analysts about Washington’s slipping support for the country following the latest wave of Democratic Socialists of America primary wins. “[Asaf] Zamir, the Tel Aviv deputy mayor, said, ‘I’m waking up and hearing that we’re “genocidal” and “apartheid.” I’m a left wing, two-state, pro-peace Israeli, but I’m not blind or crazy,’ he added. ‘I know what the situation in Israel is, and we’re not those things we’re being called. And yet, more and more Americans are buying into and voting on those grounds. That troubles me.’” [NYTimes]

Bondi and Beyond: In The New Yorker, Oscar Schwartz looks at how last year’s terror attack at a Hanukkah celebration in Sydney ignited a political debate in Australia that goes beyond the events at Bondi Beach. “In the immediate fallout of the mass shooting, Australia’s political discourse was dominated by two topics, gun control and antisemitism, with some casting the issues in oppositional terms. … The political backlash to the shooting at Bondi can be seen as a product of fear stoked by the attack, of course, but beneath that a deeper anxiety about the transformations occurring in Australian society can be detected.” [NewYorker]

Word on the Street

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani declined to express support for Israel as a Jewish state in an interview with ABC News aired Sunday, saying, “Any state that privileges one religion over the other is one that I can’t tell you I support, whether it be Israel or Saudi Arabia or anywhere else”…

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Mike Waltz posted a photo from Saturday’s Argentina-Jordan World Cup match alongside his wife, former Homeland Security Advisor Julia Nesheiwat — whose parents immigrated from Jordan — and the Jordanian royal family, writing, “Only in America!”…

The Washington Post does a deep dive into the “extraordinary feud” between leading Senate Republicans and Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s under secretary of defense for policy; the Post also reports that Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) is continuing to block the nominations of Colby acolytes Alex Velez-Green and Austin Dahmer…

Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) raised concerns about Qatar‘s relationship with Iran and role as an intermediary in U.S.-Iran talks, telling “Fox News Sunday” that Doha is “not our friend”…

Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT) introduced a resolution requesting information on Israel’s human rights practices in its campaign in Lebanon and whether Israel has used U.S.-provided equipment in such activities…

Sens. John Hoeven (R-ND) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) introduced a bill to expand the BARD program, which supports joint U.S.-Israel agricultural cooperation, to support mid-stage research…

U.C. Berkeley announced the planned launch of the Nancy Pelosi Institute for Representative Democracy, a nonpartisan institute named after the former House speaker that will focus on civic engagement…

The Committee to Protect Journalists said it is conducting a review of its database of journalists killed during the Israel-Hamas war after Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad posted obituaries for combatants who had been listed by CPJ as journalists in Gaza…

Montgomery County, Md., Councilmember Will Jawondo on Friday declared victory in the race for county executive, having secured 40% of the tallied vote; County Councilmember Andrew Friedson, who had 34% of the vote, conceded on Sunday…

The New York Times Magazine profiles comic Robby Hoffman about the “Hacks” star’s religious upbringing in Crown Heights and career trajectory…

The head of Venezuela’s largest Ashkenazi congregation said that three members of the country’s 5,000-strong Jewish community were confirmed to have been killed in the dual earthquakes that rocked the country last week…

Whole Foods, Sprouts Farmers Market and H-E-B will begin selling products from plant-based meat company Chunk Foods as the Israeli company, founded by Amos Golan, continues its U.S. expansion…

More than two dozen people were killed in clashes along the Pakistan–Afghanistan border after Pakistani forces launched strikes and a ground operation it said targeted militant hideouts; Afghan officials said women and children were killed and injured in the attack…

Israel‘s government unanimously voted on Sunday to recognize the Armenian Genocide, a move expected to deepen already strained ties with Turkey, which rejects the genocide label. The vote came a day after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared that Zionism is a “genocidal, occupying, expansionist ideology” that “threatens everyone”…

The Israeli government approved a NIS 100 million ($33.4 million) budget, which will be matched by philanthropic donations, to support Jewish day school education in the United States and Canada through the Jewish Federations of North America, eJewishPhilanthropy’s Judah Ari Gross reports…

The Financial Times spotlights U.S. efforts to modernize the production of its military arsenal and shift from expensive and time-intensive weapons to artillery that can be quickly mass-produced…

The Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen are reportedly using the recent calm in the region to conduct missile tests in preparation for potential future conflict with Israel…

The U.K.’s Times reports that Qatar provided all-expenses-paid trips to the World Cup for 1,000 “fake” fans to support the Gulf team at its matches…

Pic of the Day

The Jewish War Veterans Department of Michigan, alongside the leaders of Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Mich., held a ceremony on Sunday honoring the first responders to the March terror attack at the synagogue by a Hezbollah sympathizer.

Birthdays

Screenwriter, director and producer, he has won nine Emmy Awards for his work on AMC’s “Mad Men” and HBO’s “The Sopranos,” Matthew Hoffman Weiner turns 61…

Baltimore-area gastroenterologist, he is an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Marshall S. Bedine, M.D…. Chairman of Carnival Corporation, the world’s largest cruise ship operator (includes Carnival, Cunard, Holland America and others), and owner of the NBA’s Miami Heat, Micky Arison turns 77… Rosh yeshiva of Yeshivas Brisk in Jerusalem, Rabbi Avraham Yehoshua Soloveitchik turns 77… Former assistant surgeon general of the U.S. and deputy assistant secretary of HHS for women’s health, Susan Jane Blumenthal, M.D. turns 74… Former SVP and counsel at Columbus, Ohio-based L Brands for almost 30 years, now a consultant, Bruce A. Soll… CEO of two firms including Aliya Marketing Group, Joshua Karlin… Israeli actor, screenwriter, playwright and film director, Hanna Azoulay-Hasfari turns 66… Founder and president of Medallion Financial Corp., Andrew Murstein turns 62… Senior rabbi of Toronto’s Beth Tzedec Congregation, Rabbi Steven C. Wernick turns 59… Theater, film and television screenwriter, his credits include the 2017 film “Wonder Woman,” Allan Heinberg turns 59… Israeli political consultant and former chief of staff to Prime Minister Netanyahu, Ari Harow turns 53… Consultant, facilitator, trainer and coach, Nanette Rochelle Fridman… Rabbi of The Young Israel of Bal Harbour (Fla.), Gidon Moskovitz… Film and television director and writer, she is known for writing and directing the films “Obvious Child” and “Landline,” Gillian Robespierre turns 48… Former member of the U.K. Parliament for the Labour party, she is now a member of the House of Lords, Baroness Ruth Smeeth turns 47… Israeli actor and model, Yehuda Levi turns 47… President and dean of Phoenix-based Valley Beit Midrash and author of 30 books, Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz… Partner at FGS Global, Andrew Duberstein… Pitcher for Team Israel in the 2023 World Baseball Classic, he then played in the Mexican League, Charles Irvin “Bubby” Rossman turns 34… Campaign finance consultant, who has raised money for Hillary Clinton and the DNC, David Wolf… Steven Kohn… Sara Sansone… Fred Gruber…

ROCKY ROAD

Will Colorado’s primaries be the far-left insurgency’s next big wins?

Rep. Diana DeGette is facing a formidable challenge from DSA-backed Melat Kiros, who recently declined to call the Boulder firebombing attack antisemitic

RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images

From left, Wanda James, Diana DeGette and Melat Kiros participate in a League of Women Voters Congressional District 1 candidate forum on May 28, 2026, in Denver, Colorado.

By

Marc Rod

June 26, 2026

The wave of victories for Democratic Socialists of America-aligned candidates in New York City on Tuesday is buoying the hopes of progressives that the far left can pull off upsets against two Democratic incumbents in Colorado’s Tuesday primary elections.

Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO) is facing a challenge from Melat Kiros, whose campaign has attracted substantial national attention and backing from several anti-Israel organizations and individuals including the Justice Democrats, DSA, Sunrise Movement, Jewish Voice for Peace, TrackAIPAC, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Chris Rabb, Hasan Piker and, most recently, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) is also facing a DSA-aligned challenger, state Sen. Julie Gonzales, though her campaign hasn’t garnered as much attention as Kiros’.

Just this week, in an interview with the local channel 9News, Kiros declined to call the firebombing of a hostage awareness march in Boulder, Colo. last year antisemitic.

“I don’t know what was in the heart of the perpetrator. All I know is that he went and attacked innocent people because of what they might have believed, and I don’t even know what the people that were at that protest believed too,” she said. “I don’t know what his intentions were.”

The House voted unanimously last year to condemn the attack as an antisemitic incident. Only Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Thomas Massie (R-KY), two of the leading anti-Israel lawmakers in Congress, voted present.

Kiros lost her job at the law firm Sidley Austin in 2023 for publishing a column denouncing hundreds of top law firms that called on law schools to do more to address antisemitism on their campuses. The column argued that calling for the elimination of Israel is not antisemitic and defended Hamas and those who have expressed support for it.

Kiros has made a complete arms embargo on Israel a central part of her campaign and has described the war in Gaza as a genocide and Israel as an apartheid state.

“I believe that our selling of arms to Israel, defensive or offensive, gives them the cover to continue the genocide that’s taking place in Palestine, and now the ethnic cleansing that’s taking place in Lebanon,” Kiros said in the local interview.

Kiros said in the interview that she did not agree with Piker that Hamas is a “lesser evil” than Israel, and denied that she thought the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks were justified.

Jim Carpenter, a Democratic political strategist in the state, predicted that DeGette “will ultimately win” but “this is certainly the toughest primary challenge she’s had in a really long time, if ever, since she was elected — lots of visibility, lots of interest.”

A poll commissioned by the Justice Democrats found Kiros leading DeGette 41-36%.

Multiple local venues recently declined to host a rally led by Kiros and Piker, which Kiros blamed on pressure from DeGette’s donors — something DeGette’s campaign has called “ridiculous.” Piker and Gonzales, citing security threats, declined to appear at a rescheduled rally in front of the state Capitol.

DeGette has been blasting Kiros over her affiliation with Piker, highlighting the streamer’s comments — supporting Hamas, dismissing sexual violence on Oct. 7, claiming that the U.S. deserved 9/11 and that he “hate[s] this country so much.”

“If Melat Kiros wants to campaign with someone who said America deserved 9/11 we’d do nothing to stop her,” a DeGette spokesperson told Colorado Newsline.

Carpenter highlighted the Sanders endorsement of Kiros as particularly valuable, noting that the senator has been popular in the state. But he also highlighted the significant influx of outside spending that has flowed into the race in favor of DeGette and targeting Kiros.

One group, Pro-Choice Majority Action, has spent more than $1.5 million boosting DeGette and attacking Kiros. Some observers have tied that spending to AIPAC, noting that the group took in close to $900,000 from EDW Action Fund, which in turn received $1 million from the AIPAC-linked United Democracy Project in May.

A UDP spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. DeGette has not been consistently supportive of Israel, including signing a letter calling for unilateral U.S. recognition of Palestinian statehood and opposing additional offensive aid to Israel, but UDP has at times supported candidates not fully aligned with AIPAC’s policies in the interest of defeating others with more extreme records.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), a former Progressive Caucus chair, also recorded a last-minute video offering support for DeGette, describing her as critical to advancing Medicare for All.

Meanwhile, Justice Democrats has spent more than $500,000 supporting Kiros and opposing DeGette, and the anti-Israel American Priorities super PAC has spent $150,000 in support of Kiros.

Carpenter told Jewish Insider that, particularly in the wake of a party delegate vote earlier this year when DeGette was badly beaten by Kiros and came close to falling short of the threshold to appear on the ballot, the congresswoman has been campaigning aggressively.

Carpenter said that the anti-DeGette vote might ultimately come out split: University of Colorado Regent Wanda James is also challenging DeGette, and is likely to win support from some Black voters.

Though some in the progressive sphere have interpreted the New York City victories as a sign of momentum for an ascendant far left nationwide, Carpenter said that the results in New York don’t necessarily reflect Colorado’s own voting base.

“Colorado’s politics are very different,” he said. “All politics are local. I get the enthusiasm, and I get everybody trying to point to a trend and all of that. I just don’t think that’s going to hold in Colorado. Denver is very liberal but it’s a different kind of Democrat than the DSA.”

Gonzales is less likely to pose a serious challenge to Hickenlooper, the state’s former governor, having trailed significantly behind him in fundraising. “Gonzales just hasn’t had the resources really to compete statewide,” Carpenter said.

She’s been visible on social media and active in the Denver media market but “she just hasn’t had the ability to do paid advertising in a way that I think is any kind of real threat to Hickenlooper,” Carpenter said. Hickenlooper’s biggest vulnerabilities may be his age, 74, and a perception of him as an establishment Washington Democrat.

But Hickenlooper has also “taken this very seriously” and has been campaigning actively, reminding voters of his record during his two terms as senator and one term as governor, Carpenter said. The state also allows unaffiliated voters to choose the party’s primary in which to vote, and such voters have typically been a boon for Hickenlooper in the past, Carpenter added.

From the start of her campaign, Gonzales has made criticism of Israel a centerpiece of her bid, accusing Israel of genocide, supporting an arms embargo and fundraising based on her opposition to Israel and AIPAC. TrackAIPAC also endorsed Gonzales.

Also on Tuesday, state Rep. Manny Rutinel faces former state Rep. Shannon Bird in a primary for a key swing seat held by Rep. Gabe Evans (R-CO). Carpenter said that the race is difficult to predict and both have been strong candidates with built-in advantages and key endorsements.

Democratic Majority for Israel is supporting Bird and called the race one of its top priorities for the cycle. Bird has long been a strong supporter of Israel and vocal in opposition to antisemitism. Rutinel’s views on Israel have been less clear, and his past as a campus activist has worried some pro-Israel Democrats.

As an undergraduate at the University of Florida, according to a local news report, Rutinel attended a demonstration co-organized by Students for Justice in Palestine, but a Rutinel spokesperson, in a statement to JI, denied that Rutinel had any affiliation with SJP and said the demonstration was focused on police brutality in the U.S.

“Manny supports Israel’s right to exist and supports a two-state solution with secure borders to bring peace,” a campaign spokesperson said. Rutinel also “supports U.S. security assistance to Israel in line with the Obama administration’s 2016 memorandum of understanding,” the spokesperson added.

Carpenter said that Bird has a longer political record and deeper roots in the district, which she has leaned on in her campaign, but also may face headwinds from a perception of her as a moderate Democrat. Rutinel might benefit from the substantial Latino vote in the district.

“Bird is making the argument that because it’s a swing district that is more moderate … that’s what’s going to appeal” in the general election, Carpenter said. “That’s a harder message in a Democratic primary.”

Rutinel leaned into more of a progressive posture but “it seems to me like he’s trying to moderate that a little bit, and has gotten tripped up in a couple of debates on some of the more left progressive positions that he had taken in the past. It’s not a simple progressive-versus-establishment divide there, but it is kind of shaking out that way,” Carpenter continued.

Bird is also backed by moderate groups including the NewDems, Blue Dog PAC and Welcome PAC, as well as EMILY’s List and Elect Democratic Women.

Rutinel is backed by an array of both moderate and progressive lawmakers including Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Reps. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY), Lou Correa (D-CA), Robert Garcia (D-CA), Teresa Leger Fernandez (D-NM), Rob Menendez (D-NJ), Emily Randall (D-WA), Luz Rivas (D-CA), Linda Sanchez (D-CA) and Pat Ryan (D-NY).

The state’s gubernatorial primary is also set for Tuesday, where recent polling shows Attorney General Phil Weiser taking the lead for the first time against Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO). The poll was conducted by a group supporting Weiser and showed that a significant portion of the voting base is still undecided.

Carpenter said that Weiser’s last-minute surge might signal that Bennet’s longtime service in Washington is being seen as a negative on the campaign trail, and he’s been tagged as not being anti-Trump enough in his time in the Senate.

But he said he didn’t think that the anti-establishment mood would necessarily be sufficient to oust DeGette or Hickenlooper, noting that Weiser himself is a well-known quantity and popular among Colorado Democrats going into the race.

“I think he benefits a little bit more from that than Gonzales or Kiros would,” Carpenter said.

ROCKY RESPONSE

Most Colorado electeds remain silent on SJP praising last year’s antisemitic firebombing

The CU Boulder Students for Justice in Palestine chapter praised the attacker’s ‘decisive act of resistance’; only Rep. Gabe Evans directly condemned the statement

Chet Strange/Getty Images

Run for Their Lives hosts a march in honor of people kidnapped in Gaza on June 8, 2025 in Boulder, Colo., a week after a firebombing attack on the march.

By

Haley Cohen

June 2, 2026

Colorado’s elected officials remained largely silent after the University of Colorado Boulder chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine posted a statement supporting the perpetrator of a deadly antisemitic firebombing on the attack’s one-year anniversary.

“Today, Boulder Students for Justice in Palestine publishes this statement in support of Mohamed’s decisive act of resistance against a genocidal global order,” Boulder SJP — which is an unsanctioned campus group — wrote Monday in a since-deleted Instagram post. “We stand with him.”

Last June, Mohamed Soliman attacked a “Run For Their Lives” march — held in solidarity with Israeli hostages held captive by Hamas — on Boulder’s Pearl Street Mall using Molotov cocktails. The attack killed 82-year-old Karen Diamond and injured a dozen others. Soliman pled guilty to murder and was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

SJP praised Soliman for taking “direct action against one manifestation of the zionist death cult that we have allowed to fester in our city.” The group called his attack “the only sane response available to a rational human being confronted with the normalization of genocide.”

In a statement to Jewish Insider, Rep. Gabe Evans (R-CO) condemned SJP’s statement as “utterly deplorable.”

“To not only justify but praise a terrorist who murdered an elderly woman and left other innocent victims suffering from severe second- and third-degree burns is beyond reprehensible. How can members of the Jewish community ever feel safe living, working, worshiping, or attending school in our country when individuals openly celebrate acts of antisemitic violence?” said Evans, who is running for reelection in a battleground district.

“Antisemitism is never acceptable. It must be condemned wherever it exists, regardless of the perpetrator or political cause. I urge the Boulder Police Department and the University of Colorado Boulder to take these threats and rhetoric seriously before more lives are put at risk,” he continued.

After this story was published, Rep. Brittany Pettersen (D-CO) told JI, “The antisemitic attack in Boulder last year was a horrific act of terror that has left a permanent scar on our state and the Jewish community in Colorado and across the country. These disturbing posts are vile and should absolutely not be tolerated. Our words matter. Disgusting, antisemitic remarks like this only pave the way for more hate-fueled violence. I condemn them wholeheartedly and will always stand up against antisemitism and all forms of hate.”

Reps. Jason Crow (D-CO) and Jeff Crank (R-CO) both condemned the attack in statements to JI on Tuesday, but neither addressed the SJP statement directly.

Crow said, “The Boulder attack was a horrifying act of hate that every American must condemn. We must reject antisemitism and all senseless acts of violence.” In the aftermath of the attack, Crow voted for a resolution condemning it and reaffirming a commitment to combat the rise in antisemitism.

Crank said, “The attack on our Jewish community a year ago in Boulder was horrific and the terrorist who committed this crime must be brought to justice under the fullest extent of the law.”

Other members of Colorado’s congressional delegation, including Democrats Diana DeGette and Joe Neguse and Republicans Jeff Hurd and Lauren Boebert, did not respond to requests for comments from JI. Neguse represents the area where the attack occurred.

Melat Kiros, a democratic socialist running to unseat DeGette, did not respond to a request for comment.

Neither of Colorado’s Democratic senators, Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper, responded to requests for comment. Bennet is running for governor to succeed the term-limited Jared Polis, facing a primary challenge from state Attorney General Phil Weiser — who also did not respond to a request for comment. In the wake of the gubernatorial race, Crow and Neguse are considered leading contenders for Bennet’s Senate seat. Julie Gonzalez, a DSA-backed Colorado state senator running to replace Hickenlooper, also did not respond to a request for comment.

The SJP statement received condemnation from Jewish groups including the Anti-Defamation League and J Street.

“The content of the post is beyond reprehensible. It is so detached from basic facts, human decency and reality that it would be difficult to take seriously if its message were not so dangerous,” the ADL wrote on X.

J Street wrote, “When violence against Jews is openly celebrated, it is not activism. It is antisemitic incitement.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated on June 3 to include a statement from Rep. Brittany Pettersen.

Rocky Mountain Revolt

Colorado far left mobilizes against John Hickenlooper, Diana DeGette

Despite the success of DSA challengers at activist-dominated party meetings, analysts are skeptical they will succeed in the state’s Democratic primaries

Aaron Schwartz/Getty Images

Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) listens to testimony at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on February 03, 2026 in Washington, DC.

By

Marc Rod

March 19, 2026

Far-left challengers to Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) and Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO) are picking up support in internal party proceedings in what some progressives are touting as a sign of the incumbents’ vulnerabilities.

But local experts say those developments shouldn’t necessarily be read as signs that the two establishment Democrats are on their way out — the state’s Democratic Party processes tend to favor more progressive candidates, and both Hickenlooper and DeGette still have strong advantages going into the primary later this year.

In the Senate race, Hickenlooper, facing state Sen. Julie Gonzales, dropped out of the Democratic caucus nominating process, choosing to qualify for the June primary through petition signatures instead, a sign he’s facing resistance from typically left-wing party activists.

In the 1st Congressional District, far-left candidate Melat Kiros won nearly two-thirds of the Democratic Party delegates’ votes in Denver last weekend, nearly doubling DeGette’s support, and calling DeGette’s spot on the ballot into question.

Gonzales is a former member of the Democratic Socialists of America who was elected to the state Senate with the help of the group, but left the organization ahead of her run for Congress.

From the start of her campaign, she’s made criticism of Israel a centerpiece of her bid, accusing Israel of genocide, supporting an arms embargo and vowing, “I will never vote to send U.S. taxpayer dollars to Israel. Especially when communities here at home are being told there’s no money for schools or healthcare.”

Gonazales has also fundraised off of her opposition to Israel and AIPAC, calling the group’s support of Hickenlooper “repulsive and immoral,” and accusing Hickenlooper of funding “a genocide in Palestine” with taxpayer funds while depriving Americans of social services.

Another lesser-known candidate in the Senate, University of Colorado Professor Karen Breslin, is, like Gonzales and Kiros, endorsed by the extreme anti-Israel group Track AIPAC.

Kiros, 28, is running with the backing of the far-left Justice Democrats and the local DSA. Kiros has made an arms embargo on Israel one of her primary talking points, as well as described the war in Gaza as a genocide and Israel as an apartheid state. She said she was inspired to run for office in part by the defeats of anti-Israel Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) and Cori Bush (D-MO) last cycle.

Kiros lost her job at the law firm Sidley Austin in 2023 for publishing a column denouncing an open letter signed by hundreds of top law firms that called on law schools to do more to address antisemitism on their campuses. The primary premise of the column was that calling for the elimination of Israel is not antisemitic and that “conflat[ing] [antisemitism] with the geo-political question of Israel’s legitimacy is one of the greatest travesties in this conflict.”

In the op-ed, which she published a month after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attacks, Kiros wrote, “By conflating ‘calls for the elimination of the Israeli state’ with anti-Semitism, you delegitimize any solution that forces Israel to reckon with its colonial role in Palestine, including one-state solutions called for by Palestinians and Israelis alike,” she continued.

She also appeared to defend Hamas, and those who have expressed support for it, in the piece. Though she said that there was “no justification” for Hamas’ attacks, she also said that “it cannot be forgotten that violence does not occur in a vacuum” and questioned the description of “acts of Palestinian resistance” as “terrorism.”

“There has never been, in the history of the entire human race, a people whose land was violently taken from them, whose freedoms and rights were relegated to second-class citizenship, and whose very existence was systematically threatened by its occupier, who did not resist with violence in kind,” Kiros wrote. “And yet, acknowledging the seemingly obvious symptom of violent resistance to violent colonialism has led to the loss of employment and freedom to numerous individuals, particularly in places that claim to value freedom of speech.”

The piece is rife with factual errors and misrepresentations, including that Hamas only operates in Gaza and not the West Bank. It also described Israel’s founding as an act of colonialism imposed by a “brutalizing imperial power” to aid “a minority of Jewish people who subscribed to Zionism” and an effort to “discredit the indigeneity of the Palestinians and the existence of Palestine itself.”

While not as extreme as Kiros, DeGette has taken stances critical of Israel as well, including signing a letter calling for unilateral U.S. recognition of Palestinian statehood and opposing additional offensive aid to Israel.

“I have been saying for months that I would not support additional offensive weapon sales to Israel that could be used against innocent Palestinians,” she said in December. “More weapons are the last thing we need in the region. We need a permanent ceasefire, a massive surge of humanitarian aid, and lasting peace for both Israelis and Palestinians.”

Local political strategists said that, while these party processes should be a signal for both incumbents to take their opponents seriously, they aren’t necessarily a sign that either is likely to be defeated in the upcoming election. The delegates and activists who participate in such votes are generally more progressive and politically engaged than the electorate at large.

“It’s always been very much an insider game,” Jim Carpenter, a longtime Colorado political strategist, said of the process. “It’s always been … relatively easy to get your supporters into that and make an awful lot of noise that then kind of fades out in the primary. … The people who participate in the caucuses [are] a very different set of people than vote in the primary.”

“That reflects the party insiders, not the broader party rank-and-file,” Carpenter said.

The Denver area in particular has a large and active DSA contingent and progressives have tended to do well in internal proceedings in recent years, but those results have been a poor predictor and rarely reflective of the primary voting base, Carpenter said. If anything, finishing in the top spot in the internal process has sometimes been a poor omen for campaigns.

“If you’re putting money on this in Polymarket, you wouldn’t really want to use the caucuses as a leading indicator,” Rick Ridder, a longtime Democratic political strategist and pollster in Colorado, told Jewish Insider.

Ridder also emphasized that, with significant financial advantages over their opponents, both Hickenlooper and DeGette are positioned to win, noting that for more than 50 years, the candidates who have spent the most on television and digital ads have won in federal and statewide races.

Carpenter echoed that view, saying that as long as the two incumbents continue to raise money and remain active on the trail to emphasize their records and turn out their base, they should be well-positioned to win, though they have to take the challenges seriously, particularly when some Democrats are looking for generational change.

“Political prognostication is a dangerous business but I think they’ll be fine once the primary campaign really starts, and they can then more directly communicate with voters, and there’ll be a much bigger pool,” he said, noting that independents, with whom Hickenlooper has long been popular, can also vote in Democratic primaries in Colorado.

Carpenter said that Gonzales has a minimal statewide profile and has not proven to be a strong fundraiser so far, potentially leaving her with few resources to take on Hickenlooper. He added that the DSA and Justice Democrats, backing Kiros, are vocal and active, but “don’t have a constituency here.”

Hickenlooper, who also achieved ballot access through the petitioning process in 2020, has already collected the signatures necessary to qualify for the primary election, and framed his participation in the caucus process as aimed at energizing supporters.

“The campaign has already submitted the petitions needed to get on the ballot so our focus in participating in the process up to this point was to help energize the base, meet with voters, and support the work of our county parties,” Hickenlooper’s spokesperson said. “The Senator appreciates everyone who participated in the process and really enjoyed having conversations with folks across the state.”

Gonzales claimed that Hickenlooper’s decision was an attempt to avoid voters.

“How you show up matters, not just when things are easy, but especially when things are hard. I’ve spent my career walking picket lines, organizing tenants + teachers, and listening to working people across Colorado. That’s what you do when you actually want to earn people’s trust,” she said on X.

Like Hickenlooper’s campaign, DeGette’s campaign similarly downplayed the results of the delegate vote in a statement.

“Diana DeGette has worked hard for Denver for over 30 years and is grateful she is on track to make the ballot through the assembly process, despite the major technical issues with the party’s software platform and serious questions about the process,” a DeGette spokesperson told Colorado Politics, addressing the results of the delegate poll. “She enjoyed connecting with Democrats about the issues that matter to them.”

Kiros told the Denver Post the results were “a testament to the organizing we were doing and the lack of organizing [DeGette] was doing on her part — and her thinking she would coast through.”

The recent caucuses were also plagued by technical issues related to a new app-based voting system.

Hickenlooper had $3.9 million on hand as of the end of 2025, dwarfing Gonzales’ $161,000 war chest. Degette finished the year with $535,000, as compared to Kiros’ $64,000. Hickenlooper is also well ahead of Gonzales in polling.

seeking security

Colorado Dems push DHS on security grant funding implementation

The lawmakers wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem requesting updates on efforts to streamline and improve the process for Nonprofit Security Grant Program applicants

Graeme Sloan/Sipa via AP

The U.S. Capitol Building at sunset in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, March 6, 2021.

By

Marc Rod

December 10, 2025

A group of Democrats from Colorado’s congressional delegation wrote to Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem raising questions about the implementation and execution of the Nonprofit Security Grant Program.

“In light of the recent surge in anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, and other violent hate-based incidents in the United States, the importance of this program cannot be overstated,” the letter reads. “We urge DHS and FEMA to do more to ensure NSGP allows nonprofits and religious organizations to better protect the people they serve. All Americans deserve to visit their places of worship, schools, and community centers freely and without fear.”

The letter specifically focuses on gaps in executing the Nonprofit Security Grant Program Improvement Act, passed in 2022, which directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to establish a dedicated office to administer the NSGP and provide expanded assistance to potential applicants.

The letter notes that there has been no announcement that such an office has been established, and requests information about whether such action has taken place and, if so, “to what extent it is appropriately staffed to carry out the duties outlined.”

The letter also raises concerns about the “lack of standardization of application deadlines” among the various state agencies that manage applications from individual nonprofit groups at the state level, another aim of the Improvement Act.

“Implementing a standard deadline for all [state administrative agencies] and a set list of required documents would make the process significantly more efficient and less confusing for the organizations applying,” the letter reads. “In addition, we believe there should be increased transparency between FEMA and SAAs. FEMA should provide uniform guidance and feedback regarding both successful and unsuccessful applications. This increased communication would allow unsuccessful organizations to improve their applications.”

Though the letter does not directly address the issue, other lawmakers have raised concerns about the delayed opening and short application timeline for the NSGP this year, and accused the Department of Homeland Security of a range of issues in its handling of the grant program.

The letter also requests that FEMA change its policies to allow institutions to pay permanent security staff with the grants they receive, something they are unable to do under current guidelines; currently, institutions can only use grant funding to hire security contractors.

“While this has been helpful, at present, organizations cannot use funds from this program for permanent salaried employees or personnel expenses,” the lawmakers wrote. “This means that non-profits are reliant on contracting outside security vendors, which can be unpredictable and hard to hire when needed.”

The letter was led by Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) and co-signed by Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) and Reps. Joe Neguse (D-CO), Diana DeGette (D-CO), Brittany Pettersen (D-CO) and Jason Crow (D-CO).

extremism in action

Colorado school shooter expressed antisemitic, white nationalist views

The suspected shooter, like several other recent attackers, was active in violent online forums and showed a fascination with previous mass killers

CHET STRANGE/AFP via Getty Images

Police officers on the scene at Evergreen High School where a shooting occurred earlier in the day, in Evergreen, Colorado on September 10, 2025.

By

Marc Rod

September 12, 2025

Desmond Holly, the suspected shooter who critically injured two students at Evergreen High School in Colorado on Wednesday, shared antisemitic and white nationalist views online, according to the Denver Post and the Anti-Defamation League.

Local authorities said Thursday that Holly had been “radicalized by some extremist network,” without specifying further.

According to the Denver Post, one of Holly’s online accounts used a coded slogan for Holocaust denial and reposted antisemitic videos and other videos showing individuals in Nazi uniforms.

The ADL’s Center on Extremism said Friday that Holly’s TikTok accounts were “filled with white supremacist symbolism,” including a reference to the white nationalist “14 words” slogan, and utilized a neo-Nazi symbol in his profile photo.

The ADL reported that Holly, in online interactions, shared photos of patches he had created featuring neo-Nazi symbols, similar to those used by prior mass shooters. He also shared a photo of himself in a mask that featured multiple white nationalist symbols and slogans, including “TJD” — standing for “Total Jew Death.”

According to the ADL, Holly collected tactical gear — inspired in some cases by past mass shooters — which he decorated with extremist symbols, posted internet content mimicking prior shooters and suggested in online comments that he was preparing to carry out an attack.

His accounts included numerous references to Brenton Tarrant, the far-right killer who murdered 51 at two mosques in New Zealand, among other mass killers.

Holly also maintained an account on an internet forum where users share images and footage of various deaths and murders, and commented on posts about past mass shootings, according to the ADL research. The platform has been used by multiple prior mass shooters.

Similar fascinations with extremist and antisemitic views and prior school shooters, as well as apparent interactions with online extremist networks, have been a feature of several recent mass attacks.

“The deeply disturbing specifics of this case follow a pattern recently discovered by ADL Center on Extremism, which its analysts have found in at least three school shootings committed by young people over the past year,” the ADL report stated, including engagement with some of the same online forums.

The Colorado shooting took place shortly after the killing of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk in Utah.

attack update

81-year-old victim of Boulder antisemitic attack dies from wounds

Egyptian national Mohamed Soliman now faces two counts of first-degree murder, in addition to 12 federal hate crimes charges and more than 100 state charges related to the June 1 firebombing

CHET STRANGE/AFP via Getty Images

Colorado Governor Jared Polis speaks during a community gathering at the site of an attack against a group people holding a vigil for kidnapped Israeli citizens in Gaza oin Boulder, Colorado on June 4, 2025.

By

Gabby Deutch

June 30, 2025

Three weeks after a Colorado march in support of the Israeli hostages in Gaza was abruptly interrupted by a scene of grotesque violence, one of the victims of the antisemitic firebombing attack that left 29 people injured succumbed to her wounds.

Karen Diamond died on June 25, Rabbi Marc Soloway, of Boulder’s Congregation Bonai Shalom, announced in an obituary. She was 81, and is survived by her husband, two sons, two daughters-in-law and five grandsons.

“There are no words to express the pain of this horrific loss of our beloved member and friend,” Soloway wrote.

The alleged attacker, Egyptian national Mohamed Soliman, now faces two counts of first-degree murder connected to Diamond’s death, in addition to 12 federal hate crimes charges and more than 100 state charges related to the June 1 attack. A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment.

Run for Their Lives, the organization that arranges the weekly hostage marches, released a statement on Monday calling Diamond’s death “a heavy and heartbreaking moment for us.”

exclusive

Colorado Sens. Bennet, Hickenlooper push for more NSGP funding after Boulder attack

They also urged lawmakers to ensure that the funding can be used to pay security guards and other security personnel

Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images

Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) (C) introduces Sen. Michael Bennett (D-CO) (L) at Camp Hale on October 12, 2022 in Red Cliff, Colorado.

By

Marc Rod

June 17, 2025

Colorado’s two Democratic senators, Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper, wrote to Senate leaders on Tuesday calling for funding for the Nonprofit Security Grant Program to be increased to as much as $500 million following the antisemitic attack on a hostage awareness march in Boulder, Colo.

They also urged lawmakers to ensure that the funding can be used to “pay permanent security guards and other critical personnel.”

“In the wake of these incidents and the broader increase in religiously motivated hate crimes, we urge you to do more to protect our Jewish communities by increasing funding for the Nonprofit Security Grant Program,” the lawmakers wrote. “We also urge you to direct the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to expand eligible NSGP expenditures so that synagogues, Jewish community centers, and other religious institutions can use the program to hire and retain personnel to better prevent antisemitic and other hate crimes.”

They emphasized that antisemitism in the United States has risen to record levels since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, and that funding for the program has fallen significantly short.

“Following the recent antisemitic attacks in Boulder and Washington, D.C., it is obvious that Congress must allocate more funds for the NGSP, potentially up to $500 million, as many Republican Senators continue to request,” the two Colorado senators wrote. “Jewish Americans, like all Americans, deserve to visit their places of worship, schools, and community freely and without fear.”

Good Wednesday morning.

In today’s Daily Kickoff, we report on the aftermath of the terrorist attack last weekend at a hostage march in Boulder, Colo., and cover a resurgent push for the U.S. to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization following reports that the Boulder attacker had expressed support for the group. We also talk to students and faculty at Harvard to check in on the school’s recent approach to antisemitism and its clashes with the Trump administration, and report on President Donald Trump‘s recommendation not to increase the funding level of the Nonprofit Security Grant Program. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Rep. Randy Fine, Santa Ono and Jake Sullivan.

What We’re Watching

The White House is holding a briefing for Jewish community leaders this afternoon.
The House Education and the Workforce Committee is holding a hearing today with Education Secretary Linda McMahon on the department’s policies and priorities.
Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID) is speaking at the Hudson Institute this afternoon about the future of American foreign policy in the Middle East.
The Congressional Israel Allies Foundation is hosting a belated Jerusalem Day celebration today on Capitol Hill. MK Gila Gamliel, Israel’s minister of innovation, science and technology, will address the gathering.
In New York City, WNBC, Politico and Telemundo are hosting a mayoral primary debate at 7 p.m. tonight for nine of the candidates vying for the Democratic nomination later this month.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar is traveling to Germany today, where he’ll meet with his German counterpart, Johann Wadephul, and other senior officials, as well as Jewish communal leaders, in Berlin.

What You Should Know

A QUICK WORD WITH JI’s mELISSA WEISS

The holiday of Shavuot is one of prayer and celebration, marked by all-night learning, indulging in cheesecake and communal events.

But across the U.S., this Shavuot was marked with a fear and unease that has become abnormally normal in recent months, following the Passover arson at the home of Gov. Josh Shapiro and the murders of two Israeli Embassy employees outside the Capital Jewish Museum last month, and deepened further by the horrific attack in Boulder, Colo., on Sunday in which an Egyptian national threw homemade Molotov cocktails at marchers calling for the release of the remaining 58 hostages being held in Gaza. Twelve people, including a Holocaust survivor, were injured.

The reverberations from the attack are already being felt in Washington, where legislators are reviving a bill to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. More below.

Two days before the attack, we reported on the Trump administration’s full FY 2026 budget request for Congress — which did not recommend an increase in funding to the Nonprofit Security Grant Program, instead holding it at its current level of $274.5 million. Fewer than half of the requests — which are submitted by organizations at elevated risk of being targeted in a terrorist attack — were fulfilled in 2024.

The attack in Boulder is likely to garner additional calls from the Jewish community for increased funding for the program. In the wake of last month’s deadly attack at the Capital Jewish Museum, a coalition of leading Jewish groups called for the federal government to increase NSGP spending to $1 billion. “The rising level of anti-Jewish incitement, which inevitably leads to violent acts … requires governmental action commensurate with the level of danger,” the organizations said.

In the wake of Sunday’s attack, many legislators condemned the attacks, most denouncing the antisemitic nature of the firebombing. But three Squad members — Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Summer Lee (D-PA) — condemned the attacks without mentioning Israel or antisemitism. President Donald Trump, in his response, did not mention Israel or antisemitism either, choosing instead to rail against former President Joe “Biden’s ridiculous Open Border Policy, which has hurt our Country so badly.”

The identities of the victims of the attack and the perpetrators’ declared motivations are political inconveniences to legislators and activists on both sides of the political spectrum — and their decision to erase both perhaps reverberates the loudest.

Other lawmakers focused their comments on the shooter’s immigration status. Mohamed Sabry Soliman had come to the U.S. in 2022 and received a work visa, which expired earlier this year. That the attack was perpetrated by an individual who had been approved for a visa by the Biden administration and remained illegally under the Trump administration is expected to produce more calls for stricter immigration policies. Last night, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that Soliman’s wife and five children had been apprehended by immigration officials and faced potential deportation.

But while politicians debate the best approaches — from designating terror groups to calling for immigration crackdowns — Jewish communities remain on edge, feeling unsafe and unheard.

Perhaps nothing underscores Jewish communal concerns at this moment better than an op-ed published in The New York Times on Tuesday by National Council for Jewish Women CEO Sheila Katz.

“When antisemitism emerges within progressive spaces, cloaked in the language of justice, too often it is met with silence and discomfort, creating echo chambers where dangerous ideas are amplified rather than confronted,” Katz wrote. In response to sounding the alarm about antisemitism in left-wing circles, she said, “we have been gaslit, ignored and told that our fear is overblown, our outrage unjustified. Among many groups that have fought to secure and reclaim civil rights, voting rights and reproductive rights, we have seen antisemitism dismissed as not bad enough to matter, our grief met with cynicism, our safety treated as optional.”

Some Americans waking up to their morning news on Tuesday saw “Jews Are Afraid Right Now” as the Times headline accompanying Katz’s piece. But for the first several hours it was posted, the op-ed had a different headline: “American Jews Are Paying for the War in Gaza” — an approach to both the Israel-Hamas war and antisemitism in America that plays into the dual-loyalty tropes that American Jews have fought long before the Oct. 7 attacks.

The Times quietly changed the op-ed’s headline to the milquetoast “Jews Are Afraid Right Now” — which, while correct, missed Katz’s core point: “At rallies and on campuses, in coalition rooms and online spaces, slogans sometimes directly drawn from Hamas’s terrorist manifesto have been chanted and painted on placards, and shouted from stages and in the streets. ‘Globalize the intifada.’ ‘By any means necessary.’ ‘From the river to the sea.’ ‘Zionists out.’ These are not simply words; they can be interpreted as calls for violence.”

The Boulder attacker told investigators he wanted “to kill all Zionist people” — not dissimilar from comments made by the Capital Jewish Museum shooter, who declared, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza,” after gunning down Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim. The arsonist who set the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion on fire said he committed the crime because of what Shapiro, one of the most prominent Jewish politicians in the country, “wants to do to the Palestinian people.”

From academia to activism to journalism, there is a reticence in left-wing circles to acknowledge that inciting language around the Israel-Hamas war can have a dangerous impact.

A year and a half ago, Ivy League administrators were pressed on whether “From the river to the sea” was a genocidal chant. The response, given by the since-ousted presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, was that “it depends on the context.”

In this case, the context is the firebombing of elderly Jews calling for the release of hostages in Gaza. Last month, the context was the gunning down of a young couple outside a Jewish organization’s event focused on humanitarian aid in Gaza. In April, the context was the arson of the residence of a Jewish governor on the first night of Passover.

The recent attacks in Harrisburg, Washington and now Boulder are not surprising. They are what happens when ideology-driven activism trumps ethical journalism, when antisemitism becomes a political football and when the boundaries between free speech and calls for violence blur — creating a dangerous and deadly reality for American Jews.

temperature check

Jews at Harvard are still worried about antisemitism — and about Trump’s response to it

A glimpse into the Harvard University campus on May 24, 2025 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (ZHU ZIYU/VCG VIA GETTY IMAGES)

As Israeli students departed from Harvard University last month to begin summer break, the usual sense of relief and excitement at having completed another academic year was replaced by fear and uncertainty for many. Amid the Trump administration’s battle with Harvard — which recently escalated to stripping the university of its ability to enroll foreign students entirely — among international students exchanging goodbyes, “See you in the fall” was replaced with “I hope to see you in the fall.” Jewish students and faculty who conduct biomedical research at Harvard also face grim prospects, after Trump revoked billions of dollars in federal funds to the university. At the same time, many Jewish students on campus expressed relief that the antisemitism and anti-Israel activism that was all too common in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks had declined significantly in the previous school year, Jewish Insider’s Haley Cohen and Gabby Deutch report.

Trump effect: Changes on campus were implemented at the beginning of the 2024-2025 school year, when Joe Biden was still president, said Harvard Law professor Jesse Fried, noting that Harvard’s progress in addressing antisemitism and students’ anti-Israel bias was not only a result of pressure from President Donald Trump. But once Trump came into office and began threatening Harvard — and then implementing policies that directly targeted the Ivy League university — change happened more quickly, Fried observed. “Harvard is moving very quickly and aggressively to eliminate certain sources of anti-Israel bias on campus,” Fried said. “If the Trump administration were not breathing down their neck, I believe progress would have been much slower.”

Read the full story here.

Elsewhere: A federal judge dismissed a discrimination lawsuit filed against the University of Pennsylvania by two Jewish students, saying that the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate that the university had taken action that “could be interpreted as antisemitic with the intention of causing harm to the plaintiffs.”

OH NO

Santa Ono rejected as University of Florida president

Call Me Back podcast host Dan Senor moderates a session with WashU Chancellor Andrew D. Martin and University of Michigan President Santa Ono at the ADL Never is Now event at Javits Center on March 03, 2025 in New York City. (Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Anti-Defamation League)

In an unprecedented move, the Florida Board of Governors rejected the confirmation of Santa Ono, the former president of the University of Michigan, as the University of Florida’s next president, Jewish Insider’s Haley Cohen reports.

Board grilling: During a three-hour meeting on Tuesday, Ono was questioned by the board, which oversees the state’s 12 public universities, about an anti-Israel encampment last year that remained on the Michigan campus for a month, as well as his stance on antisemitism. Alan Levine, vice chair of the board, grilled Ono about what he described as an inadequate response to antisemitism at Michigan during Ono’s tenure to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks in Israel, The Gainesville Sun reported. “What happened on Oct. 7 deeply affected the members of my community and me personally, and so at UF I would be consistently focused on making sure antisemitism does not rear its head again,” Ono responded.

Read the full story here.

APOLOGY TOUR

Washington Post corrects story claiming aid site shooting

Men look around on alert in the wake of gunfire shots as displaced Palestinians receive food packages from a US-backed foundation pledging to distribute humanitarian aid in western Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on May 27, 2025. (AFP via Getty Images)

The Washington Post issued an apology on Tuesday for an article that claimed, citing the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, that Israeli troops had killed more than 30 people on Sunday at an aid site in Gaza, a story picked up by a variety of U.S. news outlets in spite of denials by Israeli forces and U.S.-backed aid contractors, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.

Walk-back: “The Post didn’t give proper weight to Israel’s denial and gave improper certitude about what was known about any Israeli role in the shootings,” the paper said in an editor’s note added Tuesday, days after it corrected the story. “The early versions fell short of Post standards of fairness and should not have been published in that form.” The newspaper has repeatedly faced accusations of bias and faulty reporting in its coverage of the war and the families of hostages. It has repeatedly been forced to issue corrections to high-profile stories accusing Israel of misconduct.

Read the full story here.

Bonus: The Washington Post is creating a new program to publish a range of essays and writings from journalists and writers who do not work for the Post; the move comes amid a revamping of the paper’s editorial section that saw the departure of David Shipley, the section’s editor, and other top editorial writers.

terror tag

Lawmakers push to designate Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group after Boulder attack

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is seen outside a Senate Judiciary Committee markup on Thursday, November 14, 2024. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Following Sunday’s attack in Boulder, Colo., on a group marching to raise awareness about the hostages being held in Gaza, a bipartisan push is growing on Capitol Hill to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.

New push: Mohamed Sabry Soliman, an Egyptian citizen who lived in Kuwait for 17 years prior to arriving in the United States, appears to have expressed support for the group. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said he plans to reintroduce legislation he had led on multiple previous occasions on the subject. Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) wrote to Trump urging him to designate the group as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle indicated they’ll support the effort.

Read the full story here.

fine’s fix

Rep. Randy Fine: To stop antisemitic attacks, declare CAIR a terrorist group

Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL), the newest Jewish Republican member of Congress, argued on Monday, following an antisemitic attack on a group marching in support of the hostages in Gaza in Boulder, Colo., that the federal government should take aggressive action against groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, deport all undocumented immigrants and take a strong hand toward college campuses, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.

What he said: “I’m angry that we’ve allowed this to get there, I’m angry that we’ve allowed Muslim terror to operate unfettered in this country,” Fine said in an interview with JI on Monday. “Make no mistake, the Palestinian cause is fundamentally a broken, evil philosophy … It’s time to realize there is evil in this world and we have to fight it.” He said that institutions tied to that ideology, including CAIR, the Muslim Brotherhood and Students for Justice in Palestine, should not be allowed to operate in the United States, and should be designated as terrorist organizations, “because that’s what they are.”

Read the full story here.

SPENDING FREEZE

Trump doesn’t request an increase in funding for nonprofit security grants

A Miami Beach police patrol drives past Temple Emanu-El synagogue in Miami Beach, Florida, on October 9, 2023, after Hamas launched an attack on Israel. (MARCO BELLO/AFP via Getty Images)

President Donald Trump’s full budget request to Congress on Friday recommended Congress hold the Nonprofit Security Grant Program at its current level of $274.5 million, in spite of chronic funding shortages and pressure from both lawmakers and the Jewish community for substantially increased funding at a time of rising antisemitism, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.

About the request: The budget also requests no funding for two hate crimes prevention grant programs, the Khalid Jabara and Heather Heyer NO HATE Act Program and the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Grants Program, and proposes funding cuts for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

Read the full story here.

Bonus: Speaking at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Tuesday, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon laid out the administration’s expectations for campus antisemitism policies, including encampment and mask bans and stricter student and faculty vetting, but sidestepped how the administration will execute on those directives while making substantial cuts to OCR.

Worthy Reads

Lighting the Fuse: In The Atlantic, Bruce Hoffman considers the impact that anti-Israel rhetoric plays in stoking antisemitic sentiment. “Words matter. The protester at Columbia University in 2024 holding a sign labeling Jewish demonstrators who were waving Israeli flags as ‘Al-Qasam’s next targets’ was dismissed as being hyperbolic. So were the ‘By Any Means Necessary’ banners carried at demonstrations and the red inverted triangles, similar to those Hamas uses to mark Israeli targets, spray-painted on university buildings, a national monument, and even the apartment building of a museum director. When demonstrators wave the flags of terrorist organizations, wear headbands celebrating those same groups, and publicly commemorate the martyrdom of terrorist leaders such as Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar and Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, they’re not throwing the bomb, but their message can light the fuse.” [TheAtlantic]

The Battle Over Food Aid: In The Free Press, Eli Lake looks at how the misreporting about aid distribution in Gaza is being pushed by Hamas and its affiliates in the enclave. “In other words, Hamas wants to sabotage Israel’s plans to cut out the terrorist group from one of its remaining sources of control and leverage in Gaza: distribution of food and aid. That is an important piece of context missing from nearly all of the first-day stories on the alleged massacres. It also may explain why on Tuesday morning, the world awoke to more reports of Palestinians being shot as they awaited food deliveries. At a bare minimum it’s reasonable to conclude that Hamas is instigating confrontations with the IDF in order to provoke the shootings of hungry aid recipients. This, however, does not eliminate the possibility that Israeli soldiers have in some cases fired in the direction of Palestinians awaiting aid. Israel is attempting to deliver food in the middle of a war zone. Even the most professional armies make mistakes. If the accounts of these shootings are accurate, then the Israelis have fired warning shots as crowds approached a site before the aid distribution was ready. That’s a tragedy, but not a massacre.” [FreePress]

Credit Risk:The Wall Street Journal’s David Cloud reports on efforts by Iranian-backed militias to exploit a currency-exchange scheme that allowed the groups to bring in billions of dollars. “Regulators in Iraq and U.A.E. limited daily withdrawals and cracked down on the card smuggling. In one case, more than two dozen Iraqis carrying a total of around 1,200 cash cards loaded with more than $5 million were arrested at Iraqi airports and border crossings. An Iraqi traveler was arrested at the airport in the city of Najaf with 300 bank cards hidden in cigarette packs in his luggage. In another, multiple Iranians and Iraqis were caught by border guards while attempting to smuggle Mastercards to Iran. The militias adjusted, and began persuading merchants in the other countries with access to Visa and Mastercard networks to run fake purchase transactions in return for a kickback. In an example described by bankers familiar with the scheme, a luxury-goods store in the U.A.E. charges a Visa or Mastercard cash or debit card $5,000, even though no merchandise changes hands. In return for a 5% payment, the shop gives the cardholder the $5,000 in cash or the equivalent in U.A.E.’s currency, the dirham, which is pegged to the dollar. The card company debits the card at the official Iraqi dollar rate. The funds then move back to Iraq for the market exchange.” [WSJ]

Word on the Street

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Wednesday rejected a nuclear deal with the “rude, insolent” U.S. that would require the Islamic Republic to stop enriching uranium, one of President Donald Trump’s core requirements for any nuclear agreement, Jewish Insider’s Lahav Harkov reports; the Trump administration had reportedly been negotiating an interim deal that would allow Iran to enrich uranium to 3% until a final agreement is reached in which the Islamic Republic can no longer enrich its own uranium…

Trump withdrew the nomination of Jason Isaacman to be the head of NASA, with a White House spokesperson saying that it is “essential that the next leader of NASA is in complete alignment with President Trump’s America First agenda”…

Rev. Johnnie Moore was named the new head of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation following Jake Woods’ departure last month; Moore’s appointment came a day after the Boston Consulting Group, which had been advising the effort, withdrew its team from the project…

The GHF paused operations on Wednesday with plans to resume on Thursday, following a string of security incidents in the vicinity of distribution sites in which Israeli forces fired at Palestinians who had mistakenly strayed from pre-approved routes to the sites; the GHF reportedly asked the IDF to improve instructions and directions for Palestinians to safely access the aid sites…

Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ) introduced a resolution honoring the 129th anniversary of the Jewish War Veterans organization…

Reps. Dan Goldman (D-NY), Jerry Nadler (D-NY), Yvette Clarke (D-NY) and Tom Suozzi (D-NY) introduced a resolution honoring the 100th anniversary of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research…

A group of four House Democrats introduced legislation on Wednesday that aims to exempt Israel and Ukraine from the global tariffs that Trump imposed by executive order, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports…

The State Department is launching a pilot program to vet student visa applicants’ social media profiles in an effort to crack down on the matriculation into American universities of foreign students with antisemitic beliefs; the pilot program is focused on individuals “seeking to travel to Harvard University for any purpose”…

In Foreign Policy, Aaron David Miller assesses the state of relations between the Trump administration and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu…

The House Education and Workforce Committee threatened on Monday to subpoena Bowdoin College, accusing the school of failing to comply with the committee’s requests for information regarding antisemitism on campus, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports…

In a recent appearance on the “Unholy Podcast,” former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan praised Trump for his strategy of engagement with Iran on their nuclear weapons program and predicted that the Trump administration would reach a deal that “is going to look and feel pretty similar to the” 2015 nuclear deal reached by former President Barack Obama, Jewish Insider’s Emily Jacobs reports…

In a newly surfaced clip of New York Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani from 2021, the legislator, who is currently mounting a bid for New York City mayor, acknowledged that he identifies as an anti-Zionist, saying, “In the anti-Zionist movement that I believe in and belong to, there is no room for antisemitism”…

CBS News interviews the family of Sarah Milgrim, one of two Israeli Embassy employees killed in a terror attack outside the Capital Jewish Museum last month…

The French National Assembly unanimously voted to promote Alfred Dreyfus to the rank of brigadier general more than a century after the Jewish army officer was stripped of his rank in an incident widely attributed to antisemitism…

Several Jewish institutions in Paris, as well as the city’s Holocaust memorial, were vandalized over the weekend…

U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack, who is also serving as the Trump administration’s Syria envoy, said that the U.S. would eliminate seven of its eight bases in Syria as part of a broader drawdown of troops from the country…

Israel conducted a series of airstrikes on weapons targets in southern Syria following the launch of projectiles from the area into Israel on Tuesday evening…

Betsy Berns Korn assumed the role of chair of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations over the weekend, succeeding Harriet P. Schleifer…

Macroeconomist Stanley Fischer, who served as governor of the Bank of Israel and vice chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, died at 81…

South African author Lynn Freed, whose writings focused on her childhood in a Jewish community in apartheid South Africa, died at 79…

Pic of the Day

Israeli President Isaac Herzog met with released hostage Omer Wenkert and his parents, Niva and Shai, at the president’s residence in Jerusalem, June 3rd 2025. (Haim Zach/GPO)

Israeli President Isaac Herzog met on Tuesday with released hostage Omer Wenkert and his parents, Niva and Shai, at the president’s residence in Jerusalem.

Birthdays

Model Bar Refaeli named as Hublot Grand ambassador at Hublot Boutique on February 12, 2015 in New York City. (Jim Spellman/WireImage)

Israeli supermodel, Bar Refaeli turns 40…

Co-founder of Boston Properties and owner of U.S. News & World Report, Mort Zuckerman turns 88… Professor emeritus of organic chemistry at the Weizmann Institute of Science and winner of the 2012 Israel Prize, David Milstein turns 78… Retired chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, Stephen J. Markman turns 76… Judge on the Court of Common Pleas in Philadelphia since 2018, he was the longest tenured member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives (42 years from 1974 to 2016), Mark B. Cohen turns 76… Lineman for the Miami Dolphins for 11 seasons, which included three Super Bowl appearances and four Pro Bowls, then a judge on the 11th Judicial Circuit of Florida (Miami-Dade County), Ed Newman turns 74… British journalist, author of 11 books and columnist for The Times of London, The Jerusalem Post and The Jewish Chronicle, Melanie Phillips turns 74… First-ever Jewish governor of Hawaii and then chief operating officer of Illinois, she serves on the board of directors of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Linda Lingle turns 72… President and CEO of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC until 2023, now a professor at Johns Hopkins, Daniel H. Weiss turns 68… Co-founder of Ripco Real Estate, Todd Cooper… Chair in Human Cancer Genetics at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Dr. Matthew Langer Meyerson turns 62… Law professor at both the University of Toronto and University of California, Berkeley, Ayelet Shachar turns 59… U.S. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) turns 54… French-Israeli entrepreneur, angel investor in over 360 startups, Jeremie Berrebi turns 47… D.C.-based photographer and founder of Revamped Media, Daniel Swartz… Reporter for The Washington Post, Colby Itkowitz… Senior planning analyst at Con Edison in NYC, Adam E. Soclof… Director at Dentons Global Advisors, Jason Hillel Attermann… Managing editor at eJewishPhilanthropy, Judah Ari Gross… Gena Wolfson… Political coordinating producer for NBC, Emily Gold… Former member of the New York State Assembly, now VP of government relations at UJA-Federation of New York, Daniel Rosenthal turns 34… Ken Moss…

breaking

FBI investigating attack on Colorado pro-Israel gathering as terrorism

One person has been arrested after throwing a Molotov cocktail towards demonstrators, injuring multiple victims

Screenshot/X

A man is arrested after throwing a Molotov cocktail at pro-Israel demonstrators in Boulder, CO on June 1, 2025.

By

Emily Jacobs

June 1, 2025

The FBI and law enforcement in Colorado are investigating a possible act of terrorism after multiple people attending a weekly pro-Israel gathering in Boulder to honor hostages kidnapped by Hamas were attacked by a suspect seen throwing Molotov cocktails in their direction.

FBI Director Kash Patel wrote on X that the bureau was “fully investigating” what he described as a “targeted terror attack” in Boulder on Sunday, while FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino said they were probing the incident as an “act of terror, and targeted violence” while asking for anyone with information to contact the bureau.

One person was arrested after throwing a Molotov cocktail towards the pro-Israel demonstrators, according to Boulder Police Chief Steve Redfearn. Speaking to reporters from the scene of the attack, Redfearn said authorities were called to the area responding to calls “that people were being set on fire” by “a man with a weapon.”

Redfearn also said that victims, attendees of the weekly Boulder Run for Their Lives event calling for the release of the remaining hostages in Gaza, had “injuries consistent with burns and other injuries,” though he could not provide an estimate for the number of individuals who were harmed in the attack.

He warned that some of those injuries could be life threatening. At a Sunday evening press conference, Redfearn said the victims ranged in age from 67 to 88 years old, “at least one” of whom “was very seriously injured, probably safe to say, [in] critical condition.” The 88 year old victim fled Nazi persecution in Europe, Rabbi Yisroel Wilhelm, the Chabad director at the University of Colorado Boulder, told CBS Colorado.

At a press conference Sunday, FBI Denver Special Agent in Charge Mike Michalek identified the suspect as Mohamed Sabry Soliman. Fox News reported that Soliman is an “Egyptian national in the U.S. illegally as a visa overstay who entered the U.S. during the Biden administration,” citing senior Department of Homeland Security officials.

Soliman arrived in the U.S. in August 2022 on a visa that expired in February 2023, filing a claim with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in September 2022 for a work visa that was approved for a two-year period in March 2023. He remained in the U.S. illegally despite his work authorization expiring in March of this year.

Videos circulating on social media of the attack showed Soliman shouting “end Zionists.”

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, said in a post on X that he was “closely monitoring the situation in Boulder” and said that his state was working “with local and federal law enforcement to support this investigation.”

In a second statement on his personal account, Polis wrote that, “As the American Jewish community continues to reel from the horrific antisemitic murders in Washington, D.C., it is unfathomable that the Jewish community is facing another terror attack here in Boulder, on the eve of the holiday of Shavuot no less.”

“Several individuals were brutally attacked while peacefully marching to draw attention to the plight of the hostages who have been held by Hamas terrorists in Gaza for 604 days. I condemn this vicious act of terrorism, and pray for the recovery of the victims,” he continued.

Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO), who is running to replace the term-limited Polis, described the incident as a “horrifying terror attack” in a statement posted to X. “My thoughts are with the victims of the horrifying terror attack that occurred this afternoon in Boulder. Hate and violence of any kind will not be tolerated in Colorado,” Bennet wrote.

Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) wrote on the platform that, “Hate of any kind has no home in Colorado. We’re monitoring the reports of a horrific terror attack in Boulder this afternoon. Our thoughts are with the victims and their loved ones.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) also said that he was “closely monitoring the situation in Boulder,” adding, “This is horrifying, and this cannot continue. We must stand up to antisemitism.”

A White House official said late Sunday that President Donald Trump “has been briefed” on the attack.

The attack comes less than two weeks after the murder of two Israeli Embassy staffers attending an American Jewish Committee event in Washington. The alleged shooter yelled “Free Palestine” shortly after committing the crime.

In April, during the first night of Passover, an arsonist tried to burn down Gov. Josh Shapiro’s residence. The perpetrator cited the governor’s support for Israel as his motive.

De-platformed

Several Jewish federations’ social media accounts disabled before Oct. 7

The accounts were only reinstated after Jewish Federations of North America intervened and contacted Meta directly

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

A pedestrian walks in front of a new logo and the name 'Meta' on the sign in front of Facebook headquarters on October 28, 2021 in Menlo Park, California.

By

Gabby Deutch

October 7, 2024

With the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 terror attacks approaching, JEWISHcolorado — a Denver-based nonprofit affiliated with the Jewish Federations of North America — posted on Instagram on Oct. 1 about the organization’s Oct. 7 commemoration event. Concerns about antisemitism meant attendees would need to register in advance, and JEWISHcolorado needed to give them time to do so before the start of Rosh Hashanah.

The post, though, did not successfully reach community members. That’s because soon after sharing it, JEWISHcolorado’s Instagram account was disabled. When the account manager tried to appeal the suspension, an automated email informed the JEWISHcolorado staff that their account, with 895 posts and nearly 2,500 followers, was “permanently disabled,” with all of its content set to be “permanently deleted,” according to messages shared with Jewish Insider.

JEWISHcolorado was one of at least four local Jewish federations in the United States to have accounts on Meta-run platforms disabled after posting in the lead-up to the anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks. They did not receive any answers from Meta regarding why they had been suspended, leading some to question whether they were being targeted for the content of their posts — sharing information about Oct. 7.

“We suspect maybe it had something to do with our posting, but it’s an automated message that says you violated community guidelines. We don’t consider that to be so,” said Renee Rockford, president and CEO of JEWISHcolorado. The reasoning, according to a message from Meta, was that Meta does not “allow people on Instagram to pretend to be a business or speak for them with our permission.”

The Facebook account of the Jewish Federation of San Antonio was disabled in mid-September. Similar to JEWISHcolorado, they were removed for alleged “impersonation,” according to Kayde Jones, director of marketing and communications at the San Antonio federation.

Jones and her colleagues had no way of explaining themselves, or finding out who Meta believed them to be impersonating.

“It was as if we were completely wiped off the Facebook Earth,” said Jones. “It’s very hard to get in touch with anybody at Meta. There’s no phone calls. There’s no customer service that’s readily available.” Attempts to appeal the decision through Meta’s platforms were unsuccessful.

All of the disabled accounts have since been restored — JEWISHcolorado’s after four days, and the San Antonio federation’s after nearly two weeks. But it took the involvement of a staff member at JFNA, the national advocacy arm representing Jewish Federations, who reached out to a contact at Meta directly.

It’s not clear if someone had reported the Jewish federation accounts, or if Meta’s automated systems erroneously detected these accounts. None of them had ever previously had their accounts disabled.

“We are very grateful these issues were resolved, which seems to indicate that Meta is not intentionally targeting Jewish pages,” Niv Elis, a JFNA spokesperson, told JI. “That said, the fact that pages were taken down over Oct. 7 commemoration posts was very disappointing and indicates that there is clearly a problem that still needs to be fixed.”

A spokesperson for Meta did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, who was elected in 2018 as the state’s first Jewish governor, celebrated the increasing number of Jewish Americans involved in politics, with some rising through the ranks of the Democratic Party.

“It is very heartening to see the increasing visibility of Jewish Americans throughout politics,” Polis said during a virtual event on Tuesday for Jewish Democrats hosted by the Democratic National Committee during the 2020 Democratic National Convention. “This year, several of the candidates for president of the United States were of Jewish heritage. And of course, with the selection of [Sen.] Kamala Harris, our soon-to-be second gentleman of the U.S., Douglas Emhoff, is Jewish.”

Polis noted Emhoff’s possible role is “another reason” why Joe Biden’s selection of Harris as his running mate “was not just outstanding, but, frankly, groundbreaking.”

“These are milestones and speak well of the inclusive nature of our nation and of the Democratic Party,” said the Colorado Democrat.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who participated in a follow-up panel focused on American Jewish voters, said he was deeply moved to watch “a Jew named Bernie Sanders give, I think, the most enthusiastic speech about a nominee in the nomination that he competed for and came in second place, of any second-place finisher I’ve ever heard.”

On the webcast, Polis also highlighted President Donald Trump’s comments on the campaign trail on Monday, suggesting that he “moved the capital of Israel to Jerusalem… for the evangelicals.”

“For once, President Trump was honest about his motives. It wasn’t because of a belief that Jerusalem is the capital of the State of Israel. It wasn’t because of any deeply held belief in the Jewish state. It was simply what he said it was: an appeal to evangelical voters,” Polis stressed. “I have friends on both sides of when or how, or if the embassy should be moved. But it should not be moved — I think we would all agree — simply because evangelical voters in America want it. It should be situated because of where we can best support the peace process, the stability and survival of the Jewish State of Israel.”

rocky state

Experts weigh in on the Colorado primary races to watch

Can former Gov. John Hickenlooper emerge victorious against Andrew Romanoff in the Democratic Senate primary?

Gage Skidmore/Courtesy Romanoff for Senate

Former Gov. John Hickenlooper and Andrew Romanoff

By

Matthew Kassel

June 30, 2020

As voters cast their ballots in Colorado today following a long primary season, there are a handful of intriguing races to watch as returns trickle in. Those include a heated Senate contest for the Democratic nomination and a House seat in which a Republican incumbent faces a challenger on his right.

Jewish Insider asked a few experts to weigh in with their thoughts ahead of the big day: Seth Masket, a political scientist at the University of Denver who regularly contributes to FiveThirtyEight; Marianne Goodland, chief statehouse reporter at Colorado Politics; and Kyle Saunders, a professor of political science at Colorado State University. Here’s what they had to say.

In the Democratic Senate primary, John Hickenlooper, the former governor of Colorado who briefly ran for president last year, is hoping he can prevail and go on to defeat Sen. Cory Gardner (R-CO) in November.

There have been some recent setbacks for Hickenlooper — including a couple of racially insensitive gaffes as well as two ethics violations — but Goodland believes the former governor will come out on top in the primary against Andrew Romanoff, a former state politician who is known for mounting somewhat quixotic campaigns against establishment players.

“This is kind of a big nothing,” Goodland told JI of Hickenlooper’s ethics violations, which only resulted in a $2,750 fine for gifts he received as governor. “His biggest mistake wasn’t the ethics violations themselves but his decision to defy a subpoena from the ethics commission and to force them to take him to court to enforce it.”

Goodland said that Romanoff has “done well at times, but the money favors Hickenlooper and so does the support.” The former governor has the backing of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and has raised $12.6 million, according to Federal Election Commission filings, while securing endorsements from party power brokers like Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Kamala Harris (D-CA).

Romanoff, for his part, has raked in nearly $3 million — no pittance, but a paltry amount relative to Hickenlooper’s haul.

“That’s just a hard thing for a challenger to take on,” Masket said, “and once in a rare while you’ll see a candidate kind of take on the establishment figure and win but those cases are very rare and it’s not looking like this is going to be one of them.”

More than a week ago, Romanoff’s campaign released internal polling that suggested he was 12 points behind Hickenlooper, putting him in competitive territory. But a new SurveyUSA poll put out Friday indicated that the gap has widened, putting Hickenlooper 30 points ahead of his opponent, with 58% of likely Democratic primary voters opting for the former governor.

Saunders was skeptical that Hickenlooper would win by such a big margin. “I tend to think that it’s probably a little tighter than that,” he told JI, noting that Hickenlooper’s recent blunders had dented his reputation in the state, though most likely not enough to cost him the nomination.

If Hickenlooper advances to the general election, Goodland predicted that he will beat Gardner, who has become increasingly vulnerable in a state that has been trending blue in recent years and in which registered Democratic voters outnumber registered Republicans.

“Gardner is in the most endangered Senate seat in the country,” she told JI.

Another Republican who is facing a challenge — though in this instance from his own party — is Rep. Scott Tipton, who represents Colorado’s 3rd congressional district, encompassing most of the state’s Western Slope. In the primary, he is going up against Lauren Boebert, a gun rights activist who is running significantly to the right of her opponent.

Tipton’s race is the only contested primary in the state, as every other congressional candidate is running unopposed, Goodland said. Though she had not seen any polling on the race, she said that Tipton would probably win, observing that the Western Slope was more independent-minded than far-right.

Tipton has raised about $1.1 million, while Boebert has only pulled in $133,000, according to the FEC.

Saunders seconded Goodland’s prediction. “It’s an odd challenge,” he said. “Tipton will likely survive that on the fundraising side.”

Beyond those races, Goodland — who took a break from poring over campaign finance reports to speak with JI on Monday afternoon — is also looking at a couple of interesting races for the Colorado General Assembly. Of particular note, she said, is a “hotly contested” Republican primary for a State House seat in Jefferson County, which includes the cities of Lakewood and Golden.

“Tomorrow is going to be fun,” Goodland said.

John Hickenlooper’s late-stage missteps imperil his Senate prospects

The gaffe-prone former Colorado governor and presidential aspirant is facing a stiff primary challenge from a dark-horse candidate

Gage Skidmore

Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper

By

Matthew Kassel

June 25, 2020

Until recently, it looked as if John Hickenlooper’s bid to unseat Colorado’s first-term Republican senator, Cory Gardner, was all but assured.

Hickenlooper, the 68-year-old former governor of the Centennial State, who briefly entered the presidential race last year before dropping out after five months, garnered early support from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and has notched a slew of high-profile endorsements as the party takes aim at flipping the Senate this fall. On top of that, polls suggested that Hickenlooper could handily beat his GOP opponent in the general election.

But a series of late-stage missteps — including two racially insensitive gaffes and a couple of ethics violations — have imperiled Hickenlooper’s prospects heading into Tuesday’s primary, where observers say his nomination may be in doubt. “He did not have a good June,” mused Kyle Saunders, a professor of political science at Colorado State University.

Hickenlooper now finds himself on the defensive as he goes up against Andrew Romanoff, a 53-year-old veteran state politician with a history of running longshot campaigns for federal office. Romanoff is still the designated underdog, experts note. But he has gained on Hickenlooper over the past several weeks, with his own internal polling, released in mid June, putting him 12 points behind the frontrunner.

“People underestimate him,” said political strategist Joe Trippi, who worked on Romanoff’s primary campaign against Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) a decade ago. Romanoff, who sold his house to finance his previous Senate run, came within just eight points of defeating his opponent in 2010, even as Bennet had the backing of then-President Barack Obama. “He ran very strong against a sitting U.S. senator,” Trippi recalled. “People forget that, but he did.”

Romanoff has long been regarded as a “thorn in the side of the Democratic establishment,” according to Tyler Sandberg, a GOP consultant. But he added that Romanoff had not run a particularly aggressive campaign until a few weeks ago, when it became clear that Hickenlooper’s mistakes might cause lasting damage.

Late last week, Romanoff, who has raised close to $3 million relative to Hickenlooper’s $12.6 million, released a scathing attack ad taking Hickenlooper to task for recent comments likening politicians to slaves as well as his connections with the oil and gas industry. “We can’t take this kind of risk if we’re going to beat Cory Gardner,” a voice-over says. “So vote Andrew Romanoff for a fresh, progressive voice in the Senate.”

Romanoff is campaigning as a progressive — he supports Medicare for All and the Green New Deal — placing himself to the left of the more moderate Hickenlooper.

“It’s hard to know where John stands on anything,” Romanoff told Jewish Insider in a recent interview, noting that Hickenlooper had skipped a number of candidate forums where he would have been able to make his positions known. “On healthcare, the climate crisis, on any of these issues, he has been largely in hiding.”

In spite of his insurgent status, Romanoff was at one point known for his centrism — when he served as speaker of the Colorado House of Representatives from 2005 to 2008, during which time he led the first Democratic majority in decades. He also helped pass a now-controversial immigration bill that was repealed in 2013 and has been criticized for being overly punitive.

Still, while Romanoff appears to have calibrated further left, the shift may be because he has more latitude to do so as a Senate candidate during a year in which progressive values are becoming more mainstream. Seth Masket, a political scientist at the University of Denver, points out that Romanoff was in a “compromise-oriented position” in the State House, yet one that earned him respect from both sides of the aisle. “He knew how to put together coalitions and be bipartisan.”

Before he entered the race, Romanoff spent four years as president and CEO of Mental Health Colorado, a position he took on after losing his bid for a House seat in 2014. Earlier in his career, he worked at the Southern Poverty Law Center, where he helped research the Ku Klux Klan. “By the way, I did not expect to be having the same fight 30 years later,” Romanoff said wryly, alluding to a rise in white nationalism across the nation.

Romanoff, who is Jewish, said his religion influences his approach to life and politics. “I think a lot about the teachings of our faith,” he said. He has been to Israel three times, the first with his grandfather to attend the Maccabiah Games. The other two, he said, were through fellowships sponsored, respectively, by the Aspen Institute and the Wexner Foundation. On his visits, Romanoff was struck by the “vibrancy” of Israel’s economy as well as its “ability to make the desert bloom.”

“I’d like to take a page from Israel and other countries that have accelerated their use of clean energy,” Romanoff said. “I’d like to shift from oil and gas to solar and wind and other renewables.”

As a progressive candidate, Romanoff is aware that anti-Israel sentiment emanates from his party’s left flank, but he seeks to set himself apart. “I don’t take the view that Israel can do no wrong or that it should be immune from criticism from its friends,” he said. “I think most people in both the Democratic and Republican Party share an understanding that Israel has a right to exist and to defend itself and, I think, also a desire to see a homeland for the Palestinian people. So I’d like to advance that consensus.”

In a position paper he provided to JI, Romanoff elaborates on his views regarding Israel and the Middle East. He supports a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, opposes annexation of parts of the West Bank and advocates for renewing aid to the Palestinian Authority as well as United Nations agencies that support Palestinian refugees.

Romanoff also believes that the United States should rejoin the Iran nuclear agreement. While he regards Iran as “the leading state sponsor of terrorism” and doesn’t rule out military force as a means to counteract it, he characterizes President Donald Trump’s decision to abandon the deal as a “dangerous and short-sighted mistake.”

For his part, Hickenlooper also advocates for a two-state solution as well as resuming U.S. participation in the Iran nuclear deal. He has the support of a number of pro-Israel organizations, including J Street, Democratic Majority for Israel and the Jewish Democratic Council of America.

“John has an excellent record of job creation and economic progress, expanding Medicare access, combating climate change and enacting gun safety measures,” Halie Soifer, executive director of the JDCA, told JI in a statement. “His agenda is aligned with that of Jewish voters and we look forward to him winning the primary next week and the election in November.”

In a recent interview, Gardner touted his pro-Israel bonafides, telling JI that he had visited the Jewish state a number of times. “I’ve built a good relationship with Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu and actually have had the chance to work with [Alternate Prime Minister and Defense Minister] Benny Gantz as well,” he said.

Gardner endorses Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran deal while tentatively praising the president’s Middle East peace plan. “Look, we’ve got a long ways to go,” he said. “I certainly welcome the ideas that more people have to try to find a solution. I think it’s got more work to do, and we have to keep trying.”

As enthusiasm for Trump has waned nationwide, experts say that Gardner, an avid supporter of the president, may be at a disadvantage in a state that has been trending blue and in a moment when a progressive wave is sweeping the country. Gardner acknowledges that he has a challenging contest ahead of him as his first term comes to an end. “Colorado was always tough, there’s no doubt about that.” he said. “But I feel very good about what we have done for the people of Colorado.”

The incumbent seemed emboldened by Hickenlooper’s recent indiscretions. “While I’ve been busy passing the Great American Outdoors Act,” the senator said, “John Hickenlooper was busy ignoring a legally binding subpoena.”

Dick Wadhams, a Republican political consultant in Colorado, told JI that Gardner is in a better position than he was a few weeks ago. “I think Cory Gardner’s definitely in the game now,” he said. Wadhams added that Hickenlooper will be “limping” out of the primary if he manages to defeat Romanoff — a question mark at the moment. “A month ago, I would have said there’s no way Romanoff has any shot at this, but today I’m saying he’s got a shot.”

That Hickenlooper — whose campaign declined repeated requests for an interview with JI — is facing a serious primary challenger may come as a surprise to the Senate hopeful, who has “led a charmed political life,” according to Masket. “He’s honestly not faced that many serious competitors, and part of that is because a lot of Republicans have feared running against him, but he has always been very good at managing to get Democratic constituencies on his side while not scaring off moderates.”

Laura Chapin, a Democratic political consultant in Colorado, has faith in Hickenlooper’s chances, having voted early for him in the primary because of his record on reproductive rights, which she supports. She believes the ethics issues — charges that, as governor, Hickenlooper accepted gifts including a private jet ride — have been overblown.

Still, Romanoff believes he can beat Hickenlooper and then vanquish Gardner in November. “A lot of voters are reevaluating their decisions,” he said.

Though Romanoff announced that he had left the state on Tuesday to be with his dying father — preventing him from campaigning, at least for a few days, in the last week before the primary — he will return to Colorado today, according to a spokeswoman for his campaign.

In conversation with JI, he appeared to be energized by the prospect of finally fulfilling his ambition to move beyond state politics.

“For me, the opportunity here is not just to point out all the places where Gardner and Trump have gone wrong,” Romanoff said, “but to paint a picture of what the world might look like if you put a different group of people in charge.”

Colorado Democrat Michael Bennet warned that President Donald Trump has already done lasting damage to global perceptions of the United States, telling Jewish Insider that “every country in the world is going to have to reassess the bargains that it makes with the U.S. as a result of what he’s done in Syria, in Iran and with the Paris climate agreement.”

Speaking to JI after appearing on stage at the annual J Street National Conference in Washington this week, the presidential hopeful expressed his anxiety over the damage he said the president has done to American foreign policy. Bennet said the most common foreign policy question that he’s received from voters is, “How are you going to restore our alliances” after Trump leaves office, a question he says is “an indication to me that people really deeply worried about the instability that [Trump] is creating and the opportunity cost of having somebody with Trump’s view of the world [as President].”

In particular, Bennet praised the Iran deal, from which Trump withdrew in 2018, describing it as “for once an attempt by this country to help manage a problem in the Middle East rather than go to war with it.”

Bennet’s appearance at the annual J Street conference came as the Colorado senator has established himself as perhaps the most vocal critic of the leftward shift of the Democratic Party among the current field of candidates, a stance he thought would pay off. “I just don’t think Iowa Democrats are moving way over to the left,” said Bennet.

A pointed critic of the Medicare for All healthcare plan being advocated by progressive rivals in the Democratic primary, the Colorado senator thought his critiques of the plan were finally having an impact. Voters “understand that the only person who has come up with how to pay for [Medicare for All] is Bernie [Sanders]. I think that’s also giving them real pause and I’ve been making that argument ever since I got in the race and now finding, I believe, a more welcoming audience.”

Bennet extended his critique of the party’s leftward shift globally, although he noted “there has been less focus [on the campaign trail] on foreign policy.” As an example, he argued that “support for the BDS movement is out of kilter with mainstream voters in both parties.”

Bennet has failed to surpass 1% in national and state polls and did not meet the DNC’s criteria to participate in the two most recent televised debates. “Obviously, I wish I were polling better,” he told JI. However, Bennet noted, “The field remains very unconsolidated. The last poll I saw in Iowa had undecideds up by about 10 or 15 points, so I think it is very fluid.”

Speaking Monday in Washington, Bennet broke from Warren and Sanders on foreign policy when he told J Street conference attendees that he would be hesitant to condition U.S. aid to Israel. He noted to reporters that doing so was “a fairly blunt instrument and could be easily manipulated by someone like Prime Minister Netanyahu for his political interests.” Bennet lamented that Netanyahu had “over and over again engaged with the United States in ways that had enhanced his own domestic political interests” while undermining Washington’s ability “to play a constructive role in a bipartisan way in our support of Israel.” He expressed his concern that the current Israeli government “basically has a permission slip from [the] Trump administration to do whatever they want.”

The Democrat from Colorado is confident that his party will have the advantage on foreign policy in a general election. “I think Democrats have such a strong case to make because of how reckless Donald Trump has been and how weak he’s been in the prosecution of American foreign policy and the national defense. I’m quite comfortable that Democrats are going to be able to litigate these issues successfully,” said Bennet.

After all, he argued, the current administration does not have a “particularly Republican view of the world. It doesn’t reflect the foreign policy that we’ve pursued as a country for the past 70 years.”

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