How Wesley Bell engineered a come-from-behind victory over Cori Bush

When Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) offered her concession speech on Tuesday night after losing the Democratic primary to St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell, she unleashed a tirade against the powerful pro-Israel lobby, which spent millions to defeat her.

Her loss, the Squad member said, “takes some strings off,” and she vowed, “AIPAC, I’m coming to tear your kingdom down.”

Yet interviews with a number of St. Louis-area strategists watching the race reveal that one of its central narratives — that heavy spending by national pro-Israel groups like AIPAC and Democratic Majority for Israel fueled Bush’s loss — is only one part of a complex picture that explains Bush’s political downfall. In fact, local issues, rather than her strident criticisms of Israel, may have played a more important role and gave pro-Israel groups an opening, they say.

Bush ultimately lost her seat because she fell out of step with her district on a range of key issues — including the bipartisan infrastructure bill and support for defunding police, while failing to provide adequate constituent service in her home district, according to strategists.

The AIPAC-affiliated United Democracy Project spent more than $8.5 million in the race, while Democratic Majority for Israel spent more than $500,000. But those watching the race say those attack ads wouldn’t have been effective without Bush’s myriad political vulnerabilities, most of them unrelated to her views on Israel.

Braxton Payne, a Democratic strategist in St. Louis, who did not work for either side, said anti-Bush messaging in the district focused not on her views on Israel but on vulnerabilities including missing votes, voting against the bipartisan infrastructure bill and child tax credit and otherwise breaking with the Biden administration. 

Those knocks on Bush all featured prominently in the UDP messaging campaign in the district. Anjan Mukherjee, a spokesperson for Bell, said they were also among the campaign’s key priorities.

“When she ran four years ago, one of the main things that she had talked about was serving St. Louis, and I heard from a lot of voters that there wasn’t great outreach,” Payne added. “A lot of them said that they didn’t see her come back to the district a lot — so that being a narrative especially among older voters, that I heard a lot.”

Payne said Bush had been holding fewer town halls for constituents and failing to show up for ward meetings as she did when she was first running for office.

Some in the district also saw Bush as a “ladder climber” who had failed to keep her focus on the district, focusing instead on creating a national profile, Payne said.

Payne added that the district, especially older Black voters, remains loyal to the Democratic establishment and took umbrage with Bush’s breaks with President Joe Biden. The district includes both the city of St. Louis and the surrounding St. Louis County.

Bush’s votes against the infrastructure bill lost her the support of some of the city’s key unions in the construction trade, which backed Bell. Those endorsements, which Bush’s 2022 challenger didn’t have, gave Bell “more credibility among a lot of traditional Democratic voters,” Payne said, and created a permission structure to break with Bush.

Darius Jones, the founder of the National Black Empowerment Action Fund, which sought to highlight Bush’s record to the Black community, said that polling found that public safety, jobs, the economy and cost of living were key issues that led Black voters to be “disenchanted” with Bush. Jones is also a former AIPAC staffer.

Jones said polling and canvassing showed Bush’s positions in favor of defunding the police and legalizing drugs hurt her support in the district, as did her vote against the infrastructure bill and other Biden-backed legislation and her opposition to government contracts for Boeing, which has a manufacturing facility in the city.

Jones said that Bush’s focus on “doing things to kind of advance [her] own persona” and “divisive” activist posture also hurt her among Black voters, based on polling.

Payne said Bell is well-known, especially in the St. Louis County portion of the district, having won two elections for county prosecutor, representing an early vanguard of the progressive movement.

“He was the original progressive in this area that took on a more traditional Democrat in a time where there wasn’t a Squad … and he won with little to no money,” said Payne, who worked for the campaign of the incumbent prosecutor Bell unseated.

“He became very popular with the progressive groups, so Cori Bush trying to hit him [as] a Republican or wolf in sheep’s clothing … didn’t resonate with a lot of Democratic and progressive voters and older Democrats” who had been familiar with Bell for years, he explained.

Payne said polling showed that Bell’s favorability remained consistent throughout the campaign, indicating that Bush’s hits on Bell — including attacking him for receiving backing from AIPAC — didn’t land. 

Jon Reinish, a Democratic strategist who worked with several groups active in St. Louis, said that polling in the district reflected that Bush’s anti-AIPAC messaging and failure to focus on local issues weren’t effective, particularly among Black voters.

Payne said Bush might have “moved the needle a little bit” if she had deployed earlier an ad showing the father of Michael Brown, who was killed by police in Ferguson, Mo., criticizing Bell. But Payne wasn’t sure it would have been enough to save her.

Payne theorized that Bush’s funding challenges — she was putting hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of campaign funds toward legal bills in an ongoing federal investigation, held her back from a more aggressive advertising effort. But he said that the scandal itself, that Bush paid her now-husband as a security guard using campaign funds, didn’t feature prominently in the race.

Payne said that younger white progressives in St. Louis city are likely to be among Bush’s strongest voting blocs, but turnout in the city was down 10% from 2020, indicating that Bush’s base wasn’t energized to keep her in Congress.

Mukherjee said that Bell had outperformed the campaign’s expectations in the city, adding that the campaign had detected a surge in momentum in his favor in the final weeks of the race.

While ward-level results aren’t public yet, Bell’s success in St. Louis County suggests strength among older Black voters, as well as the Jewish population concentrated in that area of the district, Payne added.

The “constant bombardment” of ads by UDP and other groups in the district undeniably helped Bell, Payne added, pointing to his surge in head-to-head polls from well behind Bush, Payne said.

But Reinish argued that Bush “did this to herself … Cori Bush would not have been vulnerable had she not been so far out of the mainstream, both as a messenger and as a legislator.”

Stacey Newman, a former Democratic state lawmaker who ran Jewish outreach for Bell’s campaign, told JI that she had been a Bush supporter, but that her rhetoric after Oct. 7 was a breaking point. Newman said she was contacted shortly after the Hamas attack by a group of St. Louis politicos — many non-Jewish — about an effort to recruit a challenger to Bush over concerns about her overall record and stances.

She said that the group had discussions with another candidate who had been considering a run, but ultimately declined to do so, and settled on Bell as the strongest challenger. 

They had begun to plan outreach efforts to Bell when Bell preempted them, independently deciding to drop his bid for Missouri’s Senate seat and run for Bush’s House seat instead. She said she’s not aware of any other recruitment efforts that were launched against Bush.

“[Bell] says there are several reasons why he jumped in, but I know in my heart that Oct. 7 was a prime reason for him,” Newman said.

Payne said, to his knowledge, Bell made the jump from Missouri’s Senate race into the House race because he realized he didn’t have a shot at winning the Democratic primary against Lucas Kunce.

“But he also saw a pathway in better representing St. Louis,” Payne said.

Mark Mellman, the chairman of Democratic Majority for Israel’s political arm, DMFI PAC, told JI that he recognized the primary would be difficult from the start. The group commissioned polling in January that showed Bell trailing Bush by 16 points, a deficit he recalled as “off-putting to some people we talked to.”

“But we saw the vulnerability there beneath the surface,” he stressed. “There was no question that it was tougher than the Bowman-Latimer race, but it was possible,” he said of the primary in New York’s 16th Congressional District that saw Westchester County Executive George Latimer defeating Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY).

Parallels have been drawn between the two races, including both candidates’ rejections of the infrastructure package and alleged weaknesses in engaging with their districts, in addition to massive pro-Israel spending and strong local Jewish engagement.

In the closing weeks of the race, DMFI PAC released its final poll, with Bell leading Bush by six points — a margin commensurate with the result on Tuesday night.

“What we saw initially was that Bush was actually a pretty popular person personally,” Mellman told JI. But voters, he said, had “serious doubts about her job performance.”

Bell, on the other hand, “was fairly well-known” in the district, Mellman said. But voters weren’t familiar with his policy initiatives as a local elected official, including a program to divert low-level offenders from incarceration that was among the issues DMFI PAC highlighted in positive ads to define the county prosecutor as a “progressive fighter.”

Patrick Dorton, a spokesperson for UDP, attributed the group’s success, in part, to the barrage of ads it ran on what he described as “the issues voters most cared about.” He cited polling that showed economic issues were particularly “important” in the district, noting that Bush’s vote in 2021 against a bipartisan infrastructure bill “was a top issue that helped determine the race.”

“What else became clear was that Bush had lost a lot of local support,” Dorton said, adding that her constituents “cared that she didn’t show up for a ton of votes and had never passed a bill into law.”

Dorton said it was “not true” that UDP had targeted Bush because she called for a cease-fire in Gaza, as some of her allies have suggested. Instead, the group “focused on” Bush because of what he called her “atrocious” record on Israel, pointing to her vote against Iron Dome funding as well as a House resolution condemning Hamas, which she recently declined to call a terrorist group.

Bush, he argued, had “one of the worst anti-Israel records in Congress.”

Bell’s campaign also ran an aggressive outreach campaign to Jewish voters, which was supplemented by nonpartisan voter turnout operations from  local nonpartisan groups, St. Louis Together — which said Jewish turnout hit “historic” levels — and St. Louis Votes, as well as Agudath Israel of America.

Newman said that antisemitic hatred directed at the campaign “ballooned” in recent weeks, including frequent and aggressive protests outside the campaign office and vandalized yard signs. She thinks that that helped motivate Jewish voters to turn out for Bell.

“I think particularly volunteers and people were seeing that … they were feeling it,” Newman said. She also linked concerns back to anti-Israel protests at St. Louis’ Washington University earlier this year, blocks from the campaign office

Newman said that the Bell campaign had also brought the St. Louis Jewish community together, across partisan and denominational lines, in a way she’s never seen before.

Benjamin Singer, CEO of St. Louis Together, said the group and St. Louis Votes harnessed volunteers’ personal social networks, contact lists from synagogues and the Jewish Community Relations Council to help bring Jewish voters to the polls and provide information about early voting.

He said they aimed to “replicate” a nonpartisan Jewish turnout effort in New York’s 16th District that brought Jewish voters to the polls with the message that “antisemitism is on the ballot.”

“I think our community needs to be proud and loud and show up,” Singer said. “Our community, every community, deserves to be heard.”

Bush’s concession speech on Tuesday night, with its threat against AIPAC, will likely only further fuel fears in the Jewish community. As of early Wednesday evening, Bush had yet to call Bell to offer her concession directly, Mukherjee added.

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre condemned Bush’s comments.

“It is important that we be very mindful of what we say. This kind of rhetoric is inflammatory and divisive and incredibly unhelpful,” she said. “We’re going to continue to condemn any type of political rhetoric in that way, in that vein, and so it is important to be mindful in what we say and how we say it. But we cannot have this type of inflammatory, divisive language in our political discourse. Not now, not ever.”

Bell said in an interview that Bush’s comments are “disappointing … at this point it’s time for us to all work together if the vibrancy and success of this region is the priority.”

Payne said Bush’s comments suggesting that she’d been held back by “strings” before but was now free to unleash her full opinions were “very interesting” because he’s never known her or other committed activists to restrain their full views. “What she said last night was kind of jarring to me. Who’s advising you not to do things and what are you going to do next?”

Newman, Bell’s Jewish outreach director and a former state lawmaker, said she’s been concerned about her safety during the campaign  — something she said she’d never experienced before — and even needed to call police when she was alone at the campaign office on one occasion. Newman said that Bush’s closing speech perpetuated those fears. 

In a video released by AIPAC, Bell thanked the pro-Israel group for its support and vowed that he’d continue to be an ally.

“We’re not getting across the finish line without all of you,” Bell said. “We know how important it is to stand with our Jewish brothers and sisters, to stand with Israel, and as the Democratic nominee … I want you to know that you will always have an ally with me.”

Jewish Insider’s features reporter Matthew Kassel contributed reporting.

Daily Kickoff: Wesley Bell ousts Cori Bush from office

IN THE CROWD

Josh Shapiro looms large over Harris-Walz ticket’s first rally

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro loomed large over Vice President Kamala Harris’ debut event yesterday with her vice presidential pick, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, on Shapiro’s home turf in Philadelphia. Both Harris and Walz opened their remarks with effusive praise for Shapiro, the runner-up for the vice-presidential slot and whose support they’ll likely rely on to win Pennsylvania. And Shapiro, speaking just ahead of Harris and Walz, declared pride in his Jewish faith, to roars of approval from the crowd, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports from Philadelphia.

Warm words: Harris said that Shapiro is a “dear, dear friend and an extraordinary leader,” adding that she’s “so, so invested in our friendship, in doing this together. Because together with Josh Shapiro, we will win Pennsylvania.” Walz said that Shapiro is a “treasure” to Pennsylvania. “This is a visionary leader,” Walz said. “Everybody in America knows when you need a bridge fixed, call that guy… [He] cares so deeply about his family. He’s a man of compassion and vision. And I have to tell you, I know this from experience, there is no one you would rather go to a Springsteen concert in Jersey with.”

Read the full story here.

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VEEPSTAKES

Shapiro boosters view VP pick a sign of rising antisemitism within the Dem Party

The decision by Vice President Kamala Harris to choose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate is raising questions among some Jewish leaders about whether a pressure campaign led by anti-Israel activists to thwart Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s nomination ultimately played a part in influencing the selection process, Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel reports. In recent weeks, Shapiro had faced mounting resistance from an outspoken coalition of far-left organizers who expressed vehement opposition to Shapiro over his staunch support for Israel and his criticism of extreme anti-Israel campus protesters, among other issues.

‘Obvious effort’: “There are all kinds of legitimate factors that go into a vice-presidential pick, but there was an obvious and concerted anti-Shapiro effort that tapped into the antisemitic fervor coursing through our country,” said Nathan Diament, the executive director of public policy for the Orthodox Union. “Irrespective of the reasons Ms. Harris had,” he told JI, Shapiro’s far-left opponents “will surely declare victory.”

Read the full story here.

Ace of base: Prominent left-wing House Democrats were among the first congressional lawmakers to celebrate Harris’ selection of Walz as her vice-presidential pick, reflecting how Walz had become the consensus preference among progressives over Shapiro, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.

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gop spin

Vance: Dem antisemitism thwarted Shapiro’s veepstakes prospects

Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), the Republican nominee for vice president, said yesterday morning that if Vice President Kamala Harris did not select Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate, then the decision would be due to what he identified as antisemitism within the Democratic Party, Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel reports. 

What he said: “If it’s not Josh Shapiro,” Vance told radio host Hugh Hewitt hours before Harris announced she had chosen Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, “I think they will have not picked Shapiro, frankly, out of antisemitism in their own caucus and in their own party. I think it’s disgraceful the Democrats have gotten to this point where it’s even an open conversation.”

Read the full story here.

Bonus: The New York Times’ Jonathan Weisman suggested that Harris’ selection of Walz over Shapiro “may well have created a new point of friction with Jewish voters leery of a lurch to the left from the Democratic Party.” Meanwhile, The Bulwark’s Marc Caputo reported that the Trump campaign amplified and fed the leftist campaign against Shapiro, viewing him as a tougher opponent than Walz.

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clear as a bell

Wesley Bell defeats Cori Bush in Missouri primary

Wesley Bell defeated Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) on Tuesday in a closely watched primary, becoming the second Democratic challenger of the cycle to unseat a Squad-aligned incumbent. Bell, the prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County, prevailed over Bush, a two-term congresswoman, in an upset that followed Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s (D-NY) loss to Westchester County Executive George Latimer in June. Bell won the race by a comfortable five-point margin over Bush, 51-46%, Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel reports.

Pro-Israel position: Pro-Israel groups invested heavily in the race to boost Bell’s campaign against Bush, whose hostile views toward Israel faced backlash in the district. The super PAC affiliated with AIPAC, United Democracy Project, was by far the biggest spender, dropping more than $8.5 million into a race that became one of the most expensive elections of the cycle. “AIPAC congratulates Wesley Bell for his consequential victory over an incumbent anti-Israel detractor,” the group said in a statement. “Once again, a progressive pro-Israel Democrat has prevailed over a candidate who represents the extremist fringe that is hostile to the Jewish state.”

Read the full story here.

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see you in court

Lawsuit alleging ‘pervasive’ antisemitism at Harvard will go to trial

Less than a week after throwing out a lawsuit filed by Jewish students at MIT alleging that the school didn’t do enough to curb antisemitism on campus, U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns ruled on Tuesday that a similar suit against Harvard will go to trial. The suit against Harvard was filed in federal court by six Jewish Harvard students who allege the school has not protected them from “severe and pervasive” campus antisemitism. Both cases allege violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; Stearns ruled that the MIT students hadn’t shown that their civil rights were violated, but that the Harvard students had, eJewishPhilanthropy’s Haley Cohen reports for Jewish Insider.

Unresponsive: In the 25-page ruling, Stearns, a federal judge in Massachusetts, wrote that “in many instances” Harvard did not respond to “an eruption of antisemitism” on campus, citing its failure to take disciplinary measures against “offending students and faculty.” Stearns wrote, “In other words, the facts as pled show that Harvard failed its Jewish students.” Shabbos Kestenbaum, a recent Harvard Divinity School graduate, was the only named plaintiff in the lawsuit. “Today’s decision affirms that Jewish students are well within their right to hold their universities accountable,” Kestenbaum told JI.

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aipac attack

Pro-Palestinian extremist group vandalizes AIPAC headquarters in Washington

The Washington, D.C., headquarters of AIPAC was vandalized early Monday morning with red spray paint and the words “F*** Israel” scrawled onto the front and side of the building. Video footage obtained by the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department shows three masked suspects defacing the building exterior and destroying property at approximately 12:41 a.m. The department said in a statement that the investigation is ongoing and is “asking for the community’s help to identify the suspects involved in a Destruction of Property offense in Northwest,” eJewishPhilanthropy’s Haley Cohen reports for Jewish Insider.  

Claiming responsibility: Palestine Action, a global network of groups that destroys property that has ties to Israel, issued a statement claiming responsibility for the vandalism. Marshall Wittmann, an AIPAC spokesperson, told JI, “We will not be deterred by the illegal actions of fringe, anti-Israel extremists in our efforts to strengthen the U.S.-Israel relationship.”

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Pic of the Day

Jewish American wrestler Amit Elor of the U.S. celebrated yesterday with the American flag after beating Meerim Zhumanazarova of Kyrgyzstan in the women’s freestyle 68kg gold-medal match on Day 11 of the Summer Games at Champs-de-Mars Arena in Paris.

Birthdays

Television cook, YouTuber, restaurateur and cookbook author, known as Sam the Cooking Guy, Samuel D. Zien turns 65… 

Brooklyn resident, Esther Holler… Former U.S. trade representative and then U.S. secretary of commerce, Michael (“Mickey”) Kantor turns 85… Co-founder of the worldwide chain of Hard Rock Café, his father founded the Morton’s Steakhouse chain, Peter Morton turns 77… Retired lieutenant general in the Israeli Air Force, he also served as chief of staff of the IDF, Dan Halutz turns 76… Former PR director for the New York Yankees and author of more than 20 books, Marty Appel turns 76… President of private equity firm Palisades Associates, former CEO of Empire Kosher Poultry, Greg Rosenbaum turns 72… Former U.S. intelligence analyst, he pled guilty to espionage in 1987 and was released from prison in 2015 and moved to Israel in 2020, Jonathan Pollard turns 70… Spiritual leader of Agudas Israel of St. Louis since 1986, Rabbi Menachem Greenblatt… Founder of the Cayton Children’s Museum in Santa Monica, Esther Netter… Professor of computational biology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Liran Carmel turns 53… CEO at Capital Camps & Retreat Center, Havi Arbeter Goldscher… U.S. representative (D-VA-7) since 2019, she is running to become governor of Virginia, Abigail Spanberger turns 45… Financial news anchor for CNBC, Sara Aliza Eisen turns 40… Emmy Award-winning political reporter for The New York Times, Jonathan Swan turns 39… Public address announcer for both MLB’s Oakland Athletics and AHL’s San Jose Barracuda, Amelia Schimmel… Former MLB catcher, he batted .350 with two home runs for Team Israel at the 2020 Olympics, Ryan Lavarnway turns 37… Podcast host and head of product at Thesis, Estee Goldschmidt… Professional Super Smash Bros. player, known as Dabuz, Samuel Robert Buzby turns 31… Goalkeeper for Real Salt Lake in Major League Soccer, he played for the U.S. in the 2009 Maccabiah Games in Israel, Zac MacMath turns 33… Founder of Love For Our Elders, a global nonprofit organization with 60,000 volunteers, Jacob Cramer turns 24… Scott Harrison… Director of research at Metiv: Israel Psychotrauma Center and clinical psychologist, Anna Harwood-Gross…

Wesley Bell defeats Cori Bush in Missouri primary 

Wesley Bell defeated Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) on Tuesday in a closely watched primary, becoming the second Democratic challenger of the cycle to unseat a Squad-aligned incumbent.

Bell, the prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County, prevailed over Bush, a two-term congresswoman, in an upset that followed Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s (D-NY) loss to Westchester County Executive George Latimer in June. 

Bell won the race by a comfortable five-point margin over Bush, 51-46%.

“I am deeply honored and humbled by the trust the people of this district have placed in me,” Bell said in a statement. “This victory belongs to every volunteer, every supporter, and every voter who believes in our vision for a better future.”

Pro-Israel groups invested heavily in the race to boost Bell’s campaign against Bush, whose hostile views toward Israel faced backlash in the district. 

The super PAC affiliated with AIPAC, United Democracy Project, was by far the biggest spender, dropping more than $8.5 million into a race that became one of the most expensive elections of the cycle.

“AIPAC congratulates Wesley Bell for his consequential victory over an incumbent anti-Israel detractor,” the group said in a statement. “Once again, a progressive pro-Israel Democrat has prevailed over a candidate who represents the extremist fringe that is hostile to the Jewish state.”

UDP added in a statement that, “Bell’s win tonight, along with George Latimer’s (D) victory over Rep. Jamaal Bowman and John McGuire’s (R) defeat of Rep. Bob Good, is further proof that being pro-Israel is good policy and good politics on both sides of the aisle.”

Mark Mellman, the chairman of Democratic Majority for Israel, which also endorsed Bell, said the results underscored that “being pro-Israel is not just wise policy, but also smart politics.”

“And there’s another valuable lesson in these results — Democrats do not want division or extremism,” Mellman added in a statement.

The local Jewish community was also engaged in the primary, including grassroots efforts to increase voter turnout. Nearly 50% of the district’s Orthodox community, for instance, voted early in the election, according to A.D. Motzen, the national director of government affairs at Agudath Israel of America.

“Just from what I saw during early voting and today, the amount of Jewish voter turnout was incredible,” said Rabbi Jeffrey Abraham of Congregation B’nai Amoona, a Conservative synagogue in the St. Louis area, who supported Bell. “The rallying that took place is like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

“It feels amazing on many levels,” Abraham added, of Bell’s victory. “Most importantly we now have someone representing us who is willing to sit down and listen to us and have a meaningful dialogue on the issues. We also were able to get a blatant antisemite out of Congress.”

Additional reporting contributed by JI’s senior congressional correspondent Marc Rod

Cori Bush rallied with pro-Kremlin activist critical of CBC PAC chair Greg Meeks

Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO), who is facing a tough fight for reelection ahead of Tuesday’s primary, attended a late-July rally for her campaign organized by a pro-Kremlin activist in St. Louis with a history of criticizing the head of the Congressional Black Caucus Political Action Committee, which is backing her in Tuesday’s Democratic primary.

On July 20, the Universal African Peoples Organization and its chairman, Lavoy “Zaki Baruti” Reed, assembled Bush supporters at the Beloved Community United Methodist Church in St. Louis’ Gate District. The incumbent congresswoman, who faces a serious challenge from St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell, subsequently posted a photo to Facebook of herself at the event with Baruti, who has backed her since her first bid for federal office in 2016.

Baruti has a long-running relationship with another activist who came to prominence amid the protest movement following the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.: Omali Yeshitela, chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party, also called the Uhuru movement. In December 2014, the pair convened a “black people’s grand jury” to hear the evidence against Brown’s shooter, Officer Darren Wilson, and in the succeeding years the duo participated jointly in events held by the “Black is Back Coalition” and served together on the National Black Radical Convention’s organizing committee.

The two were even photographed together wearing matching Soviet-style ushankas, complete with red star-shaped pins emblazoned with the hammer-and-sickle.

But according to a federal indictment unsealed April 2023, that entire time Yeshitela and two of his associates in the African People’s Socialist Party served as illegal agents of Russia’s FSB intelligence service, pushing Kremlin narratives in America while accepting financing and amplification from Moscow’s undercover operatives. Foreshadowing the criminal allegations was a Federal Bureau of Investigation raid on Yeshitela’s St. Louis home in July 2022.

In addition to attending a press conference with Yeshitela in the wake of FBI action, Baruti showed his support at a Zoom rally for the Uhuru chair in early 2023. On the call, Baruti lashed out at Rep. Greg Meeks (D-NY) for backing Ukraine in its conflict with Moscow and for proposing the Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa Act in 2022, a bill Bush voted for. Meeks is the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and chairs the CBC PAC, one of the most important institutions now backing Bush.

“A Negro congressman, I just have to call him Meeks, has proposed and maybe passed some type of legislation right that would penalize people for being — African countries for siding with Russia in essence,” Baruti said, following a preamble in which he praised Libyan despot Muammar Gaddafi and Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. “I want to just salute those countries that had the audacity to resist these, I always say, wicked people. Because to me they are like vampires.”

Baruti returned to this theme later as he struggled to recall the exact name of Meeks’ bill, which sought to develop a strategy to undercut Moscow’s meddling on the continent. In doing so, he reiterated a favorite Kremlin talking point: that the United States, which had drawn down its troop strength in Europe for decades, had provoked Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war of conquest.

“The act where this Negro was pushing, Gregory Meeks, penalty for anybody criticizing the United States/NATO aggression against Russia,” Baruti said.

Nor did Baruti distance himself from Yeshitela, who has pleaded not guilty, following the indictment itself. In January, Baruti had the accused Russian agent on his TV show, which airs on a local evangelical Christian channel, to discuss how American support for Ukraine was part of a “more than 100 years old assault against Russia” to extinguish the flame of its communist revolution. 

In the interview, Yeshitela repeated a common Russian claim that the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish, is controlled by Nazis.

Neither the Bush campaign, Meeks’ office, nor the Congressional Black Caucus PAC responded to repeated requests for comment. In a phone interview, Baruti asserted he had been the first to recruit Bush to run for office in 2016, and that he and the UAPO supported her this year because of her call for a ceasefire in the Israeli-Hamas conflict.

He again defended Yeshitela, and denied the accused Kremlin operative had ever requested his assistance in advancing pro-Russia talking points.

“The charges against Chairman Omali Yeshitela is a continuation of a policy of coming after anyone who criticizes this country as far as foreign policy,” Baruti said. “We just have similar ideas.”

Bush’s defeat would mark a second consecutive defeat for the left-wing Squad, after Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) lost the Democratic nomination for his seat to Westchester County Executive George Latimer in June.

Signs point to a second Squad defeat in next Tuesday’s Missouri primary

Wesley Bell’s campaign is projecting confidence he will pull off an upset over Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) in next Tuesday’s closely watched primary in St. Louis, amid growing signs he is well-positioned to become the second candidate to unseat a Squad incumbent this election cycle.

With just a few days remaining until the primary concludes in Missouri’s 1st Congressional District, Bell, the prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County, has been gaining momentum against Bush, a two-term lawmaker who herself rose to office in 2021 after beating an incumbent.

The outspoken progressive is facing a formidable threat from Bell, a pro-Israel Democrat, as he seeks to claim a victory that would follow in the path of George Latimer, the Westchester County executive who in June defeated Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), another Squad member, in a high-profile New York primary battle.

“Wesley is finishing the last few days of this primary campaign the way he’s been running the whole time: talking with people, hearing their concerns and sharing his vision for better representation for this district,” Anjan Mukherjee, a spokesperson for the Bell campaign, said in a statement to Jewish Insider on Thursday. “That’s how he was elected as a city councilman and county prosecutor, and it’s why he will be the next member of Congress from MO-01.”

The campaign has reasons for positivity, including a new poll released last week by the political arm of Democratic Majority for Israel, DMFI PAC, showing Bell with a 48-42% lead over his opponent. 

The popular county prosecutor has won support from a wide coalition of backers including labor unions, Black leaders and the progressive group Indivisible, among other Democratic groups. Last week, he picked up an endorsement from the editorial board of The St. Louis Post Dispatch, the city’s largest newspaper.

In addition, Bell succeeded in chipping away at segments of Bush’s political base where she had drawn strong support, including Black women, according to a recent poll described to JI by a source familiar with its findings. Another poll, commissioned by the The National Black Empowerment Action Fund and released last week, suggested that Bell’s positions on public safety and infrastructure investment, among other key issues, are closely aligned with Black voters in the district.

Bell’s supporters say they feel cautiously optimistic as the race enters its final stretch.

“We’re pleased by the direction it’s going in,” said Mark Mellman, the chairman of DMFI PAC, which is among several pro-Israel groups backing the Bell campaign as Bush has grown increasingly hostile to Israel in the wake of Hamas’ attacks. “On the other hand,” he told JI on Thursday, adding a caveat, “it’s far from over.”

Bell has outraised Bush over the course of the primary, which has quietly become one of the most expensive of the cycle. The race has drawn several millions of dollars from an array of outside groups such as the super PAC affiliated with AIPAC, United Democracy Project, which is the biggest spender by far, having invested more than $8.5 million to boost Bell’s campaign.

The pro-Israel group has also conducted polling in the district that has shown margins similar to DMFI PAC’s recent survey, according to a source familiar with the matter.

“We’re not taking anything for granted,” Patrick Dorton, a spokesperson for UDP, told JI. “Bush has an atrocious record on Israel and also has adopted a fringe agenda in Congress, including voting against President Biden. So we are going to make the case until Election Day.”

Bush’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

The congresswoman’s supporters, such as the progressive group Justice Democrats, have been spending heavily in the race, even as they have struggled to compete with UDP’s warchest. In recent days, Bush’s campaign has also received contributions from some left-leaning colleagues including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Delia Ramirez (D-IL), as progressives on the Hill have raised concerns about the direction of the race.

Rep. Katherine Clark (D-MA), the House minority whip, is expected to campaign with Bush in her district on Friday. But while the embattled Squad member has claimed endorsements from Democratic leadership, the party’s establishment wing has largely kept its distance from the primary. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), for instance, has indicated that he has no plans to campaign for Bush in the district.

The local Jewish community, which has coalesced behind Bell, has been heavily involved in the race, including through a new group, St. Louis Votes, a nonpartisan nonprofit mobilizing Jewish voters to turn out in the election.

Benjamin Singer, the group’s CEO, told JI he anticipated “record turnout among Jewish St. Louisans, in part due to our grassroots organizing, door-knocking, phone banking and work with synagogues and other community institutions.”

“People are incredibly worried and upset by the skyrocketing antisemitism across our country,” he said, noting that his group is not telling voters who to support. “The Jewish people are simply fighting for our right to survive.”

Stacey Newman, a former state lawmaker leading Jewish outreach for Bell’s campaign, told JI that the Bell campaign office has been subjected to frequent protests which have included slurs and other hateful messages. 

“I’ve never worked on a race where I had to think about mine and my staff’s safety every day or had to check in with a security advisor frequently,” Newman said. But, she added, “it only seems to motivate volunteers to keep showing up.”

Bell’s campaign has organized several Jewish get-out-the-vote events, Jewish supporters of Bell’s campaign told JI, with another one set for this Sunday, focused on Orthodox precincts.

Meanwhile, Newman said that over 200 Jewish volunteers around the country are making daily calls for the campaign.

She said a group of 30 volunteers held a phone bank in Los Angeles on Thursday night and a synagogue in Skokie, Ill., has been making calls twice a week, while students affiliated with AIPAC and the Jewish Democratic Council of America, which has endorsed Bell, have been making calls almost daily.

In a statement to JI on Thursday, JDCA said it is expecting a win next week.

“JDCA endorsed Wesley Bell because of his commitment to public service and partnership with the Jewish community in his district,” said Sam Crystal, the organization’s chief of staff. “Bell not only shares our values but has taken the time to build strong and genuine relationships in the Jewish community, especially after Oct. 7th. The voters in Missouri’s 1st District know Wesley Bell and we’re confident that on Tuesday he’ll come out on top.”

Additional reporting contributed by JI’s senior congressional correspondent Marc Rod.

Cori Bush embellished, misrepresented anecdote during ‘Jews for Cori’ fundraiser, local activist says

Speaking at a virtual fundraiser two weeks ago, Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) recalled how earlier in the day at a separate event she had rushed to the aid of a Jewish activist supporting her opponent who had fallen over. The unnamed activist, Bush said, was “the person that brought this [AIPAC spending] to my doorstep” and the “No. 1 author” of the opposition to her in her district. 

The story sounded almost too good to be true — and it largely wasn’t, according to the person involved.

Debbie Kitchen, a St. Louis activist who identified herself as the person Bush was discussing, says that most elements of Bush’s anecdote were exaggerated or misrepresented.

Kitchen isn’t Jewish and had little familiarity with AIPAC prior to the race between Bush and St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell, she told Jewish Insider. Kitchen is a longtime activist in St. Louis who led the local chapter of the progressive group Indivisible until late last year.

“I wish I had that kind of power” to summon millions in outside spending, Kitchen said in an interview with JI on Tuesday. She said she has “absolutely not ever in my life” had contact with AIPAC or anyone representing the pro-Israel organization.

Kitchen first disputed Bush’s description of the incident in a Substack post, and subsequently discussed it in an interview with St. Louis Magazine.

She said she tripped over a cooler at the event in question, and two people — neither of them Bush — helped her up. She said Bush followed the two over and asked if she was alright and encouraged her to sit down. Kitchen said she’d thanked all three, including Bush, for their assistance, before walking away to sit down.

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

Bush’s description of the anecdote, first reported by JI, featured the congresswoman much more prominently.

“I bent down in my dress to help pull her up. I did what nurses do, to take care of the person that was in need,” Bush said. “And she kept saying ‘Thank you Cori. Thank you Cori. Oh, I appreciate it, Cori. Thank you Cori.’”

Kitchen said that Bush was lying about the incident, and she wanted to correct the record.

“I can’t let that go,” Kitchen said. “This is too important in this time for politicians not to be transparent. Running a negative campaign this way and based on lies, innuendo, rumors, never proof. I just am not OK with this, and I had to make a statement.”

She compared Bush’s misrepresentation of the event to “the very tactics that [former President Donald] Trump uses to win — and Democrats cannot go there.”

“I just could not allow her to raise $30,000 on a lie,” she reiterated, referencing the fundraising total from the event.

Kitchen said that she “really like[s] Bush as a person” and noted that she was the leader of Indivisible St. Louis when the group endorsed Bush’s first two congressional runs, including when Bush ran against and ousted then-Rep. Lacy Clay (D-MO).

She said Bush and Indivisible were largely aligned on policy priorities including the Green New Deal and health care but Bush “never showed up for Indivisible St. Louis — never, ever ever.”

“She wouldn’t answer the calls, wouldn’t answer the texts, couldn’t get ahold of her,” Kitchen said, a pattern that continued even after the group’s second endorsement. “She never showed up for anything we asked her to attend, and she never did town halls in St. Louis.”

But, she said, Bush continued to lean on the group for volunteers and other support. Kitchen no longer leads the chapter, but remains involved and said that the group ultimately endorsed Bell in the current primary because of Bush’s absenteeism.

The current Indivisible leadership didn’t respond to a request for comment. Bush’s unresponsiveness to district issues and constituent communications has been a frequent refrain among local leaders supporting Bell.

She said that Bell’s record on constituent engagement has been the polar opposite. Kitchen was a member of Bell’s 2018 campaign for county prosecutor.

“He looks you in the eye and he tells you the truth,” Kitchen said. “And guess what? He answers his phone. He responds to texts, he responds to his emails and he’ll even have a meeting with you in person.”

She also expressed frustration with Bush’s misleading claims of delivering more than $2 billion in federal funding for the district. 

Kitchen said that Bush’s campaign had gone “off the rails” after Oct. 7. Bush’s response “showed her true colors and her antisemitism … that’s how my Jewish friends feel,” Kitchen said. Many in the Jewish community in St. Louis have described Bush’s response to the attack and criticisms of Israel as antisemitic.

Kitchen said that Bell has been misrepresented by Bush and her allies’ attacks, insisting that he’s “not influenced by AIPAC money” or any other outside concerns, and that he “is his own man, and he’s a very smart man. Bottom line, he’s a public servant.”

Kitchen said she’s also been disappointed that “we have become so polarized that we’re making it [distasteful] for individuals who may be Republican … [to] want to support a Democrat because they will do better, they will bring results.” Bush’s campaign has described AIPAC’s spending — now totalling more than $7 million — as malign Republican influence in the race.

Wesley Bell builds momentum in final days of Missouri primary

A new poll commissioned by Democratic Majority for Israel’s political arm suggests that momentum is building for Wesley Bell as he prepares to take on Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) in a hotly contested primary next week.

The poll shows Bell, the prosecuting attorney for St. Louis, with a six-point lead over Bush, a prominent Squad-affiliated lawmaker who has faced backlash from Jewish voters over her strident criticism of Israel. Among 400 likely Democratic primary voters surveyed between July 21-24, Bell led Bush, 48-42%, according to a polling memo shared on Monday.

His performance was an improvement over a previous poll released by DMFI PAC and conducted in mid-June, which showed Bell — at 43% — with a one-point lead in the race. Both polls were conducted by the Mellman Group. 

Other recent polls have shown Bell strongly positioned to prevail as he seeks to become the second challenger this cycle to unseat a Squad incumbent, replicating Westchester County Executive George Latimer’s victory over Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) in New York last month.

In an echo of that race, the St. Louis primary has quietly become one of the most expensive of the congressional cycle — with a diverse coalition of outside groups spending millions to boost Bell’s campaign. The biggest spender has been AIPAC’s super PAC, which has invested more than $7 million on ads and mailers.

For its part, DMFI PAC, which is also backing Bell, has spent nearly $500,000 in the race. “As voters hear from the candidates,” Mark Mellman, DMFI PAC’s chairman, said in a statement, “Democrats in Missouri’s 1st District are increasingly disillusioned with Bush and attracted to Bell.”

Cori Bush faces diverse coalition of opponents looking to oust her from office

The National Black Empowerment Action Fund, founded by AIPAC alumnus Darius Jones, recently began spending in Missouri’s 1st Congressional District to raise awareness around what Jones called Rep. Cori Bush’s (D-MO) underwhelming “job performance” on such issues as school choice, public safety and infrastructure investment.

The group’s move comes as outside spending in what’s expected to be a tight race has been quietly adding up. The Aug. 6 primary has become one of the most expensive of the congressional cycle, with more than $11 million in independent expenditures — fueled largely by AIPAC’s active engagement in the contest.

In an interview with JI on Thursday, Jones, who previously served as AIPAC’s national African American constituency director, said that Black Democrats are fed up with “extremism” among members of Congress who he claimed are not representing the interests of Black constituents.

“We also recognize that those same members within the Congress, and particularly within the Squad, tend to be the ones who are most overtly anti-Israel — and the ones who are engaging in rhetoric which further alienates and endangers Jewish people here in the United States of America,” he added. “That kind of a convergence of interests really is paramount in our efforts to try to get those folks out and to bring better leadership to Black communities.”

The group, which kicked off its new campaign early last week and will continue through the end of the race, is initially investing in the “high six figures” but could spend more “as resources permit,” according to a spokesperson. The effort, Jones said, includes digital ads, direct mail and door-to-door canvassing highlighting instances in which Bush has opposed key policies of the Biden-Harris administration while breaking with fellow members of the Congressional Black Caucus.

In late June, the group commissioned a poll of 300 Black Democrats — conducted by Mercury Public Affairs and reviewed by JI — that showed Bush leading her opponent, St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell, by 13 percentage points (46-33%).

When respondents were informed of Bell’s “record on public safety and criminal justice reform,” a polling memo shared with JI notes, “the Black community splits evenly at 40%” for both candidates.

Other polling on the primary, including a recent survey commissioned by DMFI PAC and conducted in mid-June, has shown a close race between Bush and Bell.

Fundraising reports filed by both campaigns on Thursday showed Bell with a commanding financial lead — he’s raised a total of $4.7 million, including $611,000 between July 1 and July 17, as compared to Bush’s $2.8 million total haul and $235,000 in the period. Bell has nearly $2 million on hand, while Bush has $354,000.

Jones clarified that his group, which also worked to unseat Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) last month, is not directly backing Bell’s campaign but is instead encouraging voters to consider Bush’s positions and to contact her office so she can have the “opportunity to respond to the information that we’re sharing.”

The largest portion of outside spending in the district has come from the AIPAC-linked United Democracy project, which has spent more than $7 million supporting Bell and opposing Bush as of this week.

Other major independent spenders include Justice Democrats, which has spent $1.5 million supporting Bush; pro-cryptocurrency PAC FairShake, which has dropped $1 million against Bush; the Reid Hoffman-funded Mainstream Democrats PAC, which has spent $875,000 supporting Bell; Democratic Majority for Israel, which has spent $475,000 supporting Bell; and the Working Families Party, which has spent $400,000 for Bush.

UDP’s ads largely blast Bush as an ineffective lawmaker, highlighting that she’s passed no legislation, missed a significant number of votes and voted against the infrastructure and debt ceiling bills. The ad campaign, which does not mention Israel, accuses Bush of having “her own agenda” that’s damaging to the district — a similar message to the one UDP deployed against Bowman.

“I think Cori Bush has her own agenda, and Cori Bush is her agenda,” one constituent said in an ad that recently finished running in the district. Another featured a construction worker who accuses Bush of failing to “deliver for St. Louis.”

Pro-Bell ads laud him as a reformist prosecutor, highlight his efforts to fight abortion bans and say that he will “deliver for us.” Bush’s campaign has questioned Bell’s record on abortion rights.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and other House leaders have endorsed Bush — in line with their unofficial policy of endorsing Democratic incumbents — but he told reporters on Thursday he’s “not currently scheduled” to campaign with Bush in her district.

In another boost to Bell, he picked up the “enthusiastic endorsement” of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Thursday, which described Bush as “less interested in working [the federal government] system for the good of her constituents than attacking it on behalf of a small, hard-left klatch of lawmakers — ‘the Squad’ — who are good at getting headlines but bad at actually accomplishing anything.”

It described Bush’s stance on the war in Gaza as “outrageous”: “Bush’s tendency to equate both sides — and even to side with the terrorists, as when she cast one of just two House votes against a resolution to bar Hamas members from the U.S. — should in itself be disqualifying for re-election.”

The editorial called Bell’s stance “appropriately measured.” Bush, the editorial board said, declined its interview request. Her campaign did not respond to a request for comment from JI.

Linda Sarsour and Marc Lamont Hill speak at ‘Jews for Cori’ Bush fundraiser

Linda Sarsour and Marc Lamont Hill, two controversial far-left activists with histories of antisemitism and strident anti-Israel stances, headlined a virtual fundraiser on Wednesday night for Rep. Cori Bush’s (D-MO) reelection campaign convened by far-left groups including Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow.

Other organizers and speakers on the call, organized by a group calling itself “Jews for Cori,” included Beth Miller, political director of JVP Action; INN spokesperson Eva Borgwardt; Abbas Alawieh, Bush’s former congressional chief of staff and a spokesperson for the Uncommitted campaign; and anti-Zionist Jewish activist Naomi Klein, a longtime member of JVP.

Sarsour is a Palestinian-American activist who has been repeatedly accused of antisemitism by Jewish groups, including praising a convicted terrorist, comparing Zionism to white supremacy, seeking to exclude Zionists from progressive and feminist movements, invoking dual loyalty tropes, supporting a one-state solution and supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting Israel.

Hill was fired as a CNN commentator after a speech in which he said that “justice requires… a free Palestine from the river to the sea,” language Jewish groups say amounts to a call for the elimination of Israel.

Bush’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment. She is facing St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell in the Aug. 6 Democratic primary.

Sarsour said on the call, a recording of which was obtained by Jewish Insider, that, “when you talk to people directly [in the district]… people understand that there is something sinister that is happening here in this district. And we all know that AIPAC and their affiliated PACs are putting big money.”

Hill said that Bush is “not kicking an imaginary two-state solution down the field.” 

He said that AIPAC and other groups opposing Bush are “nervous because of what it would mean for us to have a visionary political agenda that encompasses Black folk, brown folk, Christians, Muslims, Jews.”

Bush claimed on the call that “maybe even over 100,000 people” have been killed in Gaza since the beginning of the war between Israel and Hamas, a statistic that far exceeds the disputed data provided by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry.

“I cannot sit by and allow a genocide, an extermination to happen,” Bush said. “I’m not going to back down. What they’re doing is radicalizing me even more.”

The fundraiser was organized by a group called End The Occupation PAC, according to an invitation to the event; the PAC is affiliated with IfNotNow, which the PAC has paid for staff services, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Speakers at the fundraiser said the event was also affiliated with JVP and a local group, Progressive Jews of St. Louis, which has worked with JVP, the local Democratic Socialists of America chapter and American Muslims for Palestine Missouri. 

Organizers said the fundraiser had raised more than $30,000.

“I need Cori Bush to stay in office,” JVP’s Miller said. “There is no other office that operates this way.”

Bush said she has been leaning heavily on JVP and INN in the months since Oct. 7.

Alawieh said that AIPAC and others opposing Bush are trying to “get our most powerful pro-working class people out of Congress.”

Jewish leaders in Bush’s district supporting her opponent told JI that she has sidelined mainstream Jewish organizations and leaders, elevating her relationships with JVP, INN and other far-left Jewish groups that support her criticisms of Israel.

Bush claimed on the call that she had assisted an unnamed Jewish critic in the district when the critic fell over at an event in the district earlier on Wednesday. Bush described the person as more individually responsible than anyone else for AIPAC’s spending in the district.

“I did what nurses do, take care of the person that was in need,” Bush said, adding that she “didn’t care that this is the person that brought [AIPAC] to my doorstep” and that the individual had thanked her profusely.

The invitation to the fundraiser also asked attendees to participate in a phone bank event hosted by Jews for Cori, the left-wing Working Families Party and the Sunrise Movement, the climate activism group that has ventured into anti-Israel advocacy.

WFP is also hosting another event this Sunday under the Jews for Cori banner. The sign-up page for that event includes a disclaimer, “You do not need to be Jewish or have experience canvassing to join us!”

Inside Wesley Bell’s Jewish turnout operation

In the race for Missouri’s 1st Congressional District, where St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell is challenging Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) in the Aug. 6 Democratic primary, the margin of victory is expected to be small. And the Jewish community’s support could prove critical to a potential Bell victory.

Not only is Bell the beneficiary of close to $5 million in outside support to date from AIPAC’s United Democracy Project super PAC, but there’s also grassroots Jewish community momentum in his favor — motivated by Bush’s positions on Israel and antisemitism. Bell’s campaign is aiming to capitalize on that energy with an aggressive Jewish voter operation.

Stacey Newman, a former state representative who has been backing Bell in a personal capacity since the beginning of his campaign, formally joined his campaign in June as his coalitions director running Jewish outreach. 

Newman told Jewish Insider that she and others in the Jewish community were, particularly after Oct. 7, working behind the scenes to recruit a candidate to challenge Bush, before Bell, independently, made the decision to enter the race. Newman said she, Rabbi Jeffrey Abraham — who has brought together local rabbis in support of Bell — and Lisa Baron, a local nonprofit leader, came together to build a Jewish outreach program for Bell.

“Our world changed in October completely, and we had to basically come up with what could be a viable plan to basically engage the Jewish community in the 1st Congressional District,” she explained.

Newman added that anti-Israel protests at Washington University in St. Louis have further catalyzed interest from the local community.

Newman told JI that Jewish outreach has been a priority for the campaign — ”basically taking over half of the campaign office; we’ve got Jewish volunteers in here every single day” conducting phone calls and knocking on doors. The Jewish outreach program has produced tailored campaign literature for the community laying out Bell’s support for Israel and the Jewish community.

The campaign has a network of both local Jewish interns and volunteers that are knocking on doors, as well as supporter groups in synagogues across the country whose members are making calls for the campaign. 

Barron said she’s also organizing get-out-the vote activities, particularly targeting Orthodox Jews.

“A lot of people coming in to volunteer for Wesley, who are Jewish, have never done this before,” Newman said. “They don’t really know how it works, but they’re eager.”

Newman said that she researched Westchester County Executive George Latimer’s successful primary challenge against Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) and Rep. Shontel Brown’s (D-OH) successful races against Nina Turner, but found “there really was no model for this.”

She added that she feels the attention and pressure of the nation on Bell’s race, especially after Latimer’s victory last month.

Newman said that the campaign, and the local Jewish community, don’t have clear data on the size of St. Louis’ Jewish population. Newman said that the campaign has identified around 10,000 Jewish voters in the district, although she believes there are many more. She knows firsthand how critical every single vote is — she once won a primary race by a single vote.

Newman told JI that the response to Bell’s campaign from the Jewish community has been immensely positive, recounting his visit to the St. Louis Holocaust Museum’s fundraiser in October.

“I just walked in the door with him … and he didn’t have to say anything,” Newman said. “People were just coming up and hugging him and thanking him. And it’s been that way ever since. The emotion of having an ally when we clearly did not have one … it’s just connected the entire Jewish community.”

She added that the campaign has unified the Jewish community across denominational boundaries in unexpected ways.

“This is what Oct. 7 did, I think, for the entire world. It doesn’t really matter who we thought we were before. We’re all unified now because we know that antisemitism doesn’t discriminate,” Newman said. “We have all joined hands, regardless of other beliefs we have on other issues. People ask me about November — I say I can’t go there. This is the top of our list. This is too important.”

Newman and Baron said that there’s been especially strong engagement from the Orthodox community, particularly from Orthodox rabbis. 

Several Orthodox rabbis in the community told JI recently that they tend to vote more politically conservative, but are uniting behind Bell, who describes himself as progressive.

“There is no hesitation on anybody’s part that I’ve spoken to,” Baron said. “This has been a very easy — it’s not a sell, it’s an opportunity for people to express themselves in a meaningful way, and they’re very serious about it.”

Baron said that, in the Orthodox community, the campaign is working to remind voters to request a Democratic ballot when they go to the polls and explain that their primary vote won’t impact how they vote in November.

Baron told JI she’s also making a push for community members who have children living in Israel to remind their family members to send in absentee ballots.

Though Bush’s views on Israel and antisemitism catalyzed their opposition, both Newman and Baron said that their frustrations with the incumbent began with unrelated issues.

Baron founded a nonprofit focusing on Alzheimer’s disease, which received national attention and federal funding. The group invited Bush to visit so they could express their appreciation for that federal funding — but Bush’s office never replied, she said.

Newman said she’d had an experience with a “very disappointing constituent service issue with her office — they don’t return phone calls, they don’t help … she wasn’t actually administering her office the way that we all assume a congressperson should.”

Bush’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment on these incidents or her campaign’s efforts to engage with Jewish voters.

Newman added that, on a personal level, she considers herself a progressive and had cordial relations with Bush’s office on other issues during her own time in office. But she said she’s felt betrayed and disappointed by former colleagues and other progressives since Oct. 7, who have condemned Newman and defended Bush and her rhetoric.

“It’s disgusting, it’s annoying and it’s heartbreaking to realize,” Newman said. “We all know what it is. It’s that undercurrent of antisemitism that never went away.”

Cori Bush received multiple donations from NBA player Kyrie Irving

Rep. Cori Bush’s (D-MO) election campaign has received multiple large donations from Kyrie Irving, the NBA star who was condemned by Jewish groups over antisemitism, including his promotion of a film which spread Holocaust denial.

Those donations include a $6,600 donation — the maximum allowable under federal law — in November 2023, as well as a $5,511 donation in March 2023, a $2,211 donation in March 2023 and a $1,089 donation in November 2023.

The $2,211 donation and the $1,089 donation were refunded last year, while the $5,511 donation was refunded in April 2024, according to Bush’s latest campaign finance filing. Such refunds are required when donations exceed legal limits.

Based on Federal Election Commission records, Bush is the only candidate to whom Irving — who has no apparent ties to St. Louis — has donated.

Irving apologized for sharing the film but deleted the apology after being traded to the Dallas Mavericks, his current team, last year. The Mavericks are owned by Miriam Adelson and her son-in-law Patrick Dumont.

Bush, who has been among the most outspoken opponents of Israel in Congress and faced criticism from local Jewish leaders, is facing a difficult reelection race against Wesley Bell, the St. Louis County prosecutor, who supports Israel and is working to appeal to the Jewish community.

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

Rep. Cori Bush draws ire of St. Louis Jewish community

During her time in office, Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO), who is fighting for her seat in her Aug. 6 primary, has consistently ignored and rejected efforts from members of the mainstream Jewish community to communicate and connect with her and her office, six Jewish leaders supporting her opponent told Jewish Insider.

Bush is fending off a challenge from Wesley Bell, the prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County, who has leaned into support for Israel in his campaign and picked up the backing of national pro-Israel groups.

A group of more than 30 rabbis from the St. Louis area came together in March to write a letter condemning Bush and endorsing Bell, accusing the Missouri congresswoman of antisemitism and of having “continually fanned the flames with the most outrageous smears of Israel, accusing the Jewish state of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide’ as it has fought to defeat the terrorists.”

The letter follows one sent on Nov. 1, signed by local rabbis as well as the leaders of the local chapters of the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee, J Street, Jewish Community Relations Council, Jewish Community Center, Hillel, National Council of Jewish Women and other Jewish institutions.

That letter condemned Bush for her comments on Israel, accusing her of a “lack of decency, disregard for history, and for intentionally fueling antisemitism and hatred.” Her behavior, the letter charged, “not only fails to advance peace, but it incites anger and the potential of further violence toward the Jewish community.”

Signatories to the March 4 rabbis’ letter supporting Bell described Bush’s response to the Oct. 7 attack as a breaking point in long-simmering frustrations with the incumbent congresswoman dating back to her earliest days in office.

“The groundswell is really taking place post-Oct. 7, because when you are basically siding with Hamas two days after the attack and calling out Israel and calling for a cease-fire when Israel hasn’t even attacked, the Jewish community at that point basically threw their hands up and said, ‘We’re not going to be able to work with this person. We need to find an alternative,’” said Rabbi Jeffrey Abraham of Congregation B’nai Amoona, a Conservative synagogue in the St. Louis suburb of Creve Coeur. 

Abraham organized the March 4 letter. Bush’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Jewish leaders highlighted Bush’s statements in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7 calling for a cease-fire and blaming U.S. support for Israel for the Oct. 7 attack, as well as her votes against a resolution condemning Hamas and a bill barring Oct. 7 attackers from the U.S. as particularly offensive.

Bush was also the lead sponsor of an Oct. 16 cease-fire resolution which made no mention of Hamas or the hostages taken by Hamas.

“I’m hesitant to ever get involved politically because I’m going to upset one group or another,” Rabbi Yosef David, of Orthodox educational organization Aish HaTorah in St. Louis, told JI. “The difference here is that I look at Cori Bush and what she has done as being dangerous to the safety of Jews, both here in the States, as well as the safety of Jews in the Jewish state.”

David said that Bush’s public statements about Israel, accusing it of genocide and condeming Israel immediately after Oct. 7, ”amount to, practically speaking, a blood libel about Israel.”

“That’s beyond the pale, especially after Oct. 7,” David said. “That is putting Jews in actual, physical danger.” 

He also condemned her for supporting “anarchy” on Washington University in St. Louis and Columbia University’s campuses, backing anti-Israel campus encampments.

But the Jewish community’s difficulties with Bush aren’t new. Leaders said that Bush has largely refused to engage with the mainstream Jewish community since she first took office in 2021.

“Going back for the last four years, in general, Cori Bush has not been willing to work with the mainstream Jewish community here,” Abraham said. He said her staff has brushed off meeting requests by highlighting her relationships with far-left groups including Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow.

Abraham said the dynamic was particularly stark around Hanukkah last year, when the local Chabad held its annual menorah-lighting in downtown St. Louis. Bush skipped that event, instead attending a pro-cease-fire ceremony with JVP and INN. Bell, her primary challenger, attended the Chabad event.

Abraham said he was aware of multiple requests from the local federation and JCRC to meet with Bush in 2021 and 2022, inviting her to discuss Jewish communal concerns, which were refused. He said Bush had sent staffers to some events, but almost never appeared herself. 

Ze’ev Smason, the Midwest chairman of the Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV), an Orthodox rabbinic advocacy group that leans conservative politically, said that Bush had also been slated to appear at the opening event at a local Holocaust museum, but didn’t show up. Smason is also the rabbi emeritus of Nusach Hari B’nai Zion congregation, a Modern Orthodox congregation in Olivette.

The federation declined to comment in the midst of the election, referring JI to the November letter.

“It was just a number of times where, over and over again, she wouldn’t support the Jewish community when all we wanted was to sit down and meet with her,” Abraham said. “We weren’t trying to even change her views, per se.”

Based on public information, Bush has met publicly just once with Jewish leaders in St. Louis, in 2022, sitting down with the local JCRC days before her 2022 primary election. The then-leader of the JCRC, Maharat Rori Picker-Neiss said that Bush’s views on Israel didn’t come up at the meeting. Bush toured the Holocaust museum and a food pantry during that visit.

Abraham emphasized that the meeting didn’t happen until her second year in office, that it was limited to a small group from the JCRC and that Jewish leaders were turned down when they asked for a follow-up meeting with Bush.

Bush has also refused to sit for an interview with the St. Louis Jewish Light, which multiple local rabbis cited as a point of concern.

“She has demonstrated a real lack of interest,” Rabbi Yonason Goldson, executive vice president of CJV Missouri, told JI. He said that his wife had reached out to Bush’s office shortly after she was elected to arrange a meeting between her and the Orthodox community in St. Louis. “There was no interest in that whatsoever.”

Rabbi Jordan Gerson, the rabbi of the Washington University Hillel, said that Bush has “abdicat[ed]” her responsibilities to her constituencies when they “offer opinions that are critical of her policies or her stances, especially on Israel.” Gerson does not live in Bush’s district, but the Hillel falls within it.

“Not only have they been dismissed, but they’ve been ignored completely,” Gerson continued, explaining that Bush’s office has often not even acknowledged receiving communications from those who don’t agree with her views on Israel. He said the Hillel’s executive director told him that she wrote to Bush four times, without any response. “There’s just no recognition of their viewpoint because it’s inconvenient for her.”

Rabbi Jeffrey Stiffman, the rabbi emeritus of Congregation Shaare Emeth, a Reform synagogue, told JI that Bush has not responded to any of his letters — either positive or negative.

“She has her own agenda and she runs on that agenda where there’s good and there’s bad — and the Jews and Israel are bad,” Stiffman said.

Goldson said he’s heard throughout the community that “the consensus is that she feels she doesn’t need us, and therefore she has no interest in establishing any kind of a relationship or really engaging in any kind of discussion about what our priorities are.”

Bush’s icing out of the mainline Jewish community carries echoes of one of the weaknesses that ultimately brought down fellow Squad member Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) in his primary in New York last month. 

While the Jewish population in Bush’s district is smaller than in Bowman’s district, Jewish leaders supporting Bell said it could be heavily mobilized against Bush in next month’s primary.

Abraham, who organized the March 4 letter endorsing Bell, said that he was inspired directly by a similar communique by rabbis in Bowman’s district condemning him and supporting his primary challenger, Westchester County Executive George Latimer.

He and other signatories described it as a largely unprecedented show of unity from the St. Louis Jewish community, bringing together leaders across religious and political denominations. Abraham said still other rabbis expressed their support for the effort, even if they weren’t willing to sign publicly.

“It took Cori Bush to get individuals to simultaneously sign a letter who have never co-signed a letter before,” Smason said. “So I think that expresses what is an overwhelming consensus within the Jewish community, our support for Wesley Bell over Cori Bush.”

Abraham said many of the signatories are now actively volunteering with Bell’s campaign, talking about him in their congregations and inviting him to speak in their synagogues. Bell’s campaign is actively working to reach out to and mobilize Jewish leaders and voters. Smason said Orthodox rabbis have been particularly engaged in supporting Bell’s campaign.

Jewish leaders said that Bell’s posture clearly contrasted with Bush’s, including meeting with and standing with the community repeatedly at local events and in other settings, including shortly after the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, before he had declared his candidacy.

“He’s actually listening to who would be his constituents, and that’s critically important,” Gerson said. “We need someone who can listen to both sides, who can discern reality from fabricated reality and really keep in mind the values of the people that they’re serving.”

Abraham said that Bell has shown up to “almost every” rally and memorial event the community has held since the Oct. 7 attack, as well as met individually with rabbis and other leaders in private settings. 

“He’s been willing to meet with anyone and everyone in the Jewish community, really every step of the way,” Abraham said.

Stiffman said that, a year ago, well before he ever entered the race against Bush, Bell had attended and brought his staff to a program on antisemitism organized by the local chapter of the AJC.

David said that Bell has “become close to the Jewish community” and praised his willingness to publicly stand up for Israel.

Some of those who signed the letter endorsing Bell acknowledged that they, and others in the Orthodox community particularly, have strong disagreements with Bell politically, but have been willing to support him anyway.

“Our community does not widely support the policies of Wesley Bell, but he has taken the step of showing solidarity with the Jewish people in times of antisemitism, which [Bush] has not done at all,” Goldson said. “He seems to be a person who has a measure of personal integrity.”

Goldson said that many in the Orthodox community are Republicans but plan to vote in the Democratic primary, which is permitted under the state’s open primary rules, because “the community feels very strongly that Cori Bush has no interest in us and has no business representing our district or any others.”

Smason offered a similar assessment.

“We want a legislator who’s going to do the nuts-and-bolts work of getting things done,” he said. “I disagree very strongly with a number of Wesley Bell’s positions… but he’s a person who I believe is a person of integrity, a person who has a track record as an effective prosecutor, a person who I think will be an effective legislator for the St. Louis community.”

Some of the leaders also criticized Bush’s broader approach to politics, which they said has prompted further division. They argued that she has prioritized her own national profile over serving the needs of the local community, like infrastructure funding — another issue that helped sink Bowman’s campaign.

“She sees her job as making statements, dramatic actions,” Stiffman said. “But in terms of getting things done in Congress, I think you need a more sophisticated person. And I think that Wesley has shown that he can do that here in the county.”

“I see everything about her as focused on inciting division and strife, and exploiting differences between communities,” Goldson said.

Far left lawmakers, Massie vote against condemning Iranian attack on Israel

Fourteen House members, including 13 mostly far-left Democrats and Republican Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) voted on Thursday morning against a resolution condemning the Iranian attack on Israel and expressing support for Israel’s defense.

The resolution, led by Reps. Tom Kean (R-NJ) and Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), condemns the Iranian drone and missile attack on Israel; “fully supports Israel’s right to respond” through any means; calls on other countries to condemn the attack; praises the multinational effort to intercept missiles and drones; expresses commitment to additional aid to Israel; calls for “full enforcement” of sanctions and export controls against Iran; and says the House “stands ready to assist Israel” in any way.

Democratic Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), Cori Bush (D-MO), Greg Casar (D-TX), Jonathan Jackson (D-IL), Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), Hank Johnson (D-GA), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Summer Lee (D-PA), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Delia Ramirez (D-IL) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) joined Massie in opposing the resolution.

Many of the lawmakers who voted against the legislation have opposed a series of other widely bipartisan Iran measures this week.

The votes against this nonbinding legislation also suggest that there are likely at least 14 lawmakers who will oppose an aid bill for Israel if and when it comes to the floor later this week.

The legislation also notes that American and co-produced defense systems were critical to the Israeli defensive effort against the recent Iranian attack, “demonstrating the vital importance of the United States and Israel’s security partnership.”

The Biden administration and other international allies have urged Israel not to respond to the attack or to do so in a limited fashion.

Jewish Dems endorse challengers to Squad members Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush

The Jewish Democratic Council of America (JDCA) on Thursday announced its endorsement of primary challengers to two far-left lawmakers, the first time the group — which is closely aligned with the Democratic Party — has backed candidates who are challenging Democratic incumbents. 

JDCA offered its support to George Latimer, the Westchester County executive who is taking on Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), and Wesley Bell, a St. Louis prosecutor looking to unseat Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO). Both Bowman and Bush have held strongly anti-Israel views since first elected —  and have only amplified their animus since the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks. 

But they are also vulnerable because of scandals that are unrelated to Israel. Bush is under criminal investigation over alleged misspending of federal security money. Bowman pled guilty to a misdemeanor for pulling a fire alarm in a House office building last fall.

When explaining the endorsements, a JDCA spokesperson did not emphasize the candidates’ positions on Israel, saying that Israel is only one of many factors considered.

“We understand that Wesley Bell and George Latimer are supporting the priorities that Jewish Americans are prioritizing when they go to the polls,” said JDCA Communications Director Sam Crystal. “We know that they are fighting for abortion rights and for defending our democracy, and for safer communities and combating gun violence, and health care for all, and in support of Israel and combating antisemitism.”

Bush and Bowman are not the only members of the far-left Squad who are facing primary challengers. But JDCA chose to throw its support behind Latimer and Bell because it views those races as winnable. Left off the endorsement list is Democrat Bhavini Patel, who is running against Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA) in next month’s Pennsylvania primary. Lee has faced similar controversies over her strident criticisms of Israel and associations with antisemitic groups. 

Crystal declined to comment on the Pennsylvania race but, when asked about it, said JDCA is opting to focus on “competitive” races.

“We saw these two seats, in NY-16 and MO-1, as competitive races, and that’s where we’re focusing our efforts, in the places that are competitive,” said Crystal. New York’s primary is scheduled for June 25. Missouri’s primary is on Aug. 6.

JDCA does not plan to offer financial support to Latimer, Bell or other primary candidates. The group plans to spend $1.5 million in the general election. 

“We’re really focusing our efforts really on electing Democrats in November,” said Crystal. 

JDCA also announced endorsements of Democrats in several Senate races, including Rep. Adam Schiff in California, Rep. Ruben Gallego in Arizona, Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell in Florida, Rep. Elissa Slotkin in Michigan and Rep. Colin Allred in Texas.

Bush, Tlaib vote against bill barring Oct. 7 attackers from the U.S.

Reps. Cori Bush (D-MO) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) broke with the rest of the House on Wednesday evening to vote against a bill barring participants in the Oct. 7 attack on Israel from entering the United States. Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-IL) voted present on the bill, while 422 other lawmakers voted in favor.

The “No Immigration Benefits for Hamas Terrorists Act” would designate any members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and any other individuals involved in perpetrating, planning, funding or supporting the Oct. 7 attack on Israel as barred from the U.S. and from seeking any immigration relief from the U.S. 

It would also expand existing immigration restrictions barring some representatives of the Palestinian Liberation Organization from the U.S. to include all PLO members.

Democratic Whip Katherine Clark (D-MA) described the bill as “widely duplicative of current law” in a memo to House Democrats. Hamas and PIJ members are already barred from the U.S., given that both are designated terror organizations, and any individual who provides material support to terrorism is also banned from the country.

In a statement, Tlaib said that the bill “is unnecessary because it is redundant with already existing federal law.”

“It’s just another GOP messaging bill being used to incite anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim hatred that makes communities like ours unsafe,” Tlaib said.

Bush offered a similar explanation, calling it “a redundant, empty messaging bill Republicans are using to target immigrants and incite anti-Palestinian hate.”

Wesley Bell, Bush’s primary opponent, condemned her vote in a statement to JI.

“Rep. Cori Bush’s vote today is shameful and reprehensible. She was one of only two people in the entire Congress to vote in favor of allowing terrorists who participated in the horrific October 7th attack on Israel to enter the United States,” Bell said. “Rep. Bush’s vote is offensive and embarrassing to our community. We will never be a safe haven for terrorists, and we need a Congressperson who knows better.” 

Ramirez also called the bill “unnecessary” and a “waste of resources and time.”

“I voted PRESENT because I am done with political games. The majority is wasting time bringing a bill that is already current law. There are ALREADY no immigration benefits for Hamas terrorists,” she said in a statement. “After participating for 15 hours of a sham impeachment, I could not stomach another bill only introduced to score cheap political points, politicize immigration, and divide our communities. Like the Republican’s sham impeachment, this bill does not meaningfully address border security nor further protect our communities.”

Squad under fire: Two anti-Israel lawmakers facing career-threatening scandals

Two of the most high-profile left-wing lawmakers are facing existential political threats in their home districts — fueled by major new controversies that have further imperiled their chances for reelection.

Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) and Cori Bush (D-MO), leading members of the far-left Squad, independently came under intense scrutiny this week amid twin scandals that underscored their increased vulnerability as each braces for a tough primary fight against a well-funded challenger.

“These two folks were vulnerable before these stories came out,” said Mark Mellman, a veteran Democratic strategist who leads Democratic Majority for Israel’s super PAC. “They’re likely even more vulnerable today.”

For his part, Bowman, who is seeking a third term, drew renewed backlash on Monday over previously unreported online comments in which he promoted 9/11 conspiracy theories on a now-deleted personal blog that he maintained before his election to the House.

The ensuing uproar over his years-old writings, which Bowman has said he regrets, was just the latest setback in a cascade of problems that have plagued the increasingly embattled lawmaker, beginning last fall when he set off a House fire alarm, resulting in a misdemeanor charge as well as a GOP-led censure resolution.

More recently, Bowman, who has emerged as one of the most outspoken critics of Israel amid its war in Gaza, has taken heat for praising a controversial anti-Israel scholar who celebrated Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks — leading a key backer, the progressive Israel advocacy group J Street, to revoke its endorsement last week, even after he apologized for his remarks.

As his troubles have mounted in recent months, Bowman has found himself on the defensive in a key primary battle against a formidable opponent, George Latimer, the Westchester County executive endorsed by AIPAC, which now sees his bid as its best shot to unseat a Squad member this election cycle. Earlier this week, Latimer announced that he had raised nearly $1.4 million in less than a month, a significant sum in a primary campaign against a sitting lawmaker.

Bowman has yet to disclose his fundraising numbers for the final quarter of 2023, which are due today, but his campaign had been struggling financially before he drew a credible challenger, entering October with only around $182,000 on hand, according to the most recent federal filings.

The congressman’s repeated errors have given ammunition to Latimer, who has sought to cast his opponent as a showman focused on performative stunts rather than serving his constituents. But Latimer has generally preferred to let Bowman’s gaffes speak for themselves. A spokesperson for his campaign declined to comment on Tuesday when asked to respond to Bowman’s 9/11 writings, which amplified several falsehoods about the attacks.

“Jamaal is making George’s case for him,” a senior Democratic operative in New York told Jewish Insider on Tuesday. “These types of statements, which seem to pop up every other day, make it abundantly clear that Jamaal isn’t just extreme on Israel. He’s extreme, period. It’s getting harder and harder for Jamaal supporters to cover their ears and pretend nothing is wrong when he keeps putting them in these uncomfortable positions.”

While Bowman’s hostile views toward Israel have alienated Jewish voters in his current district in the northern suburbs of New York City, which could be redrawn in the coming months, the political toxicity of his newly unearthed 9/11 posts could prove just as damaging.

Despite Bowman’s apology, a Democratic leader in Westchester County, speaking anonymously to address a sensitive issue, expressed shock that the legislator had once espoused such conspiracy theories while serving as a middle school principal in the Bronx.

“It’s quite unbelievable to those of us who personally witnessed the planes that day,” the Democratic leader said. “Like me, many people in the district watched and were directly impacted by the attack on the World Trade Center and will not be comforted to hear about these since-deleted thoughts.”

Thomas von Essen, the former New York City fire commissioner who retired shortly after the World Trade Center attacks, said he was equally troubled to find that the comments had come from a future congressman. “When I first saw it I said, ‘Is this the guy who pulled the fire alarm?’” he told JI. “The fact that he’s obviously making such bad choices, that to me is the surprising part. You’ve got to wonder why we would elect people like this.”

“His comments were reckless, harmful and downright disrespectful,” John Feal, an advocate for 9/11 first responders, said in an interview with JI on Tuesday, emphasizing that he did not accept Bowman’s apology. “Congressman Bowman doesn’t regret his comments — he regrets he got caught.”

For all of Bowman’s political problems, Bush may have emerged Tuesday as the Squad member most vulnerable this year, owing to new revelations that the Justice Department is conducting a criminal probe into alleged issues surrounding her handling of federal security funding.

Bush’s campaign has drawn scrutiny for private security expenses, which have totaled more than $750,000 since she was elected in 2020. In 2022, Bush’s campaign paid $60,000 for private security services to her future husband, Cortney Merritts, even as he did not have a private security license, which is required in St. Louis. Her campaign has also paid an unlicensed private security guard, Nathaniel Davis, who has promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories and is reportedly a close friend of Bush.

Bush confirmed she was under investigation in a statement shared on Tuesday. “I hold myself, my campaign and my position to the highest levels of integrity,” she said, stressing that she was “fully cooperating” with the Justice Department as it reviews her “campaign’s spending on security services.”

The two-term lawmaker is facing a robust primary challenge from Wesley Bell, a prominent St. Louis County prosecutor who played a leading role in the aftermath of protests over the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown.

In a statement to JI on Tuesday, Bell described the investigation into his opponent’s “potential misuse of public funds” as “a serious matter,” adding that Bush “is entitled to due process.”

“It is my hope that Rep. Bush will cooperate fully with the investigation and be transparent with the public in responding to the legitimate concerns they are likely to have,” Bell said. “I entered this race because I believe the people of this district deserve a representative they can trust who will show up and get results for them. I feel more strongly about that than ever.”

Bell announced on Monday that he had pulled in nearly $500,000 in the final three months of 2023, a major fundraising haul. Bush, who raised only $120,000 between July and September last year, has not yet revealed her fourth-quarter figures.

At her campaign launch on Saturday, Bush cast herself as an “underdog” with a “calling,” telling supporters, “I need money.”

Bush is among two Squad members facing the prospect of outside spending from Mainstream Democrats PAC, a moderate group that has backed pro-Israel candidates in previous cycles. Dmitri Mehlhorn, a political advisor to the billionaire entrepreneur Reid Hoffman, who largely funds the PAC, has signaled in recent months that top donors are eager to fund credible challengers to Bush and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), who has yet to draw primary competition.

The PAC has not indicated if it will officially back Bell, who has said he entered the race in part because of Bush’s equivocal response to the Oct. 7 attacks, even though Mehlhorn says he has been personally raising money for Bell’s campaign. “In general a Justice Department investigation is not a great campaign brand,” he suggested in an email to JI on Tuesday. “If it turns out she misused official funds, that would be consistent with the critique that she has not prioritized her constituents.”

Brian Goldsmith, a Democratic consultant who often works with Mainstream Democrats and Democratic Majority for Israel, a like-minded group, said that Bush’s legal troubles are likely to fuel concerns among Democratic leaders who are eager for a scandal-free election cycle as they seek to take back the House majority. Former President Trump “has raised the salience of candidates under federal investigation,” he said. “Democrats aren’t going to like this.”

Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar (D-CA) declined to comment on the Bush investigation while speaking at a press conference on Tuesday, saying that he did not know anything about the situation beyond what had been made public.

“Representative Cori Bush has indicated that she is fully cooperating with the Department of Justice in connection with the ongoing investigation,” said Christie Stephenson, a spokesperson for House House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), who has stressed that he will continue to support Squad incumbents facing challenges this cycle. “Like any other American, she is entitled to the presumption of innocence. It is our expectation that the investigation will follow the facts, apply the law and be conducted in a professional manner.”

Additional reporting contributed by JI’s Capitol Hill reporter Marc Rod

The Justice Department is conducting a criminal probe into Cori Bush

The Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation into Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) over alleged issues surrounding her handling of federal security funding, Punchbowl News first reported on Tuesday.

The department has issued a subpoena to the House sergeant-at-arms requesting records related to Bush’s Members’ Representational Allowance, according to Punchbowl, citing six confidential sources.

Bush acknowledged the investigation in a subsequent statement. “I hold myself, my campaign, and my position to the highest levels of integrity. I also believe in transparency which is why I can confirm that the Department of Justice is reviewing my campaign’s spending on security services. We are fully cooperating in this investigation, and I would like to take this opportunity to outline the facts and the truth,” the congresswoman said.

Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar (D-CA) declined to comment on the matter at a press conference on Tuesday, saying he did not know anything about the situation beyond what has been made public.

In addition to Bush’s legal troubles, the two-term Squad-aligned lawmaker is facing a serious political threat from Wesley Bell, a prominent St. Louis County prosecutor who played a leadership role in the aftermath of protests over the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown. 

Bell, who is running against Bush in the Democratic primary, announced raising nearly $500,000 in the final three months of 2023, a significant sum against a sitting lawmaker in a primary campaign. Bush has not announced her fourth-quarter fundraising figures, which are due Thursday night.

“A DOJ investigation into the potential misuse of public funds is a serious matter. As a prosecutor, I understand that Rep. Bush is entitled to due process. It is my hope that Rep. Bush will cooperate fully with the investigation and be transparent with the public in responding to the legitimate concerns they are likely to have,” Bell said in a statement.

“I entered this race because I believe the people of this district deserve a representative they can trust who will show up and get results for them. I feel more strongly about that than ever.”

Bush’s campaign has also drawn scrutiny for private security expenses, which have totaled more than $750,000 since she was elected in 2020.  

Last year, Fox News reported that Bush’s campaign had paid $60,000 for private security to Bush’s husband, Cortney Merritts, even as he did not have a private security license, which is required in St. Louis.

Her campaign has also paid more than $137,000 to an unlicensed private security guard, Nathaniel Davis, who has promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories and is reportedly a close friend of Bush.

In change from past, pro-Israel groups rally to oust left-wing lawmakers 

As far-left House members face primary competition over their polarizing stances on Israel’s war with Hamas, newly emboldened pro-Israel groups are indicating that they are now preparing to invest significantly in the upcoming election cycle.

In one notable development, a major Democratic fundraiser with ties to a moderate political action committee that backs pro-Israel candidates is signaling that top donors are eager to fund credible primary challenges to Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Cori Bush (D-MO) — who have drawn backlash for equivocating over Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror attack.

Their reactions to the brutal massacre have created “a lot of energy among donors and activists in the center,” Dmitri Mehlhorn, a political advisor to the billionaire entrepreneur Reid Hoffman, who largely funds the Mainstream Democrats PAC, confirmed in an interview with Jewish Insider on Thursday.

“One of the very, very small silver linings of this horrible moment is that it does modestly increase the likelihood that we can remove some of these members of Congress,” Mehlhorn said. “We believe that there is a winning electoral coalition, a large governing majority of Americans who want their leaders to be able to condemn violent atrocities and mass rape.”

In another salvo aimed at Tlaib on Thursday, Democratic Majority for Israel’s political arm released a six-figure TV ad in Detroit hitting the Squad member over her calls for a cease-fire and vote last week against a resolution standing with Israel in the wake of Hamas’ assault, among other things. 

The target of the ad — as well as its messaging — was noteworthy for DMFI, which has traditionally avoided going after anti-Israel incumbents. The group’s advertising has also not typically mentioned Israel or foreign policy, despite its focus on electing pro-Israel candidates. But Mark Mellman, the president of DMFI, suggested that the escalating conflict has contributed to a new sense of urgency on issues relating to Israel.

“Normally foreign policy is not an important electoral issue unless American troops are fighting a war,” Mellman told JI on Thursday. “But Israel is the number one news story in the world right now and polls demonstrate it is a salient issue for a large majority of Americans.”

On Monday, Bush drew her first challenger: Wesley Bell, the prosecuting attorney of St. Louis County, who cited Bush’s positions on the conflict between Israel and Hamas as a reason for entering the race. “Hamas is a terrorist organization,” he told JI, “and I will not waver in my support for Israel.”

Meanwhile, Tlaib, who represents a large population of Arab American voters in Dearborn, has yet to face opposition in her primary — despite ongoing efforts to recruit a credible challenger.

Political activists in Detroit have been working behind the scenes to convince Adam Hollier, a former state senator who launched a rematch against freshman Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-MI) last month, to switch races and challenge Tlaib instead, according to a Democratic source familiar with the effort.

Hollier, however, said in a text message to JI on Thursday that he is “not considering any other district,” adding, “I’m running in MI-13, my home district, because our communities deserve real, serious representation in Congress and they just aren’t getting it with Rep. Thanedar.”

Speaking with JI, Mehlhorn said he had already heard from several unnamed donors in the tech and finance worlds who reached out to him after he went public with his plans in an interview with CNBC on Thursday — which he characterized as an opening signal to spur “credible candidates to run.”

Mehlhorn had indicated in an interview with The Intercept last May that he believed Mainstream Democrats PAC had succeeded in neutralizing the far left in 2022 — and would not need to spend as aggressively this cycle. But he suggested that his thinking had since changed as the Israel-Hamas conflict has underscored the growing extremism of the far left ahead of a presidential election year.

“We believe the winning strategy is for Democrats to present themselves as capable and able to police their own extremists,” Mehlhorn told JI.

Mehlhorn explained that he and his allies would for now be focusing exclusively on unseating Tlaib and Bush — even as other Squad members who have staked out polarizing positions on the ongoing war in Gaza are also poised to face primary opponents next cycle. “If you try to police your own side too aggressively,” he said, “it actually breaks things.”

The Bush and Tlaib campaigns did not respond to messages seeking comment on Thursday evening.

In addition to Bush, Reps. Summer Lee (D-PA) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN) are preparing to defend their seats from new challengers who are drawing sharp contrasts on Middle East policy. 

Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), who has faced mounting criticism from Jewish and pro-Israel constituents over his approach to the war, also appears poised for a competitive primary as George Latimer, the Westchester County executive, weighs a challenge — which could come as soon as next week, according to sources informed of his thinking. 

AIPAC, the bipartisan pro-Israel group, has privately indicated that it is ready to back Latimer’s campaign.

Daily Kickoff: Cori Bush’s pro-Israel primary challenger

funding fight

Democrats slam GOP plan to split Israel and Ukraine funding, offset with IRS cuts

House Republicans’ proposal to split emergency Israel and Ukraine funding and offset it with funding cuts to the Internal Revenue Service is being criticized as political gamesmanship by House and Senate Democrats, even staunch supporters of Israel, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.

In the bill: The Republicans’ bill, which is set to come up for a vote later this week, would offset the $14.3 billion in proposed aid to Israel with equivalent cuts to funding for the IRS — an unusual provision for an emergency aid bill. IRS funding has been a particular target for congressional Republicans since it received significant increases as part of last year’s Inflation Reduction Act.

Bipartisan: Although most criticism has come from Democrats, a bipartisan group of House members including Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC), the Republican chairman of House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia subcommittee, pro-Israel Democrats Reps. Brad Schneider (D-IL) and Debbie Wasserman Schutlz (D-FL) and Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), also critiqued the plan, JI scooped last night. “We beseech you not to separate aid for Israel’s fight to rescue its hostages and secure its borders from Ukraine’s fight to do the same, or from Taiwan’s efforts to deter a war,” the letter reads. “The introduction of offsets, or the potential deferral of our commitments, threatens not only our national interest, but also our long-term fiscal health.”

Outside the Hill: An official at a pro-Israel organization in contact with Capitol Hill told JI the proposal from House leadership was a misstep. “The House legislation puts Israel in a tough spot unnecessarily. There is no upside here,” the official told JI. “It is [dead on arrival] in the Senate all the while making the funding partisan and raising questions about setting a new precedent for emergency assistance to our most important ally in the region. A largely partisan vote at a time when Israel is fighting a war and recovering from burying 1,400 of its citizens sends the wrong signal to the world — including Israel’s enemies.”

Read the full story here.

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no beating around the bush

Cori Bush becomes the latest Squad member to pick up a pro-Israel challenger

Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) has emerged as one of the most stridently anti-Israel voices in Congress since Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7 — to which Bush responded by calling for the end of U.S. aid to Israel. On Monday, Bush became the latest anti-Israel House member to pick up a primary challenger, Wesley Bell, who cites Bush’s stance on the Israel-Hamas conflict as one of the reasons he’s joining the race, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.

Quotable: “As a country, we have to be reliable partners. We have to stand by our fellow democracies, and we have to stand against terrorism,” Bell, the prosecuting attorney of St. Louis County, told JI on Monday afternoon. “Hamas is a terrorist organization and I will not waver in my support for Israel.”

Timing: Bell said that the Israel-Hamas war and Bush’s comments about it had factored into his decision to challenge her for her House seat. “It contributed to [my decision] for the surface reasons that those comments were offensive on many levels, but also from a national security level as well,” Bell said. “It’s going to take steady and effective leadership to ensure that we’re able to bring about peaceful resolutions and that often means standing with fellow democracies.”

Personal experience: Bell, who traveled to Israel in 2017 with the American Israel Education Foundation, a nonprofit linked to AIPAC, said he’d seen firsthand the importance of Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system. Bush voted against supplemental Iron Dome funding in 2021, after the last war between Israel and Hamas. “It’s one of those things that you have to be there to fully understand what our Jewish brothers and sisters and our Israeli brothers and sisters have to deal with,” he said.

Read the full story here.

Bonus: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said yesterday that “Now more than ever, we must emphasize the importance of separating people from governments. Antisemitism is disgusting and unacceptable. We have a responsibility to defend our Jewish brothers, sisters, and siblings from hatred. No movement of integrity should tolerate it. Ever.”

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campus beat

Columbia University, Barnard College silent after faculty letter calls Hamas terrorist attack a legitimate ‘military action’

Columbia University declined to comment to Jewish Insider after 144 members of its faculty signed an open letter on Saturday that called Israel an apartheid state while referring to Hamas’ terrorist attacks as a legitimate “military action.” The professors wrote that they are uneasy about students being deemed antisemitic if they “express empathy for the lives and dignity of Palestinians, and/or if they signed on to a student-written statement that situated the military action begun on Oct. 7 within the larger context of the occupation of Palestine by Israel,” eJewishPhilanthropy’s Haley Cohen reports forJI.

Protecting the protests: Even as some of the protests have turned violent, the letter defended the student demonstrators against the “egregious forms of harassment and efforts to chill otherwise protected speech on campus [that] are unacceptable.” Earlier this month, an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s main library after confronting a woman ripping down flyers with names and pictures of Israelis kidnapped by Hamas. 

No comment: Columbia’s faculty demanded that the administration “cease issuing statements that favor the suffering and death of Israelis or Jews over the suffering and deaths of Palestinians.” When asked whether administration condemns the letter and thinks it is antisemitic, a spokesperson for Columbia told JI, “on this, we have no comment.” 

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white house meeting

Biden administration pledges plan to combat rising antisemitism on campuses within 2 weeks

Jewish leaders suggested the Biden administration strip federal funding from universities that fail to address antisemitism on their campuses during a meeting at the Department of Education on Monday to discuss steps to counter the noted rise of antisemitic incidents on college campuses — which comes amid a 388% increase nationwide since the Oct. 7 terror attacks in Israel. ​​Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt and other members of the administration met with 13 Jewish leaders – from across the political and religious range of the community – who have been focused on the rise of antisemitism on campus. The administration pledged to make a plan within two weeks to address the wave of antisemitism, eJewishPhilanthropy’s Haley Cohen reports.

Proposing consequences: Sheila Katz, CEO of the National Council of Jewish Women, proposed that universities lose their federal funding under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin. Nathan Diament, executive director of the Orthodox Union Advocacy Center — an organization that often does not see eye to eye with NCJW — said he had in mind to suggest the same. “The whole community is on the same page here,” he told eJP. “[Universities should be] made to understand that there are consequences to failing to serve your Jewish students appropriately.”

Taking it seriously: Several participants told eJP that the meeting provided the sense that the Biden administration is taking seriously the uptick in antisemitism. “It was very clear that both the Department of Education and the Biden administration saw this as a worthwhile use of their time and something they needed to be at,” Julie Rayman, managing director of policy and political affairs at the American Jewish Committee, said, adding that the discussion was a “combination of voicing angst and anxiety of the community but also trying to provide some real, tangible recommendations for what we hope to see from the Department of Education.” 

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pitch perfect

Former Rangers second baseman Ian Kinsler rallies support for Israel

When former Texas Rangers All-Star Ian Kinsler took the field to throw out the first pitch at the American League Championship Series game against the Houston Astros last week — 10 days after Hamas’ deadly rampage in Israel — he looked fit and trim, like he could grab his cleats and glove and take up his old spot at second base. But Kinsler wasn’t wearing the Rangers uniform the home crowd was used to seeing him in for eight seasons, with its distinctive Old West lettering. Instead, he had donned the blue pinstriped jersey of Team Israel (along with a Rangers cap), part of an effort Kinsler has joined to rally support for the Jewish state since the Hamas attack on Oct. 7,  Frederic J. Frommer reports for Jewish Insider.

Fighting the fiction: “There’s a lot of propaganda and there’s a lot of backlash towards Israel by people that aren’t really educated or don’t really understand what the country actually does in the relationship with the Palestinian people,” Kinsler, who manages Team Israel, told JI last week. “So I’m trying to bring awareness to that situation and hopefully people look into it a little bit deeper than just reading the headlines. I find it bizarre that when Hamas puts out a statement, that people read it and it makes them think different things. I mean, this is a terrorist group that you’re listening to.”

Coaching: The day after he threw out the first pitch, Kinsler appeared in a video along with 18 current and former Jewish major league players and coaches urging people to stand up against antisemitism – and with Israel. They are the Jewish boys of summer in an anguished autumn of war.

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Pic of the Day

Israeli soldier Ori Megidish (center) poses for a photo with her family after IDF forces rescued her from Hamas captivity in Gaza yesterday.

Birthdays

CEO of Feld Entertainment, which operates the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus and Disney on Ice, Kenneth Feld turns 75… 

Actor with a lengthy career in film, television and theater, Ron Rifkin turns 84… British historian, born in Baghdad, emeritus professor of International Relations at Oxford, Avraham “Avi” Shlaim turns 78… Co-founder and co-chairman of Heritage Auctions, James L. Halperin turns 71… Author, historian and writer-at-large for the U.K.-based Prospect Magazine, Sam Tanenhaus turns 68… Staff writer for The New Yorker and author, Susan Orlean turns 68… Former owner of the Phoenix Suns, Robert Sarver turns 62… Managing partner of Arel Capital, Richard G. Leibovitch turns 60… PAC director at AIPAC, Marilyn Rosenthal… British lawyer who has served as CEO of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and COO of World ORT, Marc Jonathan (Jon) Benjamin turns 59… Former MLB pitcher, now a managing director at Rockefeller Capital Management in Boca Raton, Steven Allen Rosenberg turns 59… Founding partner at Lanx Management, former president of AIPAC and past chairman of the Orthodox Union, Howard E. (Tzvi) Friedman turns 58… Director of development for Foundation for Jewish Camp, Corey Cutler… Chief brand and innovation officer of Ralph Lauren, David Lauren turns 52… Founder and CEO of MercadoLibre, Marcos Eduardo Galperin turns 52… Film and television director and producer, Ruben Fleischer turns 49… Professor, attorney, author, political columnist and poet, Seth Abramson turns 47… Member of the California State Assembly since 2016, Marc Berman turns 43… Actor Eddie Kaye Thomas turns 43… CEO at Climate Club, he is the founder of Pencils of Promise, Adam Braun… Rabbi-in-residence at the Solomon Schechter School of Westchester (N.Y.), she is the founder of Midrash Manicures, combining Jewish education and creative nail art, Yael Buechler… General manager at Returnmates, Spencer Herbst… Director of institutional advancement at Yeshiva Schools of Pittsburgh, Masha Shollar… Wheelchair basketball player and social media personality, Peter Berry turns 22…

Cori Bush becomes the latest Squad member to pick up a pro-Israel challenger

Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) has emerged as one of the most stridently anti-Israel voices in Congress since Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7 — to which Bush responded by calling for the end of U.S. aid to Israel. On Monday, Bush became the latest anti-Israel House member to pick up a primary challenger, who cites Bush’s stance on the Israel-Hamas conflict as one of the reasons he’s joining the race.

Wesley Bell, the prosecuting attorney of St. Louis County, announced on Monday that he was ending his candidacy for the U.S. Senate seat in Missouri — which he launched in June, hoping to unseat Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) — to instead challenge Bush for her House seat.

“As a country, we have to be reliable partners. We have to stand by our fellow democracies, and we have to stand against terrorism,” Bell told Jewish Insider on Monday afternoon. “Hamas is a terrorist organization and I will not waver in my support for Israel.”

In a press conference announcing his candidacy, Bell said, “We cannot give aid and comfort to terrorist organizations.” Pressed on that comment by JI, Bell noted that Bush had voted against funding for the Iron Dome missile-defense system, and said that the U.S.’s foes, including Hamas, “pay attention” to public divisions in the U.S.  

“They want propaganda to try and create confusion and disinformation,” he said. “I think it matters a lot. And then obviously how one votes. There’s certain things that we cannot politicize and that’s one of them, in my opinion. And as we see — Republicans and Democrats alike, one of the few issues that we all come together on.”

He said that the Israel-Hamas war and Bush’s comments about it had factored into his decision to challenge her for her House seat.

“It contributed to [my decision] for the surface reasons that those comments were offensive on many levels, but also from a national security level as well,” Bell said. “It’s going to take steady and effective leadership to ensure that we’re able to bring about peaceful resolutions and that often means standing with fellow democracies.”

Bell declined to say if he had been in conversation with AIPAC or Democratic Majority for Israel, the pro-Israel PACs working to recruit challengers to Squad members. But he said that he has strong relationships with Jewish leaders in the district, and that recent events have increased the calls from supporters for him to run for the House seat, instead of the Senate.

AIPAC spokesperson Marshall Wittmann told JI, that “there will be a time for political action, but right now our priority is building and sustaining congressional support for Israel’s fight to permanently dismantle Hamas, which perpetrated this barbaric, terrorist attack on the Jewish state.” DMFI did not respond to a request for comment.

More broadly, Bell said constituents and supporters have been encouraging him to run for the House seat for some time, since even before he entered the Senate race.

Bell, who traveled to Israel in 2017 with the American Israel Education Foundation, a nonprofit linked to AIPAC, said he’d seen firsthand the importance of Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system. Bush voted against supplemental Iron Dome funding in 2021, after the last war between Israel and Hamas.

He explained that while visiting a kibbutz, residents informed them that they had just seconds to head to bomb shelters when alarms sounded in the kibbutz. Forty-five minutes after the group left, sirens went off in the kibbutz, although all of the incoming rockets were intercepted by the Iron Dome. If not for a scheduling conflict, the group might still have been in the kibbutz when the attack happened, he said.

“It’s one of those things that you have to be there to fully understand what our Jewish brothers and sisters and our Israeli brothers and sisters have to deal with,” he said.

Bell emphasized the need to keep the possibility of a two-state solution alive. But he said he did not know what the path to a peaceful settlement would look like at this stage.

“Israel has to be able to have basic security, it has to be able to defend its borders. Terrorist organizations — we cannot tolerate those, and Israel has a right to defend themselves,” Bell explained. “Sometimes the narrative is as if Israel completely controls whether there’s going to be peace or not. And Israel did not attack Hamas. Hamas attacked Israel and attacked innocent people and kidnapped folks, and reportings of rapes.”

Bell said he supports continued military aid to Israel and opposed conditioning such aid, noting that Israel “cannot just sit back and allow someone to attack it and hope that rockets don’t get through.”

On his trip to Israel, Bell said he was struck by the security situation on the ground, noting that the group’s guides had told them it would be unsafe for them to visit Bethlehem.

“One thing that I know is that if the terrorists, Hamas and these organizations laid down their arms, there will be peace in the region. But as we know, if Israel was to lay down their arms, they would be destroyed,” he said. “And going back to 1947, the United Nations negotiating the [partition plan] — Israel accepted it and the Arab nations did not.”

Bush, for her part, took to X on Sunday to accuse Israel of an “ethnic cleansing campaign” in Gaza, claiming that “millions of people in Gaza with nowhere to go [are] being slaughtered” and again calling for the end of U.S. support to Israel.

Bell called the surge of antisemitism that has occurred in the United States and worldwide since the Hamas conflict “disturbing” and “troubling.”

“I think we’re better than that,” he said. “Obviously we have our challenges as a country, we have our history as a country. But I want to believe that we are trending in the direction of tolerance and recognizing that our superpower has always been our diversity… We have to continue to counteract this disinformation… [and] continue to support folks who are going to make the right decisions and be on the right side of history.”

Looking at the looming threat in the Middle East, Bell said that the U.S. needs to “do everything that we can” to ensure that Iran cannot obtain a nuclear weapon. He said that U.S. lawmakers should present a unified front behind the president’s efforts to “as much as possible handle and manage these situations diplomatically, so that we can avoid larger conflicts.”

“But I think we all know the stakes, I think we all realize the gravity of what’s going on,” he continued.

In areas well beyond the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Bell emphasized repeatedly during his press conference and to JI that the district needs “steady and effective leadership” that has not been seen from Bush. 

He criticized her for voting against the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the bill to raise the debt limit — accusing her of joining Republicans in trying to use that issue to “get other things that are on their agendas… that don’t represent the values of a majority of Americans.”

He also lamented her support for defunding the police, a movement he said had given Republicans ammunition against Democrats and contributed to Democrats losing the House in the 2022 midterms. He highlighted his own history of working with local law enforcement as a prosecutor.

Bush faced a primary from state Sen. Steven Roberts in 2022, but Roberts lost by around 40 percentage points. His candidacy was weighed down by multiple accusations of sexual assault, and Roberts’ own record included a series of votes against pro-Israel bills, which he disavowed on the campaign trail.

Missouri State Sen. Brian Williams was floated at Monday’s press conference as another potential primary challenger to Bush. Williams issued a strong statement in support of Israel and condemning Hamas following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack.

“Hamas terrorists have slaughtered hundreds of innocent women, children and Israeli civilians. This is not about resistance to occupation. This is about fear and hatred being made manifest in violence,” Williams said. “I stand with Israel. Missouri stands with Israel. America stands with Israel. Our nation must do what we can to help the Israeli people defend themselves against terrorism and protect innocent families from violence.”

Reps. Tlaib, Bush face condemnation from several congressional Democrats — and the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. 

Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Cori Bush (D-MO) blamed U.S. military aid to Israel for contributing to the massive Hamas terror attack on Israel yesterday, which has left more than 700 Israelis dead. Tlaib also described Hamas’ actions as “resistance” to Israeli “apartheid.”

The comments come as most U.S. lawmakers have offered strong support to Israel in the conflict, without many of the typical calls for cease-fires and de-escalation by both sides in the hours following the onset of the attack. The exception to this has been members of the far-left Squad and a handful of other lawmakers aligned with them.

“I am determined as ever to fight for a just future where everyone can live in peace, without fear and with true freedom, equal rights, and human dignity,” Tlaib said in a statement on Sunday. “The path to that future must include lifting the blockade, ending the occupation and dismantling the apartheid system that creates the suffocating, dehumanizing conditions that can lead to resistance.”

Tlaib added that “as long as our country provides billions in unconditional funding to support the apartheid government, this heartbreaking cycle of violence will continue.”

Bush, in a similar statement on Saturday, said she was “heartbroken” by the violence and loss of life, “following attacks by Hamas militants on Israeli border towns and Israeli military bombardment of Gaza.”

“As part of achieving a just and lasting peace, we must do our part to stop this violence and trauma by ending U.S. government support for Israeli military occupation and apartheid,” Bush continued.

Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) condemned the comments by his colleagues.

“U.S. aid to Israel is and should be unconditional, and never more so than in this moment of critical need,” Torres told Jewish Insider in a statement. “Shame on anyone who glorifies as ‘resistance’ the largest single-day mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. It is reprehensible and repulsive.”

Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) highlighted the barbarism committed by Hamas terrorists in his own response.

“Two of my colleagues called for America to end assistance to Israel, despite the countless images of Israeli children, women, men, and elderly, including Americans, murdered by radical Iranian-backed Hamas terrorists,” Gottheimer told JI. “It sickens me that while Israelis clean the blood of their family members shot in their homes, they believe Congress should strip U.S. funding to our democratic ally and allow innocent civilians to suffer.”

Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI), who serves in the Michigan delegation with Tlaib, distanced herself from Tlaib’s comments in a statement to JI.

“We must continue to come together as a Congress and a country to disavow terrorism and support the Jewish state, our democratic ally, Israel,” Stevens said. “Israel has a right to exist and defend herself.”

None of the other Democratic members of Michigan’s House delegation responded to requests for comment.

Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Herzog responded directly to Tlaib, in an impassioned statement on X, formerly known as Twitter.

“How much more blood needs to be spilled for you to overcome your prejudice and unequivocally condemn Hamas, a U.S.-designated terror organization?” Herzog wrote. “Hundreds of innocent Israeli civilians massacred in cold blood on a holy day. Babies kidnapped from their mother’s arms and taken to Gaza. An 85-year-old woman in a wheelchair and a Holocaust survivor taken hostage. Is that not enough, @RashidaTlaib?”

At the same time, a number of New York Democrats condemned a Democratic Socialists of America rally on Sunday in New York’s Times Square expressing “solidarity with the Palestinian people and their right to resist 75 years of occupation and apartheid.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called the rally “ill-timed” and “cold-hearted.”

“We’ve seen unprecedented viciousness coming from Hamas aimed at innocent families and children,” Schumer said. “Everyone — no matter your views — should condemn this brutal act.”

Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) said, “The NYC-DSA is revealing itself for what it truly is — a deep rot of antisemitism.”

He added, “There is a special place in hell for those who glorify the cold blooded murder of civilians and children… The DSA should be universally condemned for its genocidal celebration of Israel’s destruction.”

Rep. Pat Ryan (D-NY) called the rally “an absolute disgrace” and “blatant antisemitism.”

“These actions are an insult to the memories of the innocent men, women, and children brutally murdered,” Ryan continued.

Through a spokesperson, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) also condemned the rally.

“Leader Hakeem Jeffries strongly and unequivocally condemns the hate-filled rally held by the DSA in [NYC] and any effort to support the barbaric, inhumane and despicable terrorist attack by Hamas on the State of Israel and its citizens,” spokesperson Andy Eichar said.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said the rally was “abhorrent and morally repugnant.”

Former Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-NY), who is currently running for a House seat in the New York City suburbs, said that “no one should support terrorist attacks against Israel” and that “today’s rally by the NYC DSA is despicable.” He added that “Hamas alone is responsible for this heinous violence.”

Brad Lander, the left-wing NYC comptroller who has in the past called for conditioning U.S. aid to Israel — and is affiliated with the DSA — disavowed the group’s rally.

“Today’s DSA rally — which effectively celebrated Hamas’ murder & kidnapping of hundreds of Israeli civilians, including children & grandparents — was abominable,” Lander said. “There is no place for glorifying terror, left, center, or right.”

Cori Bush’s opponent attacks her Israel stance, but his past votes raise questions

In his bid to oust Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO), state Sen. Steven Roberts is leaning on Bush’s criticisms of Israel and her vote against supplemental Iron Dome funding as a dividing point. 

But Roberts’ own record — having voted multiple times against anti-Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions legislation — is raising questions about his stance on issues related to the Jewish state.

Bush, a Black Lives Matter activist who has become an outspoken voice in the House in favor of defunding the police, won an upset victory over longtime Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-MO) in the 2020 Democratic primary, ending a two-generation political dynasty and ousting a reliable pro-Israel vote. In the final stages of that primary, Clay issued a mailer hitting Bush for her “anti-Israel agenda” and support for the BDS movement targeting Israel. Clay is supporting Roberts.

In the primary, Roberts, who is also a former prosecutor, has been espousing a staunchly pro-Israel line, telling Jewish Insider that antisemitism and Israel are among “the most important issues at stake in this race.” 

On his campaign website, Roberts pledges to “continue to honor our friendship with Israel while supporting peace initiatives that don’t jeopardize Israel’s national security.” He argues Bush’s vote against funding for Israel’s missile-defense system “jeopardized the lives of innocent Israeli civilians” and says her “public statements defaming Israel border on antisemitism.”

In January, Roberts spoke at an Israeli American Council meeting in Florida. In an op-ed in the St. Louis Jewish Light following that meeting, Roberts blasted the BDS movement as “discrimination” and a “hateful disinformation campaign” designed to “delegitimize, destabilize and eventually eliminate the State of Israel as the eternal homeland of the Jewish people.” 

Yet, Roberts voted against anti-BDS legislation on three separate occasions in the Missouri House and Senate, over the course of multiple years and legislative sessions.

In a floor speech in the Missouri Senate in 2020, Roberts argued against one bill, saying that it would infringe on Americans’ rights and that it failed to distinguish between the BDS movement and individuals engaging in boycotts of Israel, repeatedly noting that the legislation did not specifically mention the BDS movement.

He drew parallels between boycotts of Israel and boycotts of apartheid South Africa, although he stopped short of accusing Israel of apartheid, and said that constituents had told him they were trying to “find a nonviolent way to protest a nation that’s engaging in oppressive behaviors.”

Roberts told Jewish Insider in late July that he would have voted differently if the bills had come up now, and said that “this wasn’t a bill that went through my committee; it wasn’t an issue that I was as familiar with as I probably should have been.”

He emphasized that he did not personally believe at the time of his 2020 speech that Israel was engaging in apartheid or “oppressive behaviors” but was relaying concerns that his constituents had expressed to him.

Roberts also indicated that he was misled about the intent and function of the bill that passed in 2020.

“What we were being told was that this was about an individual’s right to protest, telling folks what they can and can’t do,” he said.

“Knowing what I know now, having spoken to other leaders of the Jewish community, I would have changed my vote, I would have voted differently,” Roberts continued. “My position on it changed just through my interactions with the Jewish community.”

He told JI that he now feels that state agencies and contractors should be barred from engaging in boycotts of Israel or engaging with the BDS movement. Roberts also attacked Bush for supporting the BDS movement targeting Israel while opposing and voting against sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.

The state senator, who serves as the minority caucus whip, was set to travel to Israel late last year as part of a delegation organized by the America-Israel Friendship League and National Conference of State Legislatures, but that trip was canceled as a result of Israeli coronavirus restrictions.

As part of his shift on Israel policy, Roberts told JI he has met with a range of local Jewish leaders, including local rabbis, community leaders and members of the Jewish Community Relations Council of St. Louis.

Galit Lev-Harir, a member of the IAC’s St. Louis Regional Council, told JI she first met Roberts at the IAC conference and felt that his conversations there had had a major impact on his Israel policy views.

“I think that was really what was the first step in influenc[ing] him and coming to the understanding that he has today on policy toward Israel,” Lev-Harir told JI. 

Lev-Harir said that Roberts had not previously been aware of the prevalence of Arabs in Israeli society or the role of the Arab Ra’am party in the previous Israeli coalition government, nor of the particulars of the security and governance situation in the West Bank and Gaza.

“He didn’t understand all of that — I would say most Americans don’t understand all of that — because it certainly doesn’t get explained on the nightly news or in the newspaper,” she said. “And so that was all very eye-opening to him.”

She said that she believes Roberts is “very committed” to his current pro-Israel positions and “if elected, will stick to these pro-Israel positions.”

St. Louis JCRC Executive Director Rori Picker Neiss told JI that the group has collaborated with Roberts on a range of issues during his time in state government, particularly gun violence and criminal justice reform. She said that Roberts has also reached out to her and the JCRC to discuss Israel policy and that they have also connected him with other experts on the issue.

“Since the time of the vote, he has reached out to us trying to understand the issues better and we have always been thrilled to engage with anyone who’s trying to understand more about these issues, and have been really happy to speak with him more,” Picker Neiss said.

Nancy Lisker, the St. Louis regional director for the American Jewish Committee, told JI that AJC has not met or spoken with Roberts, but noted his shifting stance on BDS.

“He expresses support for Israel, however as a state representative he voted twice against the AJC-sponsored anti-BDS legislation that overwhelmingly passed the Missouri Legislature in 2020,” Lisker said. “More recently, he has spoken out against the BDS movement. We hope this change reflects an evolution of state Sen. Roberts’ views on this movement rather than a campaign strategy to curry favor with pro-Israel advocates.”

The 1st Congressional District’s new lines, which Roberts helped draw and voted on as a member of the state Senate, bring in greater portions of University City, where a significant portion of the St. Louis Jewish community resides. Roberts was accused during the process of seeking to draw a map that might favor him in a potential congressional run.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch recently published an article revealing that Roberts previously dated Neveen Ayesh, a Bush ally and fundraiser who has come under fire for past stridently anti-Israel and antisemitic social media posts. Ayesh and Roberts dispute the details of the relationship — she said she dated him for two years, while he claims they “briefly dated” and he broke off the relationship when “her views became clear to me.” 

The Post-Dispatch also shared a photo of Roberts taken by Ayesh in which he is wearing a necklace in the shape of Israel and the Palestinian territories, inscribed with “Palestine” in Arabic. Roberts told JI he did not recall the photo, that the necklace belonged to Ayesh and that he did not know what it said.

“Cori Bush is being paid by hate and she knows it… I chose to reject hate and walk away. I recognized that because I had been uninformed, I was vulnerable.” Roberts said in an open letter addressing his relationship with Ayesh. “Cori Bush has long known that many of her friends and supporters are anti-Jewish bigots.”

Roberts told JI that, in office, he would call out antisemitism when he sees it and engage more closely with the Jewish community than Bush has.

“At the bare minimum, it’s your obligation to listen and hear them out,” he said.

Bush met earlier this week with leaders of major Jewish organizations in the city, but did not discuss Israel or antisemitism.

Asked by JI to elaborate on his position from his campaign website on potential “peace initiatives that don’t jeopardize Israel’s national security” between the Israelis and Palestinians, Roberts did not offer specifics, emphasizing that “the main thing is you have to ensure Israel’s security.”

He said that the 2015 Iran nuclear deal did not go “far enough” but offered few specifics. He suggested that both the U.S. and Israel need to be “able to make sure that Iran is keeping up their end of the deal… checks and balances.”

Roberts’ campaign is being boosted by a group called Yachad PAC, which is being run in part by a non-Jewish Republican operative and is also linked to a former top Clay staffer. The group has received donations from Clay, Clay’s sister and the investment firm that employs Roberts’ father. The group also shares addresses with companies connected to Roberts’ family, according to The Intercept. The group repeatedly failed to file required Federal Election Commission disclosure forms earlier this year. 

National pro-Israel PACs have not stepped in to boost Roberts’ campaign and did not comment when asked about the race by JI.

Roberts trails Bush by a wide margin in fundraising, having brought in $397,000 to her $1.7 million, indicating that he’s likely in for a steep uphill battle to defeat her in the Aug. 2 primary election.

Bush’s campaign has also frequently attacked Roberts over two past allegations of sexual assault, one of which he settled for $100,000. 

Outside of Jewish and Israel issues, Roberts told JI that he’s challenging Bush because he feels her record has been harmful to their community.

“Cori Bush does not represent the values we have here in St. Louis,” he said. “She’s gone from the point of indifference to actually causing harm to the growth and development of the region.”

He pointed specifically to her vote against the bipartisan infrastructure package, which Roberts argued provides badly needed aid for remediating lead pipes and repairing roads and bridges; her opposition to Pentagon funding, including for a defense manufacturing facility in the St. Louis area; and her failure to support a bipartisan initiative by the Missouri delegation to preserve manufacturing jobs in the district. 

He also blasted her for her support for defunding the police, explaining that crime and gun violence are the top issue for voters, and arguing that Bush’s position is “a catchy slogan” rather than a nuanced reform policy.

“This is someone who just really seems more interested in her social media following as opposed to the actual real work that needs to be done,” he said.

Roberts pledged that he would work in a bipartisan fashion in Congress, outlining his top issues as abortion rights, gun control and educational and job opportunities.

He criticized Democrats for failing to act faster and earlier to codify abortion rights, before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. “It should not have gotten to this point,” he said. Congressional Democrats did attempt to pass abortion legislation prior to the Supreme Court’s ruling, but were stymied by opposition in the Senate from all Republicans and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV).

On Monday, Bush refused to say whether she wanted President Joe Biden to run for a second term. Roberts fired back, saying, “I support President Biden, full stop. Curious to know who Cori intends to support.”

Roberts recounted a story from his time as a prosecutor that he described as having helped shape his later work on education issues, including championing legislation to create high schools for adults. When Roberts was 20, he said he was involved in prosecuting a nonviolent weapon and drug offender who told prosecutors he was unable to read or fill out a job application and had a 10-year-old son.

The man asked Roberts, “What else can I do?” the former prosecutor recounted. “And I didn’t have an answer for him at that time. But it really stuck with me.”

Daily Kickoff: The new White House Jewish liaison + St. Louis Jewish groups host Cori Bush

Transition

White House to name Shelley Greenspan its new Jewish liaison

Shelley Greenspan

Chanan Weissman will step down from his role as White House liaison to the Jewish community this week, and will be replaced by Shelley Greenspan, who joined the White House last month as policy advisor for partnerships and global engagement at the National Security Council, Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch reports.

Bio in brief: Greenspan’s background spans the federal government, the private sector, presidential campaigns and nonprofits. After launching her career on AIPAC’s legislative team, where she covered the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, she worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign before spending three years in Amazon’s policy team in Washington. Since 2020, she has worked at the State Department as a civil servant. She helped lead a national cohort of activists called “Jewish Women for Joe” during the 2020 presidential election.

Stepping up: “She’s just the right person. I enjoyed working with Chanan, but if he’s moving, I think Shelley is just perfect for that,” Ann Lewis, co-chair of Democratic Majority for Israel, told JI. Lewis worked with Greenspan on the 2020 campaign.

Two-way street: The Jewish liaison position requires a nuanced understanding of the landscape of Jewish communal life, and a willingness to engage segments of that community that may be at odds with administration policy on many issues. “If you think about the job description, it’s two-way advocacy. You represent the administration to the community and the country, and you represent the community within the administration,” said Lewis. One challenge she expects Greenspan to face is building ties with Jewish Republicans, especially if Republicans win control of Congress in the midterm elections.

Sense of purpose: Greenspan, a Miami native, has held board positions with several U.S. Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League and Jewish Women International. Both organizations “are simultaneously committed to the Jewish people and humankind as a whole,” Greenspan said in 2020. “I once heard Congressman John Lewis say that to be an effective public servant, you must love people. Serving in leadership roles with JWI and the ADL has given me a sense of purpose and the opportunity to build a community that actively engages in these ideals.”

Read the full story here.

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Missouri Meeting

St. Louis Jewish groups host Cori Bush amid scrutiny of congresswoman’s ties to antisemitic activist

Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) speaks during a March for Our Lives rally against gun violence on the National Mall June 11, 2022, in Washington, D.C.

Following an uproar over Rep. Cori Bush’s (D-MO) relationship with an activist with a history of making antisemitic comments, the St. Louis congresswoman toured a Jewish food pantry and Holocaust museum on Monday with leaders of local Jewish groups, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports. An organizer indicated that the conversations with Bush focused on the local institutions and did not address antisemitism or her policies towards Israel. 

Tweet and delete: Rori Picker Neiss, the St. Louis Jewish Community Relations Council’s executive director, tweeted yesterdaythat it was “an honor for [JCRC St. Louis] to host [Bush]” at the Jewish Family Services St. Louis food pantry and Jewish Federation of St. Louis’ as-yet-unopened St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum “and show her the incredible services our community provides to the entire St. Louis region.” Picker Neiss’ tweet was posted midafternoon on Monday and included photos of Bush with Picker Neiss and leaders of JCRC and the St. Louis Jewish Federation. The tweet was subsequently deleted.

Congressional connections: The meeting came amid scrutiny of Bush’s ties to Neveen Ayesh, a Palestinian-American activist and government relations coordinator at the Missouri Chapter of American Muslims for Palestine. Ayesh repeatedly tweeted about her hatred of Jews and expressed a desire to “set Israel on fire with my own hands & watch it burn to ashes along with every Israeli in it.” Ayesh hosted a fundraiser for Bush in 2020. Bush has not commented publicly on her ties to Ayesh since the recent reports, and her campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Local focus: Asked by JI if the congresswoman’s positions on Israel or her ties to Ayesh had come up during the tour, Picker Neiss indicated that they had not. “We are always happy to share with any and all elected officials the inspiring work of our Jewish community institutions,” she said. “We were grateful that the congresswoman and her team took time to join us as the Jewish food pantry and Holocaust museum hosted us to tour these valuable institutions. Our discussions focused on how these Jewish institutions benefit the St. Louis community.”

Election eve: Picker Neiss also said that the JCRC is “trying to tread carefully in advance of the election.” As a nonprofit group, the JCRC is banned from making political endorsements or engaging in electoral activity. Missouri’s primary elections, in which Bush faces multiple challengers, are set for Aug. 2. Greg Yawitz, who chairs the Jewish Federation of St. Louis’ board and was pictured with Bush, did not respond to inquiries from JI.

Read the full story here.

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Race to watch

Fort Lauderdale vice mayor makes a bid for Rep. Ted Deutch’s seat

Shelley Greenspan

Fort Lauderdale Vice Mayor Ben Sorensen can’t say exactly what he does for the Navy Reserves as a lieutenant commander specializing in intelligence. But he does believe that this national security experience will help make him a strong candidate to replace Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL) in a South Florida congressional seat, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.

Jumping in: Sorensen, who is also a Presbyterian minister, announced his campaign in early April, joining the top rung of candidates running to represent Florida’s 23rd Congressional District, which encompasses parts of Fort Lauderdale and Boca Raton. “I have a passion for public service,” Sorensen told JI in an interview in May. “There’s many issues at the federal level which I’ve been working on for years that I’m passionate about.”

Top secret: In the Navy Reserve, Sorensen served for a time at the Pentagon and is currently affiliated with U.S. Southern Command in Florida. He told JI he was unable to say what his specialty is, but, in a candidate forum this month, alluded to work supporting U.S.-Israeli cooperative missile-defense programs like Iron Dome, David’s Sling and Arrow 3. “Working at the highest levels of our national security apparatus, there’s no learning curve for me on some of the key national security issues — I’m gonna hit the ground running and lead,” he said. 

Standing together: Sorensen told JI that the U.S.-Israel relationship “has to be protected, fostered and nurtured” both economically and militarily, emphasizing the two nations’ shared values, including “open and fair elections, embracing of diverse people and drawing big tents to include diverse demographics.” In a candidate forum, he praised Israel as representing “the core values… of equality, embracing diversity and service to the country.” Speaking to JI, Sorensen called for the U.S. to “continue to engage fully” with both the Israelis and Palestinians to work toward a two-state solution.

Staying involved: Rabbi Schneur Kaplan of the Downtown Jewish Center Chabad in Fort Lauderdale, who also used to be Sorensen’s neighbor, said he is a “mensch” and has “worked extensively” with the Jewish community from the city commission. After the synagogue shooting in Poway, Calif., Kaplan recalled that Sorensen was “concerned about the security for synagogues, came over to our synagogue with local law enforcement to discuss how we could enhance the security at our congregation. This was something that really touched him, and he went out of his way to see what he could do to help.”

Read more here.

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Pic of the Day

Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Gilad Erdan shares a video of Sha’aban al-Sayed pleading for the release of his son Hisham, who has been held by Hamas since 2015, at a gathering of members of the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday. Last month, Hamas released a video that appeared to show Hisham al-Sayed wearing an oxygen mask in a hospital bed, the first images of him since his disappearance seven years ago.

Birthdays

HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – JUNE 09: Norman Lear speaks on stage at the “Real To Reel: Portrayals And Perceptions Of LGBTQs In Hollywood” Exhibit at The Hollywood Museum on June 09, 2022 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Unique Nicole/Getty Images)

Television producer of many popular sitcoms in the 1970s and later, founder of the progressive advocacy group, People for the American Way, Norman Lear turns 100…

Real estate developer who founded Aspen Square Management, he heads an eponymous foundation known for its flagship program PJ Library, Harold Grinspoon turns 93… Forensic pathologist known for his work investigating high-profile deaths, Michael M. Baden turns 88… Managing partner of Access Fund Management Company, he is a past president of the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, Harold Zlot… Former CIA Director and Deputy Secretary of Defense in the 90s, now a professor emeritus at MIT, he has served on the boards of multiple Fortune 500 companies and non-profits, John M. Deutchturns 84… Steven M. Mizel turns 83… Former chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Stephen M. Greenberg turns 78… Artist and museum founder focused on Fusionism, Shalom Tomáš Neuman turns 75… Israeli author and television producer, Yarin Kimor turns 70… Israeli-born fitness personality, Gilad Janklowicz turns 68… Comedian, writer, producer and actress, Carol Leifer turns 66…

Washington bureau chief and White House correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, Linda Feldmann… Former VP of global communications, marketing and public policy at Facebook, he previously held a similar position at Google, Elliot Schrage turns 62… U.S. Army colonel (retired), Jeffrey Brian Carra… Israeli television and radio personality, Erez Moshe Tal turns 61… Heir to the Hyatt Hotels fortune, now a film producer, Jean “Gigi” Pritzker turns 60… Former member of the Hungarian Parliament and member of the European Parliament since 2009, Tamás Deutsch turns 56… Rabbi at Kesher Israel: The Georgetown Synagogue, Rabbi Hyim Shafner… Political consultant, Andrew Grossman… Managing partner at Capitol Venture, LLC, Jeremy Deutsch… SVP of marketing at Xometry and winner on “Jeopardy!,” Aaron Lichtig… Benjamin Rothenberg… Deputy chief of staff for communications for Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), Jeremy Adler… Former CEO of the Rabbinical Assembly, she is now the managing director at Leading Ethics, LLC, Rabbi Julie Schonfeld…

BIRTHWEEK: Vice president for sponsorship at The Marine Bowl, Marc Goldman turned 53 yesterday… Israel-based music promoter Hillel Wachs turned 62 on Monday…

St. Louis Jewish groups host Cori Bush amid scrutiny of congresswoman’s ties to antisemitic activist

Following an uproar over Rep. Cori Bush’s (D-MO) relationship with an activist with a history of making antisemitic comments, the St. Louis congresswoman toured a Jewish food pantry and Holocaust museum on Monday with leaders of local Jewish groups. 

An organizer indicated that the conversations with Bush focused on the local institutions and did not address antisemitism or policies towards Israel. 

Rori Picker Neiss, the St. Louis Jewish Community Relations Council’s executive director, tweeted yesterday that it was “an honor for [JCRC St. Louis] to host [Bush]” at the Jewish Family Services St. Louis food pantry and Jewish Federation of St. Louis’ as-yet-unopened St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum “and show her the incredible services our community provides to the entire St. Louis region.”

Picker Neiss’ tweet was posted midafternoon on Monday and included photos of Bush with Picker Neiss and leaders of JCRC and the St. Louis Jewish Federation. The tweet was subsequently deleted.

The meeting came amid scrutiny of Bush’s ties to Neveen Ayesh, a Palestinian-American activist and government relations coordinator at the Missouri Chapter of American Muslims for Palestine. Ayesh repeatedly tweeted about her hatred of Jews and expressed a desire to “set Israel on fire with my own hands & watch it burn to ashes along with every Israeli in it.” Ayesh hosted a fundraiser for Bush in 2020.

When the tweets resurfaced earlier this month, Ayesh disavowed them, saying she was “young, dumb, & said horrible things that I never acted on, that I would never act on.” Bush has not commented publicly on her ties to Ayesh since the recent reports, and her campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Asked by JI if the congresswoman’s positions on Israel or her ties to Ayesh had come up during the tour, Picker Neiss indicated that they had not.

“We are always happy to share with any and all elected officials the inspiring work of our Jewish community institutions,” she said. “We were grateful that the congresswoman and her team took time to join us as the Jewish food pantry and Holocaust museum hosted us to tour these valuable institutions. Our discussions focused on how these Jewish institutions benefit the St. Louis community.”

Bush was one of nine House members who voted against supplemental funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system in 2021. In May 2021, during the conflict between Israel and Hamas terrorists in Gaza, she delivered a speech on the House floor criticizing Israel and referring to its capital as “Jerusalem, Palestine.” She also supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement targeting Israel.

Picker Neiss also said that the JCRC is “trying to tread carefully in advance of the election.” As a nonprofit group, the JCRC is banned from making political endorsements or engaging in electoral activity. Missouri’s primary elections, in which Bush faces multiple challengers, are set for Aug. 2.

Greg Yawitz, who chairs the Jewish Federation of St. Louis’ board and was pictured with Bush, did not respond to inquiries from JI.

Picker Neiss’ original tweet was replaced on Tuesday afternoon with a new one that included photos of Bush touring the food pantry, but did not have the group photographs with Jewish leaders. The new tweet did not mention Bush’s visit to the Holocaust museum. 

“Yesterday, [JCRC St. Louis] coordinated a tour for [Bush] of the Jewish Food Pantry. Today, I got a call from her office that someone whose home and car flooded needed food for their baby,” the new tweet reads. “Called [Jewish Family Services St. Louis] who immediately coordinated to have someone deliver to them. Help in action.”

Picker Neiss and leaders of other local Jewish groups met in August 2021 for the first time with Bush staffers, after the freshman congresswoman took office in January. 

Picker Neiss told JI at the time that the leaders had offered to provide information to her office on Israel issues, but did not delve into policy specifics or address Bush’s support for the BDS movement.

Bush staffers also “acknowledged that this could be an area where we might have more disagreement, but that because it’s an area where we know we have differing opinions, that’s why we need to talk about it more,” Picker Neiss said. “We felt like they left that door wide open for us to continue that conversation with them.”

Tlaib, Squad push resolution labeling Palestinian Arabs the ‘indigenous inhabitants’ of Israel

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and a handful of progressive Democrats introduced a resolution on Monday referring to Palestinian Arabs as the “indigenous inhabitants” of Israel and endorsing Palestinian right of return, one of the most sensitive issues in Israeli-Palestinian relations.

The resolution seeks to set as U.S. policy recognition of the “Nakba” — the term, translating to “catastrophe,” that Palestinians use to refer to the mass Palestinian exodus that accompanied the foundation of Israel — and accept as a settled issue Palestinian refugees’ right of return to inside Israel’s borders. It also refers to Palestinians as the “indigenous population” of the region, but does not acknowledge Jewish history in the region.

The legislation accuses Israel of having “depopulated more than 400 Palestinian villages and cities” during its 1948 War of Independence and characterizes ongoing Israeli “expropriation of Palestinian land and… dispossession of the Palestinian people,” including Israeli settlements, as part of an ongoing Nakba. In a statement announcing the legislation, Tlaib accused Israel of “ongoing ethnic cleansing.”

Tlaib’s resolution has been cosponsored by Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Betty McCollum (D-MN), Marie Newman (D-IL), Cori Bush (D-MO) and Jamaal Bowman (D-NY).

Neither Tlaib nor any of the cosponsors responded to a question from Jewish Insider about whether they viewed Jews as also being “indigenous” to the region.

Newman is currently facing a primary challenger, Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL), who is backed by various pro-Israel groups, including J Street, which had endorsed Newman in 2020. Bowman has faced criticism from the Democratic Socialists of America over his positions on Israel, including voting for supplemental Iron Dome funding and traveling to the Jewish state last year. He has since removed himself as a cosponsor of legislation supporting the Abraham Accords.

Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) blasted Tlaib’s resolution as “predicated on a demonstrably false historical narrative… predictably failing to mention the hundreds of attacks on Jewish communities in the British mandate of Palestine by Palestinian militias.” 

Sherman noted that the resolution “omits” that Israel was attacked by eight Arab states in 1948, that the 1948 war began with attacks by Arab forces seeking “a war of annihilation” against Jewish militants and civilians, that “not a single Jew was left alive in the portion of the British mandate controlled by Arab armies, that no Jews lived in the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem for two decades and that 800,000 Jews were expelled from neighboring Arab countries.”

“Thankfully, the vast majority of my colleagues in Congress and in the House Foreign Affairs Committee understand that the historical narrative in Congresswoman Tlaib’s resolution is an outrageous falsehood and thus this bill isn’t likely to be passed or even considered,” Sherman added.

Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) agreed that the resolution has no “hope of moving forward,” claiming the resolution seeks to “rewrite history and question Israel’s right to exist.”

“It’s unfortunate that this histrionic and invidious resolution was introduced now, particularly, as we see continued progress in efforts to normalize relations between Israel and its neighbors in the region,” Gottheimer added. “Divisive efforts like this only set back our fight against terror and the advancement of democracy in the region.”

Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who advised multiple secretaries of state on Arab-Israeli negotiations, said that the legislation asks Congress to “wade into the intricacies and volatility of some of the most combustible issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and essentially recognize a narrative.”

“This legislation is packed with landmines and traps,” Miller continued. “The whole issue of right of return is an issue that for years in negotiations we realized was the most combustible, most complicated, and the one which we had the least chance of resolving…. That’s the third rail of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.”

Miller emphasized that the legislation has no prospect of seeing widespread support in “any Congress that I can imagine.”

He described the legislation as “designed basically to support what the framers regard as an unrecognized, underreported and unacknowledged narrative in the American political scene of the Palestinians.” He added that the “Palestinian narrative has never been adequately explored or acknowledged” in U.S. politics and argued that “there was a way perhaps to go about this which would have recognized both Israeli independence and the Nakba being intertwined.” 

Some Republicans seized on the legislation.

Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) called it “the latest in a long line of antisemitic, anti-Israel statements, policies and actions by the most radical voiced in the Democratic Party.” Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) called it “disgusting anti-Semitism.” Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) said “the continued anti-Semitism from radical socialists in the House is horrific.” The three Republicans also sought to tie House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to the initiative, demanding that she condemn the move.

Daily Kickoff: St. Louis Jewish leaders met with Rep. Cori Bush’s staff — what they did and didn’t discuss

the room where it happened

St. Louis Jewish leaders meet with Rep. Cori Bush staffers

WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 22: Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) speaks during a news conference to advocate for ending the Senate filibuster, outside the U.S. Capitol on April 22, 2021 in Washington, DC. With the Senate filibuster rules in place, legislative bills require 60 votes to end debate and advance, rather than a simple majority in the 100 member Senate. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Staffers for Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) met for the first time on Tuesday with leaders from St. Louis’s Jewish federation and Jewish Community Relations Council and the local chapters of the National Council of Jewish Women and American Jewish Committee, days after the Missouri congresswoman drew national attention for her successful sit-in at the Capitol to protest the end of the eviction moratorium, reports Jewish Insider‘s Marc Rod.

Background: Bush, who supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting Israel, has staked out a stridently anti-Israel stance, drawing connections in a May House floor speech between “militarized policing, occupation and systems of violent oppression and trauma” in the Palestinian territories and Ferguson, Mo., referring to Israel’s capital as “Jerusalem, Palestine” and describing Israel as an “apartheid” state.

Keeping it light: Jewish community leaders offered to provide information to Bush’s office on Israel issues going forward, but the conversation did not go into specifics on policy, according to St. Louis JCRC Executive Director Rori Picker Neiss. Bush’s support for BDS also did not come up.

Diverging opinions: Picker Neiss told JI, “They acknowledged that this could be an area where we might have more disagreement, but that because it’s an area where we know we have differing opinions, that’s why we need to talk about it more. We felt like they left that door wide open for us to continue that conversation with them.”

Reaching out: She also told JI that there has been a “getting to know you process” with Bush’s staff, given that Jewish organizations do not have long-running contacts in the freshman congresswoman’s office, but that Bush’s chief of staff, Abbas Alawieh, “made the initiative to reach out” to Picker Neiss to set up Tuesday’s meeting.

Next steps: The staff was also “committed to keeping an open channel of communication with the Jewish community, with future meetings taking place with Rep. Bush,” according to AJC St. Louis Director Nancy Lisker.

scene the other night

Turkish ambassador’s event seen as signal of warming ties between Ankara and Jerusalem

Credit: Turkish Embassy in Washington, D.C.

In an apparent sign of warming ties between Ankara and Jerusalem, Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. and U.N. Gilad Erdan was slated to attend an event at the Turkish ambassador’s residence on Tuesday night, but thunderstorms in the Northeast prevented him from getting there, an attendee told Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch.

Azerbaijan angle: Turkish Ambassador Hasan Murat Mercan hosted a farewell dinner for Azerbaijani Ambassador to the U.S. Elin Suleymanov, who is leaving Washington after 10 years at the embassy. Last week, Azerbaijan opened its first trade mission in Israel to boost economic ties between the two nations, and Israel has negotiated arms deals with Azerbaijan in the past.

History lesson: Ties between Israel and Turkey were first formalized in 1949, but relations between Israel and Turkey grew strained in 2010 when armed activists aboard the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara attempted to break through to Gaza, leading to a clash with Israeli soldiers. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Israeli President Isaac Herzog last month to congratulate him on becoming president, and a spokesperson for Erdogan announced that the two countries agreed to work toward improving relations.

Rebuilding ties: “We need to focus on the ability to get the chain back on the bicycle, and continue the wonderful journey of many centuries which marks the relationship between Turkey and the Jewish people, in Israel as well as the Diaspora,” said Rabbi Levi Shemtov, executive vice president of American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad), who spoke at the event.

Who’s who: Attendees at the event included ambassadors from Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Georgia and Monaco; Jonathan Missner, board chair of Pro-Israel America; George Kent, deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs; Tom Kahn, former staff director and chief counsel of the House Budget Committee; Nechama Shemtov; and Andrew Schofer, co-chair of a negotiating group for the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

podcast playback

Murphy urges U.S. to deprioritize Iran, tells Saudis to ‘come to terms’ with Hezbollah influence

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) speaks during the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the nomination of Linda Thomas-Greenfield to be the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on January 27, 2021.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee focusing on Middle East issues, believes the U.S. should deprioritize Iran deterrence and urge Saudi Arabia to “come to terms” with Hezbollah’s influence in Lebanon, he said in a Tuesday podcast interview with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Rollback: “How much does it matter to the United States what share of power Iran and Saudi Arabia have in the region 10 or 20 years from now? We act as if that question is existential to the United States. I’m not sure that it is,” Murphy said, adding that he is skeptical whether “providing security guarantees big enough to provide deterrence against the Iranians — for instance, creating red lines about what they can and cannot do in a place like Lebanon… is commensurate with our interest in the region. We have an interest in keeping the Iranians at bay. We have an interest in continuing to work with our partners, but I don’t know that it is such a significant interest that we should be dramatically increasing the security presence of the United States in the region.”

Targeted: Murphy recounted that Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif “always reminds” him that Iranian missiles are pointed at Saudi Arabia, not Israel. He acknowledged, however, that he takes “everything [Zarif] says with a large shaker of salt.” Rather than increasing security aid to Gulf allies, which Iran finds “provocative,” Murphy said the U.S.’s priority should be reentering the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear deal and reaching other long-term diplomatic agreements with Iran.

New reality: Murphy warned that Lebanon, which is facing a series of crises, is on the brink of becoming a failed state and a source of instability and terrorism that could last decades. He blamed the deteriorating situation in part on a lack of Saudi engagement due to Hezbollah’s influence inside Lebanon. “[The Saudis] are deeply uncomfortable with the role that Hezbollah plays. The Saudis should come to terms with the fact that — at least in the short term — Hezbollah is going to be part of the political infrastructure there,” he said. “It would be much better for the Saudis to be a partner with the United States, with the French and other countries to try to offer the kind of economic support that might provoke political reform that would eventually allow for technocrats and non-sectarian actors to have greater influence in the government. That would lessen the influence of Hezbollah.”

Read more here.

travel plans

J Street postpones congressional trips to Israel

J Street/WikiCommons

J Street, the left-leaning Israel advocacy group, has delayed two August delegations to Israel, including one for House members and another for congressional staffers, amid mounting concerns over the surging Delta variant of the coronavirus, reports Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel. “We’ll be closely monitoring the outlook and hope to get our delegations to the region up and running again as soon as it’s safe and viable to do so,” J Street spokesperson Logan Bayroff told JI. The group hopes to reschedule the trips for the fall but has not made “any definitive timing decisions,” Bayroff said.

New direction: The postponements come as J Street seeks to advance a new policy that represents a change in direction for the lobbying group amid growing divisions over Israel within the Democratic Party. While J Street says it’s opposed to conditioning aid to Israel, the organization has recently begun advocating for restricting aid to the Jewish state. The group, which supports a recent bill that would restrict foreign security assistance to Israel, argues that this policy is different from conditioning aid. A spokesperson told JI in May that the group favors “end-use restrictions” to ensure that Israel uses U.S. aid only for “legitimate security purposes.”

Policy push: The group sought to advance this policy in New Mexico’s 1st Congressional District special election this past spring. Melanie Stansbury, the Democratic candidate who was endorsed by J Street, called for restricting aid to Israel “if it is indeed being used in any way that goes against U.S. interests and values, endangers Palestinian people or threatens the basic human rights of Palestinians,” as she put it in a statement to JI at the time. Stansbury, a former New Mexico state legislator, now serves in Congress.

‘No names to share’: J Street has yet to announce its full slate of congressional endorsements for the 2022 midterms, but earlier this summer confirmed to JI that it was backing Rep. Danny Davis (D-IL) for reelection next cycle. In June, following the conflict between Israel and Hamas, Davis told JI that he had been invited by J Street to participate in the now-postponed August delegation but had not yet decided if he would make the trip. Bayroff said J Street was planning to “roll out” a list of participants for the upcoming congressional delegation “once a trip is confirmed” but had “no names to share” at this point.

Read more here.

Pic of the Day

Credit: The Associated: Jewish Federation of Baltimore

The Elijah Cummings Youth Program in Israel (ECYP) unveiled a mural of the late Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) at the Baltimore courthouse named in his honor. Rep. Kweisi Mfume (D-MD), second from left, a friend of Cummings and his successor in Congress, was on hand for the event to honor the late congressman, who founded the organization in 1998.

Birthdays

U.S. diplomat, Karyn Allison Posner-Mullen turns 70…

Hungarian-American investor, George Soros (born György Schwartz) turns 91… Retired Beverly Hills attorney, Sheldon S. Ellis turns 89… Television writer, creator of Dallas and Knots Landing, David Jacobs turns 82… Television screenwriter, producer and author, Gail Parent turns 81… NYC-born historian and author, William Rubinstein turns 75… Attorney in Ontario, Canada, who served as president of the Canadian Jewish Congress, Lester Scheininger turns 74… Director of management operations at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Fredi Bleeker Franks turns 69… Sales manager of Illi Commercial Real Estate in Encino, Calif., Stuart Steinberg turns 65… Israel’s resident ambassador to Albania and non-resident ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Noah Gal Gendler turns 64… Former member of Knesset from the Yesh Atid party, Haim Yellin turns 63… Founding editor of The Times of Israel, David Horovitz turns 59… Rabbi at Brookline’s Temple Beth Zion, Claudia Kreiman turns 47… SVP for external engagement at NYC’s Educational Alliance, Anya Hoerburger turns 44… Chief marketing officer at Cross Campus, Jay Chernikoff turns 42… Senior product manager at NYC-based Dynamic Yield, David Fine turns 32… CEO and co-founder of Forsight, a leading prop tech AI and machine learning company, Ariel Applbaum turns 27…