Election season is turning Israel and AIPAC into central campaign issues, and the rhetoric around them is testing everyone’s ability to hold two ideas at once. Criticism of AIPAC’s spending is legitimate politics. Claiming Jews vote wrong, or that politicians can only support Israel because they’ve been bought, is something else. This week the failures came from the president and from candidates alike, and drawing that line precisely is exactly the work Nexus exists to do.
If you missed last week’s conversation between Nexus’s Becca Israel and historian Lila Corwin Berman, author of Who Is American? Belonging and the Question of Jewish Citizenship, the full recording is now available.
In a new piece in the Times of Israel, Nexus Communications Director Nate Wolfson looks at the edge cases that split Jewish communities: actions that don’t meet any definition of antisemitism but still make Jewish inclusion feel conditional. His argument is that “technically not antisemitic” is the wrong standard, and that movements should be asking what kind of environment they’re creating and how to expand their coalitions rather than silo them.
Over 90 percent of American Jewish voters are concerned about antisemitism. That is where the agreement ends.
In a new analysis of Jewish Voters Resource Center survey data, Aryeh Tuchman, Director of the Nexus Center for Antisemitism Research, shows how that consensus breaks apart along political, denominational, and age lines. Two-thirds of Democrats locate the danger on the right, while nearly three-quarters of Republicans point left. Orthodox and Conservative Jews rank antisemitism among their top voting issues at a much higher level than Reform and unaffiliated Jews. American Jews agree antisemitism is real and dangerous, but different parts of the community understand the threat in fundamentally different ways.
Antisemitic conspiracy theories rarely arrive as open hatred. They arrive as history you were never taught, a tragedy whose official story feels too clean, a war you have every right to question.
Our new explainer breaks down five of the most common conspiracy theories, from “the Talmud says so” to “Israel controls the government,” showing what each claims, why it falls apart, and the trick it runs to pull people in.
In Michigan’s Senate primary, Abdul El-Sayed has made AIPAC’s spending against him a centerpiece of his campaign. Questioning that spending is fair game. But in comments to CNN, El-Sayed went further, saying that support for Israel could not be about anything other than money “if you’re a Democrat and you believe in human rights,” and dismissing Rep. Haley Stevens as a politician bought by AIPAC.
Saying someone can only support Israel because they’ve been bought is a clear example of anti-Zionism crossing into antisemitism. It replaces a person’s actual convictions with a payoff, a canard with a long history. We caution El-Sayed and all candidates to refrain from reductive statements that rely on it.
When credible sexual assault allegations ended Graham Platner’s Senate campaign in Maine, a conspiracy theory spread quickly online: AIPAC was behind the accusations. Marjorie Taylor Greene pushed a version of it too.
Writing in the Forward, Emily Tamkin, Fellow with the Nexus Task Force, takes the theory apart and offers a basic rule for this political moment: grounded criticism of AIPAC is not antisemitic, and conspiracy theories about it are. Criticism is about what an organization actually does. Conspiracy assigns it hidden power over events it has nothing to do with, including, apparently, a woman’s decision to tell her own story.
In a CNBC interview, President Trump said: “How a Jewish person can vote for a Democrat is beyond me. I’ve been the best president in the history of Israel and they acknowledge it.”
One sentence, several antisemitic assumptions. The premise is that American Jews should vote based on Israel policy, when they vote on healthcare, the economy, democracy, and everything else their neighbors vote on. Treating Jewish votes as belonging to another country is one of the oldest antisemitic tropes there is. His proof was his approval rating in Israel, collapsing American Jews and Israelis into one people with one obligation. And he has made the disloyalty charge explicit before, saying in 2019 that Jews who vote Democratic show “great disloyalty.”
We broke down each assumption in the statement. Presuming Jewish allegiance to Israel is antisemitic no matter who says it. That includes a president who claims to fight antisemitism.
This is what we do: track real antisemitism, call out when it’s weaponized, and make clear the difference. If you’d like to support this work, you can donate here. We’d love to connect.
We’ll continue offering clear responses, frameworks, and resources as these stories develop.
