As a teenager, Morton Klein, Zionist Organization of America national president, learned about the importance of knowing when it is time to fight back and when to leave the country from his Holocaust-survivor parents.
“If the time comes that politicians in America begin to condemn Jews or Israel or Jewish groups because it’s beneficial to them politically, because it helps them garner more votes, you must then double down and fight these people with all your heart and soul,” Klein’s parents taught him, he told JNS on Election Day.
“If you see that these attacks continue and expand, then you must consider leaving America for Israel,” Klein said. “I believe we’re coming close to that danger point.”
“They saw that happen in Czechoslovakia and Poland and Germany and then a nightmare began,” he told JNS.
Democratic candidates, who have drawn widespread criticism from Jewish groups and pro-Israel advocates for their statements about Jews and the Jewish state, won their races in the U.S. midterm elections. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who wouldn’t say publicly that the Iranian regime is more dangerous than Israel and won a Senate seat in Michigan, is one of the best known of the class of anti-Israel members-elect of Congress.
El-Sayed, whom the Republican Jewish Coalition called “the most antisemitic U.S. Senate candidate in America,” has garnered the most headlines. But the democratic socialists Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez, both of whom were backed by Zohran Mamdani, the anti-Israel mayor of New York City, are close behind.
Avila Chevalier, who helped organize the antisemitic encampment at Columbia University in 2024, won 87.5% of the vote in New York’s 13th Congressional District. On Oct. 8, 2023, the day after the Hamas-led attacks on the bloodiest day for Jews since the Holocaust, Avila Chevalier attended an anti-Israel demonstration in Times Square.
Her priorities on day one, according to her campaign site, include raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 an hour and working to “ban the U.S. from sending weapons to Israel that are used to bomb Gaza.”
Valdez, who won 83.3% of the vote in New York’s 7th Congressional District, has accused Israel of “genocide” and questioned if a super PAC supporting her opponent was connected to AIPAC even though the group was reportedly backed by labor organizations.
She campaigned on issues that included pushing to “end all weapons sales and military aid to Israel and fight for Palestinian freedom,” “universal rent control,” “Medicare for all” and abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Moshe Spern, president of United Jewish Teachers, which represents more than 1,000 Jewish public school educators and staff in New York City, told JNS that “sending Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez to Washington is a gift to every antisemite who wants to see Israel destroyed.”
“One celebrated the Oct. 7 bloodbath. The other has made the blood libel ‘genocide’ her default description of the Jewish state,” he said. “New York City just put two more Jew-hating extremists in Congress.”
“This doesn’t bode well for the Jewish community in New York and the rest of the country,” Spern told JNS.
Sam Markstein, national political director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, told JNS that “across America, Democrats are electing, elevating and appeasing the most radical elements of their party, putting their partisan pursuit of power ahead of the country.”
“This election was a clarion call to the Jewish community in particular, which is why year after year, American Jews are fleeing the Democratic Party,” he said. “The deranged Democrats who were elected in the 2026 election will undoubtedly accelerate that trend.”
Brad Lander, a Jewish Democrat who is a former New York City comptroller, often aligns himself with anti-Israel politicians. He won 83.2% of the vote in New York’s 10th Congressional District, after unseating Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.), who is also Jewish, in the primary. Lander self-identifies as a “liberal Zionist” but made a point not only of accusing Israel frequently of “genocide” but pressing Goldman to do the same.
Dr. Adam Hamawy, a surgeon and U.S. Army veteran, received 70.2% of the vote in New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District. He has accused Israel of “genocide” and testified in defense of Omar Abdel-Rahman, known as the “blind sheikh,” during the latter’s 1995 terrorism trial.
Andrew C. McCarthy, a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York who tried the case against Abdel-Rahman, wrote in National Review, where he is a columnist, that Hamawy is a “blind sheikh sympathizer.”
“I remember Hamawy only dimly. The trial happened more than 30 years ago, there were hundreds of witnesses over 10 months (including a defense case that lasted over two months) and I did not cross-examine him—those honors were done by one of my partners, Pat Fitzgerald,” McCarthy wrote.
“Does a sympathizer of an infamous anti-American terrorist, one who went to the trouble of testifying in his behalf, have a realistic shot at being elected to Congress?” McCarthy wrote on May 7. “In blue New Jersey in 2026? If you dismiss the possibility of Rep. Adam Hamawy (D., N.J.), you haven’t been paying attention.”
Mark Goldfeder, CEO and director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, told JNS that the election results mean that “in these races, antisemitism wasn’t disqualifying.”
“It should have been and pretending otherwise helps nobody,” he said. “What it doesn’t mean is that our civil rights protections disappeared overnight. An election does not repeal the Civil Rights Act.”
“When people ask what those wins say about America, my answer is: often less than it looks like,” Goldfeder told JNS. “They say something about who organizes and who shows up to a primary in a safe seat. That’s a problem we can actually do something about.”
It helps him sleep at night to remember the historical context.
“This country has been here before. Henry Ford, one of the richest men in America, spent years publishing conspiracy theories about Jews,” Goldfeder told JNS. “The Klan had millions of members and marched down Pennsylvania Avenue. David Duke got himself elected to a state legislature.”
“Now look at what became of their claims to respectability,” he said. “Ford’s antisemitism is a permanent stain on his legacy. The Klan is a byword for national shame. Duke’s name is an insult. Jews didn’t do that alone. Other Americans saw the ugliness and refused it.”
Movements get “big enough to convince themselves they’re the future, and then they find out how many Americans want no part of that future,” according to Goldfeder.
“I’d rather we skipped the ugly part,” he told JNS. “But history gives me reasons to believe in this country, even on nights like this, and I know which side of that history I’d bet on.”
Jews ‘deserve more than assurances’
North of the 12th district and its newly elected blind sheikh “sympathizer,” in New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District, Rep. Analilia Mejia (D-N.J.), who won a special election for the seat in April, won again on Tuesday, with 60.2% of the vote.
She has also accused Israel of “genocide” and said that “Congress must end the blank check for Trump and Netanyahu.”
“As elected leaders prepare to govern, Jewish New Yorkers and New Jerseyans deserve more than assurances,” stated the Anti-Defamation League’s regional New York and New Jersey office.
“They deserve leaders who recognize antisemitism, confront it regardless of its source and take concrete action to strengthen security for Jewish institutions and protect Jewish safety and equal rights,” the ADL said.
“The election of new officials aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America,” including “but not limited to” Valdez, Lander, Avila Chevalier, Hamaway and “several state DSA candidates in New York, marks a shift in our region’s political landscape,” the ADL said. It added that it has “serious concerns about DSA rhetoric and positions that normalize antisemitism, deny Jewish peoplehood or condition Jewish participation in public life based on special litmus tests.”
In Pennsylvania, democratic socialist Chris Rabb won the open House seat in the 3rd Congressional District with 93.6% of the vote. He campaigned alongside antisemitic streamer Hasan Piker and accused Israel of “genocide.”
After the results were finalized, the ADL Philadelphia office said that Rabb has invoked “antisemitic tropes that delegitimize Israel” and aligns with antisemitic figures.
In Colorado, where a terrorist murdered a Jewish woman during a march for Israeli hostages last year, 78.3% of voters in the 1st Congressional District elected Melat Kiros, a democratic socialist, who has appeared on Piker’s show and who said that she was unsure if the killer’s actions were antisemitic.
She also said that the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks were an “inevitable consequence” of Israel’s actions. The United States has designated Hamas as a terror organization since 1997.
Susan Rona, director of the ADL’s mountain states region, said that it has “serious concerns” about Kiros’s “deeply flawed understanding of antisemitism” and that “refusal to condemn or even recognize a blatant act of antisemitism can fuel an increasingly hostile environment for the Jewish community and has no place in politics or public discourse.”
Some 2,000 miles away, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) lost to Troy Jackson, who secured 53.3% of the vote. Jackson, who has accused Israel of “genocide,” stepped in after the prior Democratic candidate, Graham Platner, dropped out after allegations of rape against him were reported widely in the media.
Platner also had a Nazi tattoo. He claimed that he didn’t understand its symbolism, but some of those who knew him said that he had referred to it as a Nazi tattoo.
Jackson, who has made cutting aid to Israel part of his campaign, told a local news outlet of “genocide” that “there are people here in Maine that don’t like to use that term only because, you know, they’re Jewish and, you know, what that means to them with the Holocaust.” He later said that he “misspoke and made a generalization about Jewish Mainers’ views that doesn’t reflect what I meant to say” and apologized “for the pain that caused.”
The Republican Jewish Coalition posted a list of what it said are “the most unwanted Democrats,” who are “the most radical, far-left public officials in history,” on Thursday.
The RJC included William Lawrence, who won 51% of the vote in Michigan’s 7th Congressional District and said, when asked if the Iranian regime is evil, “I do not believe any regime in the world is wholly good or wholly evil,” and Angela Gonzales-Torres, who won 59.7% of the vote in California 34th Congressional District and campaigned with Hasan Piker.
It also listed Randy Villegas, who won 66.4% in California 22nd Congressional District and said that “increasingly, people are aware that we are sending billions and billions of dollars to this genocidal regime that has universal healthcare” while “we do not.”
Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, a Democrat, won the Senate race over former sportscaster Michele Tafoya, with 53.7% of the vote. Flanagan has accused Israel of “genocide” and supported cutting military aid to Israel.
In Ohio’s 15th Congressional District, Don Leonard, a former Ohio State University professor, unseated Rep. Mike Carey (R-Ohio) with 51.9% of the vote. Leonard has accused Israel of “genocide” and said, during an April campaign appearance, that those who don’t see things that way don’t deserve to be in Congress.
Donavan McKinney, a Democratic state representative, won 76.5% of the vote in Michigan’s 13th Congressional District. His campaign website called for Israel to “end the genocide” and for the United States to end military aid to Israel.
Tyler Stapleton, senior director of government relations at FDD Action, told JNS that he wouldn’t comment on individual members, but “it’s very troubling.”
“A large Democratic majority in the Senate will have a mandate to reject President Trump’s handling of the Iran war,” he said. “It is likely they will place restrictions on the Department of Defense until there is a clear exit strategy from the conflict.”
Stapleton believes that “support to Israel will also come under a microscope as the president this week indicated foreign aid should be reduced.”
“This is in line with statements made by Israeli officials, but Senate Democrats may move to restrict aid and military sales in the first weeks of the new Congress starting in January,” he told JNS.
“Israel will also come under scrutiny in the coming months for any additional military action in Lebanon, the West Bank or in Gaza,” he said. “The incoming Democratic majority will be pressed to reject many of the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu and may pursue boycott or sanctions legislation against him and his key advisors.”
Incoming House and Senate majority leaders “will be pressed hard to take stronger action against U.S. and Israeli military cooperation and arms sales,” he said.
