Ahead of the Nov. 5 election, Rep. Steven Woodrow, a Democratic nominee for Colorado House District 2, sought an endorsement from the Working Families Party, a progressive, labor-oriented political party. It had endorsed Woodrow in previous races.
His progressive politics aligned with theirs. Woodrow said that he voted for nearly every one of the party’s priority bills as state representative. When his interview with the party ended, he had no reason to think things would look different this time.
He was wrong.
When the party released its list of endorsements, Woodrow’s name was absent. He received a call from its Colorado director, Wendy Howell. People on the board had further questions for him.
A follow-up was scheduled. Woodrow was not informed of the agenda but based on events in the Colorado legislature since Oct. 7, 2023, he knew what was coming.
Party member Lisa Calderón—a former two-time candidate for Denver mayor—went through a PowerPoint presentation of Woodrow’s comments on Israel, as well as those on hostages kidnapped and held by Hamas, including one about Israel’s rescue of one hostage last June.
He was asked if he would sign the party’s ceasefire statement that calls for an immediate end of all military aid to Israel.
To his knowledge, the only other person seeking the endorsement of the party who faced similar questioning was another Jewish candidate.
“I go to shul. I pray for a ceasefire for innocent Palestinian lives,” Woodrow told the Intermountain Jewish News. “It makes me sick to my stomach when I think about innocent Palestinians being killed and buried under rubble. I think it does for all of us. But I’m not going to be bullied into signing a ceasefire statement from folks who I think have a serious lack of understanding about this conflict.
“I’ve been very critical of my fellow progressives on this issue,” said Woodrow. He cited an hour-long tirade against Israel by now-outgoing state Rep. Elisabeth Epps (D-6th District)—she lost her primary—during the legislature’s special session in late 2023 about property taxes. He recalled that families of the hostages were not allowed on the House floor and that Democratic Speaker Julie McCluskie did not schedule a Holocaust memorial in the chamber. Instead, it was organized by Woodrow and Rep. Ron Weinberg (R-Loveland).

Woodrow calls the anti-Zionist stance among some progressives an “ideological inconsistency,” in which terms like Jim Crow and settler-colonialism—“concepts that the left has studied for the last few decades”—are “grafted onto this very different situation.”
The inconsistency is also evident for Woodrow when Israel’s operation against Hezbollah pagers, held specifically by Hezbollah terrorists, is decried.
“That’s a big tell,” he stated.
“So I’m not going sign on to this ceasefire agreement. … They don’t call for a ceasefire when Iran is raining down missiles. They don’t call for a ceasefire when Hezbollah is shelling northern Israel. They don’t call for a ceasefire when Jews are killed. And they don’t go picket outside the houses of Christian Zionists,” continued Woodrow.
“They can insist until they’re blue in the face that it’s just anti-Zionism. It’s not antisemitism,” he said, but “if they’re not willing to at least admit it’s a possibility and look inward, that says it all.”
‘You don’t care about Palestinian lives’
Chris Nicholson, running for RTD Board of Directors in District A, encountered the same treatment from the Working Families Party.
Nicholson got word that there were “significant concerns” from Calderon and other members of the political group surrounding Nicholson’s views on Israel.
Nicholson, who is Jewish, told the IJN: “We have the largest Jewish community of any seat in the metro area by far. I’m the only Jewish candidate running in the entire metro area.”
He had two rounds of interviews with members of the Working Families Party.
“There were concerns led by Lisa [Calderón], pretty much entirely driven around my very vocal positions on Israel,” Nicholson told the IJN. “I had actually reached out to her before the interview and said, ‘I’m pursuing the Working Families Party.’ [Calderón] responded with one sentence: ‘Have you walked back your support for genocide?’ That was all she said to me.”

After the first interview, Nicholson said he “got word that there were some people who had concerns” and was told that the group did not vote to recommend him in the RTD race.
Nicholson said he was invited back for another interview, when “they wanted to talk about Israel.”
“She (Calderón) had done comprehensive searches through my tweets going back five, six, seven years,” he said. “Not just stuff about Oct. 7, but about my support for the State of Israel and support for the security of the state. They were trying to draw all these inferences of ‘you don’t care about Palestinian lives.’”
He noted that “as a progressive, I am deeply paying attention to what is going on there (in Israel) right now, and I have been very vocal about the need for dialogue on these issues. I’ve been willing to be supportive of people I disagree with on these things.”
After a second conversation, Nicholson said, “I knew there was a decent chance I wouldn’t get it (the endorsement). What I found out afterward was that they had done the same thing to Steve Woodrow, and Steve is not in a competitive race. He is going to win re-election. Like me, Steve is an equally religious Jew. He’s a strong progressive. At the end of the day, I’ve gotten this far in life by being honest and by being true to who I am.”
He added that “one of the things that I’ve learned about being Jewish is you don’t walk away from the difficult moments just because it seems like the politically expedient thing to do.”
‘There is room for dissent’
As for the leadership of the Working Families Party, its state director, Wendy Howell, declined to answer questions from the IJN. Instead, Howell issued a statement, beginning with the party’s values, and continued: “We support a ceasefire. We support peace and a two-state solution. We also respect the incredible passion and nuance around this issue and know that neither our membership nor our leadership bodies are monoliths.
“Within WFP, there is room for dissent, for discussion, for complicating each others’ beliefs … Our endorsement process is comprehensive and covers many issues, and our State Committee evaluates candidates along several metrics: alignment with our values, viability and the strategic importance of the race to WFP.
“When we choose to not endorse a candidate, it is almost never due to a single area of misalignment. We also do not make public any information about decisions not to endorse, because some of the candidates who do not quite rise to the bar of our endorsement remain good friends and allies who we work with often in seeking progress.”
‘Unfair, systemic disadvantage for Jewish candidates’
A member of the Colorado Jewish community who was present at the Working Families Party interview with Steven Woodrow was Jonathan Singer, a state committee member of the group and a former member of the Colorado House of Representatives who represented Longmont and Boulder County.
Singer was concerned that the questions posed by party members to Woodrow, specifically those involving Israel and the Middle East, were directed to him only because he is Jewish.
“When candidates are asked questions that are related to Israel, Palestine and the Middle East peace process, it seems that only candidates with Jewish heritage receive those questions,” Singer told the IJN this week. “That strikes me as really creating an unfair, systemic disadvantage for Jewish candidates as a whole.”

Since the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., in the summer of 2017, when anti-Jewish sentiment resounded clearly from the rally-goers, he said: “I think it has become more and more clear that it is harder to be Jewish today than it was 10 years ago in this country.”
He noted that “the second thing is that we, as individuals with Jewish heritage, are placed at a disadvantage in these conversations because there’s already an expectation that Jewish politicians have an opinion on the Middle East, even if it isn’t necessarily at all related to the office that they’re running for.”
Even if a Jewish candidate is not outspoken on Middle East issues or chooses not to take a position on those issues, some organizations, including the Working Families Party, might choose to use a candidate’s Jewishness “as a qualifying or disqualifying factor for endorsement,” Singer said.
“I think it’s really unfortunate that it’s more often the Jewish candidates that receive additional scrutiny on these issues,” he said, expressing the hope that the Working Families Party and other political organizations will examine their tendency to hold Jewish candidates to different standards than others or to automatically assume that Jewish candidates hold certain views on Israel and the Middle East.
Singer believes that Woodrow is specifically qualified for the position he is running for and that it was fundamentally “unfair” for the party to grill him on his views of the Middle East.
But he avoided using such terms as antisemitic or discriminatory in referring to the party: “I think the best way to categorize it is that there’s a systemic unfairness that needs to be recognized and addressed. And in my conversations with the Working Families Party leadership and staff, they are very interested in how they want to proceed with this.”
Singer acknowledged that he considered resigning from the party after the Woodrow event but changed his mind after its leadership expressed “a willingness to revisit how we choose to interview candidates, especially Jewish candidates, as it relates to the Middle East so everyone is treated on an equal footing.”
When asked to express his own views on the current conflicts with which Israel is engaged, Singer described himself as a supporter of a two-state solution.
“I’m pretty outspoken and have been since last year on the fact that there needs to be a ceasefire and immediate return of the hostages. The most immediate issue for me is stopping the loss of life. It’s a very emotional thing. I have family members and friends of both faiths that live on both sides of the border, so anything we can do for an immediate ceasefire and return of the hostages is critical.
“As it relates to the larger picture—and far be it for me to be the one that solves Middle East peace—but a two-state solution where both sides have security and the ability to thrive is the ideal end game that I would like to see.”
‘Israelis had it coming’
In 2022, Woodrow endorsed Epps, who was running for the seat Woodrow was vacating. Post-Oct. 7, “it was the silence from her that was the most troubling. We heard nothing.
“I heard from my Democratic colleagues, I heard from my Republican colleagues, I heard from strangers, I heard from friends, everyone checking in. Staunch progressives like Sen. Julie Gonzalez showed up to Temple Emanuel [for a vigil on Oct. 9] to grieve with community. [From] Epps, not a peep. Not a word.
“I believe she was spending that time trying to work on inflammatory statements, excusing what had happened. When I listened to the rhetoric, so much of it seems an effort to justify the events of Oct. 7, to say that at the end of the day, Israelis had it coming.”
Among the questions he was asked in the follow-up interview with the workers party by a panelist with a Jewish parent was: “Didn’t he as a Jew, embodying the message of Passover, want Palestinians to be free?”
For Woodrow, that evinced the lack of knowledge of the conflict. “Palestinians haven’t been free under Hamas,” he replied. While he was permitted to speak, he said he didn’t feel that anyone was listening.
Woodrow said he is open to having difficult conversations about limits, proportionality and even revenge and that he has tried to engage in conversation when anti-Israel accusations are leveled at him. “But I’m not going to be told by folks who justify hostage-taking as a means of protest, who don’t think Israel has a right to exist, who equate it to a Spanish colony in North America. … No, I’m not. I’m not signing some suicide pact.”
He acknowledged that the party “had nothing to lose” by not endorsing him, as he will continue to support its stances on workers, criminal justice reform and affordable housing.
“I’m not going to start voting some other way,” he said. But he also won’t shy away from saying that the Working Families Party pretends that “they don’t have antisemitism in their ranks and that they refuse to examine it.”
“If they were willing to look inward, if they were willing to say maybe we need to add antisemitism to DEI, maybe we need to … bring in some experts and have them talk to us and educate us. Maybe we learn that we’re not antisemitic. Maybe we learn that we’re playing into blood libels when we falsely accuse people of genocide. That we’re playing on tropes that are centuries old without even realizing it. But if they’re not willing to do the work, how are they going to know?”
When he finally received the call informing him that he wouldn’t be endorsed by the party, he was told that it wasn’t only the Israel issue. It was also a speeding ticket he had successfully fought in court.
“I vote 99% in your favor,” he told the caller, “but I argued a speeding ticket successfully? Really? That doesn’t make sense.”
As for disappointment about not receiving the Working Families’ endorsement, Woodrow said: “So far as they’ve decided that anti-Zionism is a litmus test, I’m proud to have failed it.”