r/jewishpolitics

My wife wrote this about her experiences trying to talk with the democratic nominee for US Congress in our district. She doesn't have a reddit account to post this. Apologies for any formatting or typos issues.

**I told the Will Lawrence campaign I was a Jew, and they responded by wondering if I’m even worth speaking to.**

I feel like I just got punched in the face. I’ve always considered myself a Democrat and voted Blue in all the places I’ve lived. I don’t know where I fit anymore, I can tell where I don’t, and it hurts like losing a dear, dear friend.

I always wanted to live in Ann Arbor, since I was a kid. My mother was a U of M alum and she was always happiest when we visited Ann Arbor. I moved to Michigan in 2012 and did just that.

I loved the town and couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. Then I got priced out and moved just east to Ypsilanti. I fell in love with Ypsi’s weird and vibrant spirit. There was this attitude of hard knocks, but survival through it with love, community, and spirit. Then 10/7 happened. It felt like not just the town, but the entire Washtenaw County turned over in the night. I felt compelled in my grief to wear a Magan David and grow my Judaism.

Then I got stalked at Meijer. Pro-Palestinian protesters coming from their encampment clocked my Magen David and me and menaced me through the store. It was surreal. The store was full of other people, but it felt like no one saw what was happening. I was shocked and told my husband, but the whole incident was so surreal, so full of microaggressions, that I didn’t think anyone would believe me. I began to avoid letting people come to my house, in case they saw my Judaica. I told my cousin, and he taught me how to maintain and shoot a gun. I couldn’t bring myself to buy one. I desperately wanted to put a mezuzah on my door, but fear kept me from doing so.

The overt and covert Jew hate permeated through 2024, and by 2025, I moved out of the county entirely. I didn’t want to be afraid of my neighbors, and I wanted to live Jewishly. I wanted to put a mezuzah up and put Shabbat candles in the window. I didn’t want to be afraid of who would notice and how they would judge me. I felt so alone.

South Lyon was better. I put my mezuzah up and light candles every Friday night. I don’t have people over except family. I wear pomegranates, evil eyes, and hamsas instead of my Magen David. I guess I’m content.

In March 2026, a Hezbollah terrorist tried to kill 150 toddlers at Temple Israel, 20 minutes from me in Oakland County. I watched as what felt like the entirety of the Democratic community shrugged and said standard platitudes with a big fat “BUT” and some variation of "What do you expect when Israel bombs children," “Hurt people hurt people.” To say it was heartbreaking doesn’t really describe my feelings. I still haven’t found the right words for the deep betrayal and pain I feel not just from what the terrorist did, but how my neighbors in Michigan reacted.

By July, Will Lawrence was in a 3-way Democratic primary and sent doorknockers out in the MI-07 district. They came to my door, somehow missed my giant mezuzah, and proceeded to monologue about how Israel bombs kids and Will wants to stop it.

You see, Michigan had passed anti-gerrymandering laws, and that meant, even in South Lyon, a rural little town at the corner of Oakland County and Livingston County, my congressional district included part of Lansing. Will is from Lansing and was part of the DSA chapter (up to like 10 days ago….).

I was so unsettled by how unaware the door knocker was to who they were speaking to. Why would they start by monologuing about Israel to my household, a visible Jewish household? I realized the doorknocker didn’t know what a mezuzah was.

I sat on this realization for a few weeks. I worried what this Will person would do if put in the US Congress? Where would his rhetoric end and action begin? Would he try to get a pound of flesh from Americans when he couldn’t get it from Israel? So I asked the campaign.

Here is how that communication went:

*“On Fri, Jul 31, 2026 at 10:19 PM wrote:*

*Hello,*

*Before I decide who to vote for in the 8/4 primary, I’d like to know if Will would be willing to hold hearings on Americans who served on the IDF and hearings on AIPAC.*

*I look forward to hearing back!*

*Shell”*

I really didn’t think the campaign would respond, but the response was quick:

*“On Aug 1, 2026, at 5:15 PM, Kelly - Field Director wrote:*

*Hey Shell,*

*Thanks for reaching out before the primary. As a Congressperson Will would do everything in his power to hold people accountable for war crimes and get money out of politics. I can tell you AIPAC is funding millions of dollars in attacks against Will, so that should tell ya something!*

*Hope we can count on your support,*

*Kelly Collison*

*Field Director*

*William Lawrence for Congress (MI-07)*

*Building a people-powered campaign to flip the 7th.*

*��* [*kelly@wewill2026.com*](mailto:kelly@wewill2026.com) *|*

*�� www.wewill2026.com”\*

I never said war crimes. My stomach sank. I said Americans who served in the IDF and the campaign just assumed that meant war crimes. I decided to press further.

*“Mon, Aug 3, 2026 at 9:49 AM wrote:*

*Thanks for your response Kelly.  How does Will intend to determine who committed war crimes to investigate.  What is his starting point?*  

*I’m still undecided and await your reply.*

*Shell”*

Kelly Collison responded the same day.

*“Aug 3, 2026, at 5:59 PM, Kelly - Field Director wrote:*

*“Hi Shell,*

*That's a great question, and I want to make sure I give you an accurate answer. After tomorrow's election, I'll have more time to talk with Will and get back to you on it.*

*I hope you can understand that over the next 28 hours we're fully focused on getting out the vote across all seven counties, so I honestly don't expect to see him before Election Day is over. I'd be happy to follow up with you afterward with his position.*

*In the meantime, I can say with confidence that the other two candidates have not been advocates on this issue and have not publicly referred to what's happening in Gaza as a genocide.*

*Hope we can count on your support,*

*Kelly Collison*

*Field Director*

*William Lawrence for Congress (MI-07)*

*Building a people-powered campaign to flip the 7th.*

*��* [*kelly@wewill2026.com*](mailto:kelly@wewill2026.com) *|*

*�� www.wewill2026.com”\*

Will Lawrence won the primary; it was a three-way race, and he got some 40ish% of the Democratic vote. The day after the primary. He let his DSA membership lapse. He spoke to CNN and The Hill about it. I pressed further.

*“Aug 5, 2026, at 9:51 AM, wrote:*

*Hi Kelly,*

*I know you guys were probably up all night celebrating.  Please don’t forget about me and my questions for Will.*

*Shell”*

I waited. I sent the campaign the UNICEF and IPC famine report that came out in early August, showing that Gaza never had an acute malnutrition problem; in fact, the rate of acute malnutrition in Gaza was better than Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and some European countries. Gaza, in fact, has an obesity problem among their children. No response.

I thought that was it. They had figured me out and weren’t going to respond to me anymore. Then Kelly sent me a response on August 16.

*“Aug 16, 2026, at 2:58 PM, Kelly - Field Director wrote:*

*‘Hi Shell,*

*I'm so sorry that I haven't been able to get back to you until now. My inbox has had over 100 unread messages since Election Day, and I've been trying to work through it as quickly as possible.Will would likely use international law and guidance from experts to determine this, but if you\'d like to talk to him directly, keep an eye out for upcoming events where he will be. You can find those events at*

*wewill2026.com/events.*

*Kelly Collison*

*Field Director*

*William Lawrence for Congress (MI-07)*

*Building a people-powered campaign to flip the 7th.*

*��* [*kelly@wewill2026.com*](mailto:kelly@wewill2026.com) *|*

*�� www.wewill2026.com”\*

I was mad at this point. I felt she had brushed me off and made promises she did not keep, and forgotten about the conversation we were having while we were in the middle of it. I decided to stop mincing my words and start being plain and blunt.

*“Sun, Aug 16, 2026 at 4:49 PM wrote:*

*Hi Kelly,*

*What “international law” has legal bearing in the US?  What “experts”?  I asked for specifics.  You said you would speak to Will and get them.  You have not.*

*I sent you data from famine experts, Unicef and IPC retracting famine and acute malnutrition claims from 2024 and 2025; showing Gaza never experienced a famine or even an acute malnutrition problem.  Gaza has an overweight problem among their children.  Would you refer to those?* 

*There’s a vast gulf between the rhetoric of “genocide” and “famine” and a better acute malnutrition rate than England, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, etc.*  

*I’m trying to understand if Will follows facts on the ground, even when they come in the form of retractions of allegations and quietly released updates after false allegations have been made.*

*I understand having a full inbox, but 100 emails is not that much to wade through.  Most professional adults handle a similar volume daily at work.  I get the impression that you make lots of promises and like applause lines but the nitty gritty reality seems to be something to ignore.*

*I have no interest in trying to attend an event for a candidate who already broke promises made through email communication.  Seems like a waste of my time.*

*You said you would ask Will for specifics about what actions he would take in congress around this “genocide”.  I want to know how far he will take his rhetoric into action and what that action will be.  You have already brushed me off and seem to have forgotten your promise so I have no reason to believe anything would be different trying to attend an event.*

*Sad and disappointing.”*

Things escalated.

*“Hi Shell,*

*I'm sorry that I couldn't provide the full detailed answers you are looking for. I am looping in our campaign manager who can hopefully give you a more in-depth answer than I can provide.*

*As for the emails, it's over 100 emails per day, not total. Hope that makes more sense.*

*Kelly Collison*

*Field Director*

*William Lawrence for Congress (MI-07)*

*Building a people-powered campaign to flip the 7th.*

*��* [*kelly@wewill2026.com*](mailto:kelly@wewill2026.com) *|*

*�� www.wewill2026.com”\*

I thought maybe the campaign director would jump in and de-escalate or something. I heard nothing for a few days and sent one final explanation, this time addressed to the campaign director Stevie O’Hanlan.

*“Sun, Aug 19, 2026 at 8:29 PM wrote:*

*Hi Stevie,*

*I am wondering if you have been able to speak with Will about my questions? Do I need to repeat them for you or are they clear in the email chain below? What timeframe can I expect for a detailed direct answer to my concerns?*

*You might be wondering why I’m asking about the Israel-Gaza conflict and Will’s rhetoric and what actions he will take in Congress about it. It’s because that was what your campaign door knockers spoke to me about first. I had never met or heard of the campaign and then your door knockers came to my door, somehow didn’t see my massive mezuzah hanging on the doorframe and proceeded to monologue about how Will wants to stop the Israelis from bombing kids. It was deeply unsettling.*

*I left Washtenaw County to get away from rhetoric like that coming to my door. I was oddly relieved your door knocker was so unaware that Jews live in South Lyon too, so I could be unnoticed. I wonder what they would have asked me if they were aware.*

*I thought, maybe I should ask the campaign itself, why is this a topic of concern, and what Will is going to act on. I live in the rising antisemitism every day and I thought maybe I should let you all explain yourselves before I make a judgment.*

*Kelly changed my words from \"I’d like to know if Will would be willing to hold hearings on Americans who served on the IDF and hearings on AIPAC,” to "As a Congressperson Will would do everything in his power to hold people accountable for war crimes.”*

*I never said war crimes. I said fellow Americans. I am deeply concerned this campaign is participating in the populist method of accusations without substance. What actions will come of these accusations? War Crimes has a specific meaning and legal definition. What is Will going to do with what I can only assume, based on the campaign’s various actions, are his deeply held beliefs?*

*You see I tried to give all of you a chance to define and explain yourselves. I tried to think, maybe they don’t know the weight of the words they use.*

*In truth, this whole saga has confirmed the deep concerns I have that Will and those around him are deeply unserious people who recklessly use rhetoric that leads to things like Temple Israel, getting targeted by the brother of a Hezbollah commander. 150 toddlers and staff almost died that day, and I watched people like Will and his campaign shrug and talk about how Israel shouldn’t bomb children. As if that had anything to do with the terrorist attack. Turns out the man who perpetrated the attack on Temple Israel had been planning it for months. His family was deeply entrenched in Hezbollah’s leadership ranks.*

*I cannot vote for anyone who is unable to stand up for their neighbors, is too unaware to realize who they are speaking to, is willing to throw Jews under the bus for some facile applause line, and who doesn’t just ignore constituents, but actively lies to them.*

*I hope somehow I’ve misjudged your campaign’s actions thus far.*

*-Shell"*

Today, 8/20/2026, I received what I can only assume was a message I wasn’t supposed to get:

*“Aug 20, 2026, at 7:58 PM, Stevie O’Hanlan wrote:*

*do you want to talk with her? i don't think it's worth it*

*---------- Forwarded message ---------*

*--*

*Stevie O'Hanlon*

*Campaign Manager*

*William Lawrence for Congress (MI-07)*

*Building a people-powered campaign to flip the 7th.*

*�� stevie@wewill2026.com �� www.wewill2026.com”\*

So there it is all laid out. I told them I was a Jew and have been judged not worth speaking to. I don’t know what to do. But I thought someone else should know.

The first of its kind in the US, this bill would allow Jews to voluntarily identify as Jewish on state forms. It now awaits a final vote by August 31, at which point Governor Newsom will have another month to approve it. The article explains how its proponents say "SB 1387 would help the state better track antisemitism, target public health outreach and understand the size of California’s Jewish population", while the publication also linked concerns regarding individual privacy and erasure of identity for those who descend from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds (such as in Latin America). However, California government demographic data standards require state agencies to allow individuals to select multiple ethnic and racial designations. Currently, Jewishness is only classified in California law as a religious affiliation.

Thoughts?

Edit: erase to erasure

>For the past decade, police have been stationed outside the door of one of China’s most prominent native Jews. “They see who goes in, who talks. They can hear who is saying what inside the house,” says that person’s sibling, who now lives in Israel (to protect their identities, this article will refer to the one living in Israel as Zhao Lao’er and the one living in Kaifeng as Zhao Laoda). The police monitoring Zhao Laoda’s life are national-level police. “They are like the FBI, not local Kaifeng police.” Several times a year, Zhao Laoda is hauled in by the police for questioning about activities in the Jewish community.

>The recent crackdown under President Xi Jinping’s rule has focused on erasing Kaifeng’s Jewish history.

>Most of what we know of the small Jewish community in this central Chinese city is carved in stone on four tablets that, for centuries, were located outside the Kaifeng synagogue, particularly the tablets from 1489 and 1512. Those tablets used to be the highlight of the former Kaifeng Museum, drawing foreign tourists willing to pay extra to see them. The old Kaifeng Museum, near the site of the city’s former synagogue, was shuttered early in the crackdown, in 2016. What became of the tablets remained unknown for several years.

>A new museum opened in 2018 in Kaifeng’s distant suburbs. All mentions of the Jews had been scrubbed from the new museum, and the tablets were not on display. When Noam Urbach, an Israeli expert on the Kaifeng Jews, visited the new museum on opening day, he asked where the tablets were. Museum staff called around. Eventually they told him, “We have them, but they are not on display.” Later, Urbach learned from a source who entered the closed museum that the tablets had been thrown into an outdoor courtyard. Rebecca Bitterman, a curator at the Israel Museum, once asked Beijing to lend the tablets for an exhibition on China but was rebuffed. “They said they will never leave China,” she says. Today, the tablets China once considered too valuable to leave the country lie in the dirt of an abandoned museum.

>This crackdown began in April 2015, when Rebecca Davis wrote about Kaifeng’s Jewish revival for The New York Times. She attended a seder hosted by a mix of foreign and Kaifeng Jews, with one government official present. “That article was a very big problem,” Zhao Lao’er said. Zhao Laoda was interrogated for 10 hours. Around this time, police were ordered to guard the entrance to their house, though a worse fate awaited the official who participated in the seder. “He was arrested,” Zhao Lao’er said.

>The pressure spread. Rabbi Marvin Tokayer had been leading Jewish tours to Kaifeng. In 2015, he was stopped mid-tour and was not allowed into the city. Ester Guo Yan, one of the community’s leaders, was harassed by police, who demanded to check identification while she was guiding tours. Two years later, authorities shut down a small, unofficial museum of the Kaifeng Jews that she had cobbled together in an apartment next to the site of the old synagogue.

>A month after the Times article, Xi announced a broader campaign against foreign religions. This campaign focused on the larger religions it perceived as foreign, Christianity and Islam, but the Davis article appears to have brought Kaifeng’s tiny Jewish community into the campaign’s sights.

>Things grew increasingly frightening. In April 2023, thugs disappeared Guo for five days. Later, she sent an email to The Sino-Judaic Institute, an American group that works closely with the Kaifeng Jews, saying she feared that the next time they abducted her, she would be killed. As the pressure intensified, Chinese officials covered up the city’s Jewish history, sometimes literally. A mikvah, one of the last remnants of the synagogue, was buried. Stars of David and street signs indicating the city’s Jewish past were stripped from walls. Historical markers vanished. The campaign was no longer simply to suppress Jewish life today, but to erase evidence of its long history.

>The community has deep roots in China. As best scholars can tell, the Jews arrived in Kaifeng sometime between 1000 and 1100 A.D., when Kaifeng was the largest city in the world. By 1163, as trade networks all over Asia were linking China to far-flung markets, they built the city’s first synagogue.

>But over the following centuries, commerce shifted. The Chinese Jews were cut off from the rest of the Jewish world, becoming more Chinese. Blending the Jewish creation story with the Chinese creator deity, the 1489 tablet begins by saying, “Abraham, the patriarch who founded the religion of Israel, was of the nineteenth generation from Pangu Adam.” The community sought to justify Judaism as being as good as Confucianism. They even ditched halachic descent through the mother and instead modeled the patrilineal system in which Jewishness passed from the father.

>Ink rubbing of the 1512 stone inscription of the Kaifeng Jews. Jérôme Tobar, Inscriptions juives de K’ai-Fong-fou (Shanghai: 1900).

>Public domain via Google Books

>As the Chinese Jews were isolated, pressure on them to assimilate grew. The Kaifeng community, at various times estimated to number several hundred to several thousand Jews, was one of several Jewish communities in China. As trade networks contracted, the others disappeared into surrounding Han Chinese or Muslim communities. The community in Kaifeng would have also disappeared had it not been for one Jesuit.

>In 1605, Matteo Ricci was building a church in Beijing when Ai Tian, a Jewish Kaifeng bureaucrat, wandered in. Ai had read about a group of recently arrived foreigners from the far Western Ocean who were monotheists yet not Muslims. Ai and the others in Kaifeng had only ever heard of two groups of people who believed in only one god: Muslims and Jews. Ai assumed that these must be some of the Jews from the far Western Ocean that the 1489 tablet spoke of.

>When Ai Tian first entered his church, Ricci assumed that Ai, with his deep biblical knowledge, was a Christian. For some time, the two conversed, each mistakenly believing that they had discovered long-lost coreligionists. Ricci genuflected before paintings of Mary, Jesus, and John the Baptist. Believing they were Rebecca, Jacob and Esau, Ai followed his lead.

>Eventually Ricci realized that Ai was not a Christian, but a member of a long-lost Jewish community. It is unclear if the Chinese Jews ever understood that Ricci was not Jewish. The city’s chief rabbi was sick, and the community was struggling to maintain its Judaism. The rabbi sent a letter saying that although he found Ricci’s belief that the messiah had already appeared odd, he would still like Ricci to take over as the chief rabbi in Kaifeng.

>During the three centuries after Ricci’s encounter with Ai, Kaifeng witnessed the near destruction of its Jewish community. A 1642 flood destroyed the synagogue and soaked many of its scriptures. The synagogue was rebuilt, but the scriptures proved nearly impossible to replace, as the community had no means to contact the wider Jewish world.

>In 1810, Kaifeng’s last rabbi died. Almost all knowledge of Hebrew disappeared, along with the practice of halachically converting Chinese women who married into the community. In the 1850s, another flood destroyed the synagogue, this time for good. By 1888, an anonymous Christian traveler wrote of a visit to Kaifeng. The street where the synagogue once stood was still named after the Jews, but the building’s ruins had become a public urinal. Two Jewish families were found, but they had become secularized. No one knew Hebrew. The last thing that bore witness to the Jewish community was the stone tablets.

>In 1914, the city’s Jews had dwindled to the point that the few Jewish families with a memory of their heritage decided to sell the site of the synagogue to a Protestant missionary. After 751 years in Jewish hands, the land was turned into a YMCA playground. But even then, embers of Jewish identity persisted. In 1932, David Abraham Brown, the publisher of the American Hebrew and Jewish Tribune, landed in Kaifeng and met with more than 200 Kaifeng Jews who told him that they wanted to rebuild the synagogue.

>But a new threat to the remnants of the Kaifeng’s Jews was rising.

>Marxists, skeptical of religion, were always unlikely to recognize this small band of Jews when they took over China. But after the 1949 takeover, the Chinese Communist Party at least considered it.

>Like the Soviets, Mao promised to give special preferences to ethnic minorities, but that required the CCP to determine who counted as an ethnic group. In October 1952, the Ai and Shi clans sent representatives to Beijing to plead their case with Zhou Enlai, the second-most important leader after Mao. They asked if Beijing would recognize the Kaifeng Jews as an official ethnic group, which would protect their religious practice and offer privileges.

>A few days later, Beijing rejected their claim. “Among China’s ethnic groups, there is no Jewish minority; nevertheless, they say they are Jewish, so they must be cared for,” stated a letter to the Kaifeng government. The Kaifeng Jews did not meet the Stalinist criteria for an ethnic minority: They were too small, and they had no distinct language and possessed no territory of their own. Yet the second clause—”they must be cared for”—left local officials room to recognize them informally. Many had the word Jew listed as their ethnicity on their government IDs.

>During the two decades of high Maoism, the Jews of Kaifeng were, like the rest of China, pushed to torch their pasts. Most Jewish artifacts were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. One Kaifeng Jew was accused of being an Israeli spy and subjected to daily accusations, and the ethnicity listed on his ID was changed from Jew to Spy. The tablets were neglected; when members of The Sino-Judaic Institute found them in June 1990, one was leaning against a storage building outside, and two were lying on the ground in the Kaifeng museum’s basement.

>The community survived. After Mao’s death, foreigners began to return to Kaifeng, looking for the remaining Jews. Since Mao died, Kaifeng’s Jews have faced several cycles of repression, each one following a pattern. Jewish activity would draw the attention of foreigners, making Beijing nervous and triggering a crackdown. After a few years, pressure would ease, and the community would revive.

>Wendy Abraham, the Matteo Ricci of the 1980s, was one of the first to establish a bond with Kaifeng’s Jews. In September 1985, during a second visit to Kaifeng, she returned to collect oral histories of the community. She spent days in the Shi family household, quizzing them about the city’s Jewish past. The Shi family introduced Abraham to Kaifeng’s other Jews, like Li Rongxin— who hailed her with a “Shalom, landsman!”—and Ai Fengmian, one of the men who had traveled to Beijing in 1952 to plead with Zhou Enlai to recognize Kaifeng’s Jews. But Ai no longer seemed interested in his Jewish identity. Unlike the Shi family, when Abraham quizzed Ai’s children about local Jewish history, they “all stared blank-faced. They either did not know or did not care,” she concluded.

>At 5:30 the morning after meeting Ai, a hotel worker called Abraham: “Three people are waiting for you.” The waiting police took her passport and packed her into a Mercedes-Benz, whisking her away for an eight-hour interrogation. By the end of the day, they scribbled a list of everything she had told them, using red ink to circle every illegal thing she had admitted to. Her crimes included being in Kaifeng alone and traveling without being part of a tour group. But the highest of her high crimes was this: “I was not supposed to be talking to these people who did not exist. It was like something out of Kafka.”

>Abraham had arrived in Kaifeng during the middle of the first post-Mao crackdown on the Kaifeng Jews. In August 1985, Rabbi Arnold Belzer, founding board member of The Sino-Judaic Institute, had passed through the city without any problem, arranging for the bar mitzvah of the son of a Chinese Jewish couple to be held in front of the stone tablets in the Kaifeng Museum. But by September, news of a Time article, “A New Hope for the Jews of China,” had roiled the city’s leadership with its claims of a Jewish revival. Beijing was pushing local officials to suppress all signs of Jewish identity in the city, particularly anything connected with foreigners.

>At least Abraham escaped without betraying anyone. “I never gave [the officer] the names of anyone I had met. I agreed I had met with people, but conveniently, I didn’t remember their names. He wanted that more than anything else, and I realized they would be in deep shit if I gave it to them,” she told me in a phone interview. When the police ejected her from the city, they smiled and told her, “We warmly welcome you back to China, we warmly welcome you back to Kaifeng, but you are never allowed to speak to these people again.”

>In 1989, Marvin Josephson, founder of one of the world’s largest talent agencies, and his wife, Tina Chen, wanted a bat mitzvah that blended Chinese and Jewish traditions. They hired Rabbi Arnold Belzer to conduct the service in front of the stone tablets in the Kaifeng Museum. But word of the religious ceremony with foreigners reached Beijing. National leaders panicked and ordered the ceremony cancelled. Eventually, leaders agreed to green-light the bat mitzvah, but only if it was held in a hotel in front of carbon cutouts of the tablets. No Chinese Jews were allowed to attend.

>By the early 1990s, however, restrictions had eased. The local government raised $3,957,170 to build a Jewish museum on the site of the old synagogue. Shlomo Jin Guangyuan, a leader of the Kaifeng Jews, was able to travel to Beijing, where he showed his ID listing his ethnicity as “Jew” to the Israeli embassy, hoping to demonstrate to Israeli diplomats his effort to revive Judaism in Kaifeng. Zhao Xiangru, an important Kaifeng scholar, began to publicly identify as a Jew. He and Andrew Plaks, a Jewish expert on Chinese literature at Princeton University, held a conference in 1993 where more than 50 Jews were brought together, the largest gathering of Chinese Jews since 1932. Zhao called on conference attendees to return to Judaism and began to discuss creating a special economic zone in Kaifeng for foreign Jews and building a Jews-only hotel.

>Beijing responded with another crackdown. Plans to build a Jewish museum were ditched, and the nearly $4 million disappeared. Shlomo Jin and the other Kaifeng Jews were forced to turn in their old ID cards for new ones. They could no longer list their ethnicity as “Jew” on the cards. Instead, they had to decide whether their ethnicity would be Han Chinese or Hui Muslim. Zhao Xiangru was sacked from his job and placed under house arrest.

>The 2015 crackdown initially followed a similar pattern: Local authorities allowed the Kaifeng Jews latitude to practice their religion, but when signs of a Jewish revival made it to the world outside China, Beijing struck back with a heavy hand. Freedom to practice was strictly curtailed, only to be loosened five or 10 years later.

>This most recent crackdown under Xi was severe, but today, there are signs that it is loosening somewhat. Last year, an Argentine Jewish YouTuber posted a of himself attending a Shabbat dinner with members of several Kaifeng families. David, a Kaifeng Jew who hosted the dinner, showed off a photo of an associate’s former ID card listing their ethnicity as “Jew.” There were no signs anyone was punished for the video, and David stated that up to half a dozen Shabbat dinners occur across the city every week. “Before, surveillance was 24 hours a day, and they would not let foreign tourists visit them. Now, it is not so bad,” Zhao Lao’er said. The sibling is now one of only three to four families being closely watched by the police.

>A rumor has spread throughout the community that Xi has personally said that the Jews of Kaifeng are not to be harassed as long as they practice their faith in private. This rumor, impossible to prove, is nevertheless widespread. “People in Kaifeng believe this. I was told by someone who was told by the police that this was coming directly from Xi,” Urbach said to me over Zoom.

>But there has been no letup in the government’s attempts to erase the Jews from Kaifeng’s history. References to the Kaifeng Jews are missing from most official and semiofficial websites discussing the city’s history, and the stone tablets that were the foundation of Jewish history remain hidden. “The Xi era crackdown is different. They are erasing history, they are denying history, they are making it a taboo subject,” said Urbach.

>Even as surveillance loosens, there is no sign that Beijing intends to let the Kaifeng Jews back into the history books. Neither the future nor the past of Kaifeng’s Jews is carved in stone.

Of course, the big political subs are elated. It feels like social media and “no child left behind” have created some perverse Moore’s Law of Stupidity such that magnitude societal stupidity doubles every two years.

A group of 10 Jewish, Hindu, and Zoroastrian parents filed a lawsuit against Palo Alto Unified School District and Palo Alto High Principal Brent Kline for reportedly pushing students to wear Islamic religious attire during a field trip to a local mosque.

…the Palo Alto High School students were encouraged to wear Muslim religious attire, including hijabs for the girls, during the visit to the Muslim Community Association’s mosque in Santa Clara in fall 2025. They were also given Qurans as gifts to take home.

Students also … heard from Zahra Billoo, executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of Council of American-Islamic Relations.

The lawsuit alleged that Billoo was “allowed unfettered access to students to advocate personal religious and political views without balancing perspective or adequate supervision.” The plaintiffs note that Billoo has previously made "hostile and discriminatory statements regarding Jews."