Readers Write: Minneapolis mayoral race, Jewish Minneapolitans

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes letters from readers online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

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One wonders if U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar actually read the DFL’s statement before issuing her condemnation of the endorsement revocation for state Rep. Omar Fateh (“Mpls. fight threatens wider DFL split,” Aug. 23). I was a delegate at the convention and can attest firsthand to how dysfunctional it was: The electronic voting system repeatedly failed, votes were miscounted and there was no credible credentialing process for alternates. Most troubling of all, the final badge count could not be verified because no accurate tally existed.

The state party’s decision was not about disliking the outcome but about addressing a deeply flawed and unreliable process that undermined trust in the endorsement itself.

I was relieved to hear this decision. At its core, this is about safeguarding the fairness and integrity of the process. Omar should be standing up for the rules and credibility of her own party, not aligning herself with the Democratic Socialists of America, a group openly determined to undermine the DFL while simultaneously seeking its endorsement. That contradiction should trouble all of us. By echoing the DSA’s attack lines, she is siding against her party and constituents like me — and alienating the very voters who put her in office.

Sarah Stephens, Minneapolis

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Michel Janssen, Minneapolis

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Bravo to Rochelle Olson for calling out Minneapolis DFL hypocrisy in its Fateh mayoral endorsement (“Minnesota DFL was right to revoke Fateh’s endorsement,” Strib Voices, Aug. 24): “The DFLers who have loudly challenged and opposed the president cannot simply look away when an inept-at-best and corrupt-at-worst process in Minneapolis suits their needs.” As the rule of law and rules-based governance are assaulted daily by President Donald Trump, threatening the liberty of all of us, so-called “progressives” can’t be permitted to use similar tactics.

Sadly, the authoritarian impulse (“my will must prevail”) tempts many of us, no matter our ideology or ideals, but its results are ugly, dangerous and freedom-threatening, whether from an autocratic leader or a faction claiming to embody the will of the people versus the establishment. And Minneapolis politics have been rife with this latter: whether the history of irregularities in certain precinct caucuses, or the Defund the Police movement, or the obstructionism of the Democratic Socialist wing of the City Council (still no resolution to George Floyd Square or Third Precinct station!), or the recent and shameful rabble-rousing of some politicians over the supposed immigration raid on Lake Street and subsequent attacks on Police Chief Brian O’Hara for maintaining the peace.

What we desperately need instead are political servant/leaders in the mold of assassinated Rep. Melissa Hortman (perhaps a commitment to a “Hortman initiative: Toward good governance”: progressive, values-driven but reality-based, committed to achieving outcomes that positively affect lives).

George Muellner, Plymouth

Steve Hunegs, who recently attacked courageous efforts by state Sen. Omar Fateh and others to divest our city from Israel as it conducts genocide against the Palestinian people, does not speak for this Jew (“A ‘city that works for everyone’ cannot boycott its Jewish community,” Strib Voices, Aug. 22). He doesn’t speak for my anti-Zionist Jewish family or anyone in my beloved anti-Zionist Jewish community here in Minneapolis and across the country.

I am repeatedly shocked at the eagerness with which conservative Jews defame the legitimacy of progressive Jews, always calling into question whether we are real Jews or Jewish enough. In Hunegs’ commentary, we became “tokens.” I can’t tell you how insulted I was to read that. Despite that, I take heart in the numbers: Poll after poll shows that young American Jews are embracing our history and rejecting the genocidal Israeli regime.

There are more of us every day. We are not blind to the threat of antisemitic violence. We remember Tree of Life. But we know that Jewish safety lies in solidarity with other religious and ethnic communities here and around the globe in a shared fight against the global far-right, especially the Holocaust deniers and Great Replacement conmen stalking the halls of government as I write this.

To be an anti-Zionist and a Jew is to refuse to identify our millennia-old global culture with an 80-year-old military settlement built atop the ruins of the Palestinian homeland. Yes, we are a “minority” now, but give it some time; I think you’ll be surprised at what the next generation looks like.

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Hunegs’ commentary in Friday’s Star Tribune brings back memories of 1946, when Minneapolis was called ”the capitol of anti-Semitism in the United States.” Hunegs is referring to mayoral candidate Fateh’s pledge to “‘refrain from any and all affiliation’ with Israel,” as well as a number of Jewish organizations that he falsely labels as ”Zionist lobby groups." Fateh’s pledge would have the effect of returning Minneapolis to that earlier time, when notable essayist Carey McWilliams observed that in Minneapolis, “in almost every walk of life, ‘an iron curtain’ separates the Jews from the non-Jews.”

Ronald Haskvitz, Minnetonka

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I am writing in response to Hunegs’ commentary to argue that a Jewish community that works for everyone cannot ignore its anti-Zionist members. As a Jewish Minneapolitan I have long been disturbed by the Jewish Community Relations Council billing itself as “the consensus public affairs voice of the Jewish community,” as if to say any one community, especially the Jewish community — famous for “two Jews, three opinions” — has one voice. Hunegs predicts the backlash from Minneapolis Jews who support Fateh for mayor by diminishing us as “tokens.” How did the JCRC decide it was that voice, when the majority of Jewish Americans and Jewish Minnesotans voted against Trump, yet it celebrates President Donald Trump’s McCarthyist “investigation” into antisemitism on university campuses and his nomination of Republican Gov. Kristi Noem?

I love the diversity of thought and opinion in the Jewish community. I take great joy in being a part of a thriving anti-Zionist Jewish community in Minneapolis and appreciate that those who relate differently to Israel and their Judaism have their spaces. But my Jewish values, passed down to me through generations, instruct me to back the candidate who supports those most at the margins of our city and stop the ad hominem attack that conflates Judaism and Zionism. I refuse to be reduced to a “token” or told one group speaks for all Jews, when that is simply untrue and actually perpetuates the antisemitism the JCRC claims to so fiercely oppose.