Despite the Wesley Bell-Cori Bush race concluding last week, local progressives’ ire toward AIPAC, which pumped millions of dollars into the Bell campaign, has grown beyond the bounds of that primary—as well as, at times, into antisemitic tropes.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is the pro-Israel group that, angered by Bush’s comments about Israel in the aftermath of Hamas’ October 7 attacks, spent $9 million to unseat her.
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Bush laid the blame for her loss squarely on the group at her election night party, saying, “AIPAC, I’m coming to tear your kingdom down!” The remarks drew rebuke from White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre, who called the statement “inflammatory and divisive and incredibly unhelpful.” In the days that followed, St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones fretted openly to the Post-Dispatch about being the group’s next target.
By the end of the week, a tweet that Aldermanic President Megan Green had made on the eve of the election came under fire from the Anti-Defamation League and a local rabbi. Green had retweeted a comment on X suggesting AIPAC was also behind the purchase of the alt-weekly Riverfront Times. The paper’s staff was laid off in May on the same day it was sold to an undisclosed buyer.
Green quote-tweeted someone espousing the theory that AIPAC purchased the alt-weekly to silence its coverage—the evidence for which doesn’t extend beyond a man named Leonid Ravinsky both getting very rich off OnlyFans as well as giving money to AIPAC. (The RFT’s new editor has been steadily publishing story after story promoting OnlyFans.) Green tweeted that “more and more signals are pointing” to the paper’s purchase being connected to its thorough coverage of protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. She later deleted her tweet.
To Rabbi Daniel Bogard of the Central Reform Congregation, the tweet was “classical antisemitism.”
“The fundamental way that antisemitism operates is to suggest that Jews are the answer to why the world is broken…like an independent newspaper closed and all of a sudden, the reason for it must be disproportionate and malignant Jewish power,” he says.
The Anti-Defamation League Heartland blasted Green for deploying the centuries-old trope of Jews controlling the media. “@MeganEllyia stepped over the line and knows it,” they wrote on X. “Retweeting and deleting a conspiracy theory alleging the Riverfront Times was sold due its reporting on the Israel-Hamas war, relying on antisemitic tropes of Jewish power and control of the media. We expected better.”
In an email Friday, Green defended her tweet, saying, “My commentary was directed at the media’s failure to cover the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. It’s true, I am critical of news outlets for equating anti-genocide protests with antisemitism which has influenced news coverage of this issue overall.” She added, “I want to be clear that criticism of the Israeli government and calls for an end to human rights violations are not a form of antisemitism.”
She did not address SLM’s question about what “signals” she saw connecting the paper’s purchase to its coverage, but wrote, “The former RFT was thoughtful in their coverage of the protests and recognized that criticism of the Israeli government was not antisemitic. Moreover, RFT journalists understood that members of the Jewish community hold diverse views on the genocide in Gaza and that thinking all people of a certain identity hold the same beliefs is problematic.”
Bogard, who has been outspoken in advocating progressive causes in Missouri, stresses that the mainstream Jewish community should be more accepting of voices critical of Israel—but Green’s tweet had nothing to do with that.
“That tweet wasn’t about Israel,” he says. Instead, it promoted a conspiracy theory about Jewish interests controlling the media landscape.
Says Bogard, “Even if she didn’t mean to say that, even if she didn’t realize she was saying that, sorry, at this point, particularly amongst progressives who are supposed to be attuned to these sorts of things, to be that ignorant of the ways that she was playing in and promulgating antisemitic conspiracies, is so inappropriate and so disheartening to see.”
Rabbi Jeffrey Abraham, a major supporter of Bell and senior rabbi at the Congregation B’nai Amoona in Creve Coeur, said that Bush’s speech on Tuesday night was a chance to lower the temperature on the rhetoric. Instead, her “tear your kingdom down” remark only escalated it.
“The way she put things out there, now everyone is basically saying, ‘Well, the Jews control the money in the race, and that’s why she lost,’ instead of maybe taking a step back and looking at the actual issues at hand that led to her defeat,” says Abraham.
One thing that Bush and Bell supporters seem to agree on is that the race got ugly, and the raw feelings will be slow to subside.
Stacey Newman, a former state representative from St. Louis County and Bell’s Jewish outreach director, says that the invective she faced throughout the primary was jarring—especially because it came from people who she was politically aligned with until October 7, people who, other than on Israel, she still agrees with on key issues like abortion access. “Why are they calling me a white supremacist?” she says.
And the race being in the books has seemingly done little to dial down the rhetoric. “Particularly since election day, we’ve seen social media hate amp up,” says Newman.
On Friday, the Progressive Jews of St. Louis issued a statement praising Bush’s legacy and decrying AIPAC’s role in her defeat. The group called AIPAC a “pro-war lobby group” that spent millions “for Wesley Bell to spread misinformation about Cori Bush.” “When AIPAC tried to offer their $20 million deal to two men in Detroit—Hill Harper and Nasser Beydoun—they both turned it down on principle,” they wrote. “Bell not only took this deal, but did so after giving Cori his word that he was not going to run against her.”
The day after his victory, Bell told KSDK that some of the epithets lobbed at him, including that he was a “puppet” and a “plant,” were unlike any he’d received before. “I’m from Missouri. I’m an African American man, and Missouri has had its issues of racism and things of that nature and in our history, and I’ve never been called anything like some of the things that I was called during the election,” he said.
Bogard says the primary brought to the fore such heated emotion because different people usually all part of the same coalition felt betrayed by each candidate—organized labor and the Jewish community by Bush; local progressives by Bell, who had been propelled to his position as prosecuting attorney in part by activist group Action St. Louis.
“I’m seeing friendships right now really strained,” Bogard says.
Bogard stresses that antisemitism is far worse on the American right than the left and that in the bigger picture of Missouri politics with its Republican supermajority, the open fissure caused by the Bush-Bell primary is not good for Democrats.
“People who are close with each other, people who are on nonprofit boards with each other, people who are allied in so many important ways for bringing meaningful, progressive change, they feel betrayed by each other.”
Full disclosure: Writer Ryan Krull is a former Riverfront Times staff writer.
