For some Jewish voters in Georgia, neither U.S. Senate choice is simple
Suddenly, Mike Collins is all over Georgia’s Jewish community.
The Republican U.S. Senate nominee turned up this month at a synagogue’s festival in Atlanta’s exurbs. And he met privately with Jewish leaders at the home of a prominent philanthropist as Georgia’s race is surfacing in Jewish media from Atlanta to Jerusalem.
Collins has plenty of ground to make up elsewhere. U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff is the favorite to win reelection and is generating national buzz as a potential presidential contender.
But Collins is trying to exploit one of Ossoff’s most personal fault lines: his criticism of the Israeli government, which has put Georgia’s first Jewish U.S. senator at odds with some influential members of his own community.
“Jon Ossoff is a sellout who is too afraid to stand up for what’s right when his next political promotion is on the line,” Collins said of Ossoff’s Israel policy.
Collins is making that case while confronting an extraordinary problem of his own.
His son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, has used Nazi imagery, spread antisemitic conspiracy theories and promoted white nationalist propaganda to more than 1.5 million followers on social media.
And Collins’ former chief of staff, Kip Talley, pledged to far-right activists he would use his legislative post to seek the release of a Holocaust denier from prison. Talley has since left Collins’ office.
The fight has sparked the biggest political divide in Georgia’s Jewish community since 2014, when Republican Gov. Nathan Deal worked to remind Jewish voters of Jimmy Carter’s criticism of Israel as he campaigned against the former president’s grandson, Jason Carter.
“I have friends who are sitting this one out because they don’t feel comfortable with either option,” said Dov Wilker, the Atlanta-based regional director of the American Jewish Committee. “Others are backing Collins because of his support for Israel even if they’re still concerned about him. And some are going to hold their nose and vote for Ossoff.”
That split is forcing some Jewish voters to weigh Collins’ record on Israel against the controversies surrounding his family and former staff.
“You can’t pick your family. While it’s disappointing to hear about his son-in-law, this doesn’t affect Collins’ commitment to Israel or his voting record,” said Manny Fialkow, a prominent Jewish Republican.
Others are troubled by a background that includes Collins’ embrace of President Donald Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election, a history of incendiary remarks and what they see as a lackluster response to Scheer.
“Mike Collins says he’s already handled the issue with his son-in-law, but he won’t repeat that he condemns the language,” said Laura Kurlander-Nagel, a retired attorney and Jewish activist. “That’s a much bigger red flag than not supporting one of the aid packages to Israel.”
‘Say the words’
Ossoff’s Jewish identity is no minor factor in his political trajectory.
It was key to his unsuccessful 2017 special election bid for a suburban congressional district home to roughly half of Atlanta’s Jewish population. And when Ossoff and Raphael Warnock campaigned together in 2020, they often emphasized they would make history by electing Georgia’s first Jewish senator and first Black senator at the same time.
But a backlash among some Jewish Georgians began building as Israel’s war against Hamas after the Oct. 7, 2023, attack — and the subsequent humanitarian crisis in Gaza — became a flashpoint in U.S. politics.
Ossoff voted in 2024 for two unsuccessful resolutions sponsored by Vermont U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders that sought to block some U.S. weapons transfers to Israel. About 50 prominent Jewish organizations in Georgia criticized the votes, including the Atlanta synagogue where Ossoff earned his bar mitzvah.
Ossoff’s broader record on Israel, though, is more complicated than those votes suggest.
He also rejected a Sanders-backed attempt in April 2025 to block $8.8 billion in arms sales to Israel. Three months later, he opposed an effort to halt a $675 million package of bombs and guidance kits for Israel.
And by April, when Ossoff backed unsuccessful resolutions to block roughly $450 million in sales of bombs and military bulldozers, he was no longer an outlier in his party. A majority of Senate Democrats joined him.
Michael Morris, publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, wrote a scathing open letter last week accusing Ossoff of “lying” to Jewish Georgians when he describes his support for Israel as “ironclad.”
Days later, David Zalik, an Israeli-born American entrepreneur in Atlanta whose foundation helps fund Jewish charities, argued in the Jerusalem Post that Ossoff has lost Georgia’s Jews.
“Sen. Jon Ossoff cannot be trusted,” he wrote. “When the only Jewish state was fighting for its life, he broke faith — and no scorecard, no invocation of his own heritage, can buy it back.”
Yet the criticism of Ossoff hardly reflects a consensus. Many Jewish Georgians reject the idea that chastising the Israeli government or restricting weapons transfers amounts to abandoning Israel. After his 2024 votes triggered pushback, more than 100 Jewish Georgians signed a response praising Ossoff for supporting Israel’s right to defend itself while seeking “regional stability, security and peace.”
When the American Israel Public Affairs Committee attacked Ossoff last year, other Jewish Atlantans publicly defended him. And his Jewish allies have responded to the latest back-and-forth with ringing endorsements in local media.
Few reflect that uneasy divide more clearly than state Rep. Esther Panitch, a Sandy Springs Democrat and the Georgia Legislature’s only Jewish member. She labeled Ossoff a “disappointment” after his 2024 votes.
And even though she endorsed Ossoff, she criticized him in an interview for supporting Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, who called Israel a “rogue state” and accused it of committing genocide.
Still, Panitch said, she’s sticking with Ossoff despite their disagreements. She pointed to Collins’ interaction with an antisemitic social media account and said his condemnation of Scheer rang hollow.
“I disagree with Jon Ossoff and I’m standing with him,” she said. “Both are true.”
Ossoff’s campaign has not responded to the recent criticism, though he’s said in the past the U.S. can’t ignore the “extreme mass deprivation” and starvation of children in Gaza. Nor is he retreating from his opposition to the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.
At his Sunday rally in Atlanta, Ossoff said the conflict “drained our stockpiles to achieve nothing” and argued that Trump and his MAGA allies “lied nonstop about this war like they lie about everything.”
‘Driven by the record’
The fight over Israel has become a proxy for a much broader political realignment, with stakes that extend well beyond Georgia’s relatively small Jewish electorate.
An Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll this spring found 27% of Georgia Democrats believe supporting Israel is in the national interest, while 55% disagreed. Among Republicans, the numbers were almost reversed.
Collins is betting that divide gives him an opening with voters like Susan Kublanow, a market researcher who attended the Jewish festival in Cumming. Though Kublanow sees Ossoff as “bright and effective,” she said there’s a pro-Israel “record of proof” in Collins’ favor.
“Am I going to disintegrate Collins’ record because of some press on his son-in-law? No way,” she said. “And that’s what I’m telling my Jewish friends who are extremely liberal that this is a time for us to be driven by the record.”
That is central to Collins’ pitch. At a recent gathering at the Sandy Springs home of entrepreneur and philanthropist Kirk Halpern, he urged Jewish voters to judge him by his own actions.
Atlanta Jewish Times editor Sasha Heller, who took notes during the meeting and shared them with the AJC, noted one guest pushed Collins to “specifically denounce white supremacy so we can feel comfortable voting for you.” Collins replied: “Hate has no place in America.”
“Please note that he did not denounce white supremacy, even when put on the spot in a room filled with approximately 80 Jews,” Heller wrote of the event.
Halpern came away with a far different impression. He said he was so impressed by Collins that he would trust him to challenge a group of neo-Nazis to renounce their views if they were locked in a room together.
“And if Mike was unable to convince them, and it got to a physical fight, there’s no question in my mind he’d be fighting alongside me.”