A publicist named Joseph Wolkin, working for a firm called Noyse Group, sent reporters an email this week.
Wolkin isn’t a neutral party fielding a random assignment — he’s a former staff writer for World Israel News, previously worked at the Consulate General of Israel in New York, and currently also holds a copywriting role at UJA-Federation of New York, a major Jewish charitable organization. His career has run through pro-Israel communications work for years.
The subject line: “INTERVIEW: America’s top interfaith rabbi warns of DSA antisemitism.” And the pitch Wolkin offers up is, Rabbi Marc Schneier, founding senior rabbi of The Hampton Synagogue and president of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, to talk about how boss babe badass Melat Kiros, the 29-year-old democratic socialist who just whooped 15-term Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado’s 1st District primary, is part of a “concerted effort to bifurcate Israel from Judaism.” Get the fuck outta here.
That’s a hell of a claim to build out of a handful of quotes. So let’s look at what Kiros actually said, shall we?
On CNN, she was asked about a firebombing attack in Boulder that targeted a demonstration for Israeli hostages, Melat called it a hate crime and a terrorist attack. She said it made Jewish people in her city and across the country feel unsafe. What she declined to do was certify, on air, before any trial, exactly what was in the head of the man who did it. Her actual point wasn’t “antisemitism doesn’t count.” Nobody knows what that psychopath’s motivations were. We don’t have access to his brain. It was that the actions of the Israeli state and the identity of Jewish people are NOT the same thing, and collapsing them together, is itself, part of what’s putting Jewish communities at risk.
That is not a radical stance. It’s a distinction that plenty of Jewish scholars, rabbis, and organizations have spent years trying to get a hearing for. It is also, apparently, an unforgivable one if you’re running against an entrenched, well funded, AIPAC-backed Democratic incumbent and an opposition wants a clean line of attack.
But let’s go back to the Wolkin pitch and talk about what this bullshit actually does. It takes Melat Kiros’s actual, careful language, language specifically about not conflating a government with a people, and tells reporters it proves she’s trying to do exactly that conflating. It’s a laundering operation feeding a sympathetic, credentialed voice a distorted premise, getting him to say something quotable, and now you’ve got a “rabbi warns” headline instead of a “PR firm spins” headline. That’s the whole play y’all. This is how the machine churns information and spits it out into the narrative they want to push.
It’s always worth knowing who’s behind the play too. Noyse Group describes itself, in its own marketing copy, as building “the credibility that decides whether leaders grow.” The firm’s founder and CEO, Noy Assraf, built her career in Israeli government and military communications before opening Noyse and she served as a spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces, then as a senior media consultant at Crpr, a PR and crisis management firm in Israel, then as Director of Strategic Communications at the Consulate General of Israel in New York. This is a commercial publicity shop, not a newsroom or a civic watchdog. It’s a firm built by someone whose whole career has been Israeli state and military messaging, now selling narrative management as a service. Hell of a coincidence, ya think?
None of this means Kiros is above scrutiny. She’s a first-time candidate about to represent a district in Congress, and every word she says on Israel, Gaza, and antisemitism deserves real examination. But real examination means engaging with what she actually said. It doesn’t mean handing a PR firm’s premise to a rabbi with a national platform and letting him repeat it back as an “interview.”
Just watch Melat’s interviews for yourself and really listen to the words she says, the energy she puts out, the compassion and care behind those words and energy. Anyone with two eyes and two ears can see for themselves and doesn’t need an unAmerican Pro-Israel PR firm to tell us otherwise.
In cases like this, what we should all be asking ourselves is, if the case against Melat Kiros were actually strong, would it even need a publicist?
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Thank you for being here. Seriously. You make this worth doing.
Of course they're trying to turn it against her she's a threat to everything that they're doing. And they're trying to equate socialism with Communism what b*******! We already have socialism in the form of taxpayers paying for roads paying for infrastructure paying for other things they just don't want to pass to stay healthy and live longer.
Keep up the good work girl 💪
What hateful article he wrote. But not surprising 😞