Scott Wiener grew up helping his mother fold the newsletter for the tiny Conservative synagogue his parents built in rural New Jersey — a congregation so small it borrowed space from a Lutheran church. Half a century later, the California state senator is running for Nancy Pelosi’s seat, bringing a Jewish story rooted in survival to a political moment defined by division.

His view of Israel, shaped by family history and moral discomfort with the Gaza war, puts him at odds with an older generation of Jewish Democrats.

In an interview on Thursday, just hours after Pelosi announced she would step down following four decades of service in Washington, Wiener said his Jewish identity and stories of his ancestors escaping pogroms and fascism in Eastern Europe guide him to take a more human-centered approach to the Israel-Palestinian conflict — one that is often critical of Israel and reflects a broader realignment among Jewish Democrats in recent months.

“I care deeply about Israel as the home of one half of all Jews on the planet,” Wiener said. “And I want to recognize the basic humanity of both Israelis and Palestinians living there to a peaceful existence.”

Wiener, 55, is expressing a growing view among Democratic incumbents and candidates now running for office when speaking about Israel. He was an early supporter of a bilateral ceasefire, called the war in Gaza “indefensible,” and said he would back congressional measures to halt the sale of offensive weapons to Israel to protest the country’s leadership. “In my view, it’s a moral stain” on the U.S.-Israel alliance, he said about Israel’s conduct of the war.

And like Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, who recently announced a primary challenge to Sen. Ed Markey, Wiener has promised not to take contributions from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which has become increasingly unpopular among some mainstream Democrats in recent years. “I’m not seeking AIPAC’s support because I have policy differences with AIPAC,” he said.

Wiener insisted that his view reflects that of the “large majority of Democrats in Congress” who don’t want to sever ties with Israel. “I strongly support the U.S.-Israel relationship,” Wiener said about his position. “I want Israel to have a government that is committed to democracy and to peace and a Palestine that is not being run by Hamas.”

At least six candidates have registered to compete in the June 2026 Democratic primary to succeed Pelosi in California. The field includes Saikat Chakrabarti, a former chief of staff to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who has called the war in Gaza a genocide.

Who is Scott Wiener? 

Born in Philadelphia, Wiener grew up in Turnersville, a rural town in southern New Jersey that he described as being conservative and Christian. When the family moved there in the early 1970s, their neighbors asked why they didn’t have horns, Wiener recalled.

In the 30-minute phone interview, Wiener said his ancestors fled pogroms and state-sponsored antisemitism in the early 1900s from Lithuania, Romania, Russia, and the borderlands of Belarus and Ukraine, arriving in Philadelphia between 1903 and 1909.

His childhood revolved around Judaism. His parents — a small business owner and a teacher — gathered a dozen Jewish families from nearby areas and founded a small Conservative congregation, B’nai Tikvah. At first, the group met in a Lutheran church, draping a sheet over the cross during services.

Rabbi Leonard Zucker, an Orthodox rabbi from Cherry Hill, would come to town each Friday before sundown and sleep at the Wieners’ home for Shabbat so he could walk to the synagogue. Wiener would help his mom, who was the treasurer, fold, stamp and mail the monthly newsletter to members. Within 15 years, the congregation grew to 150 families and moved into its own building.

“I did not have any friends outside of the synagogue until I was in 10th grade,” Wiener said. In public school, he experienced what he describes as a “fair amount of antisemitism.” He said kids called him a kike and a Christ-hater; someone tried to burn a cross on their lawn. He said his sixth-grade history textbook had a chapter about how the Jews begged the Romans to kill Jesus. In high school, he helped form a committee to address religious intolerance after a Christian minister delivered a sermon at a graduation.

Wiener came out as gay while at Duke University, and was elected president of his fraternity.

After college, he spent a year in Santiago, Chile, on a Fulbright scholarship, finding there a local synagogue where he could attend High Holiday services. He later moved to San Francisco to work as a litigation attorney at Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe before becoming a deputy city attorney. He served on the Board of  Supervisors for six years before being elected to the state Senate in 2016. At 6-foot-7, Wiener likes to note that he’s the tallest elected official in the California Legislature. He also co-chairs its Jewish Caucus.

His childhood memories shaped one of his signature legislative victories: a law requiring that antisemitism be explicitly addressed in the state’s ethnic-studies curriculum. The bill, signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom last month, builds on existing civil rights protections to ensure that students of all faiths and backgrounds can participate in public education free from harassment, bullying or bias.

Wiener said he doesn’t consider himself very religious. He rotates between various San Francisco synagogues — Congregation Emanu-El, Sherith Israel and Sha’ar Zahav — on the High Holidays and special occasions.

Wiener’s views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict 

In his statement days after Oct. 7, Wiener declared that “Hamas must be entirely eliminated,” and condemned the subsequent pro-Palestinian protests, one of which disrupted a Halloween pumpkin carving event he hosted in 2024.

But as Israel’s military campaign in Gaza intensified, his rhetoric shifted. Weeks into the war, he had already called for a negotiated ceasefire.

By mid-2025, he was calling the bombardment of Gaza “indefensible,” and in September of this year, he said the Israeli plan to invade Gaza City was “abhorrent and unacceptable.”

In the interview, Wiener said the war in Gaza went “far and beyond self-defense” and rooting out terror. “The obliteration of Gaza and the scale of death among Palestinians,” he said, “is an immoral thing.”

The post-Pelosi test

Pelosi, who often spoke of her pride in her Jewish grandchildren and her father’s early support for Israel’s founding, represented a generation of Democrats for whom unwavering pro-Israel support was a given. Wiener’s bid to succeed her could signal the start of a different era.

In a fundraising email sent Wednesday, the day after Zohran Mamdani, a critic of Israel, was elected New York City’s first Muslim mayor, AIPAC warned that “anti-Israel forces in America are energized, mobilized, and taking the fight directly to us.” The race for Pelosi’s seat could become a key test of how Congress approaches Israel in the years ahead.

Support from Jewish Democrats, including Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland and retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, for a bill restricting offensive arms sales to Israel highlights the growing divide within the party over how to back an ally.

Wiener said his support for restricting U.S. arms sales to Israel would apply only under a right-wing government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “We have to ensure that U.S. taxpayer dollars are not being used to do what Israel just did in Gaza,” he said. “We need to be able to strike that balance and have that kind of relationship where it’s not just a blank check.”

“I hope that changes,” he added. “I hope the conversation can be led by the broad middle — by people who simply want peace.”

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