Senator Jon Ossoff is easy to admire. He is handsome, articulate, disciplined, and telegenic – the kind of politician who makes supporters feel they are backing not just a candidate but a future.
I understood that initial, superficial appeal. For a long time, many of us shared it. Not anymore.
In November 2024, 13 months after October 7, the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust, with Israel fighting on seven fronts at once – Ossoff joined Bernie Sanders and a handful of others to block some of the weapons Israel needed to defend itself, backing two of three resolutions to halt the transfer of military equipment.
He said he wanted to send a “message to Israeli politicians.”
But instead, he sent a message to his Jewish constituents: at the hour of maximum threat to the Jewish homeland, it was more important to “virtue signal” to the far-left than to ensure the defense of the only Jewish state on earth.
Then, hypocritically and ironically, he posed with freed Israeli hostages, smoothing over the fact he had voted to deny Israel the arms its soldiers needed to fight the very captors who took them.
His own community was loud and clear in their response – not once, but twice. Nearly 50 Georgia Jewish organizations, representing the vast majority of its engaged members, signed a formal rebuke; 22 rabbis added their own.
On the Senate floor, Ossoff called his commitment to Israel’s security “ironclad.” His community wrote back with the truth: it was not ironclad. It had rusted through.
And this week, the publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times – who has spent years avoiding partisan fights – accused the senator, in an open letter reported by Jewish Insider, of “lying” about his support for Israel.
Criticizing this Israeli government is legitimate; Israelis do it every day, loudly. But there is a difference between criticizing a government and disarming a nation.
You do not take the shield away from 10 million people because you are angry at the man holding it.
So I would ask the senator plainly: On seven fronts – Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, and the rest – how, exactly, would you have protected a child in Sderot? With a statement of concern? With a vote to cut off the weapons?
This is not partisan noise. Esther Panitch, the only Jewish member of the Georgia legislature and a Democrat, wrote at the time that she “cannot overstate how upset Georgia’s Jewish community – especially Democrats – is with our senators.”
Partial loyalty is not loyalty
Mark Mellman, the late founder of Democratic Majority for Israel, said the two (Georgia) senators “voted to endanger Israel by blocking aid to that country.” Ossoff’s own long-time Jewish donors wrote to Governor Kemp urging him to run.
When your most loyal supporters shop for a challenger, the problem is not messaging.
Put Ossoff in a pro-Israel room, and he grows smooth: billions in aid; the arms he blocked, a sliver, less than 5%. He will say that he votes with Israel the overwhelming majority of the time, almost proud of the math.
But no one congratulates a spouse for being faithful 90% of the time.
Fidelity is not a batting average. It is a covenant; you keep it when it is hard, or you did not keep it at all.
On the ordinary votes, the ones that cost him nothing, Ossoff was with us. On those that counted – when Israel was fighting for its survival and the world was watching to see who would flinch – he broke faith.
Partial loyalty is not loyalty. It is betrayal made respectable by arithmetic.
And notice where his voice goes missing. When Graham Platner, the Sanders-backed Maine Democrat, was exposed with a Nazi symbol tattooed on his chest, Ossoff, Georgia’s first Jewish senator, would not condemn the man.
His office managed a single line about “Nazi symbols” in the abstract and left it there – no rebuke of Platner, no call for him to leave the race. He went quiet. Not a profile in courage.
The senator is reliably unreliable.
He has told the digital news outlet Semafor that he is backing Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s new Democratic Senate nominee – a man who calls Israel’s war “genocide and apartheid,” and who, asked directly whether the Jewish state has a right to exist, would not say yes.
Ossoff wants him in the US Senate.
Sen. Jon Ossoff cannot be trusted. 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.
That is why, with more regret than anger, much of this community can no longer stand with him.
The writer is co-founder of the Zalik Foundation, which has invested more than $200 million in Jewish education, thriving Jewish communities, Israel, and families in need.