A Meeting With Scott Wiener's Caucus Consultant Max Migdail Shows How Distant the Senator's Office Is From SD11's Majority Asian-American Constituency
I. The pro-Israel Senator's 11th Senatorial District is majority Asian – so why is he ignoring polls showing outsized support for Palestinians in the Asian American community? II: Back To Marin!
I. A Rally at the California State Capitol and a Meeting with Scott Wiener’s Consultant, Max Migdail
At a park adjacent to the Capitol building, a Chinese-American physician inquired what time the rally was scheduled to end. He had come to lend his support to educators and activists rallying to stop the McCarthy-esque, anti-teacher Assembly Bill 715, but he couldn't take the entire day off. "I have to get back to work," he mentioned to one of the organizing groups, which included Jewish Voice for Peace, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and AROC Action.
A member of the Sacramento chapter of Healthcare Workers for Palestine, and a founding member of the Sacramento chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility, the doctor wore a bright scarf bearing the colors of the Palestinian flag. It matched the scarf worn at the same rally by a retired Jewish teacher – the same retired teacher I wrote about last summer when educators organized to fight AB 715's earlier iteration: AB 1468. At this rally, there were familiar faces from the past year’s activism, as well as some new faces who had traveled from Southern California to fight AB 715.
Both AB 1468 and AB 715 were created by the California Legislative Jewish Caucus, which functions as a de facto arm of the Israel lobby. AB 715 was specifically designed to punish educators for teaching about Palestine, but it doesn't stop there.
Lilly Greenberg-Call, the first Jewish political appointee to resign in protest of the Biden administration's support for Israel's genocide, warned about AB 715 in a recent opinion piece in The New York Times. She described AB 715 as "blurring the line between hate speech and political speech, empowering institutions to investigate, punish, or even ban expression that is supposed to be constitutionally protected."
But AB 715 is also an attack on teachers. As Margarita Berta-Ávila, President of the California Faculty Association, explained during the rally, AB 715 would eliminate teachers' rights to due process, especially for K-12 teachers, circumventing the local bargaining agreement straight to the state level. "We do not need a bill that would create a climate of fear, intimidation and suspicion," she told the assembled educators.
Asian-American Opposition to AB 715 and Support for Palestinians: The Data Behind the Turnout
There continues to be significant Asian American opposition to the anti-Palestinian AB 715, and simultaneous support for Palestinians. This is in line with the most recent polling I could find on this issue that shows Asian Americans have long felt uncomfortable about the US-Israel relationship and its impacts on Palestinians.
Polling conducted in December of 2023, just two months into Israel's genocidal bombing campaign, showed that 49% of Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) adults believed the US is not supportive enough of Palestinians. Meanwhile, only 15% of AAPI adults believed the US is not supportive enough of Israel.
And that was over 20 months ago – before some of the worst Israeli atrocities were live-streamed and recorded by IDF soldiers; before Israel bombed Gaza's schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings into rubble; tortured and raped Palestinian physicians; executed Palestinian paramedics; constricted food and water to the point of famine; and well before the rest of US public opinion started shifting against Israel.
Asian American Support for Palestinians Is Ongoing Despite Higher Risk of Asians Being Targeted by State and Federal Law Enforcement, Including ICE
There are many explanations for why Asian Americans as a group have been more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, which you can read about in this analysis. But one obvious aspect is that many Asian Americans are just one or two generations removed from surviving a genocidal occupation or bombing themselves. Many have aging parents who still suffer from the trauma of WWII, or the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the bombing of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and so on.
But at the same time, there has been a long history of domestic anti-Asian policy in the US, as well as ongoing targeting of Asian Americans by US law enforcement (including ICE and the FBI). Unlike most white Americans, Asian Americans who speak up for Palestine can face deportation. This was particularly obvious with the Asian students deported as a result of pro-Palestinian university protests.
There is a longer, untold history of this sort of targeting of Asian Americans. Beyond the better-known but still under-examined incarceration ("internment") of Japanese Americans during WWII, there are the under-reported impacts on voting and property rights under the 61-year-long Chinese Exclusion Act; the gross abuses of Asian Muslims during the so-called "War on Terror"; and the untold story of the FBI's subsequent targeting and repression of Chinese Americans starting in the 1950s, as Amy Chen's documentary shows.
This discrimination is, of course, linked – not only between the treatment of other Asian American groups (a broad category) but other minority groups in the US. Bonnie Jean Cherry, a Doctoral Candidate at UC Berkeley has been tracing how the management of Indian affairs set the path for Japanese "internment"/incarceration during World War II and was later folded into extrajudicial "war on terror" actions and "border" activities.
One quick takeaway from my recent forays into the archives at UCBerkeley and reading Professors Brian Hayashi and Stephanie Hinnershitz: What we have been taught about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II is highly sanitized. For example, there has been almost no discussion of the actual torture of Japanese American internees who resisted their ill treatment, and barely any institutional memory of those like the Bazelon and Pritzker families that profited from improperly seized Japanese American properties through the Office of Alien Property, a point raised by investigative journalist Gus Russo but otherwise largely ignored.
But what seems equally important is how, in the lengthy struggle for redress, many in the Japanese American community reached out to other targeted groups beyond their own. That same dynamic was in full view at the Capitol rally last Tuesday amongst those fighting AB 715.
That sort of cross-racial solidarity in the fight for redress was especially necessary given the pushback from conservative activists, such as Lillian Baker, who supported Japanese American “internment” throughout her life.
The photo below shows conservative activist Lillian Baker trying to pry Nisei veteran Jim Kawaminami’s testimony from his hands during the Commission of Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians in August 1981. And here’s a great write-up from Densho.org about the hearings.
The Walk from the Rally to "O" Street to Meet with Legislative Staff
Given the additional risks to Asian Americans for speaking out, it is a measure of how toxic AB 715 is that so many Asian Americans, including East, Southeast, West, and South Asians, had the courage to rally against an assembly bill that would prevent educators from even teaching about Palestine. And the name on many peoples' lips as the rally attendees walked to the Legislative offices on O Street to meet with legislative staff was that of Mike Lee.
Mike Lee was the much-respected, retired Sonoma State University President who had been called back to help "right the ship" when SSU later ran into financial trouble. His return coincided with pro-Palestinian student protests. But, in an unusual move for a university president, Lee had gone out to meet the students, where he offered his support for their protests and agreed to student demands, which included: “establishing an Advisory Council of Students for Justice in Palestine, introducing a historic curriculum around Palestinian studies and a statement for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.”
For that simple and pragmatic act of decency, Lee was immediately put on leave for “insubordination”, despite his stellar credentials. He resigned shortly thereafter.
(Lee’s case is particularly interesting given that he is a veteran of the Taiwanese military. Taiwanese-Americans in particular have been pursued as potential pro-Israel advocates by the Israel lobby, as we have seen with pro-Israel Taiwanese-American elected reps, including: former State Assemblyman and current San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu, Berkeley’s City Auditor Jenny Wong, and Livermore City Councilmember Kristie Wang. But these elected officials, with their trips to Israel and cozy relationships with the Israel lobby, do not represent the majority views of Asian Americans – or even ethnic Chinese American views – on Israel/Palestine.)
The dismissal of Mike Lee occurred after Vietnamese-American Viet Thanh Nguyen's 92nd Street Y speaking engagement was canceled because he expressed support for Palestinians, and a few months after Chinese-Canadian physician Yipeng Ge was fired from his medical residency for traveling to Gaza to provide medical assistance.
And it was with awareness of this and so many other retaliatory incidents against other groups that had spoken up for Palestinians that activists and educators of all ethnicities – Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latino, Jewish, Italian and so on – patiently went through the metal detectors at the state legislative offices on O Street for the opportunity to plead once more against AB 715.
Meetings with legislative offices, however important for metrics, are usually fairly rote. Rarely will the actual legislator meet with grassroots activists. Instead a staffer will come out to meet with them. The staffer will listen, present some aspect of the legislator's perspective, after which time hands are shaken, cards and pleasantries are exchanged, and that is all.
But until this Tuesday, I had never been in any meeting with any legislative staff member that was quite like the meeting I attended with Max Migdail.
The Meeting With Max Migdail, Legislative Jewish Caucus Consultant for Senator Scott Wiener:
Max Migdail is listed on Senator Scott Wiener's website as his "Consultant, California Legislative Jewish Caucus". Migdail is in his late 20s, with blue eyes and chestnut hair, although his somewhat baby-faced online photos do not capture his newly chiseled good looks or his near-feline sense of his own handsomeness. Migdail's credentials for the position are not publicly available other than a degree from Tufts and parents who regularly and generously donate to various Jewish nonprofits.
During the meeting, a small group of educators (and one former San Francisco Supervisor) politely brought forward their concerns about AB 715. Migdail surprised his audience not only with his hostile demeanor, but by the unusual claims he made. This was very different from all the other meetings with legislative staffers. For example, last August, we had sat through a very long meeting with pro-Israel State Senator Beck’s aide, Charlie, who had sympathetically and professionally listened to the many concerns brought forward by Jewish, Palestinian, Black and Latino educators about AB 715’s precursor, AB 1468. Charlie had provided some insight into Senator Becker’s thinking, which was part of his job.
To give fair credit, Migdail’s contempt for the constituents in the meeting did fulfill the task of conveying his employer's thinking: Only a few days later, Senator Wiener himself would lash out at a South Asian organizer for AROC Action, Nadia Rahman. This occurred in a public exchange on social media after Rahman released a video making the entirely reasonable statement that the California Legislative Jewish Caucus must be held to account for its promotion of Israel's genocide. If you want the Jewish, printed version of what Nadia Rahman says in the video, Simone Zimmerman has an article saying much the same thing in Jewish Currents.
Of course, both Rahman and Zimmerman are right. There needs to be accountability for genocide. Why does this even need to be said? Why is that so hard for our elected officials to understand?
I provide a few screenshots of Senator Wiener’s unhinged rant against Nadia Rahman for saying the same thing Simone Zimmerman wrote in Jewish Currents in Section III of this article.
The day after the meeting in Wiener’s office, I wrote back to Mr. Migdail and Senator Wiener's Chief of Staff seeking clarification of some of Migdail's claims. I followed up with phone calls. To date, I have received no reply to my questions.
A short summary of just some of Migdail's flimsy claims are as follows:
1. Migdail vehemently pushed back on educators who questioned the claimed increase of a 395% increase in "antisemitic" incidents. He stated that these were not ADL statistics but incidents reported directly to the DOJ.
But this claim by Migdail does not appear to comport with reality. As an attorney in Marin later pointed out to me, "there is absolutely nothing like that reported by the DOJ." There is also the question of whether the DOJ actually tallies “incidents” or “complaint” statistics, as their focus is normally crime data.
When I checked the DOJ website, they referenced not their own data, but data provided by the FBI. The FBI's report notes an increase in reported antisemitic incidents. But as we have seen over the last 22 months, reports of antisemitic acts can be filed over the mere wearing of a keffiyeh, or mere criticism of Israeli policy.
So, in the as-yet-unanswered follow-up email to Senator Wiener’s Chief of Staff and Mr. Migdail, I asked the office to explain what Mr. Migdail meant – for example, what percentage of the "antisemitic" incidents were merely complaints about the wearing of a keffiyeh/Palestinian flag/watermelon pin, complaints about criticism of the State of Israel, etc., which do not in any way constitute antisemitism.
2. Migdail appeared to conflate Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans in response to a question about redress for the Chinese Exclusion Act, and claimed that legislation had been passed to address the injustices of the CEA and other civil rights violations against other non-white groups.
But Migdail provided no example of such legislation, even performative resolutions. This is noteworthy given that Senator Wiener's district is nearly 37% Asian American, with the majority being Chinese American. Asian Americans are the fastest growing voting bloc in the US, and have traditionally voted left of their white counterparts, (although inept leadership from Democrats such as Scott Wiener have alienated many Asian American voters from the Democratic Party.)
In the followup email, I asked whether Mr. Migdail acknowledges the role that San Francisco's influential Jewish American community played in the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act and its extensions, as documented by UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus Fred Rosenbaum.
3. Migdail claimed that no one had been more critical of Israel than Senator Scott Wiener. As evidence for this, Migdail noted the many times that Senator Wiener had criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
But criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu, an indicted war criminal, is not the same thing as criticizing the State of Israel; worse, it is a distraction from the larger crimes that Israel, with US funding and support, is currently enacting.
In the followup email, I asked for any evidence that Senator Wiener has either acknowledged that Israel has been engaged in an ongoing genocide of Palestinians, or acknowledged that Israel is an apartheid state. I also asked why, if Senator Wiener is so critical of Israel, why has he consistently attacked other Jewish Californians who criticize Israel for its genocide of Palestinians and for maintaining an apartheid state.
4. Migdail dismissed concerns about the $8.5 million in state education grants funneled through the Marin County Office of Education to the private, $87-million-in-assets "nonprofit" Jewish Family and Childrens' Services for a deeply biased "Holocaust and Genocide Education" program for California schools.
Migdail did not acknowledge that the JFCS was not qualified to write curriculum, or that the curriculum already existed before the transfer of precious state educational dollars to the pro-Israel JFCS.
5. Migdail claimed that the "Holocaust and Genocide Education" program was created by fourteen independent educator groups as part of the "California Teachers Collaborative".
Migdail did not acknowledge correspondence acquired through Public Records Act requests showing how many of the fourteen "independent" educator groups in the "California Teachers Collaborative" were dependent on JFCS administrators to gain their nonprofit status, or how tightly the "independent" educator groups were controlled by the highly politicized narrative pushed by the JFCS.
6. In response to concerns about the influence of Brooks Allen (Governor Newsom's Education Policy Advisor and Executive Director of the State Board of Education) on the $8.5 million in state educational grants funneled through the Marin County Office of Education to the private, non-profit JFCS, Migdail grew particularly angry and declared in response that Brooks Allen is one of the most respected officials in Sacramento.
This was a shoddy way of evading the issue raised, which has involved the MCOE skimming a percentage of the $8.5 million in state grants. Migdail also declined to address the fact that Brooks Allen is the former legal counsel for the Marin County Office of Education.
7. Migdail asserted during the meeting that AB 715 was necessary because, he alleged, a public high school teacher in Marin County had told a classroom of students that "there are too many Jews in the district." Migdail went on to claim that the district itself confirmed the incident had happened.
But did the District where the alleged incident occurred (Tamalpais Union High School District) actually confirm anything more than that a complaint had been made?
For the sake of argument, let’s suppose that such a statement had been made by a teacher in any district. Why would it necessitate the passage of AB 715, when there is an existing complaint process?
In the followup email, I asked Mr. Migdail to provide any context for equally inflammatory statements that have been routinely made about other groups in schools in California, e.g., that there are too many Chinese, that there are too many Blacks, that there are too many Latinos in any one district? Why is there not an equivalent bill for them, especially given that each one of those groups has been more vulnerable to violent physical attacks than have Jewish Californians?
8. Migdail, asked why Senator Wiener was so focused on antisemitism and relatively unconcerned with the families being separated and abducted by ICE activity under the Trump administration, claimed that Senator Wiener had introduced a bill to require ICE agents to be unmasked during their operations.
In the followup email, I asked what actual difference would it make to a child being improperly seized by ICE whether the agent is masked or not? I also asked for an explanation of what substantive measures Senator Wiener has taken to protect constituents under attack by ICE.
II. Back To Marin
1. Body Found in Apartment Fire in San Rafael's Canal District
An ongoing tragedy has unfolded in the Canal District as a body was found in the wreckage of a recent apartment fire that has since been deemed “suspicious” by the San Rafael Fire Department. The fire broke out at 5:36 a.m. last Thursday and injured at least 8 people and displaced 50-60 residents.
The Marin Independent-Journal declined to report the identity of the building owner (Attorney Scott Bassin, who did not respond to my request for comment) or the context of the location: the entire Canal is a Trump-administration-designated scam "Opportunity Zone”, ripe for development. Unsurprisingly, some of Marin County’s premiere “progressives” were pushing for the Canal and Marin City to “win” OZ status.
Gift card donations for the impacted families are being accepted by the Canal Alliance.
Given the number of fires afflicting working-class dwellings, it may be time to review how many of these fires start – not due to any fault of the renters, but because it is profitable for owners. I am not suggesting that is the case with the fire in San Rafael, but Bench Ansfield’s new book provides an important corrective history to past fires:
2. Top-Secret Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission
On Monday, August 25, the first meeting of Marin County's newly-minted Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission will take place at 10:00 am when working-class people are unlikely to be able to attend, but also when most people are still out of town. The meeting will apparently not be zoom-accessible, which likely means there will be no recording of the meeting except for the recording I plan to make.
You may be wondering why the County is being so secretive about this commission. (What is this, the Star Chamber?) Well, I have run the CPRA's and…. let’s just say, more on the commission soon.
3. Take Action:
Longtime pro-Palestinian activist Jane Jewell alerted me that the DNC has a very big vote on Tuesday on
(a) an immediate ceasefire;
(b) an arms embargo;
(c) suspension of military aid to Israel; and
…the opening of humanitarian corridors. If you can make some phone calls or emails to elected reps before then, that might work, here is a helpful link!
Jewell has also just informed me of this Drop the ADL petition.
4. I'm working on a story about two big FOIA cases here in the North Bay, hope to release it next weekend.
5. Be Ready For Another Trip to Sacramento Right After Labor Day
Legislators have informed us that AB 715 may return on either September 2 or September 3. The post-Labor Day schedule means that most educators will not be able to attend, as they will be back in class. If you want to speak up for Palestine and teachers in the same breath, this is your chance to come to Sacramento. If you sign up for JVP or CAIR or AROC newsletters, or follow their social media accounts, they will let you know the date as soon as it is announced.
6. TUHSD Curriculum
Two weeks ago, I was permitted by the Tamalpais Union High School District to review their Asian American studies curriculum. I found much to admire about what is finally being taught about the Asian American experience, as well as some alarming errors and omissions. But definitely progress, more on that soon.
III. Notes:
As discussed, here are a few screenshots of Senator Wiener’s attack on Nadia Rahman, of AROC Action. Bear in mind that all Rahman had said was the the California Legislative Jewish Caucus, of which Senator Wiener is the Co-Chair, needed to be held accountable for promoting Israel’s genocide.
Instead of addressing his own responsibility for promoting Israel’s genocide, Wiener immediately shifted to insinuating that Rahman is antisemitic. It certainly sounds like a certain Senator might be feeling nervous about the potential for criminal charges or sanctions. You can read the entire exchange on the social media site, Threads.
Thanks as always to patient readers for insights, support, and inspiration.
©2025 Eva Chrysanthe