By Cory Franklin

August 28^th, 2026

At the legendary South Loop delicatessen, Manny’s, every stratum of Chicagoan comes to enjoy the delicious corned beef sandwiches. They eat elbow to elbow – blue collar workers, professionals, journalists, cops, figures from the Outfit and notable Democratic politicians (Republican politicians in Chicago have been extinct for many years). Two of the most prominent Democratic VIPs often seen schmoozing and eating together are close friends, Rahm Emanuel and David Axlerod.

Or maybe Cassius and Brutus, the conspirators against Julius Caesar. Although in Rahm and David’s plotting, the treachery is against their fellow Jews. If what’s going on now is any indication, Emanuel and Axelrod are probably exchanging notes over potato latkes on how best to betray Israel.

Last month, Emanuel, the former mayor and now a wannabe presidential candidate, delivered the first volley in the sell-out of Israel,  ‘The days of taxpayers subsidizing Israel militarily, that’s over. No more financial aid… the US should never spill any blood for the state of Israel’s security.”  Dispiriting words from someone who was once an Israel Defense Forces volunteer.  We wouldn’t want to help fund our best, most trustworthy allies in the Middle East in the face of an existential struggle, would we?

Not to be outdone, his friend Axelrod, former chief strategist and adviser to President Barack Obama, opined on CNN about the recent victory of Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary. Axelrod said of AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group that gave money to El-Sayed’s opponent in a losing cause, “I think it’s a legitimate question: Should essentially an agent of any foreign government, whether it’s Israel or any other, be able to spend—or is it healthy for them to spend—$30 million in a race like this to influence the outcome of that race.”

So, Axelrod has turned AIPAC into an agent of Israel.  The Islamists could not have said it better. But at least he did preface his remarks by identifying himself as the “son of a Jewish refugee.”  Something to lend a patina of moral virtue as he twisted the knife.

Axelrod deserves a double gold medal for hypocrisy and pandering. First, when he was part of Obama’s White House inner circle, he seemed to have had no reservations about AIPAC.  Obama spoke to AIPAC three times, including once when he was seeking its support over Hillary Clinton for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination and again when he was running for reelection in 2012. (Obama pledged to stand by Israel, words that didn’t travel so well in his second term.)  Axelrod was more than happy to welcome AIPAC when it could serve the Obama campaign goals.

Second, the double standard. While questioning AIPAC, Axelrod has yet to say a word about CAIR, the Islamic lobbying group that helped Al-Sayed over the line in Michigan.  As domestic organizations, neither AIPAC nor CAIR is under any legal obligation to register as a foreign agent, and Axelrod knows that.  However, CAIR has a far more dodgy history in the US than AIPAC does. Federal prosecutors named CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation trial, the largest terrorism-financing prosecution in American history. CAIR has also been designated a terrorist organization by the UAE, a US ally. All that evidently has never appeared on David Axelrod’s radar.

Why are these two Jewish influencers espousing positions that amount to betraying Israel? Their remarks could have come from the Hamas press office.  Is Israel, the only multi-religious democracy in the Middle East, somehow less virtuous than Hamas, and its Islamist and Iranian sponsors? Do Axelrod and Emanuel actually put stock in the demonstrably false canards of genocide, apartheid and settler colonialism, which are essentially antisemitic propaganda. Do their politics render them morally blind and preclude them from seeing who is America’s true friend in the region?

This seems to be a pathetic attempt of old white men seeking to remain relevant in the Democratic Party, even as the Al-Sayed primary victory in Michigan demonstrates the Party is turning socialist and antisemitic. At least James Carville, a non-Jew, has the decency to call out the dark turn his Democratic Party has taken, at the expense of his own future as a party consultant.

Emanuel still harbors hope of becoming the Democratic presidential nominee. If the current polls are to be believed, he is delusional. Right now, his poll numbers range somewhere between the microscopic and subatomic. And this is before taking into account the chances the Democratic Socialist and Islamic wings of the Democratic Party — whose candidates a majority of Jewish voters inexplicably still tend to support at the polls — would nominate a Jewish candidate for president.

As long as we’re talking about Shakespeare, Caesar and the Jews, may as well throw a little New Testament into the story. “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”  Axelrod has basically accused American Jews allied with AIPAC of being foreign agents. You don’t get a more antisemitic slur than that. It is a scurrilous charge that the antisemitic wing of the party, as well as the Tucker Carlson wing of the Republican Party, would no doubt nod their heads, smile and concur with.

Meanwhile, Axelrod has received little opprobrium from the mainstream press, an institution increasingly willing and even anxious to praise the undeserving in this situation.

No one would mistake Manny’s Delicatessen for the Curia of Pompey, where Caesar met his end.  But the betrayal of the Jews by Manny’s two-star patrons resembles that of Brutus and Cassius. It is the same story of ruinous personal ambition and treacherous disloyalty.  And the antisemitic slur David Axelrod delivered about AIPAC is “the most unkindest cut of all.”

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Cory Franklin, physician and writer, is a frequent contributor to johnkassnews.com. Director of Medical Intensive Care at Cook County (Illinois) Hospital for 25 years, before retiring he wrote over 80 medical articles, chapters, abstracts, and correspondences in books and professional journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA. In 1999, he was awarded the Shubin-Weil Award, one of only fifty people ever honored as a national role model for the practice and teaching of intensive care medicine. 

Since retirement, Dr. Franklin has been a contributor to the Chicago Tribune op-ed page. His work has been published in the New York Times, New York Post, Washington Post, Chicago Sun-Times and excerpted in the New York Review of Books. Internationally, his work has appeared internationally in Spiked, The Guardian and The Jerusalem Post. For nine years he hosted a weekly audio podcast, Rememberingthepassed, which discusses the obituaries of notable people who have died recently. His 2015 book “Cook County ICU: 30 Years Of Unforgettable Patients and Odd Cases” was a medical history best-seller. In 2024, he co-authored The COVID Diaries: Anatomy of a Contagion As it Happened.

In 1993, he worked as a technical advisor to Harrison Ford and was a role model for the physician character Ford played in the film, The Fugitive.