U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner will host a Passover seder Thursday in Maine with Jewish community leaders, including the state chair of the liberal pro-Israel lobby J Street, in a show of Jewish outreach following months of controversy over his Nazi-symbol tattoo and strong condemnation of Israel.
The seder was Platner’s idea and will include a custom haggadah that draws from Jewish tradition across denominations, organizers said.
In an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency prior to the event, Platner said he had extensive personal connections to the Passover holiday.
“Throughout my life I’ve just had a direct family connection to Judaism, and I’ve attended multiple seders,” Platner, an oyster farmer and military veteran, told JTA on Tuesday. “Honestly, it’s one of my favorite of the religious traditions: sitting down, having this very ritualistic way of discussing oppression and discussing freedom and discussing what all that means in relationships to people and spirituality.”
In the interview, Platner revealed new details about his extended Jewish family and his views on Israel. He also reflected on his appearance on a podcast whose host posts derogatory memes about Israel and “goyim” — as well as on the controversy over his tattoo.
Seth Frantzman, an Israeli policy analyst and stepbrother to Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner, discusses Israel’s military offensive in Gaza on Fox News, Aug. 29, 2025. (Screenshot via YouTube)
Platner’s stepfather is Jewish and his stepbrother is Seth Frantzman, an Israel policy analyst, former Jerusalem Post editor, fellow at the conservative think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and author of “The October 7 War: Israel’s Battle for Security in Gaza.” Platner said he remains “very close” with Frantzman’s family, who live in Jerusalem, and has largely avoided mentioning them on the campaign trail out of concern for their privacy.
The Democratic candidate said his own views on Israel, which include his push for an end to U.S. military aid to Israel and his view that the country committed genocide in Gaza, are informed in part by those relationships.
“I want him to be safe. I want his children to be safe. I want his wife to be safe,” Platner said of Frantzman, who did not return a JTA request for comment but wrote favorably of Platner on social media in 2021.
“I do not think that they’re going to be able to live in safety while Palestinians are living under immense amounts of repression, because repression begets intense resistance, which is exactly what we’re seeing,” Platner continued. “I think that the best way to have my stepbrother and his family live in safety is to have everyone in the region also living in safety.”
Platner has ties to another Jewish family through his brother. In fact, the candidate said, the video that first revealed he’d sported a Totenkopf tattoo on his chest for 17 years (unaware of its symbolism, he’s long insisted) was taken at his brother’s Jewish wedding.
That, he told JTA, should be seen as further evidence that no one in his circle knew, prior to media reports on its origins, that his skull-and-crossbones tattoo, which he got while deployed overseas, was a Nazi symbol.
Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner sports a Totenkopf tattoo on his chest, in an archival video released by Platner himself. The skull-and-crossbones symbol is commonly associated with the Nazi SS. Platner later retouched the tattoo to remove the Nazi affiliation. (Screenshot via YouTube)
“I took my shirt off at the wedding and performed a rather ridiculous dance for them as their wedding present,” he told JTA. “If I thought that I had something that had clear white supremacist or antisemitic connotations, I would not have taken my shirt off in front of my extended Jewish family, because that would have been ridiculous.”
Platner retouched his tattoo to remove the Nazi symbology after its origins came to light, resisting calls to drop out of the race over it as well as his past derogatory Internet posts about sexual assault, rural Americans and LGBTQ people.
Since then, he has gained in polling against his primary rival, Gov. Janet Mills, with an Emerson College poll released last week finding him up 55% to Mills’ 28%. (Thirteen percent of respondents were undecided.)
More Democrats are endorsing him, including key senators Elizabeth Warren, Ruben Gallego and Jewish progressive Bernie Sanders, the latter of whom has dismissed concerns about Platner’s tattoo.
Platner’s unconventional rise has positioned him as a vanguard for contemporary progressivism in a state the party sees as a must-win, even as some Jewish groups have expressed concern. His seder plans come as his campaign has recently staffed up in a show of strength; its new communications director previously worked on Jewish Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s 2022 campaign.
Maine’s small Jewish community, which numbers around 19,000, is mixed on Platner. Last year the state’s sole Jewish federation arm, the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine, said it was concerned by Platner’s “broader messaging,” adding that his “repeated, singular focus on not taking money from AIPAC plays into familiar, harmful tropes that Jews or organizations like AIPAC control the government.”
The Jewish Community Alliance did not return a request for comment about whether its views had changed, and Platner’s campaign did not say whether representatives would attend the seder. Some national Jewish leaders, including Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, have expressed concern that Platner’s tattoo could represent a “flirtation with Nazism” — a charge amplified by Republicans including Sen. Ted Cruz and the Republican Jewish Coalition.
Those charges don’t reflect the real Platner, according to one of his lifelong Jewish friends.
“I think that all these questions about his Nazi stuff or whatever, I think it’s really far-fetched and super inaccurate,” Avi Gabel-Richards, a childhood friend who’s helping to organize the seder, told JTA. “As long as I’ve known him he’s basically been one of the most tolerant and accepting people. He’s pretty much the total opposite of what those accusations are saying, in my opinion.”
A staffer at Acadia National Park who said he is not organizationally involved in Jewish causes today, Gabel-Richards recalled that Platner attended his bar mitzvah at a Bangor synagogue. After stories about his friend began circulating, Gabel-Richards said, he suggested Platner plan some kind of event with the Jewish community.
Platner then came up with the seder, but, Gabel-Richards said, “I was never thinking of it as some political advertisement for him in any way.”
Former State Department advisor Steven Koltai delivers the TED talk “World Peace Through Entrepreneurship,” inspired by his work with Israeli and Palestinian entrepreneurs, in Maine, Nov. 23, 2012. Koltai, a chair of J Street Maine, is organizing a Passover seder with progressive Senate candidate Graham Platner. (Screenshot via YouTube)
One local Jewish figure who has embraced Platner is Steven Koltai, a business consultant who advised Hillary Clinton’s State Department on entrepreneurship and is the chair of J Street Maine. Koltai said in an interview that Platner had approached him directly about putting on the seder, which is not an official J Street event.
“My primary interest in Graham is as a Mainer, not as a Jew,” said Koltai, a son of Holocaust survivors and a Hungarian refugee. He also serves on the board of the Jewish immigrant aid group HIAS and authored the book “Peace Through Entrepreneurship,” inspired by his work with Israeli and Palestinian entrepreneurs.
He said Platner was the best candidate to beat Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins.
On his blog last fall, Koltai had expressed reservations about Platner’s tattoo and comments on Israel. “I was alarmed by his hyperbole on the Gaza crisis, calling Israel’s actions a genocide,” Koltai wrote at the time. “But, as I explained to fellow Jewish friends who know how deeply committed I am to the Jewish people and to Israel, Gaza isn’t on the list of top 15 things Mainers voting for their senator most care about.”
Today, Koltai said, Platner had pacified his concerns “in broad strokes.”
Koltai said he believed he and Platner were largely aligned on Israel, including on wanting to see a two-state solution.
“I’m very interested in the United States using its influence to rein in, if not help change, the government of Israel. And Graham is very much in concert with that view,” Koltai said. “I view Graham as somebody who knows and understands a lot about international politics, particularly war. And I think he shares my view that the Israeli government, the current Israeli government, operates way beyond the bounds of not only legality, but frankly, in my view, what is in the interest of long-term peace with the Palestinians.”
Koltai said he would be crafting a custom haggadah, or Passover liturgy, for the seder; he usually does so for his own seders, anyway. Platner’s campaign said around 50 people were expected to attend, though Koltai said the demand was much higher.
“I hope that at least half the people are Jews,” he said.
Platner said his own views on Israel do not exactly align with J Street’s: “I do not let organizations dictate my opinions or politics to me. But I’m happy to work with folks who I think broadly, very much, share similar values and a similar outlook on the future.”
Asked to elaborate, he responded, “In order for the future to be one of safety and justice and decency, I firmly believe that everyone in the region, everyone who’s currently existing within, I would say, the security boundaries of what is currently the State of Israel — to include the occupied territories because I think that, at this point, it’s hard to say there isn’t any Israeli power in those areas — I think absolutely everyone needs to be given the exact same rights and freedoms.”
He continued, “And what that looks like, I’ll be honest, I don’t have the answer. I don’t think anybody has the answer at this point.”
Maine U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner appears on the podcast “Valhalla VFT” with host Nate Cornacchia, Jan. 27, 2026. (Screenshot via YouTube)
Platner also defended his January appearance on a veterans’- and gun-themed podcast whose host, Nate Cornacchia, has spread numerous conspiratorial memes about Jews and Israel. Cornacchia last week posted memes depicting a conservative Israel supporter in a “Best Goy” shirt and an Uncle Sam recruitment poster reading “I Want You to Die for Israel.” On the same episode in which Platner appeared, after the candidate left, Cornacchia signaled his support of far-right Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback, a proponent of the antisemitic “groyper” movement.
Claiming he never checked the host’s Instagram, Platner said his goal was to build outreach for his progressive policies to new constituents.
“That podcast is listened to by almost every single guy I served in the military with,” Platner said. “I went on an avowedly right-wing show, and I talked about how immigrants are a key to our community here in Maine. I advocated for a legal pathway to citizenship for people who are already here. I talked about how ICE was essentially a Gestapo organization that is killing American citizens, and that it needs to be fully defunded and destroyed and turned into something else.”
He continued, “If we don’t do that, then we’re going to cede ground to those who are going to be able to easily lean into things like antisemitism and xenophobia and racism.”
Platner added that his outreach strategy has limits: “There is a difference between going on a show like that, that has some tangential issues, and, for instance, going on Nick Fuentes. F–k that guy.”
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