Shadowy GOP firm is behind pressure campaign on Schumer over antisemitism bill

By Arno Rosenfeld
November 19, 2024

Television ads and mailers in New York and several battleground states slammed Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer this summer for his purported opposition to a bill addressing antisemitism.

“Schumer alone blocks it from coming to a vote,” the narrator intoned as scenes of violence at protests against Israel flashed on the screen. “Faced with blind hatred, Chuck Schumer plays politics.”

The group that spent $2 million on the ads, the Florence Avenue Initiative, which described itself as a coalition of “concerned Jewish donors” angry that Schumer was not supporting the Antisemitism Awareness Act, a bipartisan bill that aims to crackdown on anti-Zionism on college campuses. Now, Schumer has announced he will attach the bill to another expected to sail through Congress, and I have found records showing the ads were purchased by a Republican firm that has run other deceptive campaigns, underscoring the degree to which the cause of fighting antisemitism has become a political cudgel since Oct. 7.

Those records, which have not been previously reported, show that the Florence Avenue Initiative is run by Howard Kenyon, Sara Lytle and David Neelley out of a UPS box outside Austin, Texas, and that the group hired Del Cielo Media to purchase its TV ads.

Kenyon, the president of FAI, did not respond to requests for comment.

Del Cielo, Spanish for “from heaven,” has previously bought ads for conservative dark money campaigns. In 2019, it ran spots opposing limits on hospital bills for what it claimed was a coalition of doctors and patients but was in fact at the behest of two private equity-backed medical firms that made money off high hospital bills. And back in 2013, the firm was behind a campaign attacking President Barack Obama’s nominee for defense secretary as “anti-gay” and “anti-Israel” — a campaign that purported to be on behalf of a Democratic gay rights group but news reports said was in fact a Republican project.

This election cycle, the firm was also paid more than $7 million to run attack ads against Sen. Bob Casey, a Pennsylvania Democrat who has been one of the strongest supporters of the very same antisemitism bill the group attacked Schumer for supposedly opposing. The anti-Casey ads focused mostly on immigration, not antisemitism.

The Antisemitism Awareness Act would require the Department of Education to classify anti-Zionism as antisemitic when investigating discrimination. It has both support and opposition in both parties; at least two Democrats and two Republicans are said to have spent months blocking it from moving forward due to free speech concerns.

I was unable to find much background information about Kenyon, Lytle and Neelley, including what other political activities or Jewish-connected activism they may have been involved with. It’s possible, of course, that they are in fact leading a coalition of concerned Jewish donors whose only goal is passing this legislation, and that they happened to believe that a secretive Republican ad firm was the best partner to work with on that project.

But on Friday, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson gave additional reason to think that the campaign to pass the antisemitism bill is at least partly a partisan stunt. Hours after Schumer finally agreed to help it become law, Johnson said he would block it.

“It sounds like they’re just trying to drive a wedge between Democrats,” said Kevin Rachlin, a lobbyist for the Nexus Project, an antisemitism advocacy group that opposes the bill. “They want this alive because it causes hardship for Democrats.”

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