The survey, released last week by the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, found that 43% of Jewish adults said they identified as Zionist, while 42% said they did not. A much higher share, 69%, said they feel somewhat or very “emotionally attached to Israel.” At the same time, 52% of respondents agreed that “Israel regularly violates the human rights of the Palestinian people.”
Milwaukee, WI
The painful injury history and ‘what-ifs’ of the Milwaukee Bucks in the NBA playoffs
Giannis Antetokounmpo, Bucks teammates react to his historic game vs. 76ers
Giannis Antetokounmpo and teammates Brook Lopez and Pat Connaughton react to his historic triple-double vs. 76ers on April 3, 2025.
The Milwaukee Bucks find themselves confronting a familiar issue when it comes to their postseason aspirations: A star player could be sidelined or dramatically diminished for the biggest games of the year.
It happened to the Bucks last year, the year before, the year before that, the year before that (even though they won a title), in 2010 when the world was learning to Fear the Deer, even back in 1974 when Milwaukee was playing for a second championship.
Damian Lillard’s blood clot adds to a long list of Bucks playoff misfortune, and Milwaukee is once again confronting a daunting playoff challenge. Here’s a look at the bad breaks.
2024: Soleus-powered shut down for Giannis Antetokounmpo
The 2023-24 season was supposed to mark a new start for the Bucks, having acquired star Damian Lillard before the season to team with incumbent stars Giannis Antetokounmpo and Khris Middleton. But only Middleton would play in all six games of the team’s first-round series against Indiana, a 4-2 loss to the Pacers.
Antetokounmpo injured the soleus muscle in his calf in early April, mere weeks before the start of the postseason, and was lost for the rest of the season, though it wasn’t clear until later that he’d be unavailable for every playoff game. Lillard gutted through his own Achilles injury, missing two of the six games, though he averaged 31.3 points per game when available.
2023: Bucks run it back (in a bad way) against Miami
Antetokounmpo was sidelined 11 minutes into Milwaukee’s Game 1 clash with the No. 8-seeded Miami Heat after he injured his back, and Miami took advantage by winning two of the first three games in the first-round series.
Giannis returned in Game 4, and Miami had its own health problem when it lost Tyler Herro. But the Heat won Game 4 and then shocked the Bucks in overtime of Game 5, with Jimmy Butler hitting a layup as time expired to tie the game before a 128-126 win at Fiserv Forum.
The Bucks, at 58-24 to post the best record in the East, won only a single playoff game. The Heat, who also eliminated the Bucks in upset fashion in 2020, went all the way to the NBA Finals before losing to Denver 4-1.
2022: Khris Middleton’s MCL sprain
The Bucks started their NBA title defense with a convincing 4-1 series win over Chicago, but it came with a monster cost: The loss of Middleton to an MCL sprain in Game 2.
Middleton, who had proven to be a matchup nightmare for the Celtics over the years, was unavailable for a big second-round clash against Boston. Still, led by Antetokounmpo and Jrue Holiday, the Bucks took a 3-2 lead before enduring back-to-back lopsided losses and falling in seven games. Boston went on to the Finals and lost to the Warriors 4-2.
To that point in his career, Middleton had been the picture of health, but he was slow to start the 2022-23 season and played in only 33 games, then 55 in 2023-24 before more injury issues at the start of the 2024-25 season. The 2022 postseason is, however, the only time Middleton wasn’t available in the playoffs.
2020: Breakdown in the bubble
Antetokounmpo missed the final game and a half of the second-round series inside the “bubble” of Disney World with a sprained right ankle. Realistically, the Bucks already were in serious trouble, down 3-0 in the series before his injury, and Middleton (36 points) managed to help Milwaukee rescue a Game 4 victory before the Giannis-less Bucks fell in Game 5. The fifth-seeded Heat prevailed over the top seed 4-1.
Perhaps the bigger what-if was the nature of the season itself. The Bucks had a 53-10 record on March 6, easily the best team in the East, before three straight losses before the COVID-19 shutdown (with Giannis sidelined for two of those). When play resumed at the end of July in the unusual format, the Bucks struggled to re-discover their magic, going just 3-5 in games before the playoffs and then losing a first-round game against Orlando before rallying to take the series.
There were bigger fish to fry, including a high-profile protest for social justice, but the Bucks had a special team that never seemed to get off the ground in the bubble.
2010: A gruesome injury to Andrew Bogut
The plucky Milwaukee Bucks took the third-seeded Atlanta Hawks to the brink in the first round, a 4-3 loss that included some shining performances from Brandon Jennings, John Salmons and Carlos Delfino.
It probably would have been a series victory if big man Andrew Bogut had been healthy. After a tremendous season averaging 15.9 points and 10.2 rebounds per game, landing him on the All-NBA third team and getting votes for defensive player of the year, Bogut was lost on April 3 against the Phoenix Suns. He went up for a dunk and fell hard to the ground after defender Amar’e Stoudemire flew in, landing awkwardly on his right arm in a gruesome injury. Bogut broke his right hand, dislocated his elbow and sprained his wrist.
The Bucks (46-36) had won the most games since 2000-01 and wouldn’t win that many again until 2018-19.
2001: The ‘conspiracy’ claims Scott Williams
Power forward Scott Williams wasn’t hurt in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference finals against the Philadelphia 76ers, but he was missing, and Bucks fans today still talk about it.
NBA vice president Stu Jackson re-evaluated an elbow Williams threw against Allen Iverson in Game 6 as a Flagrant II after it was originally ruled a Flagrant I during the game. It was his third flagrant of the postseason, and he surpassed the limit of three “points” against him with the re-evaluation. Williams found out on the team plane en route to Philadelphia that he wouldn’t be allowed to suit up in Game 7.
“I just remember the heartache, the pain of knowing we’re a championship team and to sort of have it taken away from us, without one of our key figures who was playing well in that series,” said current Bucks assistant Darvin Ham, who was inserted into the starting lineup in place of Williams. “To have it go down the way, it did was unfortunate.”
The 76ers won Game 7, 108-91, and advanced to the NBA Finals.
1974: Lucius Allen lost in March
The Bucks’ powerful three-headed monster of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Oscar Robertson and Bob Dandridge carried a lot of the load for the 1974 squad, but Lucius Allen was vital.
Allen was lost March 15 to a knee injury that required surgery, and that loomed large against a Boston team in the Finals that could press and create turnovers. With Allen’s lightning-quick ball-handling off the floor, the Celtics were able to capitalize on the void and won the series in seven games.
Allen’s 17.6 points per game were third on the team that season, well ahead of Robertson (who was playing in his final games that season), and the 26-year-old was second on the team with 5.2 assists.
Bonus: The 2021 championship
If we’re playing a game of “what-if,” it’s worth noting that the Bucks were able to balance out a near-catastrophic loss in the 2021 postseason with some good fortune.
Most everyone remembers the story of Antetokounmpo suffering what looked like a surefire season-ending knee injury in the conference finals against the Atlanta Hawks, a Game 4 loss that tied the series at 2-2. But Middleton, Holiday and Brook Lopez rose to the occasion, winning the final two games of the series, and Antetokounmpo triumphantly returned for an NBA Finals for the ages.
There were no denying some breaks, too.
Hawks star Trae Young didn’t play in Games 4 (an eventual Hawks win after Giannis went out) or 5 (a Bucks win). More prominently in the Eastern Conference semifinals one series earlier, the Brooklyn Nets were ravaged by injuries to James Harden and Kyrie Irving, with the tandem missing functionally seven (and nearly eight) games between them.
There’s also, of course, the famous foot-on-the-line moment at the end of regulation in Game 7, when Kevin Durant appeared to hit a game-winning three-pointer but had to settle for a two that allowed Milwaukee to win in overtime 115-111.
Milwaukee, WI
Survey finds less than half of Jews in Milwaukee identify as Zionists | The Jerusalem Post
Yet another survey has found that fewer than half of Jews in an American city identify as Zionists, this time in Milwaukee, the childhood home of Golda Meir, the Zionist icon and former Israeli prime minister.
The results join a growing number of similar data points generated by Jewish groups that point to evolving, and at times seemingly contradictory, views about Israel among American Jews. A survey released in February by Jewish Federations of North America, an umbrella group, found that 37% of Jews identified as Zionist even as 88% believed that “Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish, Democratic state.”
The findings cut across North American Jewish communities of different regions and sizes and are prompting Jewish leaders to reexamine their assumptions at a time when Israel is shedding support among Americans of all backgrounds.
“A year ago I really would have had a knee-jerk reaction where I was stuck on the word, because I am a Zionist,” Miryam Rosenzweig, the Milwaukee federation’s president and CEO, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about her views on the survey. “What I needed to overcome and understand is that, as a brand, it’s tarnished.” The word, she said, “is tainted.”
‘The values are still there’
Yet, Rosenzweig insisted, for her Jewish community, “the values are still there.”
The Milwaukee area is home to an estimated 27,500 Jews who attend more than a dozen synagogues and six Jewish schools. The local federation operates a number of programs directly and supports a wide range of education, cultural, religious and security initiatives meant to strengthen the Jewish community. (It also gives to a number of national Jewish organizations, including a small grant to 70 Faces Media, JTA’s parent company.)
The local survey, completed by 980 families, was conducted between December 2024 and March 2025, at a time when criticism over Israel’s handling of the war in Gaza was sharply mounting. More than 100 hostages taken when Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, triggering the war, were still in captivity at the survey’s start, while dozens were released during a temporary ceasefire midway through the survey period.
Conducted by researchers at Brandeis University and the University of Chicago’s NORC social research firm, the survey is the federation’s first deep dive into its Jewish population since 2011. It was conducted by email, mail and phone, with options to complete the survey online or over the phone, and has an overall margin of error of 6.5%.
The survey asked about a wide range of topics and, Rosenzweig said, has illuminated unique challenges for the federation, including the region’s aging Jewish population and its relatively lower average household income when compared to similarly sized Jewish communities.
High levels of Jewish ‘participation’
The data also offered unique bright spots, such as high levels of what Rosenzweig classified as Jewish “participation.”
Three-quarters of Jewish children in the area’s interfaith households are being raised Jewish, for example, and nearly one in four of all Jewish children in Milwaukee are enrolled in a Jewish day school or yeshiva, higher than the national average.
But it is the Zionism question that has seized public interest, in part because it was asked at all.
For decades, according to Matthew Boxer, a researcher at Brandeis’s Cohen Center for Jewish Studies who led the Milwaukee study and has worked on many others, local federations conducting population studies would ask about topics such as emotional attachment to Israel, but largely refrained from directly asking their communities whether they identified as Zionists.
That changed with the 2020 Chicago federation survey, also led by Boxer’s team, which found that 40% of the region’s Jewish adults self-identified as Zionist while 80% agreed with the statement “It’s important for Israel to be a Jewish state.”
Since then, Boxer said, around a dozen federations have opted to ask some version of the Zionism question on their surveys. Recently released findings from the federations in Boston and St. Louis found similar results to Chicago’s and Milwaukee’s; new survey results in Austin, Texas, and Orange County, California, are expected later this year. (Some have decided against including the question, too.)
The findings have functioned as something of a Rorschach test for American Jews. Those who are deeply critical of Israel say the fact that a minority of American Jews identify as Zionists prove that American Jewish groups should roll back their support for and engagement with Israel. Those who want to preserve the historic relationship urge looking beyond the label and focusing on the fact that a significant majority of Jews are aligned in their support for traditional tenets of Zionism.
In an essay for JTA published after the national federations group released its survey, Mimi Kravetz, JFNA’s chief impact officer, concluded that most Jews still believe in the “historic definition” of Zionism, while conceding that the term has gone through “definition creep.” She urged federations to “open pathways for learning and belonging,” and avoid “responding with anger when the moment calls for steady leadership.”
For Rosenzweig, who came to Milwaukee in 2019 after years working with Jewish young professionals at Detroit’s federation, polling her community about Zionism was a no-brainer even when they were first conceiving the survey before Oct. 7. “We have to ask the question,” she said.
“The demographic study is not meant to answer what we want to hear,” she said. “We need to know where they stand, where do people agree and disagree?”
While the survey found a split on Zionist identification, it found broad consensus on other issues, sometimes ones that are in tension with each other. For example, 84% of Milwaukee Jews somewhat or strongly agreed with the statement, “I consider it important for Israel to be a Jewish state.” At the same time, 88% agreed that “Israel should be a democratic state for all of its citizens, regardless of religious identity.”
Two ideas could coexist
Rosenzweig said she believes the two ideas could coexist. “Our community can support Israel and support Israel’s right to exist and be a Jewish state, and they’re concerned for the human dignity of Palestinians. It’s not binary,” she said. “And I think that’s really an important message about who American Jews are.”
Rabbi Noah Chertkoff, who leads the Reform Congregation Shalom in the suburb of Fox Point, said he wasn’t surprised by the survey results on Zionism but cautioned against drawing too many conclusions from them.
“I proudly identify as a Zionist, but I also recognize that the word itself has been badly distorted and, at times, deliberately defamed by people more interested in vilifying Jews than engaging seriously with Jewish history, Jewish belief and the Jewish people’s own understanding of our story,” he wrote in an email to JTA.
Chertkoff added that his own congregants have expressed both “real anguish” over Oct. 7, as well as concerns for democracy in Israel and “the suffering of civilians on all sides of the conflict.” He added that the survey should be read as a “mandate”: “If we want the next generation to inherit a durable connection to Israel and Zionism, we cannot rely only on inherited labels.”
Rabbi Lex Rofeberg, a Milwaukee native who runs the alternative Jewish engagement network Judaism Unbound from his current home in Rhode Island, said he believed the survey is surfacing more than mere confusion over the word Zionism.
“As a person who would self-identify as ‘not a Zionist,’ I hope that Jewish organizations in Milwaukee, and beyond, would respond to this finding not by trying to shift my beliefs, or by insisting that I don’t really know what I’m opposing,” he wrote in an email. “I’d hope instead they’d recognize the reality that ‘I’m not a Zionist’ is a sincere, deeply-held belief for a lot of Jews all around the world, and that includes just over 40% of Jews in the greater Milwaukee area.”
Jewish institutions, he suggested, “should respond to lower support for Zionism not with ‘how do we re-brand Zionism’ but rather ‘how can we create meaningful Jewish experiences for folks who are actively not Zionists?’”
Jewish Milwaukee, which Rofeberg calls “awesome” and credits with having “shaped me as a person and a Jew,” could achieve this, he insists.
What the federation does with this new information is still to be determined. Rosenzweig is currently drafting “a very extensive strategic plan,” she told JTA, but said it was too early for specifics. She does hope to focus on points of commonality, rather than trying to convince half of the local Jews they are, or should be, Zionists.
For inspiration, Rosenzweig has been dusting off Milwaukee’s community survey from exactly a century ago. (Meir had already moved to Palestine by way of Denver at the time.) Back then, she said, the community was roughly the same size it is now, and its Jewish funding arms were raising roughly the same amount of money, adjusted for inflation.
“It was talking about the ‘Campaign for Palestine,’ in 1926, because the Jews of Eastern Europe had nowhere to go,” Rosenzweig said. “They were worried about it then. And so today, we’re responding to the moment. And yes, it looks dark. There were dark days, and we survived because we came together. We know how to do this.”
Drone view of the Milwaukee County Courthouse
Check out a bird’s‑eye view of the Milwaukee County Courthouse from a drone
A Milwaukee County Board supervisor wants the public to weigh in on the county’s multi-million dollar project to revamp the the county’s downtown courthouse complex.
In early July, the county updated its project estimate to $897 million to overhaul the crumbling downtown courthouse complex, roughly doubling initial projections.
Supervisor Justin Bielinski, who has been the biggest opponent to the project on the board, authored a resolution calling for a contingent referendum on the Nov. 3 ballot. The referendum would ask voters whether they would require County Board approval for any additional financing needed for the construction phase of the courthouse project.
The resolution, which will go before the finance committee on July 23, also asks for the transfer of $18,000 from the appropriation for contingencies to the Milwaukee County Election Commission to offset the cost of the referendum.
“A capital project of this size is likely to require substantial long-term borrowing, debt service, and future budget commitments by Milwaukee County, which may place upward pressure on the property tax levy to service the debt issued to finance the project,” Bielinski’s resolution says.
The more than 320,000-square-foot Courthouse Complex is almost 100 years old and is home to the county’s criminal courts, County Jail as well as the Sheriff’s and District Attorney’s offices. The existing judicial buildings have been called “severely outdated” and “functionally obsolete,” creating public safety and security concerns over the years as its maintenance backlog exceeds $75 million.
Upon the release of new project estimates, County Executive David Crowley argued he expects his administration’s funding approach to cover the increased costs of the courthouse project and cut the cost to county property tax payers by more than $400 million by tapping other sources.
Crowley has described the project as urgent.
“The Public Safety Building has well surpassed the end of its life. The question in front of us isn’t whether we replace it, but when we will do it and how responsibly we can get it done,” Crowley said in a statement July 2.
The design phase of the new courthouse complex began in late 2024 and with initial timelines expecting to wrap up in 2028 and demolition set to start that year. Construction is expected to take place between 2029 and 2032.
So far, the county has allocated roughly $38.6 million between fiscal years 2024 and 2026 for the preliminary planning, design and consulting work for the project. Approximately $858 million will be needed for the remaining construction.
The county’s adopted capital budget for 2026 was limited to the approved bonding cap of $56.8 million, which leaves $63.3 million in requested bonding authority unfunded, Bielinski’s resolution says, adding that substantial borrowing for the project could limit the county’s ability to finance other major infrastructure needs, such as parks, transit, bridges, roads as well as other public facilities.
“Because of the magnitude and potential countywide fiscal impact of this project, Milwaukee County voters should have a voice through a contingent referendum before the County makes a final construction-phase funding commitment for the [courthouse] project,” the resolution said.
MILWAUKEE, Wis. – Several Milwaukee leaders are condemning recent Immigrations and Customs Enforcement activity in the city, though questions remain whether actions meant to limit the agency within city limits can be enforced.
The group led by U.S. Congresswoman Gwen Moore expressed anger at the nature of the at least 57 confirmed arrests made by ICE agents across Wisconsin during “targeted operations” that began in late June.
“They’re being kidnapped. They’re being disappeared. They’re being rushed through a judicial process without due process because they don’t have any money. And we’re here to decry that,” said Moore during a press conference July 9.
Back in April, Milwaukee Common Council members unanimously passed one of the key pieces of their “ICE Out MKE” package: an ordinance that prohibited ICE agents from wearing masks while working in the city. But the Department of Homeland Security has indicated they will not adhere to the ordinance, with representatives asserting the US Constitution’s Supremacy Clause allows for federal laws to supersede any local ordinance.
“State and local sanctuary politicians attempting to ban our federal law enforcement from wearing masks is despicable and a flagrant attempt to endanger our officers,” said an ICE spokesperson in a statement to WTMJ. “To be crystal clear: we will not abide by unconstitutional bans. The Supremacy Clause makes it clear that state and local sanctuary politicians do not control federal law enforcement.”
During the recent arrests, ICE agents were spotted by groups like Voces de la Frontera wearing masks despite the ordinance. Agents also used the Milwaukee Police Department District 2 parking lot for staging purposes, which is against another “ICE Out” city ordinance. A statement from MPD said they were not told in advance that ICE intended to use the parking lot, and then asked them to leave.
No citations have been written by Milwaukee Police against any agents who have violated the mask ban, with the department citing the need for legal clarity from City Attorney Evan Goyke.
“We’re waiting to see what the city attorney’s advice will be on that,” said Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson July 9 when asked by WTMJ if any of the “ICE Out” package is enforceable.
ICE says those arrested will remain in custody pending removal proceedings.
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