JTA — Rabbi Mara Nathan says watching an antisemitic conspiracy theorist emerge as a serious contender for a US House seat in her Texas district has been “very disorienting.”

Nathan lives and works in San Antonio, where Maureen Galindo, a local activist who has vowed to turn a local immigrant detention center “into a prison for American Zionists,” was the top vote-getter in a Democratic primary in March and now faces a runoff on Tuesday.

Galindo said the ICE agency’s facility “will also be a castration center for pedophiles, which will probably be most of the Zionists” in the post to social media, one of many that have included conspiracy theories that are ostensibly about Israel.

“It seems shocking that someone who is so virulently antisemitic and anti-Zionist has not only been given a voice, but is even now in this primary runoff,” Nathan, the senior rabbi of Temple Beth El, a 150-year-old Reform congregation, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Galindo’s extreme rhetoric has drawn national attention as the runoff in Texas’s 35th Congressional District nears — and increasingly has also drawn condemnation from other Democrats, including some who are themselves critical of Israel and its supporters in the United States.

In a recent video posted to social media responding to accusations of antisemitism, Galindo insisted: “I think billionaire Zionists and their puppet journalists… are fake Jews who create antisemitism, who create the condition for people to think it’s ‘all Jews.'” The reference to “fake Jews” appeared, in context, to refer to conspiracy theories about Jews’ ancestry.

Supercut of Texas 35 Democratic primary candidate Maureen Galindo ranting about Jews and Zionists for 8:30 minutes. Beyond calling for Zionists to be imprisoned, she claims they're not real Jews, they control human trafficking in Texas, and control ICE and DHS to conquer the US. pic.twitter.com/GOaHBXt9aE Advertisement if(typeof rgb_remove_toi_dfp_banner != "function" || !rgb_remove_toi_dfp_banner("#Article_Incontent1")){ window.tude = window.tude || { cmd: [] }; tude.cmd.push(function() { if(navigator.userAgent.indexOf("rgbmedia-app") > -1){ tude.setDeviceType("mobile"); } tude.refreshAdsViaDivMappings([ { divId: 'Article_Incontent1', baseDivId: 'Article_Incontent1', } ]); }); } — Michael Starr (@StarrJpost) May 20, 2026

Supercut of Texas 35 Democratic primary candidate Maureen Galindo........

© The Times of Israel