New Jersey Jewish Dems should vote for the Democrat

In his article in last week’s Jewish Standard/New Jersey Jewish News, Denny Klein of North Caldwell describes himself as a lifelong Democrat but tries to convince fellow Democratic voters like me that we should support the Republican candidate to replace now-Governor Mikie Sherrill in the April 16 special election to Congress in New Jersey’s 11th District (“Why this lifelong Democrat is endorsing Joe Hathaway for Congress,” April 3). He tries to paint public relations executive Hathaway, who worked for former Republican Governor Chris Christie before serving as mayor of Randolph, as the elusive “Republican moderate” we can trust, and Analilia Mejia, the Democratic candidate, as too extreme. He claims that his personal flip to the party of Donald Trump is just about “asking the Democratic Party to remember what it stands for.”

But Jewish Democrats like me certainly have not forgotten what we stand for, including, urgently, the preservation of democracy for everyone in our country; healthcare; stopping gun violence; welcoming the stranger, including hard-working, law-abiding immigrants; the strict separation of church and state; protecting the planet from climate change, and advancing efforts for peace. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for leading Republicans, who for the last decade or so, especially since Donald Trump, have had almost nothing in common with the party of President Eisenhower I lived under as a child.

It is clear to me that Mr. Klein, who takes pains to paint Democrat Mejia in the most negative light possible, has not done sufficient homework on Hathaway, which I’ll discuss later, and he has fundamentally misperceived the nature of our challenge.

Congressional elections are not just contests between individual political combatants, like tennis or boxing matches. They are more like team sports. In our two-party system, the party that holds the majority in the House of Representatives, even if by only one seat, appoints the speaker, who controls the calendar, allowing that party’s legislation to move to a vote or most often entirely blocking the proposals of the minority party. The majority/minority status of the two parties also controls the work of the committees, since for the most part the minority party can’t subpoena witnesses. Now, only two or three votes separate the Republican majority in the House from the Democrats’ minority caucus. Along with the current Republican control of the Senate and the present balance in the Supreme Court, the two- to four-vote majority the Republican party now has in the House has allowed Donald Trump to ride roughshod over the federal government, including blocking the expenditure of funds allocated by Congress, which per the Constitution has the power of the purse.

It is nice to hear Mr. Hathaway say that he disagrees with President Trump on a few specifics, but frankly we have heard this before from a handful of GOP representatives in swing districts, and their promises to work across the aisle have almost never been matched with serious action. Republicans who would have fit into the GOP of earlier times, like Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Mitt Romney, and former New Jersey Governor Christie Whitman, have been unceremoniously drummed out of their party. After the Trump-supported effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election by inciting the members of private militias — the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers — to assault the U.S. Capitol, most of us would consider it impossible for any principled Republican to vote for Donald Trump for another term, as Mr. Hathaway apparently did in 2024.

Joe Hathaway gave away that he is very much the Republican partisan he pretends he isn’t during a recent debate sponsored by the New Jersey Globe. He answered yes to the question of whether he would support the Louisiana Christian nationalist and Trump loyalist House Speaker Mike Johnson to continue in that job, despite the fact that Johnson has persistently done his best to stymie any accountability for Mr. Trump and prevent just the type of commonsense compromises with House Democrats that Hathaway purports to support.

In the same debate, Hathaway promoted the party line-passed Trump-Republican spending bill, which made permanent tax cuts for a minority of Americans last summer, but left it to Ms. Mejia to mention the draconian cuts to healthcare under Medicaid and food assistance included in that so-called Big, Beautiful Bill. The State of New Jersey estimates that 350,000 of our residents stand to lose health insurance coverage — about 20,000 of them in the 11th district — because of this law, which also will force our state to come up with hundreds of millions of dollars to replace the federal food assistance cuts.

Mr. Klein points to the fact that NJ-11th is “one of the wealthiest congressional districts in the country” and draws from this what I think is an incorrect inference that Jews here would object to Democratic party proposals on taxation that Ms. Mejia, along with others including Warren Buffet, have supported, i.e., that investment income should be taxed at the same rate as earned income. From personal experience, I would guess that Jews in our district are somewhat more likely to be salaried professionals who now get the short end of the Republican efforts to reduce taxes on the very rich. A great many of us or our close relations rely on healthcare that is associated with the government programs like the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid, and Medicare that resulted from decades of Democratic Party effort and that Republicans have been trying endlessly to kill or erode. Republicans frequently plead for a mass “Jexodus” of Jewish voters from our blue party, but they consistently fail to understand that as a group we proudly vote our values to support assistance to our neighbors, and not just our pocketbooks. Perhaps Mr. Klein has also been taken in by this misconception.

In a recent interview with NJ Spotlight News, Hathaway announced his agreement with the Trump-supported SAVE Act, which bases itself on the long-discredited contention that non-citizens are voting illegally. This bill would make it harder for millions of citizens to maintain their voter registration. Maintaining our freedom to vote is an oversized issue this year in multiple ways. Trump signed an undoubtedly illegal executive order a few days ago to interfere with the constitutionally mandated state control of voting by requiring the U.S. Postal Service to mail ballots only to voters on lists approved by his administration. A House of Representatives no longer dominated by far-right partisans — where principled disagreement was met with respect rather than vicious attacks and intimidation tactics — would quickly launch a public investigation.

A GBAO Strategies survey commissioned by J Street and conducted at the end of March showed 60 percent of American Jews opposing Trump’s war against Iran, while another poll from the same week commissioned by the Jewish Electorate Institute had this number at 55 percent. But Hathaway says he’s all for it. What’s more, he told the New Jersey Globe debate moderator, “I trust our military leadership to make the right decisions.” This leadership of course refers to our erratic commander-in-chief and the macho-posturing defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, who sports tattoos associated with the crusades and Christian nationalism and routinely fires experienced high-level officers for blatantly dishonorable reasons, like they’re not white men. Under Hegseth, the Naval Academy and other military institutions have removed reading material from their libraries that the administration complains allow too much diversity, including “The Diary of Anne Frank.”

Mr. Klein’s most vehement objection to Mejia appears to be that she has used the contentious term “genocide” to refer to the manner that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has prosecuted the war in Gaza following October 7. Klein, like his preferred Republican candidate, labels such a reference “antisemitic.” Many of us would recoil from having this word applied to the elected leader of the Jewish state just out of consideration of our people’s experience of the Holocaust, which obviously was a historical crime of a different order of magnitude. But we also have to recognize that the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, actually encompasses a much more expansive definition, and that this is a legal question of some complexity, with credible arguments, and expert-scholars, Jewish and otherwise, on both sides. What there can be no dispute about is that such policies as the complete deprivation of food, clean water, and medical supplies to the entire population of Gaza for several months is a war crime, and the deaths of at least 71,000 Gazans — the vast majority civilians, many women and children — at the hands of Netanyahu’s government has been a reprehensible thing that extended far beyond military necessity. It is noteworthy that in recent polls by the Washington Post and others, about 39 percent of American Jews, including a majority of younger Jews, agree with describing this as “genocide.” Before blithely hurling the “antisemitic” label at Ms. Mejia over this word, we should consider that many in our own community would be similarly categorized.

Analilia Mejia lacks experience in foreign policy, as she openly admits. She is very different from former Democratic Congressman Tom Malinowski, who likely would have been able to resume his previously important role on the House Foreign Affairs Committee had he won the now-open seat. There is no question that if Ms. Mejia should become our next representative, she should avail herself of every opportunity to learn a more nuanced understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its history (as she appears already to be doing).

Which brings us to the more substantive matter Mr. Klein mentions.

Mr. Klein says he “strongly supported Tom Malinowski in the Democratic primary” and that he understands that the stealth multimillion-dollar ad operation that AIPAC used to derail Malinowski was a “cynical dishonest campaign,” a point with which I agree entirely. Klein notes that AIPAC opposed Malinowski only because he was unwilling to promise that future military aid to Israel should not “come with conditions.” But he is notably inconsistent when it comes to Ms. Mejia. He says approvingly of Republican Joe Hathaway that “[h]e has publicly called on every Democratic candidate in the race to sign a pro-Israel pledge … without conditions.” In light of recent events, many Americans, both Jewish and otherwise — right, left, and center — are wrestling with this question, some entirely in good faith, others less so. I’m guessing that Mr. Klein may know this, but he never admits or addresses it. He should appreciate that according to the GBAO poll referenced above (and available on the J Street website), only 31 percent of Jewish Americans agree with Republican candidate Hathaway’s idea to continue a virtual blank check for Netanyahu and company, while around 70 percent of us say otherwise with varying degrees of intensity. Ms. Mejia’s position that aid to Israel (along with aid to any other country) should not be unconditional is hardly the outlier view in our community. If one isn’t taking AIPAC’s stance, that should be no more a red line for her than it would be for Mr. Malinowski.

I am the same age as Mr. Klein. I would love to meet him and discuss this further. So far, many indicators suggest that Democrats are continuing to do what’s necessary to take back at least the House of Representatives and perhaps also the Senate this year, and thus to begin to put in place essential checks on the autocratic Donald Trump that the Republican Party has completely refused to do. I have every confidence that Jewish American Democrats in New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District will be an important part of this, playing a similar role to one we have played for many years across our country. Don’t do a “Jexodus,” and certainly don’t stay home. Vote Democratic. It’s that obvious.

Mark Lurinsky of Montclair recently retired from a career in public accounting. He is an activist in local politics.

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