Why we must vote ‘Jewish’ on Tuesday

To hear the haters tell it, we Jews care nothing about the issues facing this country. We are not loyal Americans, and we prove it every Election Day because we are “one-issue voters.” All we care about at the polls is Israel.

We are not “one-issue voters,” as our voting patterns over the last seven decades amply attest, but we are “one-party voters.” We consistently give Democrats an average 71 percent of our vote, which makes us that party’s second-most reliable voting bloc. (The one exception is the Orthodox vote, which is currently 75 percent Republican.)

The data also show that our votes are selfless, not selfish. We are motivated by a wide range of issues—social justice, gun violence, education, healthcare, and so forth. That is why it is so often said that “Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.”

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That comment was first made 52 years ago in a February 1973 Commentary magazine article by the late sociologist and essayist Milton Himmelfarb, and it remains as true today as it was then. In that article, Himmelfarb noted the paradox that is the Jewish vote. Even though we are demographically similar to traditionally Republican-leaning Episcopalians, we nevertheless overwhelmingly vote for the liberal Democratic candidates favored by lower-income groups, as Puerto Ricans generally were at the time.

The 2024 election is a case in point. When we went to the polls last year, the issues we were most concerned with were October 7, the war in Gaza, and the growing antisemitism here and around the world. The Trump campaign spent tens of millions of dollars trying to convince us that Kamala Harris was wrong for us on all those issues. Nevertheless, and precisely because we do care most about the issues facing this country, she won 71 percent of our vote, while Trump received only 26 percent.

In this Tuesday’s New York City mayoral race, however, we Jews who live there must be “one-issue voters” because the mainstreaming of antisemitism in America demands it. To a lesser degree, this is true for us who live in New Jersey, as well, at least in the gubernatorial race.

Of the two, the mayoral race is the more critical. I have no doubt that Queens Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, the far-and-away frontrunner, is an antisemite despite his protestations. Mamdani tepidly “condemns” what Hamas did on October 7, 2023, and “mourns” its victims, but such remarks pale in comparison to his attacks on the “apartheid” and “genocidal” State of Israel.

He rejects Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, because “I won’t recognize any state’s right to exist through a racial or religious hierarchy.” Calling Israel a Jewish state, he says, undermines the rights of its non-Jewish minorities. By “any state,” however, he means “any Jewish state,” period. Mamdani does recognize the legitimacy of Arab and Muslim states that “exist through a racial or religious hierarchy,” and that have laws on their books that discriminate against non-Muslims — laws that Israel does not have on its books.

For any Jew to make an antisemite the next mayor of the largest Jewish city outside Israel is beyond the pale of acceptability and morality. Voting for Mamdani would also violate the talmudic principle that “all Israel [meaning all Jews] are responsible one for the other.” (See the Babylonian Talmud tractate Shevuot 39a.)

Curtis Sliwa, the Republican in that race, also qualifies for a “no” vote. Last year, he quipped that “antisemitism is in my DNA,” because that is how non-Jews are raised. There is nothing humorous, however, in the outrageously antisemitic remarks he has made over the years. In 2018, for example, Sliwa warned a Hudson Valley audience that Orthodox Jews were trying to “take over your community.” He also said, “All they do is make babies like there’s no tomorrow, and who’s subsidizing that? We are. So are we the shmucks and putzes? Yes.” Politicians, he added, “roll over” for Orthodox donors because “the big machers write the checks, and the checks don’t bounce.”

His apologies are meaningless. As the Babylonian Sage Rav Huna taught, once a person commits a transgression and repeats it, it becomes something he or she considers acceptable to repeat. (See BT Sota 22a.)

It must be noted, however, that Sliwa’s two youngest sons are Jewish and were raised that way, and he is on record as having supported that decision. Their mother, Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz, conceived them with Sliwa through in vitro fertilization. Katz and Sliwa are not a couple, but he has been involved in his sons’ lives and attended their bar mitzvah celebrations. This, however, should not enter into the decision of whether to vote for him on Tuesday.

This leaves New York City’s Jewish voters with what, for many, is the unpalatable choice of voting for the state’s disgraced former governor, Andrew Cuomo, who was forced to resign in 2021 following multiple allegations of sexual harassment.

Given Mamdani’s ill-disguised antisemitism and Sliwa’s tendency to shoot Jews from the lip, Cuomo’s past misdeeds are not relevant in this case. Besides, we Jews are obligated to accept a person’s repentance if it is sincerely made. We must not remind such people of their past sins nor shame them in any way. (See BT Bava Metzia 58b.)

The New Jersey gubernatorial contest is also an urgent one for Jews, even though neither candidate — the Republican Jack Ciattarelli or the Democrat Rep. Mikie Sherrill — appears to harbor antisemitic feelings.

At least one prominent member of Ciattarelli’s inner circle, however, does appear to harbor such feelings, and Ciattarelli’s specious defense of him must concern us.

Dr. Ibrar Nadeem is the Ciattarelli campaign’s unofficial and unpaid “executive director for Muslim relations.” At a “Muslims4JackToo” dinner event he hosted on October 18, he delivered a rambling, often self-aggrandizing speech that not even remotely had anything to do with Jews or Israel until a gratuitous comment he made toward the end. Said he: “Somebody said, ‘You are taking money from Jews.’ I check my bank account every day, brother. It is not there.”

When he took to the microphone, Ciattarelli was clearly unconcerned about the antisemitic implication of that comment. “Dr. Ibrar Nadeem,” he jokingly said to his host, “just once, I wish you would say what’s exactly on your mind.” Ciattarelli then described Nadeem as being a “very impressive man” who “has not let me down one day” since they first met eight months earlier. He then asked everyone to give Nadeem another round of applause. Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a Democrat, was right on point when he said that “a real friend of the Jewish community doesn’t applaud disgusting antisemitic tropes.”

Two days later, Ciattarelli was forced to address the remark, but instead of condemning it, he completely misrepresented it. Nadeem’s statement, Ciattarelli wrote on social media, was taken out of context. Nadeem, he said, was addressing “the grief he gets from some BECAUSE of my unwavering support for the Jewish community and Israel and his own efforts to build bridges between Muslim and non-Muslim communities.” I watched the video of that event twice. Nadeem never mentioned anything about Ciattarelli’s views about Israel or his own efforts at bridge-building.

Ciattarelli also completely misrepresents what Mikie Sherrill has said about her “support” for Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral candidacy and his far-left socialist views. Ciattarelli, for example, claimed that “Sherrill endorses Zohran Mamdani and calls his radical policies ‘interesting.’”

Sherrill has said no such thing.

When an NBC News Philadelphia reporter asked Sherrill whether she would support Mamdani’s candidacy if he won the primary, she did say, “I assume I will.” Since then, however, she has consistently refused to support him because of his repeated statements about Israel and other issues. While she did tell her interviewer that if Mamdani was “going to be working on efficient government, that’s something very interesting to me,” that is a far cry from being “interested in” Mamdani’s radical policies.

Sherrill’s voting record in support of Israel has been unwavering since she entered Congress in 2019. She repeatedly stresses her readiness to help Israel “defend its people and safeguard its sovereignty.” While at times she has called for humanitarian relief for Gaza, she explicitly acknowledges Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas and its ilk, all of whom commit “acts of international terrorism and aggression.”

She also has spoken out consistently against antisemitism, especially on college campuses, and has urged university presidents to take stronger action to protect Jewish students.

For voters in New Jersey, there is also this to consider: Mainstream Democrats are quite vocal in condemning the radical left extremists among them. Too many GOP leaders, however, embrace the extremists in their midst, including in New Jersey. As the prominent Republican strategist Alan Steinberg puts it, the Republican Party in the Garden State has been “kidnapped” by the hatemongers on the far right.

In recent weeks, too, a long-dormant “Nazi” strain has re-emerged within the GOP among its future leaders. In mid-October, Politico reported that Nazi-infused chats are now common among some leaders in the Young Republican National Federation. Those chats — which the GOP has denounced — included jokes about Hitler and the Holocaust, and some even discussed putting opponents in “gas chambers.” Several included the words “I love Hitler.”

We are not “one-issue voters,” but this year we must be because we do care about America.

Shammai Engelmayer is a rabbi-emeritus of Congregation Beth Israel of the Palisades and an adult education teacher in Bergen County. He is the author of eight books and the winner of 10 awards for his commentaries. His website is www.shammai.org.