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A Jewish-Muslim art show builds ‘little bridges’ of coexistence
Hannah Finkelshteyn and Aakef Khan spent a lot of time in the same building even before they met. Khan’s filmmaking classes at Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts often met on the same floor where Finkelshteyn, a drawing major, had her studio.
But their paths wouldn’t cross in earnest until after Oct. 7 — when they would become unlikely friends and later co-curators of an exhibition bringing together Jewish and Muslim artists. The result is “Open Archways: by the light of the same moon,” opening Thursday at the Bowery Art Collective in Metuchen, New Jersey.
Finkelshteyn, 23, was born in Brooklyn and raised in East Brunswick, New Jersey, in the Modern Orthodox community, attending Jewish schools up until college.
“Oct. 7 and the reaction to Oct. 7 completely shifted my entire experience of college and my ability to learn and my ability to be a part of the Rutgers community,” she told me at a coffee shop in Manhattan. She and Khan took the train into the city together when we met before Thanksgiving.
The first several days after the attacks went by in a haze, Finkelshteyn recalled. She scrolled through articles, and texted and called her many family members and friends in Israel, where she spent a gap year, to ask, “Are you okay?” and “Are you alive?”
“Grief was palpable” among the Jewish community on campus, she said. But as the days went by, she became increasingly aware of responses and social media posts from other classmates that left her feeling confused and isolated. She even dropped a small group course in part because of what she saw her peers saying online.
“I can’t be sitting here being terrified for my family while this person who’s sitting across from me thinks Oct. 7 was a good thing,” Finkelshteyn said.
The only one in that room who she felt she could have an actual conversation with was a Palestinian classmate. “I asked her if her family was okay, and she asked if my family was okay,” she said. “And we both talked about just not being able to focus on anything.”
Finkelshteyn, who graduated last spring, wanted to talk and to listen, to understand and be understood. But there didn’t seem to be a space for that on campus — until a friend of her then-boyfriend (now husband) suggested they start an “Open Dialogue Table” like one he’d seen elsewhere.
The three of them, along with other like-minded students, began setting up a table on campus in shifts with a sign inviting passersby to come talk about Israel and more. “Once a week, every week, we sat at this table, and we had conversations. And honestly, it made things feel a lot less foggy,” she said.
One day, Khan came over and sat down.
Becoming friends and co-curators
Raised in a religious Muslim family of Pakistani descent, Khan, 22, went to public school during the week and to Saturday school at the mosque in South Brunswick, New Jersey, where he grew up. He first heard news not about the Hamas attacks on the Gaza envelope, he said, but about Israel cutting off water and electricity to Gaza. He and Finkelshteyn were on the same campus, but ensconced in their own communities and vastly different news ecosystems. Khan’s conversations and group chats afterward were full of talk about boycotts and encampments.
“It felt like a big gray cloud was over Rutgers for months,” Khan, who is currently a senior, told me. But as someone who had always felt the urge to ask, “Why?” and challenge his own beliefs, he said he found it unsettling to be surrounded by only one slice of opinions. So he began actively searching for others. “I was looking for a place to feel like I can belong and speak without feeling like I had to censor myself,” he said.
“I need to stand somewhere where I can see both perspectives,” he said he realized, which led him through the doors of Hillel and steered him toward the Open Dialogue Table.
When Khan first sat down, he started chatting with Finkelshteyn’s boyfriend, who quickly made the connection that both Khan and Finkelshteyn were art students. And then the two artists were off, chatting about filmmakers and LiDAR camera technology.
“It started with me trying to be like, ‘All right, like, what is up with Israel?’” Khan said. “But it ended up being, ‘Wow, I just made two new friends.’ And I think once I started to look at it that way, things became a lot less scary.”
He began carving time out to go to Shabbat dinners. It was uncomfortable at first to walk into such an explicitly Jewish space, Khan recalled, but it helped to hear Finkelshteyn or her boyfriend shout his name from across the room and enthusiastically motion him over to sit with them and meet their friends.
Khan and Finkelshteyn kept talking — about art, religion, language, community and current events. “Once we can talk about other things that we’re passionate about, now we can sort of hear each other out on Israel-Palestine and all those things, and be willing to see each other’s perspectives as valid, even if ultimately we don’t align,” Khan said.
They became artistic collaborators and genuine friends. “I never expected that I would invite someone I met at the Open Dialogue Table to my wedding,” said Finkelshteyn, who got married this past summer. But she did, and Khan came out to celebrate the special day — his first Jewish wedding — with his new friends.
In the months since, Khan and Finkelshteyn have been hard at work pulling together a larger group of Jewish and Muslim artists around them from Rutgers and beyond to meet, talk, create and show their work together.
“Open Archways” is their small way of trying to lift the heavy fog of tension and misunderstanding that marked their college experiences post-Oct. 7. “I believe that starts with grassroots work like this of creating spaces where Muslim and Jewish people can intermingle and create friendships,” Khan said. “They may not agree on everything, but at least they can see the other side as human.”
Living ‘by the light of the same moon’
Khalid Khashoggi has always had Jewish friends, he said. He was born in Beirut in 1965, but hasn’t returned to Lebanon since he was 10, when the civil war broke out and his family left for Europe.
At the English and Swiss boarding schools he attended, he found it easier to bond with Jewish students than the other boys. Reflecting back decades later, he said he thinks it’s because “there is more in common between Jewish and Muslim/Arab cultures than with any Anglo-Saxon culture.” He’s remained close ever since with two of those friends, who he said treated him like a brother.
“I just want other members of my culture to experience that warmth,” Khashoggi, who moved to the U.S. for college and settled here afterward, told me on a video call. He’s been running an SAT prep school for 25 years and, more recently, working with young artists and curators as founder and director of the Bowery Art Collective. The latter began right before the pandemic, when Khashoggi noticed all the art portfolios the test prep students were carrying around and suggested they use the school’s space to have an exhibition.
When the war threatened to make connections like his boarding school friendships all the more improbable, and as he witnessed “scary” incidents of antisemitism that were more “mean and violent” than he’d ever seen before, he came up with the idea of a joint exhibition.
“I could tell that both sides were getting pushed apart,” he said, recoiling at the idea of being placed in a stance of immutable opposition against people he considered friends. As he put it: “Don’t tell us who we need to hate.”
“Let’s use the magic of art to reconnect these communities, even if it’s just 10 people,” he said. “There’s no way we can solve the world’s problems,” he added. “But at least if we can make some friends while we’re doing this — across two communities that have been told not to be friends — then that would be great.”
“There’s nothing like friendship to dispel stereotypes,” Khashoggi said.
He and Arianna Astuni, his co-CEO at the test-prep company and BAC’s executive director, quickly found Finkelshteyn, at the recommendation of another student who’d worked with BAC. She was in, without hesitation. But their first call for a Muslim co-curator was met with a lot of opinions and no applications.
“We got some backlash at first,” Astuni told me on a joint video call with Khashoggi. “People get so caught up in the largeness of political issues, and then they’re yelling large things that they really don’t know and they really couldn’t possibly feel.”
For Astuni, who said she was used to watching connections being cultivated in their small gallery and community, the response was surprising. And for her longtime test prep and art collective colleague, it was dispiriting.
“I remember having conversations with friends and saying, I don’t know. I think I’m insane,” Khashoggi said. “Everyone’s telling me that what I’m trying to do is not doable. Or they would be like, yeah, it’s a beautiful idea, but it’s just not the time to do that. It’s not the time to normalize relationships.”
Instead of giving up or waiting for some elusive right time in the distant future, they reworked the ad for a Muslim curator and tried again. This time, applications came in for them to consider. Among them was one from Khan, whom Finkelshteyn had encouraged to submit.
Ultimately, Khashoggi felt, “Aakef was the best applicant. It also helped that he had worked with Hannah before, and knew her, and they had a good dynamic,” he said. “That was really important.”
Together, Finkelshteyn and Khan came up with the exhibition’s subtitle: “by the light of the same moon.” In an environment that tends to emphasize only the differences and tensions between the Muslim and Jewish communities, they wanted to speak honestly about the difficulties while also illuminating points of intersection and understanding.
One of those intersections is the lunar calendar, which both religions follow. “The moon governs when we fast,” Khan said, and determines when Jews and Muslims celebrate holidays and perform certain rituals. More than that, Finkelshteyn added, “it’s something that Muslims and Jews have in common that general American culture does not.”
“The waxing and waning of the moon has welcomed Ramadans and Yom Kippurs, Mawlids and Passover Seders. Its cycle has determined which day we gather in the synagogue for Rosh Hashanah, and which nights we fill the mosque for Taraweeh,” reads the exhibition description they developed. The artists, it says, are exploring “the intersections between Muslim and Jewish culture that begin with the use of the moon as our clock.”
Showing up
“Open Archways” isn’t like most exhibitions, in part because it brings together supposed arch-enemies. That presented a challenge, even among artists interested in interfaith collaborations. “People get worried like, ‘Oh, is there a specific political agenda? If I sign up for this, am I signing my name next to a certain thing that I don’t want to sign my name next to?’” Finkelshteyn said.
But the project veers from a more typical format in other ways, too. Group shows often come together behind the scenes, with curators putting out a call, artists submitting pre-existing work and the selected pieces being presented side-by-side without their creators ever speaking, save for maybe a quick hello at the opening reception. Here, the goal was to facilitate artist meetups as a fundamental part of the process and for these interactions to build little bridges across communities and help inspire the work on display. In practical terms, this meant artists had to be willing to engage and able to make the time commitment.
The curators ultimately assembled a group of 15 Muslim and Jewish artists with diverse religious and geographic backgrounds. The Muslim artists have roots in Pakistan, Lebanon, Turkey, Syria, Burma and Bangladesh, and their Jewish counterparts in Poland, Austria, Romania, Russia, Azerbaijan, Yemen, Israel and more.
They met as a group twice this fall, first in October at the BAC space in Metuchen with a structured agenda — Khan and Finkelshteyn had everyone sit in a circle, introduce themselves, and share something about their culture that they love, before letting everyone mingle and explore the gallery. The second meetup, at a non-alcoholic “anti-bar” and cafe in the East Village in November, was a little more casual, and allowed the conversations about identity, religion, diaspora, gender and art to expand.
“A lot of it was really oriented around, like, what has your experience been? What is your identity to you? What does it mean?” Miki Belenkov, a participating artist, told me on a video call. One of the themes that emerged in the discussion, they recalled, was around “how do we balance our deep emotional and historical connections to these identities, while also navigating being modern people.”
Belenkov, 28, a queer Jewish artist and art therapist in New York City whose parents were refugees from the Soviet Union — their father is from Muslim-majority Azerbaijan — was raised on ideas of “coexistence and mutual respect and appreciation and sharing of traditions,” they said. “It was exciting to see that here there are people trying to build conversation and space for Muslim and Jewish artists.”
After Oct. 7, which happened while Belenkov was in grad school, “I had to make entirely new friends,” they said. “Pretty much just everyone that I had built a community with did not see me as a community member anymore, because of my identity.” They’ve since focused on attending events that “create joy” and forming “community connections with equally peace-loving people.”
Their large-scale textile work in the exhibition, a tablecloth, references both the struggles of the last couple years — including mezuzahs stolen off doorposts and formerly close friends who’ve blocked them on Instagram — but also focuses on “being able to come together in the midst of all of this and still find joy and light.”
Another Jewish artist, Micah Steinerman, 22, is a senior at Rutgers studying drawing and animation whose family’s roots are in Eastern Europe and Yemen. He created a small triptych depicting the holy sites of Jerusalem, foregrounded by a blossoming fruit tree in the center. This is flanked by smaller canvases on either side: One says shalom, as in peace, and the other adapts a quote from his namesake book in the Bible: “Every person will sit under their own fruit tree, and no one will make them afraid.”
But perhaps the highlight of his experience was a collaboration with Khashoggi that melded Arabic and Hebrew calligraphy. “I had become more closed off about my Jewish identity,” he told me on Zoom. Over the course of several sessions with Khashoggi, who taught him some Arabic and oil painting basics, he realized they both related to “having to feel hidden.”
“The painting experience with Micah reconnected me to my own religion, my own culture, my own language. It was something I’d shoved in a box” after leaving Lebanon as a kid, Khashoggi said. “Micah said, ‘Hey, no, let me look in that box, it’s cool.’” That genuine display of interest by someone from another culture, he said, was “healing.”
Building little bridges
On a recent tour to pick up everyone’s finished artwork for installation, Khashoggi was heartened to see a small sign of the project’s success. One of the Muslim artists came along to assist with pickup, and Khashoggi watched as she greeted one of her Jewish colleagues. You can see “the strength of the connection from the way they hug each other,” Khashoggi said.
“I don’t imagine all of a sudden that all Arabs and Muslims and Jews around the world will start hugging each other the way our artists are,” he said. Still, he said, “we have 15 little bridges that we built.”
Khashoggi’s hope, he said, is that “one or two of the people coming to visit will have the wherewithal, the influence, to allow us to open up another show;” he dreams of another “Open Archways” in New York or Paris or Tel Aviv that would expand the circle of Muslim and Jewish artists who are meeting, talking and collaborating.
The BAC gallery where the exhibition is currently installed is dotted with couches and chairs. On opening night, there will be tea and other refreshments and, the curators hope, an opportunity for people to start conversations — maybe a little bit like the one Finkelshteyn and Khan had at the Open Dialogue Table. The art might help.
“You’re looking at the same thing, and you can talk about that thing,” Finkelshteyn said. “I hope there are a few people who come to this exhibit, who come to this reception, or even who just hear about this reception, and think, ‘Oh, people can talk to each other.’”
That doesn’t mean they’ll always be on the same page. She and Khan aren’t, and they said that was scary at first, as they navigated their fledgling friendship. The first time they didn’t agree, Khan recalled, “it felt like the whole place was burning down.” But they soon realized they can still talk and be friends, while also disagreeing.
They, along with Khashoggi, Astuni, and the participating artists, appear clear-eyed about the scale of change this one show is likely to make. But that micro-movement in the right direction seems to be exhilarating to them all the same.
Ali Saracoglu, 30, a New York City–based Muslim artist who moved to the U.S. from Turkey, put it most poetically. “When we check the news, it doesn’t look good,” said Saracoglu, who works in Ebru art, a traditional Turkish form of paper marbling. “In those moments, I remind myself, for a room to be dark, darkness needs to surround everywhere. But if light finds a tiny crack to come in, that’s usually good enough to illuminate the whole room.”
“This exhibit,” he said, “is a step toward finding that crack, or opening that crack ourselves, for the light to come in.”
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Lander unseats Goldman on winning congressional election night for Mamdani
Former City Comptroller Brad Lander handily defeated incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman in the New York Democratic primary Tuesday night, while lesser-known Assemblymember Claire Valdez secured the nomination for another House seat — both after campaigning as sharp critics of Israel and with the endorsement of Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Preliminary results showed Lander with about 66% of the vote to Goldman’s 34%. Valdez won with 56% of the vote for the open seat being vacated by Rep. Nydia Velazquez. Both are virtually assured of winning the general election in November in their heavily Democratic districts.
A third candidate whom Mamdani had endorsed, former Columbia Gaza war encampment organizer Darializa Avila Chevalier, held a slight lead over Rep. Adriano Espaillat on Tuesday night.
Representing a spectrum ranging from liberal Zionist critic (Lander) to longtime activist for the Palestinian cause (Avila Chevalier), the strong results for Mamdani’s chosen candidates is being closely watched nationally in a Democratic Party where many voters say they want the U.S. to distance itself from Israel. All three candidates say they will support cutting off U.S. military aid to Israel, including for the Iron Dome defense system.
At a campaign rally last week, Mamdani compared the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to “monsters” who “move millions in dark money to accomplish a single goal — to preserve their power, so that they can turn us against one another.” The remarks drew widespread condemnation from Jewish leaders, including some Mamdani supporters.
Lander is a high-profile Jewish politician allied with Mamdani, who this election cycle threw his weight behind a slate of progressive candidates who have critiqued hardline pro-Israel money and use the terms “genocide” and “apartheid” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank.
Setting out to challenge the incumbent, Lander zeroed in on Goldman’s support for U.S. military aid to Israel and his past ties to the campaign fundraising group AIPAC during the campaign.
Lander told the New York Times that criticizing AIPAC makes him “queasy” given “the antisemitic tropes at play,” but that he feels an obligation to call out its funding nonetheless as he promises to curtail U.S. military aid to Israel.
In NY-7, another candidate backed by Mamdani defeated the incumbent’s handpicked successor. democratic socialist Valdez won against Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who had the endorsement of outgoing Rep. Velázquez.
But Mamdani’s brand of Israel politics didn’t succeed everywhere: In the Bronx, Rep. Ritchie Torres — one of the Democratic party’s most staunch supporters of Israel — handily defeated Michael Blake, a former state assemblyman who allied with Mamdani during the mayoral primary last year.
For state comptroller, incumbent Thomas DiNapoli — who made additional purchases of Israel bonds in the aftermath of Oct. 7 — won over Jewish challenger Drew Warshaw, who argued that the state should divest from Israel bonds because they help “finance Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wars.”
State Assemblymember Micah Lasher won the race to succeed Rep. Jerry Nadler, who retired after 33 years in the House and served as one of Congress’ leading voices for liberal Jews. In that race, the leading candidates Lasher and Alex Bores had broad agreement in their support of Israel.
The other candidate in the race, Kennedy political scion Jack Schlossberg, had called for conditioning aid to Israel and attempted to draw contrast with Bores and Lasher on the issue. But Schlossberg’s campaign struggled to gain traction amid questions about his lack of political experience.
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Pro-Israel Democrats battle to take on vulnerable Republican Rep. Mike Lawler
(New York Jewish Week) — Voters in New York’s Hudson Valley on Tuesday are choosing a Democrat to challenge the staunchly pro-Israel Republican Rep. Mike Lawler in a heavily Jewish swing district.
Two candidates have emerged as frontrunners in the Democratic primary in New York’s 17th Congressional District, a suburb of New York City that includes about 30,000 Orthodox Jews.
Cait Conley, a military veteran and former national security adviser, leads by double digits in polls this month and prediction markets over Beth Davidson, a member of the Rockland County Legislature who has highlighted her Jewish identity. A poll from Tavern Research last week found that 28% of voters were still undecided as the election approached.
Both are appealing to residents anxious about the cost of living, housing, healthcare and foreign conflicts. The winner will also aim to claw back moderate voters who supported Lawler, one of the most vocally pro-Israel members of Congress and a representative who has forged close ties with Orthodox Jewish voters.
Davidson and Conley have both said they support the United States alliance with Israel while opposing actions by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. During a candidate forum in April, they distanced themselves from Democratic efforts in the Senate to block certain military sales to Israel.
Polling far behind Conley and Davidson is Effie Phillips-Staley, a progressive who says Israel is an apartheid state that has committed genocide in Gaza.
Conley and Davidson say they are marrying pro-Israel views with a liberal agenda, including fighting President Donald Trump. Davidson told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that she wants to create a political home for “Jews that have felt lost in the Democratic party.” She previously served on the board of her White Plains synagogue, Beth Am Shalom, and has touted Jewish values as driving her public service, including tikkun olam, or repairing the world, and welcoming the stranger.
Conley has presented her military experience as an advantage. A former national security adviser in the Biden administration, she has said that she supports a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and views Israel as a critical national security ally.
The winner will face off with Lawler, who has become so closely identified with the district’s Jewish community that he was recently attacked in comments by Sen. Rand Paul’s son, William Paul, who accused the lawmaker of being one of “you people,” although Lawler is not Jewish.
Often working with Democrats, Lawler has proposed a spate of legislation aimed at supporting Israel since he entered Congress in 2023. He co-sponsored the bipartisan Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would require the Department of Education to codify the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, a move championed by major Jewish groups and criticized by progressives for classifying some forms of Israel criticism as antisemitic. The bill passed in the House in 2024 but stalled in the Senate amid free speech concerns and was reintroduced in the House last year.
Lawler also introduced in 2024 the bipartisan Stand with Israel Act, which seeks to halt funding for United Nations agencies that “expel, downgrade, suspend, or otherwise restrict the participation of the State of Israel.” His bipartisan 2025 Bunker Buster Act seeks to equip Israel with massive bombs to target Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.
This year, Lawler has partnered with Democrats on two new measures that he says will combat antisemitism. The Jewish American Security Act introduced this month proposes expanding federal security support for Jewish institutions, and a House resolution from April condemns leftist streamer Hasan Piker and far-right podcaster Candace Owens for “antisemitic hate-filled rhetoric and content.”
Phillips-Staley represents the rising progressive wing of the Democratic party that is sharply critical of Israel, differentiating herself from Lawler as well as Conley and Davidson. Phillips-Staley has said that her views solidified after she traveled to Israel and the West Bank in February. She was criticized by some Democratic officials for doing an interview with Piker.
She told JTA in March that many Jewish residents supported her belief that Israel has committed genocide and the United States should sever military aid.
“I get the most encouragement, from lots of people, but a lot of encouragement from Jews who really challenged me, especially in the beginning, to be brave and say it like it is,” said Philips-Staley.
Republicans are suspected of jumping into the late stage of the race by funding a shadowy new group called Progressive Champions PAC, which mirrors GOP efforts to influence other Democratic primaries nationwide. Davidson publicly disavowed the PAC, which has spent $1.5 million on ads attacking Conley for her contract work for an AI company that works with the Department of Homeland Security, according to the Cook Political Report.
The primary winner will quickly rocket to national prominence in the general election, as Lawler’s seat is considered one of the most likely to flip in November. Democrats outnumber Republicans in the district, which former presidential candidate Kamala Harris won by less than one percentage point in 2024.
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Primary battle between rabbi and Jewish lawyer is a referendum on Mamdani and buffer zones
(New York Jewish Week) — A primary race on New York’s Upper West Side for a state legislative battle pits a rabbi against a Jewish lawyer in a referendum on where Jews stand on Mayor Zohran Mamdani and on the right to protest outside houses of worship.
Stephanie Ruskay would be the first female rabbi elected to state office in U.S. history. Her opponent is the Mamdani-endorsed Eli Northrup, a public defender and the grandson of a Jewish civil rights lawyer who worked on Supreme Court cases to combat antisemitism and racial segregation in the 1950s.
The hotly contested Democratic primary is for the State Assembly’s District 69, which covers much of the Upper West Side and all of Morningside Heights, including the Columbia University campus roiled in 2024 by pro-Palestinian protests over Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Endorsements tell a story of two New York establishments vying over prime legislative real estate: Mamdani’s Israel-critical progressives facing off against the city’s storied Jewish liberals.
Along with Mamdani’s blessing, Northrup has won prized endorsements from left-wing icons who ran now legendary insurgent campaigns: Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose energetic presidential primary run in 2016 helped doom Hillary Clinton’s presidential run; and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose ouster of top Democrat Joseph Crowley in a 2018 primary paved the way for the youthful congressional “Squad.” Mamdani has roiled this election season with endorsements of democratic socialists challenging incumbent congressional Democrats.
Ruskay has been endorsed by leading Jews in New York politics, such as City Council Speaker Julie Menin, City Comptroller Mark Levine, Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal and former Borough President Ruth Messinger. She also has the backing of ActJew, a nonprofit focused on combating antisemitism, and the New York Solidarity Network, a pro-Israel group.
Ruskay and Northrup, who both identify as progressives, are battling in a neighborhood where nearly one-third of households are Jewish. The Assembly seat opened in the fall when current Assembly member Micah Lasher, who is also Jewish, decided to run for Congress.
The district overwhelmingly supported Mamdani in the 2025 mayoral race, when his sharp criticism of Israel broke with the city’s Democratic establishment and fomented ongoing tensions with segments of the Jewish community.
Northrup is a full-throated supporter of the mayor who volunteered for his campaign. Ruskay has voiced more tepid views on Mamdani, acknowledging that many Jewish New Yorkers disagreed with his views about Israel.
“When we agree, I’ll be very excited to work together, and when we don’t agree or when I know that I represent people who have a very different perspective from what’s happening, then my job is to bring that into the room,” Ruskay told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in December.
Ruskay joined New York’s annual Israel Day Parade in May, which Mamdani skipped. She said on X that she was “proud” to attend the gathering, which she described as a reminder of “the deep bonds between New York’s Jewish community and Israel, and of the strength, resilience, and vibrancy of Jewish life.”
Northrup has resisted the long tradition among Jewish Democrats of identifying as a Zionist. “I don’t know that it’s serving us to be categorizing people as Zionist or anti-Zionist,” he told JTA last month. “I certainly don’t see myself in those terms.”
Both candidates have cited their faith and Jewish values as driving their politics. They agree on building more affordable housing, filling the district’s many vacant storefronts, supporting unions and enforcing labor laws. Both have also voiced their commitment to fighting President Donald Trump and his crackdown on immigration.
One of their rare areas of disagreement is the fight over “buffer zones” to insulate synagogues from protests, a flashpoint in New York politics. The city and state both recently passed legislation that restricts demonstrations outside houses of worship. Some Jewish leaders and lawmakers championed the measures in the aftermath of a string of pro-Palestinian rallies outside synagogues, which were hosting events that promoted migration to Israel and real estate sales in Israel and the West Bank.
Ruskay supports the buffer zones. She has argued they are necessary to protect Jews from intimidation, saying during a candidate forum in May, “In the world as we wish it was, I don’t think that you should have [to] have a buffer zone. But in the world that we actually live in right now, I think that we do need one.”
Northrup, meanwhile, said in the forum that outlawing protest within a certain distance of an institution “wouldn’t pass constitutional muster,” citing Planned Parenthood and the ACLU. He told JTA that buffer zones were more symbolic than effective in addressing rising antisemitism, and that he instead supported multifaith education and building alliances across communities.
Various civil rights groups and Jewish progressives, such as Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, have said that buffer zone laws infringe on free speech and assembly. JFREJ has endorsed Northrup.
Northrup’s skepticism of the laws aligns with Mamdani’s views. The mayor resisted signing the City Council’s buffer zone bill pertaining to houses of worship, though it became law with a veto-proof majority, and he vetoed a separate bill implementing buffer zones around schools.
Ruskay has received $25,000 from the American Centerpoint PAC, which was formed on June 11, according to City and State. The PAC’s sole contributor was Adeena Rosen, a key figure in the Solidarity PAC that boosted pro-Israel candidates in 2024 state races.
In a race lacking publicly available polls, fundraising is a significant indicator. The candidates were neck-and-neck in fundraising on Election Day, with Ruskay gathering $436,381 and Northrup raising $443,522, according to Transparency USA.
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