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Ritchie Torres’ challengers are testing how Israel plays in the Bronx — and taking aim at ‘Zionists’ in a Jewish neighborhood
(New York Jewish Week) — In his campaign to unseat the Bronx’s pro-Israel congressman, Ritchie Torres, political organizer Jose Vega has referred to the New York City borough as “Gaza West.”
In both Gaza and the Bronx, he’s said, young people’s lives are “being destroyed.” And in a recent video, Vega identified what he sees as the root of the Bronx’s problem: the concentration of power in Riverdale, the neighborhood where much of the district’s Jewish population resides.
“Rich people like to live in areas where they can buy the politicians easily — like Ritchie Torres, who is bought and controlled by Zionist influencers and millionaires, who all live in Riverdale,” Vega said in a recent video.
The video included photos of Torres meeting with Jewish leaders, with motion graphics highlighting the outline of a kippah on Torres’ head. It has drawn condemnation from Jewish leaders, who accused Vega of using antisemitic tropes.
“Just because you use the word Zionist instead of Jew doesn’t make it any less antisemitic,” said Eric Dinowitz, Riverdale’s Jewish City Council member. “Especially in your video when you have little traces around yarmulkes. Like, it is very clearly an anti-Jewish sentiment that is driving his argument.”
Rabbi Binyamin Krauss, principal of the Modern Orthodox day school SAR Academy, called the video “ugly, ugly, old-fashioned antisemitism.”
The video has served as a particularly contentious chapter in a Democratic primary race for Torres’ seat, which has often revolved around the incumbent’s support for Israel — and which could be a test of how strongly a Democratic primary campaign centered around Israel resonates with voters.
Torres represents New York’s 15th Congressional District, which covers a large part of the Bronx and is one of the poorest districts in the country. And in a moment when many progressives are hoping to take on moderate pro-Israel Democrats, he has made himself an obvious target.
A former City Council member who joined Congress in 2021, Torres is a vocal pro-Israel advocate who’s said he always has been and “always will be” a Zionist and has called himself “the embodiment of a pro-Israel progressive.” He’s received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, and been enthusiastically embraced by pro-Israel Jews in his district and across the city. In December, children from local Jewish schools serenaded him as he received the Shamash Leadership Award from the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, in a ceremony held at SAR.
Pro-Palestinian activists as well as some local constituents, meanwhile, have taken aim at Torres’ support for Israel, claiming he’s more focused on foreign policy than his own Bronx district. The Jewish and anti-Zionist podcaster Adam Friedland tore into Torres during an interview last year that went viral.
Torres’ spokesperson has said in statements that the congressman is focused on issues such as housing, affordability and standing up to Donald Trump.
“Voters across the Bronx, no matter their religion, race, or background, trust Ritchie Torres to be their voice in Washington because he is a lifelong resident who delivers real results,” said Torres’ spokesperson, Benny Stanislawski, in a statement. “He remains focused on the issues that matter most to his community, from public housing to affordability, while forcefully pushing back against the harmful attacks coming from the Trump administration, whether they be ICE’s abuses or repeated cuts to the social safety net.”
Stanislawski continued, “Efforts to divide the Bronx and pit communities against one another will fail, because this borough knows who is fighting for them and who is simply desperately chasing relevance.”
But with a primary coming up in June, some of his challengers — and many of New York City’s progressive voters, who recently elected an anti-Zionist mayor in Zohran Mamdani — are hoping that Torres’ support for Israel will work against him. It is the first time Torres has faced a primary challenge since taking office.
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The three-term congressman’s challengers include Michael Blake, the former State Assembly member who recently ran an unsuccessful mayoral campaign; Vega, a 26-year-old political organizer from the LaRouche movement, which has been described as conspiracy-driven and “cultlike”; Dalourny Nemorin, a public defender and Democratic Socialists of America organizer; and TikTok musician Jon LaTona.
Andre Easton, a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, is running as an independent in November’s general election.
The only challenger with a record of supporting Israel, State Assembly member Amanda Septimo, suspended her campaign soon after launching it, citing a recent lupus diagnosis.
Blake, who lost the primary against Torres for the same district in 2020, has made Torres’ donations from AIPAC his focal point.
A former vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, Blake said in a phone interview that Democrats, and “especially a true progressive Democrat should be opposed” to positions that AIPAC espouses, such as that the United States should provide military aid to Israel.
Blake kicked off his campaign with an endorsement from former mayor Bill de Blasio, and a launch video slamming Torres for taking donations from AIPAC.
The video drew allegations of fanning the flames of antisemitism, in part because it featured Guy Christensen, an influencer who justified the killing of two Israeli embassy workers near the Capital Jewish Museum in D.C. last year. Blake has said including Christensen in the video was “a miss”; his campaign has since taken down the original video and reposted a new version that does not feature Christensen.
Skeptics pointed out that Blake himself had previously spoken at AIPAC events and attended a trip to Israel that it ran. But he has since spoken out against the organization and scrubbed posts from his social media profiles, while sharply criticizing Israel for committing a “genocide.”
Blake’s change of heart was convincing enough to earn him praise from Track AIPAC, the X account with more than 400,000 followers that works “to end AIPAC and the Israel lobby’s stranglehold on American Democracy” by documenting politicians’ campaign donation numbers from AIPAC and other pro-Israel lobbying groups.
“AIPAC’s Rep. Ritchie Torres has a serious, anti-genocide, anti-apartheid primary challenger in #NY15!” the account posted. “@MrMikeBlake is taking a courageous stand against Israel lobby corruption!”
Included in Blake’s launch video was a clip of Mamdani praising Blake; the two cross-endorsed each other toward the end of the mayoral Democratic primary, in which Blake finished eighth.
Mamdani, whose endorsement could boost a candidate’s profile among progressives, has not weighed in on the 15th district race — and until recently, Blake wasn’t the only candidate showcasing his relationship with the new mayor.
Septimo, who was elected to a second term in the State Assembly in 2024, told Politico that Mamdani, a former colleague in Albany, is “supportive of me and my efforts to deepen my work and the reach of my work.” During last year’s mayoral election, the New York Times wrote that Septimo was part of Mamdani’s inner circle and “brain trust.”
Unlike Blake — and unlike Mamdani himself — Septimo is a longtime supporter of Israel. She strongly opposed Mamdani’s failed “Not On Our Dime” legislation which was aimed at blocking nonprofits from funding Israeli settlements in the West Bank. She also went on an AIPAC-sponsored trip to Israel in 2016, and visited again following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack.
Septimo had said her campaign would focus on “centering people in the Bronx and what they’re facing on a daily basis,” rather than international issues. But she suspended her bid last week when she revealed that she had been diagnosed with lupus.
By keeping international issues in the background, Septimo had taken a starkly different approach from Blake’s anti-AIPAC campaign — a move that might be more resonant with voters in the district, according to a political strategist.
“I don’t know if this is a winning approach for Michael Blake,” said Democratic strategist Trip Yang. “Ritchie Torres is a fairly well-liked incumbent in his district, and he has over $14 million in the bank.”
Yang added that it was affordability, and not Israel-Gaza politics, that fueled Mamdani’s rise.
Ross Barkan, a journalist and one-time State Senate candidate, said he doesn’t see Israel as being central to Bronx voters’ priorities in the way that it might be in more heavily Jewish districts, such as the 10th Congressional District race between Rep. Dan Goldman and Brad Lander.
“It’s just not a place where that many voters are emotionally tied to Israel,” Barkan said of the 15th district. “So whether you’re for Palestinian rights or for Israel, it might not resonate much either way.”
That characterization would be news to Jews living in Riverdale, one of the most Jewish neighborhoods in the city where Israeli flags hang on front lawns and synagogues and Ha-Makolet: Shoshi’s Market carries a wide range of Israeli products. The neighborhood is home not only to SAR but to a nondenominational day school, Kinneret, whose founders in 1947 included the Zionist leader Golda Meir — and whose portrait hangs in the hallway.
According to a 2023 UJA-Federation of New York community study, there are 16,000 Jewish adults and 4,000 Jewish children living in Riverdale and the adjacent Kingsbridge neighborhood. Jews are a small minority across the Bronx, though, with an estimated population of 29,000 in the borough of 1.4 million, approximately half of whom live in the 15th district.
Torres was already popular in the district before Riverdale was added in 2022. But the neighborhood has a special bond with him.
“As Jews in this community, we obviously support Ritchie, and would love that the vote gets out for him,” said Michael Brown, a Jewish Riverdale resident, in an interview. “It’s not just his support for Jews, but he’s been good for his whole constituency.”
Brown said his daughter attends SAR, where Torres has been a frequent guest. “I know, as a congressman, I’m not supposed to have favorites — but SAR is one of my favorites because it is a special and magical place,” Torres told the entire student body during a December 2023 visit, a day after he was heckled for his Israel views on the Upper East Side.
“I actually gave him a report card last year because he spent so much time here,” joked Krauss, the principal. Krauss said he’s been to Israel with Torres twice, including a 2024 trip with a group of Bronx leaders during which they met with Yoav Gallant, then the defense minister.
Torres has consistently voted on pro-Israel positions in Congress, and in January 2024, he left the Congressional Progressive Caucus as his identification with Israel made him increasingly an outlier on the left.
Dinowitz, who represents Riverdale, Kingsbridge and a few adjacent Bronx neighborhoods, is the Chair of City Council’s Jewish Caucus, and left the Progressive Caucus in February 2023.
“With someone like Ritchie in Congress, a lot of us do feel safer, knowing that someone’s not going to shy away from their support of the Jewish community because it may be politically convenient at this time or that time,” Dinowitz said.
Thomas Gardner, the senior rabbi of the Reform synagogue Riverdale Temple, said everyone he’s spoken with has “been very positive about Ritchie Torres.”
Gardner said Torres told him that the most frequent complaint he hears walking around the district is that he supports Israel despite the war in Gaza. Gardner pointed to Torres’ criticism of Netanyahu — that Netanyahu has done “irreparable damage” to Israel’s support among Democrats — as a sign of his alignment with a number of constituents.
“My personal feeling is that his statements were very much along the lines of what most of my congregants think,” Gardner said. “They’re very pro-Israel but they’re not pro-Netanyahu. They believe in Israel and hope that it is strong and exists. But they also hope that the Palestinians don’t suffer. Palestinians need better leadership. The Palestinians need peace.”
For many of Torres’ critics, simply being anti-Netanyahu falls short of the mark.
Jose Vega is taking a Michael Blake-like approach to capture those critics’ attention, having launched his campaign at a town hall called “The Bronx is ‘Gaza West’: Rebuilding Starts Here — and There.”
Vega is part of the LaRouche movement, which follows the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche, who reportedly said that only one and a half million Jews died in the Holocaust, and that the Ku Klux Klan was founded on behalf of B’nai Brith. Vega has made a point of centering Torres’ views on Israel, and even confronted him in a Bronx restaurant about them.
“You are responsible for the death of thousands of Palestinian children, thousands of Ukrainian children — you love funding war,” Vega declared in a video that he took of the confrontation.
Vega posted another video on X of a billboard in the Bronx that featured a photo of Torres and the message, “For every Palestinian child that’s murdered… your Congressman, Ritchie Torres, gains a profit. Let the Palestinian children live.”
Vega said the video was sent to him by a “Torres hater,” though JNS reported that the billboard’s message may have been AI-generated. (Torres called the message “lies and libels that are meant to incite political violence,” in a statement.)
A couple of weeks later, Vega appeared on a video podcast called the Jimmy Dore Show, and said with a smile that he “will not confirm or deny” whether he, in fact, took the video himself, though he did firmly state that “it’s not artificial intelligence, because I hate AI.”
Vega was endorsed by the Anti-Zionist America PAC, a non-partisan group that has endorsed a range of candidates including Democrats, Libertarian independents and America First Republicans calling for mass deportations, on the basis of their anti-Israel views.
His recent remarks about Riverdale Zionists controlling Torres and the district, which came during an interview with anti-Israel influencer Erik Warsaw, drew strong reactions from Jewish leaders such as Krauss, who said he was “sickened,” and Dinowitz, who called the video “frightening.”
“I mean, he wasn’t even trying to hide his antisemitism,” Dinowitz said.
There is no polling data yet for the race, and Vega, whose campaign has received about $101,000, is the only challenger to have reported receipts to the Federal Election Commission. Torres, meanwhile, has $14.3 million in cash on hand, rolled over from previous elections.
Dalourny Nemorin, a public defense attorney and DSA organizer, is running on domestic issues like housing, healthcare and immigrants’ rights, though she also criticized Torres for his AIPAC support in an interview with the Bronx Times.
His funding from AIPAC and pro-Israel views, she said in November, have led him to “deny the existence of genocide in Palestine, while we watch in real time as people starve to death.”
When asked by a Reddit user why her campaign site doesn’t emphasize her position on taking AIPAC money, Nemorin said she “wanted to highlight the issues Ritchie was ignoring and not further platform they [sic] people who keeps him preoccupied.”
Meanwhile, music TikToker Jon LaTona has said little about his candidacy. He has worn what appears to be a keffiyeh in unrelated videos, indicating an opposition to Torres’ pro-Israel stance, though the TikTok account for his campaign has been taken down.
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Why I’m vibing with the pope’s first big statement
I have long been obsessed with the Vatican and the inner workings of the papacy. (I majored and did my Master’s in religious studies.) But usually other people are not as tickled as I am by analyzing the newest theological statements from the Holy See.
Not this week. Pope Leo XIV just put out his first encyclical — the term used to refer to official statements outlining the church’s stance on a topic — and it has gone viral. “Spitting fire right out the gate,” said one of many similar trending posts, as though the encyclical was a rap song.
The topic is buzzy: AI, which the pope casts as one of the greatest threats to human flourishing and morality. (The encyclical is titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity” in English, if that gives you the gist.) “Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur,” it opens, “ is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.”
The document notes many of the concrete risks of AI — sexual abuse, distortion of facts, job loss — and calls for pragmatic solutions. But it is, at its heart, a testament to what makes humans human, written with palpable adoration for the people of the world: our creativity, our empathy, even our weaknesses. It’s a declaration that machines can never have the ineffable qualities of God’s children.
Structuring our world around technology, Leo writes, reduces “creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency.”
Later, in a paean to the importance of deep thought over easy answers, he goes on: “The speed and ease with which answers or summaries can be obtained risk extinguishing the desire to ask questions,” he writes, calling on the world “to protect our young people from the promise of the perfect machine” and warning against rendering “human thought seemingly superfluous precisely when it is most needed.”
“Magnificatus Humanitas” is a major statement, both in length — more than 43,000 words — and in symbolism. A pope’s first encyclical indicates the issues they believe are most important to the church, and signals the likely direction of their papacy.
That direction, for Pope Leo, is to be a voice for moral leadership, writ large. He addressed the encyclical not only to Catholics or even Christians, but “to all men and women of goodwill,” and cited thinkers like Hannah Arendt and J.R.R. Tolkien alongside the Bible.
It’s a declaration of a new — or, arguably, very old — relevance for religious leaders. As people rush through our increasingly fast-paced, frantic world, striving to keep up with the newest technology or geopolitical shift affecting markets and jobs, the slow-moving, zoomed-out perspective of religious leaders seems to be more and more important.
The Vatican held massive authority both moral and military for much of Western history. But its sway faded in the modern age. As democracy rose, Christianity broke into factions and religion’s prominence weakened, leaving the Church without the same ability to bestow a divine mandate on nations and rulers.
So many modern popes have kept their sights more narrowly focused on the theological. Even Pope Francis, who was a liberal, modernizing force for the church, and spoke out strongly on topics like the environment and immigration, focused three of his four encyclicals on Christian theological concepts like the Sacred Heart and Christianity as the world’s guiding light.
Pope Leo, however, seems to have found his way to modern, secular relevance by speaking out clearly on major issues of the day. He notes that he drew inspiration for “Magnificatus Humanitas” from Pope Leo XIII, an influential pope in the late 1800s and the inspiration for the modern Leo’s own papal moniker, whose 1891 encyclical “Rerum Novarum,” on the economy and conditions of the working class, was criticized for insufficient focus on the Gospel. The current pope’s own document is remarkably concrete and political.
Making political statements isn’t new for Leo, but the encyclical canonizes his boldness into an official form. In the past few months I’ve written about the ways in which Pope Leo has used sermons and statements to directly counter those made by U.S. leaders. After Pete Hegseth made a speech implying the U.S. military is doing God’s will, the pope gave a homily saying that prayers for war cannot be heard by God. He has made strongly worded comments about the rights of immigrants as Trump announced increased ICE raids, and made a point of appointing foreign bishops in American parishes. He has refused to visit the U.S. despite the fact that he is American and has been invited numerous times, including for the nation’s 250th birthday; he is instead planning to visit an island that serves as a refugee landing point in the Mediterranean.
It’s not all that surprising that Leo is making pronouncements on the justness of wars; popes have always given commentary on the world, albeit often less pointedly. Of course, Catholics have always looked to the pope for moral leadership — though that is increasingly under question, as renegade Catholics doubt the pope. (Even J.D. Vance, a Catholic convert with a book coming out about his conversion, has warned the pope to be “careful” with his theological interpretations — a near heretical statement. That’s how Protestantism came about.) The difference today is that everybody is listening.
I think the reason is that there is a certain ineffable quality that can’t be accounted for in so much of modern-day discourse in our metrics-focused world. Everything needs to be provable with a statistical analysis or some quantifiable indicator, or it needs to be as profitable as possible to extract value. But so much of what is most valuable in the human experience is intuitive — experiences and emotions like love, joy, transcendence. Connection with each other. Religious leaders have been honing the language to talk about these qualities for centuries, and they guard one of the only arenas in which the intangible remains central.
Of course, there are also plenty of issues with religious institutions, and the Vatican in particular is famous as a site where abuses of power were hidden and protected. But “Magnifica Humanitas,” and its virality, points toward a new relationship with religion, and a newly important role for it to play.
Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking, a hope for my own increased importance as a religion reporter.
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How can I live freely as a Jew in a world where strangers rip my mezuzah off my doorframe?
Twice, the mezuzah on my front door was ripped off.
The first time, I was shocked. The second time, I made a decision that still pains me. I did not put it back up.
This was before the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023.
That is the part I keep coming back to. The fear did not begin after the Hamas attacks. It was already there, intruding with the quiet calculation of whether a small Jewish symbol on my home made me less safe.
A mezuzah is not a political statement. It makes no argument about a government or a war. It is a sacred object, a marker of memory, a tiny declaration that says: Jews live here. I thought about that mezuzah again recently when the Anti-Defamation League released its annual audit showing that antisemitic physical assaults in the United States reached record highs in 2025. That increase reflects something many Jews already feel in daily life: the slow erosion of ease, the daily calculation of whether to speak up or stay quiet — things I have felt since the first time my mezuzah was violently torn off my doorframe.
Since then, the realm in which I feel safe as a visibly Jewish person has been shrinking from all directions.
After the Oct. 7 attack, the bulletin boards in my apartment building began filling with calls to boycott Israel. Campaign flyers for a Jewish political candidate who came to speak there were defaced with Hitler mustaches. I learned to scan the walls before I scanned my mail.
This was not happening on a campus quad or in some distant place. It was happening where I live.
Then, among my mother’s things, I found a Star of David necklace from the 1930s — marcasite set against black onyx, delicate and old. A boyfriend had given it to her when they were both 14.
I put it on in Florida, where I spend much of my time caring for my mother. I loved wearing it. It felt like more than jewelry. It felt like inheritance, memory, and a small way of carrying my family with me.
But when my mother knew I was going back to New York, she told me to take it off.
My mother is 102. She is not easily frightened. She has lived long enough to know when the temperature in the room has changed. She was not making a political argument. She was trying to protect her daughter.
I still wear that Star of David. But I admit I am selective. In New York, there are moments when I leave it visible and moments when I tuck it under my shirt. That calculation itself tells me something about the world I am moving through.
Recently, in a private Facebook group for women essayists, I shared a personal piece I had written for the United Kingdom-based Jewish Chronicle about how Oct. 7 changed life for my mother and me. It was not a political manifesto. It was a reflection on fear, Jewish identity, aging and visibility.
And still, I was attacked by other writers.“What about Gaza?” I was asked. The message was clear: even my personal Jewish pain had to pass a political test before it could be acknowledged.
That is the narrowing.
This ugliness is coming from more than one direction now. It stems from old conspiracy theories on the right and newer moral certainties in some of the progressive spaces where I once felt most at home. Different language brings about the same result: Jews become less human, less particular, less entitled to fear.
That collapse is what frightens me most: the definitional collapse between Jew and Israeli; Israeli and Israel’s government; Jewish symbol and political provocation; mezuzah and target.
As Jews like me reckon with that collapse, we must reckon with how much we’ll go along with it.
Right now, too often, Jews are being asked to choose between our own safety and our compassion for others. We should be able to prioritize both. I am a Zionist. I believe in the right of the Jewish people to a homeland. I also believe Palestinians are human beings who deserve freedom, dignity, and protection from suffering.
These beliefs should not cancel each other out. They should make us more careful, more humane, more committed to truth.
Yet now we must choose between speaking about antisemitism and being accused of indifference to other hatreds. That is no way to live.
Since Oct. 7, I have found myself going to synagogue on Shabbat, something I never did before. I was a High Holiday Jew. Now I seek out rooms where I do not have to explain why this moment feels frightening. I have learned where I feel seen. I have learned who can hold my fear without turning it into an argument.
The mezuzah I did not put back up is small. It fits in the palm of my hand.
But what it represents is not small: memory, faith, survival, home, and the right to be visibly Jewish without fear.
When I did not put it back up, I told myself I was being practical. But now — after Oct. 7, the bulletin boards, my mother’s warning, and the explosive allegations I’ve seen travel through respected media without sufficient care or verification — I understand it differently.
I was not just protecting a doorframe. I was learning to shrink.
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Podcast: A lively conversation in Yiddish with actress Lea Koenig
ס׳איז לעצטנס אַרויס אַ פּאָדקאַסט מיט דער באַליבטער אַקטריסע אין ישׂראל, ליאַ קעניג, וועלכע איז הײַנט צום בעסטן באַקאַנט ווי די ייִדיש־רעדנדיקע באָבע פֿונעם פּערסאָנאַזש שלום שטיסל אין דער ישׂראלדיקער טעלעוויזיע־סעריע „שטיסל“.
אינעם שמועס באַטייליקן זיך אויך יניבֿ גאָלדבערג — דער מחבר פֿון אַ נײַער ביאָגראַפֿיע וועגן איר אויף ענגליש; דער איבערזעצער און דראַמאַטורג מיכל יאַשינסקי, און דער ייִדישער זינגער און קולטור־טוער חיים וואָלף. דעם פּאָדקאַסט האָט טראַנסמיטירט די באָסטאָנער ראַדיאָ־פּראָגראַם „דאָס ייִדישע קול“.
ליאַ קעניג גיט איבער אירע זכרונות במשך פֿון איר לאַנגער קאַריערע אין ייִדישן טעאַטער, ווי אויך אינעם העברעיִשן טעאַטער, טעלעוויזיע און קינאָ. כּדי צו הערן דעם פּאָדקאַסט, גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ.
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