The first Jew elected to represent Tennessee in Congress could lose his seat to redistricting following a Wednesday Supreme Court decision that weakened the Voting Rights Act by limiting states’ ability to take race into account when drawing voting maps.

Rep. Steve Cohen, a progressive Democrat elected in 2006, represents a majority-Black district that includes parts of Memphis. He is the only Democrat among Tennessee’s nine members of the House.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican running for Tennessee governor, called on the legislature to redistrict “immediately” following the Supreme Court decision, posting to X an all-red map of Tennessee that would split up Cohen’s district, effectively eliminating his seat.

Cohen, 76, had been set to face Justin Pearson, 31 — a challenger positioned to Cohen’s left on Israel — in the August Democratic primary. Cohen has historically been backed by J Street, the left-leaning political advocacy group that supports a two-state solution and describes itself as “pro-Israel” and “pro-peace.”

But if district lines are redrawn before the midterms, as Blackburn has proposed, neither candidate would likely be competitive.

In a statement, Cohen said he had been “expecting this decision” but was “disappointed that the Court has diluted the Voting Rights Act which guaranteed minority voters the right to elect the representative of their choosing.”

Cohen’s Jewish identity

This would not be Cohen’s first brush with redistricting. In 2012, Tennessee’s voting borders were redrawn in such a way that Cohen was cut off from representing many of his Jewish constituents — including the area where his own synagogue is located in Memphis.

“When I get asked how many Jews are in your district, I used to say 10,000,” Cohen told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2018. “Now I say, ‘well, there’s Laurie, Jeff, Malcolm …”

Despite the redrawn lines, Cohen has consistently been re-elected since 2006, even as his campaigns have been marked by attacks on his Jewish identity; a flyer distributed in 2008 read “Cohen and the Jews hate Jesus.”

That same year, an attack ad seemed to insinuate that Cohen was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. “This guy would have never invited me to his Seder,” Cohen told the Forward at the time, responding to what he called the “ludicrous” suggestion that he had an affinity for Klansmen.

In 2016, Cohen took a very-Jewish jab at Donald Trump’s pick to be Israel ambassador, David Friedman, with a Fiddler on the Roof reference: “You’re no Tevye the milkman.” His wry sense of humor was most recently on display during a cameo on the show The Rehearsal, with Jewish comedian Nathan Fielder.

Cohen has worked across partisan divides with Tennessee’s only other Jewish representative, Republican David Kustoff, elected in 2017, a decade after Cohen became Tennessee’s first Jewish representative. The two share a rabbi, Micah Greenstein of the Reform Temple Israel in Memphis.

If Tennessee’s legislature moves forward with a special session to redraw the maps, Cohen has vowed to fight back.

“This ruling effectively undoes the work of Martin Luther King and John Lewis. Changes to the Voting Rights Act should be made by Congress,” Cohen said in a statement. “If the General Assembly is called back into a special session and seeks to do Trump’s bidding, I will exercise every option, legal and political, to prevent the harm this decision today makes possible.”

The post As Supreme Court dilutes Voting Rights Act, Tennessee’s first Jewish congressman could lose his seat appeared first on The Forward.

For most of my years, Yom HaZikaron (Israel’s Memorial Day) has had special significance. In 1948, my father’s younger brother (one of three survivors of a large Warsaw family) was killed in the Battle of Mishmar Hayarden. From 1950 until my father’s passing in 1990, he visited his brother’s grave, the only grave he was able to visit (his parents, sister, older brother, and baby brother were slaughtered in Auschwitz/Treblinka). I often joined him on this sad, but important, visit.

The atmosphere at the military part of the ancient cemetery in Safed was always mournful but serene and peaceful. Even after wars such as 1967, 1973 or the Lebanon campaign in 1982, it was mostly one or two family members standing by the graves of their family members. They would cry a little, listen to the memorial prayer El Moleh Rachamim, but celebrate the individuals buried in the kvarim and then go home.

This year was different. With tens of thousands of victims of the October 7 war and the wars initiated by Israel’s other enemies, every military cemetery in Israel was packed and turned into family gatherings. Noticeably, there was an upsurge of the number of children crying at graves of their parents or siblings. All I could think of was this is not the way it should be.

This war was a war for Israel’s survival. It involved the entire country from north to south, east to west. Thousands came back home to Israel to fight for the country’s existence. And the losses reflected this massive effort. Looking around the cemetery you saw every breed of Jew — religious, secular, Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Russian, Black. But as always, the saddest part was the children.

My friend Jackie Schimmel writes about the thousands of small stickers lining lampposts and bus stops, petrol stations, and kitchen fridges all across the country. Words that soldiers had as their mottos or themes of life:

“Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

“He fought out of love of those behind him rather than hatred of those in front of him.”

“It’s very good to live for our country.”

They are fragments of philosophy that stayed behind.

Rachel Goldberg-Polin quoted her son Hersh — who was quoting Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl citing German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche — “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”

Schimmel compares these sayings to Pirkei Avot (Ethics of Our Fathers), our sayings from famous rishonim, each beginning with “Hu haya omer” — “he used to say.”

So, with the large increase of children and teens that now have to visit graves and mourn their losses, perhaps we can look at these stickers and these sayings as a way for the young to mourn. These notes, the fragments of themselves that people have left behind, can be a way to pay tribute to the bravest of the brave — our soldiers and victims of terror. And even more so, a way for adults to reconnect to all of the young fighting or who fought.

“I go in search of my brothers.”

J. Philip Rosen is currently Chairman of the American Section of the World Jewish Congress and Board Member of Yeshiva University, as well as several other Jewish causes. He was Vice-Chair of Birthright Israel for many years. 

Britain on Thursday raised its national terrorism threat level to “severe,” signaling that a terrorist attack was considered “highly likely,” following an antisemitic stabbing in north London.

Interior minister Shabana Mahmood said the level had been increased from “substantial” after the attack in the Golders Green area on Wednesday, adding that the decision reflected a broader and rising threat environment rather than a single event.

“I know this will be a source of concern to many, particularly amongst our Jewish community, who have suffered so much,” the minister said in a statement. “As the threat level rises, I urge everyone to be vigilant as they go about their daily lives and report any concerns they have to the police. And I can assure everyone that our world-class security services and the police are working day and night to keep our country safe.”

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Keir Starmer vowed to take action to protect the Jewish community in Britain, acknowledging that Jews were scared a day after the stabbing left two Jewish men, one in his 70s and one in his 30s, hospitalized in stable condition.

The attacked followed a spate of antisemitic attacks in the British capital.

Starmer, who has faced severe criticism from some in the Jewish community for the government’s response, promised more police in Jewish areas, a crackdown on those spreading antisemitism, and new legislation to deal with state-sponsored threats from the likes of Iran.

He had earlier been jeered and heckled by a small crowd waving banners reading “Keir Starmer Jew Harmer” when he visited Golders Green where the two Jewish men were stabbed on Wednesday.

‘PEOPLE ARE SCARED’

“People are scared, scared to show who they are in their community, scared to go to synagogue and practice their religion, scared to go to university as a Jew, to send their children to school as a Jew, to tell their colleagues that they are Jewish,” Starmer said in a televised statement.

The suspect in the Golders Green attack, a 45-year-old British national who was born in Somalia, had a history of serious violence and mental health issues, police said.

They also confirmed he had previously been referred to the counter radicalization scheme Prevent in 2020, while local media reported he had served time in prison for an incident in 2008 when he stabbed an officer and a police dog.

Amid widespread calls for more to be done to protect the about 290,000 Jews living in Britain, Starmer said the government would do “everything in our power to stamp this hatred out,” with stronger powers to shut down charities promoting extremism and a clampdown on “hate preachers.”

The government has also said it would fast-track legislation allowing the prosecution of people acting as proxies of a state-sponsored group, so they can be dealt with in the same way as spies for foreign intelligence services.

“We need stronger powers to tackle the malign threat posed by states like Iran, because we know for a fact that they want to harm British Jews,” Starmer said.

A pro-Iranian government group has claimed responsibility for several recent attacks while last month, two men were charged under Britain’s existing National Security Act with being tasked by Iran to carry out hostile surveillance.

Tehran has rejected such accusations.

PROTEST PROBLEM

One of the major issues which has caused anger amongst the Jewish community in Britain has been anti-Israel marches, which have become commonplace since the October 2023 Hamas assault on the Jewish state that triggered the war in Gaza. Critics say the protests have generated hostility and become a hotbed of antisemitism.

“If you stand alongside people who say, ‘Globalize the Intifada,’ you are calling for terrorism against Jews, and people who use that phrase should be prosecuted,” Starmer said. “It is racism, extreme racism, and it has left a minority community in this country, scared, intimidated, wondering if they belong.”

The recent incidents in London are part of a rising number of antisemitic attacks.

Last October, two people were killed after an attack at a synagogue in the northern English city of Manchester. A week later, two men went on trial over a plot to kill hundreds in an Islamic State-inspired gun rampage against the Jewish community.

They were found guilty in December, just over a week after a mass shooting at a Jewish Hanukkah celebration on Australia’s Bondi Beach.

Britain’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, Jonathan Hall, told the BBC the British attacks had become “the biggest national security emergency” since 2017, when there was a string of high-profile attacks.

Mahmood said additional funding would pay ​for more protective ⁠security for the country’s synagogues, schools, places of worship, and community centers, boosting police numbers in areas with a large Jewish community.

According to the British government, an additional £25 million ($34 million) will be invested to increase security for Jewish communities.

“We are seeing a huge increase in antisemitism, and that’s why the government’s work on education and stamping out antisemitism across other parts of the public ⁠sector is ​also an incredibly important part of this picture,” Mahmood said.

She did not say ​the legislation would be used against Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) but told Sky News: “I expect to be making decisions in the very near future about the ​groups that we will be designating as state-linked.”

Several countries have designated the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization.