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Bosnian Jews mourn Moris Albahari, one of Sarajevo’s last Ladino speakers
(JTA) — Moris Albahari, a Holocaust survivor, former partisan fighter and one of the last Ladino speakers in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s dwindling Jewish community, passed away at the age of 93 last month.
It is believed that he was one of four native Ladino speakers remaining in a country where the Judeo-Spanish language once flourished and was spoken by luminaries like Flory Jagoda, the grande dame of Ladino song, and Laura Bohoretta, the founder of a uniquely Sephardic feminist movement in Bosnia.
Bosnia’s small Jewish community — with barely 900 members throughout the country, 500 of whom live in Sarajevo — are mourning the loss of a living link to communal memory as well as a dear friend.
“From you, uncle Moco, I learned a lot about Judaism, about life, about nature and especially about people. About both the good and the evil,” Igor Kožemjakin, the cantor of the Sarajevo Jewish community, wrote in a memorial post on Facebook, referring to Moris as “Čika,” or uncle, a term of endearment in Bosnian.
“It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevo. Our community is very small, especially after the Holocaust,” Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino language and literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members. Everyone is like a family member.”
When Albahari was growing up in the 1930s, the Jewish community of his native Sarajevo numbered over 12,000. Jews made up more than a fifth of the city and it was one of the most important centers of Jewish life in the western Balkans.
In his youth, the city was part of what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Formed out of the borderlands between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, it was a multiethnic state composed of Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, Slovenians, Macedonians, Hungarians, Albanians and more. Among them were many Jewish communities both Ashkenazi and Sephardic.
The unique mix of of Muslim, Jewish, Catholic and Orthodox Christian communities, with their mosques, synagogues and churches defining Sarajevo’s skyline, earned the city the nickname “Little Jerusalem.”
Speaking in a 2015 documentary made by American researchers, “Saved by Language,” Albahari explained that his family traced their roots back to Cordoba before the Spanish Inquisition, and through Venice, before settling in what would become Bosnia when it was part of the Ottoman Empire.
“We didn’t want to ‘just’ write an article about Moris or Sarajevo; we wanted [the audience] to see what we saw and hear what we heard,” Brian Kirschen, professor of Ladino at Binghamton University, who worked on the documentary with author Susanna Zaraysky, told JTA. “This resulted in a grassroots initiative to create the documentary.”
In the film, Albahari takes the researchers and their viewers on a tour through what was Jewish Sarajevo, giving glimpses of the thriving Ladino speaking community in which he was raised and explaining how ithe language would save him many times, when the Nazis and their Croat allies, the Ustaša, came to shatter it.
“In sharing your story of survival during the Holocaust, you opened doors that remained closed for decades,” Kirschen said in a memorial post on Facebook. “Some of your stories were even new to members of your family, but each survivor has their own timeline. While you experienced great pain during your life, from your story, we also learn about moments of kindness and heroism. Through your story, you also taught us about the power of language.”
Albahari wasn’t yet a teenager when, in 1941, Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy invaded Yugoslavia. The Nazis occupied the eastern portion of the country, including what is now Serbia, while they raised up a Croat fascist party, known as the Ustaša, to administer the newly formed “Independent State of Croatia” — often known by its Serbo-Croatian initials, NDH — in the western regions that included the modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Ustaša collaborated in the Nazis’ genocidal plans for Europe’s Jewish and Roma comunities, and they had genocidal designs of their own for the Orthodox Serb communities living in the NDH.
To that end they established the Jasenovac concentration camp, which would become known as the Auschwitz of the Balkans. By the war’s end it had become the third largest concentration camp in Europe, and behind its walls the overwhelming majority of Sarajevo’s Jews — at least 10,000 — were massacred. Including Serbs, Jews, Roma and political dissidents of Croat or Muslim Bosniak background, as many as 100,000 people were killed in Jasenovac.
Albahari was 11 years old when the Ustaša came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and he was able to help his son escape from the train.
The teacher helped guide the young Moris to an Italian soldier named Lino Marchione who was secretly helping Jews.
This was the first case when Albahari’s Ladino came in handy. Ladino is largely based on medieval Spanish, with a mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages mixed in. For speakers of Serbo-Croatian, a Slavic language, it’s entirely incomprehensible. But for a speaker of another Romance language such as Italian, it’s not such a stretch to understand, and Moris was able to converse with his Italian savior.
With his family gone, he was taken in by a Serb family, and changed his name to Milan Adamovic to hide his Jewish identity. Still, by 1942, it became clear that neither as Adamovic nor Albahari would he be safe in the town. So he fled to the mountains.
“If there was [a battle] I took clothes from a dead soldier to wear, I lived like a wolf in the mountains, you know. Visiting villages [asking for something] to give me for eating, it was a terrible time,” Albahari recalled in “Saved By Language.”
He would only feel safe in villages under the control of partisan forces. Yugoslavia was the only country in Europe to be liberated from Nazi rule by its own grassroots resistance.
During his time in the mountains, Albahari joined up with a partisan unit aligned with the movement of Josip Broz Tito, who would lead Communist Yugoslavia after the war. By the war’s end, Tito’s partisans numbered over 80,000 and included more than 6,000 Jews, many in prominent positions, such as Moša Pijade, who would go on to serve as vice president of the Yugoslav parliament after the war.
Moris was out on patrol as a partisan when he came upon a group of American and British paratroopers. They raised their weapons at him, thinking he was an enemy. Moris tried to communicate, but he spoke no English.
When he asked the soldiers if they spoke German or Italian, they shook their heads. When he asked about Spanish, one perked up: a Hispanic-American soldier by the name of David Garijo.
In Ladino, Alabahari was able to explain that he was not an enemy but could lead them to a nearby partisan camp where they would be safe.
“Ladino saved my life in the war,” Albahari recalled in the documentary.
At the partisan camp, Morris received even bigger news: The family that he had assumed had all perished after he left the train were in fact alive. The former school teacher and Ustaša guard who had warned his father had met them at the next train junction to help them escape. Furthermore, around half of the Jews in the train car were able to escape using the same hole Moris used during his initial escape.
Ultimately the family all survived the war, unlike so many other Jews of Sarajevo.
“Where is Samuel, where is Dudo, where is Gedala? They never came back,” Albahari lamented, listing missing neighbors while walking through Sarajevo’s old Jewish neighborhood in the documentary. “Maybe we are happy because we are alive after the Second World War, but also unlikely because every day we must cry for these dead people.”
When Moris returned to Sarajevo, it was an entirely different place from the bustling Jewish community he had once known.
Gone was the sound of Ladino in the streets and alleyways of Bascarsija, the market district where so many of Sarajevo’s Jews had once lived. Gone were the synagogues — only one of the many synagogues that had existed before WWII still functions. Gone was the robust Jewish life that was once a central part of Sarajevo.
Moris was still only 14 by the war’s end, so he returned to school and ultimately graduated at the top of his class. He became a pilot and later director of the Sarajevo Airport.
In this new world, Ladino was spoken, if at all, only in the home.
“Always, when I hear Spanish, I hear my father and mother, and all the synagogues, prayers in Ladino and rabbis who spoke Ladino. But that is in the past,” Albahari says in “Saved by Language.”
Eliezer Papo, who is a generation younger than Albahari, recalled that in his youth Ladino had long been reduced to a language of secrets.
“Mostly, Ladino was used when the elders didn’t want youngsters to understand,” Papo said.
Only later, in the 1980s, did community members realize what was being lost and begin to gather to maintain their language, recount what Jewish Sarajevo had been like and share their wartime stories of survival.
“He never took his story to the places of revenge, but he took it and his life experience to a place of ‘Never again,’ not just ‘Never again for Jews’, but never again for anybody,” said Papo.
Like many Sarajevans, World War II would not be the last major conflict Albahari would see. Less than 40 years later, war would once again come to Sarajevo with the break-up of Yugoslavia.
From 1992-1995 the city remained under constant siege by Bosnian Serb forces looking to break away from what would become Bosnia and Herzegovina. Moris joined with other Jews of Sarajevo in working to provide aid to their fellow Sarajevans during the harsh period.
Sarajevo’s synagogue was turned into a shelter and a soup kitchen. The community ran a network of underground pharmacies and a message service allowing Sarajevans to get word to family and friends outside of the city during what became the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare.
“Moris was an inspirational persona to many members of Jewish community and La Benevolencija,” Vlado Anderle, the current president of that local Jewish humanitarian organization told JTA. “He was a man with such inviting spirit and energy.”
When the dust settled on the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the new Bosnian state rose from its ashes, Moris found himself once again in a new role.
During the communist era in Yugoslavia, religious activity was discouraged. Sarajevo’s Jews emphasized the ethnic character of Jewish culture rather than the religious one. In the new Bosnia and Herzegovina, that was no longer true. So the community worked to reconnect with their religious identity as well.
“Everybody looked up to the people who had Jewish upbringing before the Second World War,” Papo recalled. “This doesn’t mean that they were rabbis. Just that they knew it better than anyone else.”
Moris, whose formal Jewish education ended in his preteen years, was appointed president of the community’s religious committee.
As such it often fell on him to represent Judaism to the Bosnian society at large, often in a very creative way, according to Papo, who in addition to being a scholar of Ladino is ordained as a rabbi and serves the Sarajevo community as a rabbi-at-large from Israel.
In one case, while being interviewed on a major Bosnian television station, Moris was asked why Jews cover their head with a kippah or other hat during prayer. Moris’ response, or rather creative interpretation, as Papo called it, was made up on the spot.
Moris’ interpretation began with the ancient temple in Jerusalem where Jews once had to fully immerse in a ritual bath before entering.
“Since the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed it was reduced to washing the uncovered parts of the body only, before entering a synagogue, similarly to Muslims: the feet, the head, the hands…” Papo recalled him saying. But in Europe, as Moris’ answer went, they began to cover more and more of their body. “In Europe they started wearing shoes, so the feet were not uncovered anymore, and then they started wearing a hat, not to have to wash their head… you know it’s Europe, one could catch a cold if going out with wet hair…”
“A few months later, I came to Sarajevo, and found that everyone has heard this explanation and is talking about it, not just people in the community, but in the street,” Papo said. “And you know, I let it pass, I couldn’t correct them, it was just so beautiful. That was his genius.”
“Identity is all about telling stories. And Moris was one of the great storytellers of the community,” Papo added. And through his stories he expressed an identity which was “made of the same contradictions that Sephardic Judaism is made of, that Sarajevo is made of, that Bosnia and Herzegovina is made and that Yugoslavia was and is made of and that the Balkans are made of.”
Albahari is survived by his wife and a son.
—
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Pioneering restaurant chain Taïm closes, outlets padlocked for unpaid taxes
Taïm Mediterranean Grill, a pioneering fast casual Israeli food chain, is closing locations across the country, after New York State issued warrants for hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid taxes.
The restaurant, founded by Israeli-American celebrity chef Einat Admony and now owned by the Illinois-based conglomerate Craveworthy Brands had expanded across New York, Washington D.C., and Chicago. Last week, pictures of two of New York City locations appeared on social media, with signage saying they had been seized by the state for nonpayment of taxes.
In an email to the Forward, a representative for Admony wrote that “she is unable to comment on the current status of the chain,” having not been involved with it since 2022.
When Admony first opened Taïm in New York’s West Village in 2005, it was one of the city’s first fast casual Mediterranean options. Zagat and New York Magazine gave the restaurant rave reviews, and lines formed outside the door.
Taïm opened its second location in 2012, and in 2018, former Chipotle executive Phil Petrilli and business partners invested in the restaurant and led its expansion across the country. By that time, Taïm faced a more crowded market, competing with Miznon, another Israeli fast casual creation by celebrity-chef Eyal Shani, and Cava, a Mediterranean bowl restaurant.
The restaurant switched ownership in 2024 when Craveworthy Brands bought Petrilli’s restaurant platform. But a year later, the state of New York issued dozens of tax warrants to Taïm-related entities at multiple locations. Some stores closed ahead of the recent round of state seizures.
The state has held both Pitrelli and Craveworthy’s CEO, Gregg Majewski, responsible for taxes owed. Pitrelli is currently suing Majewski, alleging that under their merger agreement, Majewski and Craveworthy are liable for all debts incurred by Taïm.
In his lawsuit, Pitrelli alleged the Taïm outlets owed $632,000 in unpaid taxes. Majewski did not respond to a request for comment; the Forward has reached out to his attorney.
Since the Hamas-led October 7 attacks on Israel, Taïm, which is Hebrew for “delicious,” has received some pushback. It has appeared on boycott lists and posts, criticizing it for being “Israeli owned,” even though its current owner is not Israeli. In a recent Instagram post noting the closure, users took to the comments to criticize the restaurant for being Israeli. However, a push to boycott Taïm specifically has not received as much widespread attention from the BDS movement as Goldie, a Philadelphia chain run by celebrity chef Michael Solomonov that recently closed six locations.
The restaurant currently brands itself as “Mediterranean,” though in the past it hashighlighted its Israeli background.
Others criticized Taïm for reasons unrelated to geopolitics. “They ruined that place when they changed the menu and made it like a big chain fast casual place,” one FoodNYC Redditor commented.
“Place has been going downhill for years, I’m not surprised,” another said.
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Antisemitism flourishes amid cultural and historical illiteracy. Classrooms should be a cure.
School will be back in session before we know it. A smattering of the headlines in the final weeks of the last academic year, coinciding with Jewish American Heritage Month in May, suggest that fighting antisemitism in educational environments will remain a monumental challenge.
They include a lawsuit against the nation’s largest teachers’ union for encouraging discrimination against Jewish teachers and students, a Texas private school displaying maps of the Middle East erasing Israel, swastikas scrawled on multiple school grounds in Massachusetts and in Georgia, and — just a few blocks from my child’s former school, which has had its own share of such issues — a flag bearing the hate symbol billowing over New York University.
The scene in the streets this summer has been arguably as bleak. Hate crimes against Jews are on the rise, even as rates of other major crimes fall. In response to the stabbing of a Jewish man in a kippah as he exited the Jewish Center on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Democratic congressional nominee Micah Lasher implored Mayor Zohran Mamdani to do more than react with the requisite expressions of empathy and promises of increased security, but to “take the temperature down” rather than foster a climate that jeopardizes Jewish safety.
Taking the temperature down is exactly what’s in order. We need proactive, preventative action from our political leaders, in New York City and beyond, to transform an environment in which antisemitic attacks still comprise the majority of hate crimes, and harsh words can too often combust into violence.
The good news is that we have a ready-made place to continue this urgent work: classrooms. As an educator, I have a strong sense of how historical and cultural illiteracy are far more rampant than unrepentant antisemitism, and that this is where we must focus our educational efforts in a more deliberate way than we currently do.
Ignorance provides antisemitism, an insidious shapeshifter that infects and unifies the otherwise polarized political right and left, with a powerful accelerant. Yet the only times when K-12 students might encounter Jewish experiences are in a Holocaust unit — mandated in 29 states — or in an antisemitism training, often introduced reactively after an incident. Neither approach addresses a generalized illiteracy about Jewish identity and experience that allows this hatred to fester. These traditional methods of “fighting antisemitism,” including in classrooms, are important but inadequate.
Rather than teaching about Jews primarily as targets of hatred — the obvious organizing principle of many lessons on the Holocaust and antisemitism training — it is crucial that students learn about Jewish identities and experiences as inextricable from our broader national narratives. When Jews are understood as full members of the polity, and as diverse participants in every historical era — as labor organizers and industry leaders, fashion designers and film directors, athletes and intellectuals — it becomes much harder to caricature us as evil or outsiders, or to render us invisible.
Such historical accuracy, rigorous source analysis, and a spirit of cultural inclusiveness, is the ethos of the New York City public schools’ Hidden Voices: Jewish Americans in United States History curriculum materials, for which I serve as lead scholar. Volume 1 is out now, and Volume 2 will be released later this fall.
A two-volume collection of profiles, original sources, guiding questions, and analytical essays written and reviewed by experts, the free materials enable history and social studies teachers to enrich existing lessons, or to create entirely new units of study.
Rich narratives about individuals illuminate broader historical eras, whether organizer Clara Lemlich on Progressive Era labor legislation, Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis on transformed legal approaches to monopoly, or Dr. Ruth Westheimer’s advocacy for sex education, to name a few. Moreover, Hidden Voices explores how each individual’s Jewishness shaped their contributions to American society.
Rather than just sprinkling in a few Jewish figures into existing narratives, “Portrait of an Era” essays show how integrating stories of both luminaries and lesser known Jews nuances and challenges dominant historical frameworks – like “the Civil Rights Era,” or “Postwar America” – in ways that render history more accurately, and more interestingly.
For example, what does it say about the early national period of a country founded on religious freedom that Rabbi Isaac Leeser worried Jews would become “Christianized,” and thus offered sermons in English, while simultaneously advocating for the “Judaization” of American Jews? Or, how is the notion that American Jews “became white” after World War II challenged by the fact that the first, and only, Jewish Miss America, Bess Myerson, sparked a torrent of complaints to pageant organizers, was disinvited from various appearances, and was encouraged to choose a less Jewish name (she didn’t)?
Hidden Voices is no hagiography — history as hero worship — even as one of its aims is to challenge negative stereotypes. Since students might only encounter one of these profiles throughout their studies, we were especially judicious in selecting individuals that highlight the complexity of history and of humanity. For example, Spaniard Luis de Caravajal y de la Cueva, whose family converted to Roman Catholicism but secretly practiced Judaism under the threat of death, arrived in the New World to advance colonization. Yet he used this position to rescue other persecuted conversos. Many years later, we profile Groucho Marx, who with his brothers indelibly shaped the worlds of vaudeville and film, new industries where Jews found success in part because antisemitism excluded them from more established ones.
Emphasizing Jews’ role in U.S. history at large is crucial, but so is educating about the specificity of Jewish experience, from the momentous — including the Holocaust and Israel’s founding – to the everyday, like mainstreaming blue jeans and bagels and establishing overnight camps. Cultural topics are especially powerful teaching tools, for students are often less guarded in discussing food or fashion than when grappling with the most fraught political questions. Given so many current conversations about Jews now turn to Gaza, Hidden Voices decenters this conflict to offer a wider lens on a diverse people too often unhelpfully decontextualized.
Why isn’t a more robust Jewish-American history curriculum already a staple in more schools, especially given how largely other identities loom in our classrooms and our culture? Indeed, Hidden Voices — which has covered race, ability, and other categories — has existed since 2018 in New York City, home to the largest population of Jews outside of Israel, and yet the project I lead was only commissioned in late 2023, spurred by Oct. 7. While Volume 1 has been downloaded 200,000 times, and encouraging reports of teachers using the materials are rolling in, integrating these Jewish stories into the study of U.S. history and culture remains optional.
Multiple factors account for this relative absence of Jewish stories in the teaching of American history, in New York City and nationwide: foremost, the widespread, reductive assumption that identity and power in the United States operate around a Black-white binary, with Jews on the white, privileged side, and thus not a marginalized group worthy of attention. Similarly, many identity-based frameworks focus on “underrepresented” groups, which Jews — despite comprising a tiny minority — are not. Lastly, many such curricula are introduced due to parental advocacy, but Jewish Americans have largely expended such energy on building a Jewish education network outside the public system.
Overlooking Jewish American history and experience intensifies both antisemitism and historical illiteracy, and must be addressed. While Hidden Voices may appear to “just add Jews” into a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion framework, it actually represents a subtly, but substantially, different intervention. First, the argument for such programs is often for people to “see themselves.” While I hope Jewish schoolchildren feel affirmed by such visibility, that aim is profoundly parochial. Learning the history of Jews — or Latinos, LGBTQ people and others — is not primarily valuable in order to cultivate particularistic pride, a dubious aim for a secular school in a pluralistic society. Rather, it is to equip all students to navigate our shared society with evidence, empathy, and universalism. Actually, a Jewish history curriculum arguably stands to be most valuable in districts without Jews at all, but ample room for antisemitism to fester unchecked by interpersonal experience.
I understand the skepticism of staking our hopes on a better future for Jewish Americans in educational institutions; I’ve been a vocal critic of how alienating these places have been to many since 10/7. To be sure, education is no magic pill, and ignorance is not our only enemy. Avowed antisemites and ideologues exist in K-12 and college classrooms, as in all professions, and they too demand our unsparing attention. But for the vast majority of Americans with scant awareness of Jewish history or experience, teaching and learning about Jews as integral to this nation’s past and present is a new, and potentially powerful intervention. We owe it to each other to pressure our politicians and our public schools to at least try it.
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What does DSA actually want? Its national co-chair can’t say.
It’s been a heady couple of months for the Democratic Socialists of America. Candidates the organization rallied behind ousted establishment Democrats in New York, Michigan, Colorado and Wisconsin state primaries. Pundits who doubted the movement last year are now eating crow.
With the DSA having forced its way into the spotlight, national co-chair Megan Romer went on The New Yorker Radio Hour podcast to share what the movement is all about. But the interview has elicited an online backlash — and some ridicule — after Romer said she would have attended an Oct. 8 protest and that she would have sought to stop Russia’s advance in Ukraine through diplomacy.
Just as damning to some viewers was Romer’s reluctance to provide specifics on a number of DSA policy positions when pressed for them by New Yorker editor David Remnick.
The backlash to the interview put Romer on the defensive. The day after its publication the national co-chair called Remnick a “debate bro” who had tried to make her look and feel stupid during the conversation. Remnick, a Pulitzer Prize–winner and former Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post, has edited The New Yorker since 1998.
“Luckily lots of practice keeping my temper in check when debate bros are well-actually’ing me, tho it still flusters me,” Romer wrote Saturday on X. “I am def particularly sensitive when people are actively trying to make me look/feel stupid and it can throw me off my game.”
The interview highlighted a challenge that faces the organization as it gains members and breaks through on the Democratic stage: Translating its rallying cries into the gritty work of partisan politics — or, for the candidates DSA champions, getting things done while remaining true to the movement’s ideals.
Nowhere was that clearer than Romer’s talking points on Israel. Romer said the organization’s position was “a free Palestine with a capital in Jerusalem, and so I think that can safely be read as a one-state solution.” When Remnick asked her if DSA would have supported the proposed terms of the Camp David summit in 2000, had the Palestinians accepted it, Romer said: “Good question — I’d have to actually look at what the specifics there were.”
(The exact terms discussed at the summit are in dispute, but most agree it would have involved a separate Palestinian state with a capital comprising several Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem.)
A testy exchange followed around Romer’s stance on the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7, 2023.
Asked whether she supported New York congressional primary winner Darializa Avila Chevalier in attending a “pro-Hamas” rally on Oct. 8, Romer said yes — she would have gone herself.
“If you put people in an open air concentration camp, and you deprive people of rights, of dignity, of food, of the ability to live in safety,” Romer said, “you have to expect that they are going to not take that for that long. And that is not defending any harm of civilians or of non-combatants.”
Remnick replied, “Well, sure it is — you said you’re supporting it.”
Romer said, “I’m saying that I think it was inevitable.”
On issue after issue, Remnick pressed Romer for details and found few.
- Romer said DSA wanted to “tax the hell out of millionaires” but demurred on what that would mean in practice.
- Romer said she believed in open borders, but not in “throwing the gates open.” When Remnick asked if that wasn’t just immigration reform — which is to say the Democratic policy platform — Romer replied, “It means reforming the system we have while we rethink the system, while we build this new one from the ground up, and then hopefully eventually flipping the switch.”
- Romer said she did not believe in sending arms to support Ukraine in its war against Russia. She asked Remnick, “Why aren’t we doing any amount of actual diplomacy? Why aren’t we doing any amount of actual sending actual human beings to talk to human beings?” Remnick pointed out that there had been many attempts of diplomacy, “however failed,” since the beginning of the war.
- Remnick asked Romer what she meant when she said she believed in prison abolition. She answered that the safest communities were not ones with cops on every corner, but ones with “good schools, good jobs, good park systems, good recreation for their teenagers, things like that. Those are the safe communities.”
- As for her support for defunding the police, Romer said she was “not in favor of getting rid of police entirely tomorrow” but that she supported decreasing their budgets until a point where social services were sufficiently funded.
For the most part, Remnick — trying to fit Romer into a 30-minute podcast slot — let Romer’s answers speak for themselves whether they answered his question or not. But he did hint at a broader argument in one of his final questions, about the DSA’s position in favor of abolishing the U.S. Senate.
Given the scant likelihood of such a measure passing, Remnick asked, didn’t it distract from policy goals that were more likely to succeed?
“I don’t think so,” Romer replied. “I think taking principled positions tells people that you’re principled, and I think we see voters really responding to that, and we see people saying, ‘Oh, you’re actually thinking about the systems.’”
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