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Jewish institutions awaken to climate crisis, with hundreds pledging action
(JTA) — For a decade starting in 2002, Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi devoted herself to pro-Israel advocacy. After that, the Jewish philanthropist and activist from Annapolis, Maryland, went all in to fight for disability rights, working in the field for the next decade. Now, Mizrahi is focused on climate change.
“Let me put it this way: In 2021, we donated to one climate organization, and in 2022, we donated to 17 of them,” Mizrahi said, referring to the small charity fund she runs with her husband, tech entrepreneur Victor Mizrahi. This year, the couple made their largest climate-related donation yet, sending a group of nine climate reporters to Israel to meet tech startups working on ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Mizrahi and her husband have also begun commercially investing in such startups.
“I was hoping other people would solve it,” she said. “But the pace of the change is not nearly meeting the demand at the moment. I felt that even though I don’t know the subject, I’m just going to have to do it because I have kids and I don’t want this world to fall apart.”
Climate change has long ranked at or near the top of a list of issues concerning Jews in the United States, according to multiple surveys, and Jews have been heavily involved in the wider climate movement. But until recently, the issue had a marginal place on the agendas of Jewish communal organizations, which neglected climate even as the subject took on importance in the activism and policies of other religious communities and in the larger philanthropic world.
Mizrahi’s newfound emphasis on climate is an early example of a larger shift that is underway in Jewish philanthropy, a multibillion-dollar world made up of thousands of individual donors, charitable foundations and nonprofit organizations.
“It’s the beginning of what will become a more widespread focus among Jewish groups,” said Rabbi Jennie Rosenn, the founder and CEO of the Jewish climate group Dayenu. “We’re seeing an awakening to this as a profoundly Jewish issue, and awakening to the role that the Jewish community has to play in addressing the climate crisis.”
Scientists say that decisions regarding carbon emissions made in the next few years will affect life on Earth for thousands of years to come. The most recent warning came in March, when leading global experts with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a new report, stating that “there is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.”
The large Jewish populations living in the coastal United States are vulnerable to extreme storms, sea-level rise, severe heat and other weather disruptions — a situation dramatized in the recent Apple television series “Extrapolations,” in which a rabbi contends with rising sea waters infiltrating his Florida synagogue. Meanwhile, Israel is experiencing a slew of impacts from drought and floods to security threats tied regional climate-related instability.
A flooded road after heavy rainfall in the central Israeli city of Lod, Jan. 16, 2022. (Yossi Aloni/Flash90)
Israeli officials visit the site where a road collapsed into a large sinkhole at Mineral Beach in the Dead Sea on December 7, 2017. Many facilities and beaches have been closed or shut down in recent years following the increase in sinkholes caused by ever-declining sea levels, as climate change strains the country’s water resources. (Mark Neyman/GPO)
The last few months have seen a flurry of new initiatives aimed at both greening Jewish institutions and directing collective action on climate.
In December, for example, Rosenn’s group published a report calculating that endowments of Jewish organizations, from family foundations to local federations, are invested in the fossil fuel industry to the tune of at least $3 billion. The report launched an ongoing campaign called All Our Might that urges Jewish leaders to withdraw these investments and put the money toward clean energy instead.
Meanwhile, many of the most prominent Jewish organizations in the country — representing local federations, Hillel chapters, summer camps, community centers, day schools and nearly every religious denomination — had already joined a new green coalition organized by another Jewish environmental group and were preparing to unveil pledges to do more in the fight against climate change.
The unveiling of the climate pledges happened in March, under the leadership of Adamah, a nonprofit created through the merger of two stalwarts of Jewish environmentalism, Hazon and the Pearlstone Center.
“Climate and sustainability have not been on the list of priorities for the vast majority of Jewish organizations; this coalition and these climate action plans reflect a deep paradigm shift and culture change moving forward,” Adamah CEO Jakir Mandela said at the time.
The commitments made by members of Adamah’s Jewish Climate Leadership Coalition include sending youth leaders to global climate summits, reducing emissions of buildings and vehicles and lobbying the federal government to pass climate policies.
More than 300 congregations and nonprofits have joined. For Earth Day, Adamah announced a million-dollar fund offering interest-free loans and matching grants to Jewish groups for projects to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
If any single event can be said to mark the debut of the climate issue as a top Jewish communal priority, it is probably the recent annual conference of the Jewish Funders Network, which took place in March in Phoenix, bringing together thousands of donors and charity executives.
For the gathering’s first event, before the formal opening of the conference, a group of participants went on a field trip to downtown Phoenix to learn about the local effects of the climate crisis. Far more people signed up than organizers anticipated, and with about 55 passengers, the tour bus chartered for the occasion reached capacity. Mizrahi, who was among the participants, said the trip was helpful as a networking opportunity for like-minded philanthropists.
“We wanted to expose them to how the existential threats posed by climate change are not long term, but are already here,” Yanklowitz said. “People down in the Zone are dying every summer from heat exhaustion and dehydration.”
Based on his debrief with the group afterward, Yanklowitz feels the trip left an impact on participants.
“I didn’t hear anyone say, ‘Oh, I’m changing my commitments.’ But I did get the sense that climate change was kind of abstract for many people, and that now it really hit home,” Yanklowitz said.
The rest of the conference featured multiple talks and gatherings dedicated to climate, including on the main stage, and an announcement that Birthright, which offers free trips to Israel for young Jews, was increasing its own climate activism with the help of a new donation.
In an interview, Ellen Bronfman Hauptman and Stephen Bronfman, children of Birthright founder Charles Bronfman, said their $9 million gift is meant to honor their father on the occasion of his 90th birthday, while also bringing Birthright more in line with the values of a new generation that is environmentally-minded.
Birthright organizers will use the funding to develop programming focused on climate that could, for example, expose participants to Israel’s clean tech scene. The money is also intended to help Birthright lower its own carbon footprint, potentially by switching to electric buses or adding more vegetarian meals.
The Bronfmans hope that Birthright’s significant purchasing power in Israeli tourism will nudge the industry toward more ecologically sustainable practices.
“To me, Birthright is like Walmart — everyone wants to do business with them,” Stephen Bronfman said. “They have the power to dictate terms to their service providers and affect the supply chain.”
The widespread interest in climate mobilization among Jewish groups comes after years in which the issue languished outside the mainstream. Rosenn, the head of Dayenu, who has attended about 15 conferences of the Jewish Funder Network, noticed a change this year.
“There used to be half a dozen people at a breakfast before the program talking about climate. And it wasn’t even climate, necessarily — it was the environment writ large,” she said.
The Jewish world is, in many ways, still lagging behind the larger climate movement. Divesting endowment funds from the fossil fuel industry, for example, is seen as a bold step among Jewish groups even though at least 1,590 institutions representing nearly $41 trillion in assets have already publicly committed to doing so, according to a website tracking such pledges. About a third of the groups on the list are defined as faith-based organizations, but only three are Jewish: Kolot Chayeinu, a congregation in Park Slope, Brooklyn; the Reform movement’s pension system; and the American Jewish World Service, a global justice group.
Rabbi Laura Bellows, now Dayenu’s director of spiritual activism and education, waves matzah as she encourages major financial organizations to divest from fossil fuels at a rally in Washington, D.C., April 20, 2022. (Bora Chung | Survival Media Agency / Courtesy of Dayenu)
Adamah’s own climate plan doesn’t include a pledge to divest but only a promise that it will investigate the option of doing so for its endowment and employee retirement funds. Instead, the plan touts the group’s education and advocacy efforts, and focuses on reducing emissions at its retreat centers.
Adamah’s chief climate officer, Risa Alyson Cooper, acknowledged that Jewish community institutions have been “largely absent” from the divestment movement and said her group regards divestment as one of several required tools for addressing the climate crisis.
She said the Jewish community hit a milestone when 12 of the 20 founding members of Adamah’s climate coalition said in their climate plans that they would consider amending their financial practices. That was significant, she said, in light of the organizations’ complex and deliberate governing structures, which can make executing such changes onerous.
“While the Jewish community may have lagged behind in years past, we are catching up quickly,” Cooper said.
Such a shift would mark not only a milestone for Jewish climate activism but also a departure from how the Jewish community has historically done philanthropy, said Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster, executive vice president of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility.
She said wielding financial holdings for social impact has been a hallmark of advocacy by Christian groups. Last year, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) opted to divest from fossil fuels in light of the climate crisis.
The Jewish community, meanwhile, has tended to act primarily through charitable donations. One of the reasons for the difference, she said, is that the Jewish community is much less centralized with communal assets spread across many endowments, making the actions of any single group relatively less impactful.
“Adamah had done some really important work to change individual behavior and grow people’s connections to the environment, but the bigger piece of bold collective action to fight the climate crisis was missing,” Kahn-Troster said. “The overall community is late to respond to the urgency of the problem. But I do think that the work of these organizations is very significant, so I’m excited to see it.”
Kahn-Troster’s historical view is informed by the legacy of her father, Rabbi Lawrence Troster, an environmental activist who had pushed for communal Jewish action on climate, and by the passion for climate justice displayed by her 15-year-old, Liora Pelavin, a member of the Jewish Youth Climate Movement, an arm of Adamah.
“Finding a meaningful Jewish space to do grassroots-level climate advocacy that many young people are demanding has been really important to Liora,” Kahn-Troster said.
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How Israel’s strongest partisans destroyed global support for Israel
No one has done more damage to Israel than the people who claim to love it the most.
As this week’s shocking election news demonstrates, the extremism of Benjamin Netanyahu, his far-right coalition partners, and his fundamentalist Amen corner in the United States has destroyed the bipartisan support for Israel that has been in place since the Kennedy administration. Israel’s most ardent defenders have become some of its worst enemies.
The change is not just taking place on the Socialist Left or Nationalist Right. And it is not a result of antisemitism, propaganda or misinformation, although all of those play a role. It is the result of years of Israeli actions that have alienated nearly half of the Democratic party, a quarter of the Republican party, and liberal Zionists in both camps.
There are now millions, perhaps tens of millions, of liberals and centrists who may still support the existence of a Jewish state, but who are morally repulsed by the destruction of Gaza and the slow-motion ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, and millions of progressives who, wrongly but not without reason, now lump Zionism in with racism and sexism as ideologies that offend their core values.
Israel has even alienated conservatives and America-Firsters who can’t understand why aid to Israel is treated differently from all other foreign aid or foreign policy programs. Yes, many of them believe in, and spread, antisemitic conspiracy theories. But many others have legitimate questions about Israel’s and AIPAC’s influence on American foreign policy, most recently the Iran war, which America and Israel have lost. These Americans include, most recently, the Vice President of the United States, who publicly rebuked Israel as no American leader has done since the 1950s, noting that Israel has lost the support of almost every other country in the world, and was now in danger of losing American support as well.
And for what? For what bowl of porridge did Israel sell its birthright as a member of the civilized world? For nationalist pipe-dreams of Gaza wiped off the map? For keeping Bibi’s coalition alive so he doesn’t go to jail for bribery? For messianic dreams of Greater Israel? For the most hawkish possible interpretation of Israel’s legitimate security needs? For revenge?
To be sure, Bibi, his ultra-nationalist coalition, and AIPAC are not responsible for all of this. But they are responsible for most of it. Had Israel conducted the war in Gaza differently and not killed over 70,000 people; had Bibi not persuaded Trump to join a fruitless and costly war with Iran; and had AIPAC not insisted on absolute, unquestioned support for Israel no matter what, we would not be where we are today. Of course, the hard left and some parts of the hard right would still be opposed to Israel’s existence, often for illegitimate reasons. But they wouldn’t have attracted so much support from others, including the voters which handed the progressive Left three election wins in New York this week.
Maybe some of those voters are bamboozled or bigoted, but surely not all or even most of them.
Israel’s standing has deteriorated so much that it’s even possible to imagine a presidential race (probably 2032 rather than 2028) between two candidates who reject the current America-Israel relationship: an AOC-type progressive on the Left and a Tucker-Carlson-type nationalist on the Right. It’s hard to think of a worse failure of political strategy.
You can’t blame this all on double standards, antisemitism, effective online propagandizing, or groupthink on the left. Of course, all of these exist, as I myself have written about many times. But at some point, we have to face the facts that the hard-right Israeli government’s policies are the primary cause of these rapid and radical changes.
Nor are they part of some timeless, causeless Jew-hatred that will never go away. Sure, some percentage of Americans (on both sides of the aisle) are, in Hillary Clinton’s words, deplorable. But they are a small minority. There are many more of us who may not use terms like Anti-Zionist, genocide, or colonialism, but who see that the Israel we may once have loved has devolved into a cruel, hyper-nationalist state whose actions are antithetical to liberal moral values.
We are horrified by what we saw in Gaza, even as we were also horrified by Hamas’ murderous attacks of October 7. We are dismayed by the failed misadventure in Iran, even as we despise the theocratic regime that has funded terrorism for decades. We are too left-wing for AIPAC, not left-wing-enough for the Bernie Left segment of the Democratic Party. Among non-Orthodox American Jews, I would venture to say that we are the conflicted majority.
Which is why, uncharacteristically for me, I want to end on a note of tempered, tentative optimism, for three reasons.
First, there is an Israeli election coming up. And while the Bennett/Lapid coalition is still to the Right of many American Jews, it is also sane, competent, and not beholden to actual genociders like Bezalel Smotrich, who sullied the recent Israel March by treading his blood-stained feet in it. Bibi’s complete failure to achieve even a decent deal with Iran has greatly weakened him. Normal, non-left-wing Israelis are exhausted by the endless wars which do not bring security. And many normal, non-left-wing Israelis are horrified by what they see in the West Bank, where, unlike Gaza, there is not an implacable terrorist enemy holding Israelis hostage, but where there are frequent, state-tolerated pogroms against innocent Palestinian people, as former prime minister Ehud Olmert has compellingly written about. There is, at last, some hope for Israeli democracy.
Second, as reflected in the February 2026 JFNA survey of American Jews’ attitudes toward Zionism, progressives’ antipathy to Zionism is, in large part, a misunderstanding — what Mimi Kravetz aptly called “the ‘Zionism’ gap.” In that poll, only 37% of respondents identified as Zionist, but 88% said that they believed Israel has a right to exist as a democratic, Jewish state — which is, itself, the classic definition of Zionism. Meanwhile, 80% of Jews who identified as anti-Zionist said that Zionism means “supporting whatever actions Israel takes,” which is definitely not what Zionism means, as evidenced by the polls about the upcoming election.
I have suggested that much of this gap is due to the difference between Zionism in theory and Zionism in recent practice. But whatever the cause, the point is that “anti-Zionism” is not nearly as strong as anti-Zionists, or many worried Zionists, say that it is. A large majority of supposed anti-Zionists and non-Zionists are really just anti-Bibi, anti-genocide (as they understand the term), and anti-oppression of Palestinians. As I am as well.
This means that, if there is a new government and new policies in Israel, there is hope for change, which is my third reason for qualified optimism.
Ironically, for that to happen, the best hopes for improving Israel’s standing in the world are some of the very constituencies and populations that AIPAC and the Israeli Right have seen as their enemies: Standing Together and their new political party Makom Le-Kulanu, the New Israel Fund, T’ruah, J Street, Rabbis for Human Rights, Smol Emuni, Peace Now, denominational bodies like Arza and Merkaz, New Jewish Narrative, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, and many others.
The path of the Right has led to a dead end. Bibi and his American allies have tarnished the Israeli ‘brand’ to the point where even taking money from AIPAC is a deal-breaker in numerous Democratic Party elections. The real debate among the liberal half of the country is now between liberal Zionists (and quasi-Zionists) like those I’ve listed above, and non-antisemitic anti-Zionists and post-Zionists who argue that Israel’s hyper-nationalism, Jewish supremacy, and war crimes are not an aberration from Zionism but an inevitable expression of it; that there can be no Jewish self-determination in the land of Israel without the oppression and displacement of Palestinians; and that the only way forward is a non-Jewish state for all its citizens. (I am omitting from this discussion Palestinian genociders like Hamas, and its supporters overseas.)
I think the latter view is both incorrect and unrealistic, not least because there are at least five million Israeli Jews who will not surrender a Jewish state. I think that coexistence is the only way, whether that takes the form of two states, or a confederation of two states, or some other political arrangement. But I also admit that the Netanyahu government’s actions over the last five years provide ample evidence for the anti-Zionist view. Who knows, maybe it is too late for a democratic Israel, or maybe the term is a contradiction in terms.
But I do know this: The moral corruption of Israel has destroyed the alliances that kept it safe for decades. No amount of tough talk from Bibi and Smotrich, no guns or bombs will enable a small pariah state to endure forever. The old logic has ended. But there is hope for a better one.
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Victory for Mamdani’s candidates prompts Jewish leaders to puzzle over implications
Jewish leaders across the political spectrum nationally were reeling — some in celebration, others suffering through elevated anxiety — after a trio of Congressional candidates endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani swept their primary contests Tuesday by taking out establishment favorites with track records of supporting Israel.
“We’re disappointed in the losses,” said Halie Soifer, chief of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, who argued that two of the losing incumbents, New York City Reps. Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat, “represent the views of the vast majority of Jewish voters.”
But close observers of the outcomes, which also included the loss of Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso in the contest for an open seat, were struggling to divine the broader meaning of the results.
Did the victories for progressive Brad Lander against Goldman, Claire Valdez against Reynoso and Darializa Avila Chevalier against Espaillat — after all three charged their opponents with enabling genocide by Israel against Palestinians — mark the end for Democratic politicians who hold traditional pro-Israel views?
Or did they represent something more narrow: New York City’s extremely liberal Democratic voting base flexing its muscle, Mamdani’s enduring popularity following his election last November or generalized anger toward a Democratic establishment that has been viewed by many of the party’s voters as too weak against President Donald Trump?
Sophie Ellman-Golan, a spokesperson for Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, a local group that is closely aligned with Mamdani, called Tuesday’s results a “sweeping left victory” but acknowledged it was hard to extrapolate beyond New York City.
“Voters are absolutely not having it for establishment Democrats who refuse to stand up and fight fascism,” Ellman-Golan said .
Some more moderate candidates did score wins outside of New York City. State delegate Adrian Boafo won a crowded race to replace retiring Rep. Steny Hoyer in Maryland with the support of AIPAC and other pro-Israel Democrats.
And even in New York, not every election went to candidates who endorsed Mamdani’s brand of politics. In the Bronx, Rep. Ritchie Torres — one of the Democratic party’s staunchest supporters of Israel — handily defeated Michael Blake, a former state assemblyman who threw his support to Mamdani during the mayoral primary last year but did not obtain Mamdani’s endorsement for Congress. Blake had repeatedly attacked Torres as purportedly beholden to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee but received just 22% of the vote to 72% for Torres.
For state comptroller, incumbent Thomas DiNapoli — who made additional purchases of Israel bonds in the aftermath of Oct. 7 — beat Jewish challenger Drew Warshaw, who promised to divest New York State from Israel Bonds and argued DiNapoli was helping to “finance Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wars.”
State Assemblymember Micah Lasher won the race to succeed Rep. Jerry Nadler, who is retiring 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 both supported Israel.
“I don’t think it is transferable elsewhere in New York or throughout the country,” Soifer said, pointing to the power of the Democratic Socialists of America in the city. “While DSA candidates can win in some places, they cannot win everywhere.”
When it comes to Israel, the DSA’s case against establishment Democrats includes on the premise that funds the U.S. is spending on military aid to Israel should be spent on social programs to benefit working Americans. As Mamdani put it at Avila Chevalier’s primary night party, she ran a campaign that “called for a foreign policy of investing in babies and not bombs.”
With other key races still to be decided — including the U.S. Senate primary in Michigan, where Israel has emerged as a major fault line — there is no sign that Israel is losing its potency in Democratic contests.
That has left some liberal Jews despairing.
Rabbi Jonah Pesner, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, released a statement decrying “the false choice between Jewish safety and Palestinian dignity” and condemning politicians who “demonize supporters of Israel, or deny Israel’s right to exist.”
Some observers also sought to draw contrasts between Tuesday’s insurgent victors. Lander, for example, considers himself a liberal Zionist and has close ties to center-left Jewish organizations in New York City. He partnered with Mamdani during the mayoral race, and Mamdani encouraged him to challenge Goldman despite their differences over Israel.
Lander’s support for a two-state solution — meaning the preservation of a Jewish state in Israel, rather than its elimination in favor of a binational country — also earned him an endorsement from J Street and a warm reception from the New York Jewish Agenda, a liberal pro-Israel group that has expressed concern over Mamdani’s policy positions on Israel.
Margo Hughes-Robinson, director of NYJA, said she was celebrating Lander and Lasher’s victories as “wins for friends of the family.”
There was less cheering among Jewish establishment leaders for the victory of Avila Chevalier, who went from helping to lead the pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia University two years ago to likely representing the Congressional district that includes the campus.
Avila Chevalier was perhaps the most outspoken opponent of Israel in Tuesday’s races and has staked out positions to Mamdani’s left on the conflict. Avila Chevalier defended her decision to attend a rally held in Times Square on Oct. 8, 2023, which many Jewish leaders — and some outside the community, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — condemned for condoning Hamas violence. She has also called Zionism “an ideology that is looking to create a political system where one group of people has more standing before the law than another group of people.”
Tuesday’s contest also followed the victory of Janeese Lewis George, another candidate endorsed by the DSA, in the Democratic primary for Washington, D.C. mayor last week.
Ron Halber, chief of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, said he thought the anti-Zionist left’s success would be relatively short-lived but acknowledged that Israel has an image problem and to fix that they needed to “rehabilitate their behavior.”
“People don’t like the product that pro-Israel Democrats are selling,” Halber said.
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Israel’s cheerleaders lost big in the New York primary
To read the news Wednesday morning, the biggest loser in New York’s primary elections wasn’t a candidate in the race. It wasn’t even a person. It was Israel.
Three candidates who support ending or conditioning American military aid to Israel, all backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, won competitive primaries. The New York Times‘ assessment was blunt: “victories by pro-Palestinian Democrats show the party’s shift on Israel.” So was Politico‘s: “pro-Israel politics just took a huge hit in New York.” This very publication proclaimed the establishment of “a new political machine against Israel.”
Even outside those particularly charged races, the Israeli discourse was overwhelming. Micah Lasher, who won a crowded primary election to replace Rep. Jerry Nadler in New York’s 12th District, said during the campaign that he was “exhausted” by the focus on Israel.
Which makes it worth asking: Why did Israel become arguably the most prominent faultline in the Democratic primaries in the first place?
As the United States faces a cadre of alarming domestic issues — including the affordability (or lack thereof) of health insurance premiums, the future of abortion access and rising inflation — why should elections in New York be about Israel?
Foreign policy is an important issue for members of Congress, of course. And it’s not unreasonable that voters would want to know where candidates stand on, say, sending weapons to a country about whose wartime conduct many New Yorkers have grave concerns. But I think a lesson from this, which supporters of Israel may not want to learn, is that pro-Israel alarmism over progressive candidates has helped to boost those same candidates, rather than damage their chances.
In other words: the strategy of trying to write candidates out of viability by declaring them insufficiently supportive of Israel — or by suggesting that their positions on Israel mean they’re antisemitic, and shouldn’t hold elected office — hasn’t just not worked. It’s backfired disastrously, increasing the political salience of Israel in ways that hurt support for Israel in Congress.
Much of this is, I think, a downstream effect of last year’s election of Mamdani, during which hundreds of rabbis signed and circulated a letter declaring Mamdani’s politics — which center pro-Palestinian activism and skepticism about Israel’s existence as a Jewish state — a bridge too far. Mamdani’s campaign didn’t center Israel, at least at the start; it was actually about affordability. But the attention from pro-Israel groups and individuals increased the prominence of Israel in the election, so much so that by the time he won first the Democratic primary and then the general election, his victory was seen as being as much about Israel as much as it was affordability.
The same has become true of his endorsed candidates, too.
It’s not of course, that Israel was only important or prominent in these elections because of pro-Israel groups and individuals. There are political activists across the spectrum, including many in the progressive camp, to whom it is indeed the most important issue on the ballot. The same is true for voters. And multiple candidates, including Darializa Avila Chevalier and former Comptroller Brad Lander, were proactive about making their criticism of Israel a key point of their campaigns.
Still, we’re seeing an inversion of the longstanding norms by which staunch supporters of Israel have drawn a line beyond which someone’s politics on the Middle East make them unelectable. Such charges arguably played a role in Keith Ellison’s 2017 defeat in the race to be chair of the Democratic National Committee. As recently as 2022, the story of Andy Levin’s defeat in Michigan was that he, a J Street-aligned Democrat, had been bested by AIPAC.
For some of this week’s losing candidates and their supporters, that playbook backfired in real time.
Three weeks ago, the group Combat Antisemitism dinged Avila Chevalier for attending, in their words, an “October 8 rally celebrating Hamas massacre.” Avila Chevalier’s opponents made her attendance at that rally a talking point against her, which meant that just as her contest ended up being largely about Israel and antisemitism, her victory over Rep. Adriano Espaillat did, too.
Rep. Dan Goldman accused Lander, who is also Jewish, of using “dangerous antisemitic tropes” in the election. Lander — who said he felt “queasy” in talking about AIPAC, given the reality that there are antisemitic tropes about the group, but still attacked Goldman for his affiliation with them — won in a landslide.
If the Mamdani-backed candidates had lost, it would have been seen as a confirmation that Mamdani was an aberration, and that the old protocol of demanding at least moderate support for Israel from candidates for office in the most Jewish city in the country was still applicable. Instead, their victories seem like confirmation of a new era in Democratic politics when it comes to Israel — potentially not just for New York City, but also for the whole country.
There are good reasons to wonder how widespread that change might be. The AIPAC-affiliated United Democracy Project, for instance, spent $5.7 million on supporting Adrian Boafo in a Maryland House race, albeit by pouring money into races via ads that didn’t focus on Israel. Boafo, who called for closer ties between Israel and the U.S., won his primary.
But when we consider why, exactly, Israel took up so much space in this week’s primary elections, part of the answer has to be that it was in part because strong supporters of Israel wanted it that way. That things have worked out differently than they might have hoped is a lesson not only about Israel and New Yorkers, but about democratic politics: you can force voters to think about something, but you can’t actually force them to think what you want.
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