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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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Why Israel’s soccer team competes in Europe rather than Asia
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — More than five decades after Israel’s only World Cup appearance, the Israel Football Association says it has no intention of trying to leave Europe for the Asian regional qualifying system that once took the country to the tournament, before Arab-led boycotts helped force it out.
The launch this month of the tournament hosted by the United States has renewed attention to Israel’s absence from the World Cup. Despite a thriving local soccer scene and success in competition abroad, the only time the country appeared in the tournament was in Mexico in 1970.
That’s because Israel seeks to qualify through the Union of European Football Associations, whose ranks are so strong that even a solid campaign can become a long shot for the World Cup. Even titans like four-time World Cup winner Italy failed to qualify this year.
Israel is the only non-European country trying to reach the tournament through UEFA, while most of its neighbors seek places through the Asian Football Confederation. Israel was ousted from the Asian soccer body in 1974. It bounced around the qualifying zones for a few years — it played in the Oceania qualifiers ahead of the 1986 and 1990 World Cups — before settling in the European grouping in 1991.
Shlomi Barzel, head of communications for the Israel Football Association, said a return to Asia is not on the table, both because Israel does not want to leave European soccer, where it has built a standing, and because he does not believe the Asian confederation would accept it back.
The only upside to such a move, he joked, would be if Israel’s opponents boycotted matches against it: “Israel would automatically qualify.”
A boycott of Israel did affect the team’s path to the 1970 World Cup. North Korea was ejected from the Asian qualifying tournament after refusing to play in Israel. As a result, Israel advanced to the final round after winning only two games against New Zealand. In the finals, Israel faced an Australian team already exhausted after fending off South Korea, Japan and Rhodesia (itself in the Asian tournament after being banned in Africa over its white governing regime).
In the tournament in Mexico, Israel’s all-amateur team defied expectations, losing 0-2 to Uruguay but notching draws against Sweden and Italy before being eliminated.
Four years later, Israel was effectively ejected from the Asian Football Confederation following a resolution introduced by Kuwait that passed 17 to 13, with six abstentions. The vote came a day before a high-profile Israel-Iran game in Tehran that Iran won 1-0 on an Israeli own goal.
Today, Barzel rejects the premise that rejoining the AFC would guarantee Israel a place in the World Cup going forward.
“It would be a little patronizing and arrogant for me to say that,” he said, adding that he was not sure Israel would beat teams such as Jordan or Qatar.
Barzel also cited Israel’s place inside UEFA’s institutions as a benefit for sticking with the current arrangement. Current IFA chairman Moshe “Shino” Zuaretz was elected to UEFA’s Executive Committee in April 2025, despite the war in Gaza and growing calls to sanction Israeli soccer, while former IFA chairman Avi Luzon previously served in a senior role on the same body.
Institutional backing has extended beyond Europe, Barzel said, pointing to the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, where Israeli fans were allowed to attend despite the absence of diplomatic ties. He also cited the global soccer body FIFA’s decision to move the 2023 under-20s World Cup from Indonesia to Argentina after Indonesia objected to hosting Israel’s team. Israel went on to finish third.
Still, Israel’s formal place in international soccer has done little to shield its teams and supporters from hostility. Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were attacked in Amsterdam after a match against Ajax in November 2024, and the club’s supporters were later barred from attending an Aston Villa match in a decision that became a political and policing scandal in Britain.
Despite its absence from the World Cup, Israel has remained a political flashpoint around the event, which U.S. President Donald Trump vowed to make “an unprecedented success.” Speculation that Trump’s hopes for a World Cup untainted by war spurred his push for a ceasefire with Iran prompted a denial from the top White House official dealing with the World Cup.
That didn’t keep the conflict from seeping into the events.
In Boston on June 19, kilt-clad Scotland fans waiting in blocks-long lines to board shuttles to the stadium where their team would face Morocco accepted Palestinian flags from activists lining the route.
Hours before Canada’s opening match on June 12, activists draped a “Kick Israel out of FIFA” banner over a World Cup logo near one of Toronto’s busiest highways.
Days later, a viral video from Iran’s match against New Zealand in Los Angeles showed security guards confiscating an Israeli flag from a fan — who was told they were acting on orders from their superiors — while other spectators behind him held Palestinian flags.
Trump’s special envoy for global partnerships, Paolo Zampolli, told Israel’s Kan public broadcaster he was “very disturbed” by the incident in Los Angeles, adding that there was “no place for antisemitism or double standards in sports.” Zampolli, who had previously urged FIFA to replace Iran with Italy at the World Cup, called on the soccer body to treat the episode seriously.
Barzel drew a distinction between the flag incident, which he said was likely a poor decision by stadium staff, and any official FIFA policy against Israel, noting that Israel’s flag is displayed alongside those of other member associations at official FIFA and UEFA events. FIFA generally discourages flags of teams not playing in a given match, he said, and added that Israeli teams have grown used to seeing Palestinian flags in soccer stadiums.
“Personally, I don’t get worked up by flags — they don’t scare me,” he said.
Yoav Borowitz, head of sports at Kan, said FIFA appeared wary of flags being used as protest symbols, pointing to the Iranian lion-and-sun flag, the country’s flag before the 1979 revolution installed the current theocratic regime, which some fans waved at the same match. FIFA’s failure to clarify whether Israeli flags were allowed in stadiums in the days after the incident, he said, “shows where Israel stands at the moment.”
“There were official FIFA stewards there,” he said, “and if the fan was effectively forced to remove the flag, then I would have expected FIFA to have issued a response by now and said that Israeli flags are allowed into stadiums, just as Palestinian flags are allowed into stadiums, just as the flag of any country is allowed into stadiums.”
Any limits placed on Israel’s soccer association have been imposed solely on security grounds, Barzel said, though in October UEFA came close to holding an emergency vote on whether to suspend Israel over the war in Gaza.
At FIFA’s congress in Vancouver in April, when Palestinian Football Association president Jibril Rajoub refused to shake hands with Israel FA Vice President Basim Sheikh Suliman despite repeated appeals from FIFA President Gianni Infantino, who called on the sides to “give hope to the children.”
Despite such gestures, Israel continues to compete as usual — almost. It has been unable to host matches at home for close to three years because of war and has had to play its home World Cup qualifiers in neutral third countries. It is hosting several contests this fall in Moldova, which last year gained an Israeli embassy, and direct El Al routes, for the first time. (Russia, by contrast, has had its national teams and clubs suspended from FIFA and UEFA competitions since its invasion of Ukraine.)
Despite the controversies, FIFA has kept pressing ahead with its vision of soccer as “a force for unity, peace and hope,” including reported discussions about opening a new under-15’s tournament in the United States in September with a symbolic match between Israeli and Palestinian youth teams.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Why Israel’s soccer team competes in Europe rather than Asia appeared first on The Forward.
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A klezmer virtuoso, Joseph Moskowitz was a cymbalist of Jewish progress in America
The restaurant occupies a long narrow basement on the Lower East Side. It is packed with a hundred Jews who fill the air with a fog of blue tobacco smoke as steak and lamb grills over charcoal. Everyone, it seems, has a glass of red Romanian wine, including the cymbalom player who is banging out a sad peasant ballad. The whole room sings along.
The scene is from the early 1900’s in Jews Without Money, Michael Gold’s 1930 novel about the poor of the Jewish Lower East Side. The mustachioed man at the cymbalom is not a fictional character, though. He is Joseph Moskowitz, a Romanian-born Jew who ran the restaurant with his wife.
One of the first klezmer virtuosos in America, Moskowitz had a hand in several of the city’s restaurants, including a wildly successful Second Avenue establishment frequented by underworld figures, politicians and showbiz royalty. The Kardashians would envy his shrewdness in garnering publicity for his multifaceted career.
In April 1908, just four months after Moskowitz came to Amerike, he landed on to the front-page of The New York Times in a review headlined “CHAMPION CYMBALIST IS PLAYING HERE NOW.” The story noted his strange instrument, a hammered dulcimer popular in Eastern Europe, looked like “a baby grand piano with the top off.” The newspaper reported that Moskowitz’s performance was greeted with cries of “Bravo!”
Nixon was here
Moskowitz’s career as a musician met with great success but his life as a restaurateur had its ups and downs. He ran a number of eateries in New York, including one in the Bronx and another in what is now referred to as the East Village with three waiters as partners. Then, after a performance in Akron, Ohio, he ran a restaurant there called The Romany.
The Moskowitz family lived above the joint. Its clientele included members of the Firestone and Goodrich families but the patronage of the rubber barons was not enough to sustain the restaurant, so Moskowitz moved to Washington, D.C. There, he performed at Michel’s, a restaurant started by a violinist he played with. Legend has it that among the regulars at Michel’s was congressman Richard Nixon who would bring in a brown paper bag concealing a fermented beverage.
“I would like to point out that one of Nixon’s first foreign trips as president was actually to Romania, where he was photographed dancing the hora at the Museum of the Romanian Peasant with Nikolai Ceausescu, the Romanian dictator,” said Pete Rushefsky, a widely esteemed cymbalist who is also executive director of the Center for Traditional Music and Dance in New York.
The triumphs and travails of Moskowitz’s life are recounted in his unpublished and untitled memoir, which is now part of the Joseph Moskowitz Archive, acquired earlier this year by the Music Division at the Library of Congress. The archive was established after a box of artifacts was discovered in the home of one of Moskowitz’s descendants in Cleveland.
An affair to remember
In the early 1900’s there were dozens of Romanian Jewish restaurants on the Lower East Side, which was home to so many Romanian Jews it was known as Little Romania. The neighborhood was also distinguished by a large number of dance halls and libraries.
The Moskowitz memoir, which was written in Romanian, makes clear that his restaurants did not always attract the cream of the crop. One became the headquarters for some Russians gangsters, most of them pickpockets.
At Lupowitz & Moskowitz, which moved from its original location to Second Avenue and 2nd Street, dinners started at 85 cents. In Moskowitz’s telling, business was going great until his partner Sam Lupowitz, stole money with the assistance of Moskowitz’s wife Rebecca with whom he was having an affair.
According to Moskowitz, the affair went on for nine years. It all started, he writes, when Lupowitz took Mrs. Moskowitz to a party and got her “totally drunk,” after which they proceeded to the kitchen to burn off some calories. Mr. Moskowitz put an end to the affair when he came home one night and caught his partner leaving Mrs. Moskowitz’s bedroom.
In the old country, Moskowitz himself had not been exactly celibate. He recounts an affair with a Romanian widow he describes as a grifter. For nine months, he wrote, they made love every day. This feat was apparently an exhausting endeavor because Moskowitz decided to depart abruptly, leaving a letter informing the widow that he could no longer “carry on in this manner.” The widow had other ideas and asked a local magistrate to arrest Moskowitz who managed to avoid incarceration by hiding.
A heavy lift
Joseph Moskowitz’s real superpower was performing on the cymbalom, which he started playing at the age of eight, taught by his father on a small folk version of the instrument. One of his first gigs was playing on the ferries that travelled the Danube. Eventually he learned how to play the large concert version of the cymbalom, which was developed in the late 19th Century and became a major orchestral instrument in Eastern Europe.
“He was an absolute virtuoso,” said Rushefsky. “His technical competence on the instrument was just incredible.”
Moskowitz was recorded playing a wide range of music on the instrument, including ragtime, classical, as well as Turkish, Russian and Greek music.
His cymbalom weighed 150 pounds and was not an easy instrument to schlep around, which made performing at restaurants appealing, since he could just leave the instrument there, though he did perform from time to time in concert venues, including Town Hall.
Rushefsky told me he was impressed with Moskowitz’s savvy at drumming up publicity for both his performances and restaurants. Moskowitz deftly cultivated relationships with media figures and other bold-faced names of the day. His memoir notes that among the celebrities who came to hear him play were Theodore Dreiser, Chaim Weitzman and Jascha Heifetz.
“He had a meticulously curated scrapbook filled with articles about his restaurant and reviews of his performances. You can tell that was really important to him,” Rushefsky said.
In Around The World In New York, a book about the city’s ethnic neighborhoods published in 1924, the immigrant newspaperman Konrad Bercovici described Moskowitz’s restaurant as a place with “haunting melodies, tripping dances” and spicy food. “At Moskowitz’s on Houston Street the Rumanian Jews sing at the top of their voices the songs of the country they left,” Bercovici wrote.
A klezpirational figure
Many of the old scratchy 78 rpm vinyl disks that were vital to the first wave of the klezmer revival in the 1970’s and 80’s featured a clarinet-centric sound but the earliest recordings we have of klezmer, from circa 1908, the violin is the main instrument, often accompanied by cymbalom.
Moskowitz’s recordings are widely available on YouTube.
“His repertoire is performed by klezmer bands around the world,” Pete Rushefsky told me. “His recordings continue to be an inspiration for a small but dedicated group of musicians working to revitalize the cimbalom as an essential part of klezmer’s sound.”
The post A klezmer virtuoso, Joseph Moskowitz was a cymbalist of Jewish progress in America appeared first on The Forward.
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Primaries prove it: In New York, pro-Israel politics are now a liability
(JTA) — A little more than a year ago, thousands showed up for the annual Paul Feig z”l Tikkun Leil Shavuot at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan, an all-night bonanza of eclectic Jewish learning. The program featured dozens of rabbis, scholars, journalists and artists. Yet the unquestioned star of the night was Ritchie Torres, the congressman from the Bronx who has become a beloved figure in the pro-Israel community.
Hundreds packed the gym to hear from Torres, with many others turned away at the door. Eventually the discussion turned to the upcoming mayoral primary that was just weeks away. Many in the crowd were alarmed by the surging popularity of Zohran Mamdani, but still skeptical that a staunchly anti-Israel lawmaker could be elected in the city with the world’s largest Jewish community outside of Israel.
Instead of reassurance, Torres, who was backing former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the mayoral primary, issued a warning: If Mamdani pulled off his improbable upset, it would quickly become open season on pro-Israel Democrats like himself.
As it turned out, Torres didn’t have to worry. He won his primary race Tuesday night in a landslide, securing around 70% of the vote in New York’s 15th Congressional District against an anti-Israel challenger. But his prediction was still spot on: The primaries were a Mamdani wave, with all three of the mayor’s endorsed congressional candidates winning their primaries – and knocking off two solidly pro-Israel incumbents, Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat, in the process.
In November, Mamdani’s ascension to City Hall felt like a political earthquake, putting an exclamation point on the reality that being staunchly anti-Israel was no longer a road block to success in Democratic politics. Yet Tuesday’s results feel more seismic – this is the first time that incumbent congressmen have lost their seats in campaigns in which they were repeatedly attacked for being too supportive of Israel. Whatever other issues were at play in the individual races, the success of candidates with an outsized focus on criticizing the Jewish state and groups that support it – in particular, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee – sends the message that their approach is a winning strategy.
There are still plenty of districts where Democrats can win with pro-Israel positions and pro-Israel support, for example the congressional seat being vacated in Marylan by pro-Israel stalwart Steny Hoyer. Hoyer’s pick to succeed him, Adrian Boafo, won Tuesday in a crowded 24-candidate primary with major backing from AIPAC.
But suddenly, for a widening swath of the Democratic congressional caucus, backing Israel has gone from being the politically safe move to a potential career-ender.
Goldman, who won his first reelection primary with about 65% of the vote in 2024, ended up on the wrong side of a similar landslide this time around in his race against former City Comptroller Brad Lander. Espaillat, who has served in Congress for nearly a decade and is chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, lost to Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York’s 13th Congressional District, which includes Upper Manhattan and parts of the Bronx.
Following Mamdani’s lead, Lander and Avila Chevalier both sought to turn their opponent’s support for Israel into a defining moral failure and painted backing from AIPAC as the dictionary definition of being in the pocket of special interests.
Lander kicked off his campaign by making clear he wouldn’t be “doing AIPAC’s bidding” and made Goldman’s support from the pro-Israel lobby group a central issue throughout the campaign. Though Lander describes himself as a liberal Zionist, he repeatedly accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza and promised to oppose U.S. weapons sales to Israel.
Just last year, Cuomo and then-Mayor Eric Adams thought Mamdani’s stance on the Jewish state was a major political liability, so they did all they could to play up his anti-Israel bona fides in their race against him. In a sign of how quickly the political winds have shifted in New York, Goldman this spring sought to minimize his differences with Lander on Israel, noting that they both received endorsements from J Street, the dovish group that advocates for more U.S. pressure on Israel to achieve a two-state solution. Goldman, in the final debate, even offered his own criticism of AIPAC, saying the pro-Israel group “has some real problems and is harmful in many ways.”
In contrast, Espaillat took aim at Avila Chevalier on Israel. “She went to celebrate the death of innocent people in Israel right after the attack,” Espaillat said during a recent televised debate, referencing her participation in an anti-Israel rally, which the Democratic Socialists of America had promoted, the day after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack.
Like Mamdani, Avila Chevalier’s early anti-Israel activism was a key aspect of her political biography: She was part of the Students for Justice in Palestine group during her years as an undergraduate at Columbia Univeristy and later helped organize the school’s pro-Palestinian encampment as an alumna in 2024. During the campaign, she criticized Espaillat for his response to the detainment of Columbia University encampment leader Mahmoud Khalil, whose arrest last year became a rallying point for pro-Palestinian activists.
What should really alarm the pro-Israel community, however, is that this progressive playbook contributed to victories in two very different races. In the case of Lander versus Goldman, you had two Jewish self-described Zionists running in a very Jewish district. Avila Chevalier, on the other hand, was a non-Jewish anti-Israel challenger taking on a non-Jewish incumbent with strong pro-Israel credentials in a district with relatively few Jews (at least by New York’s standards).
As Mamdani’s handpicked squad heads to Washington, the pressure on other congressional Democrats to speak out strongly against Israel and back measures such as end to U.S. arms sales will only intensify. That was clear from the election night victory speeches.
During Avila Chevalier’s speech, the crowd erupted into cheers of “Free Palestine.” She couched her victory as a rejection of funding from AIPAC, crypto and other corporate interests.
Lander promised in his victory speech to be “one of the Jewish members of Congress most willing to stand up loud for Palestinian human rights.”
“We cannot keep paying for Netanyahu’s wars with our tax dollars,” he added. “Democratic voters across the country are saying this loud and clear.”
It’s possible that Lander’s wrong and that Mamdani’s rise and coattails are an only-in-New York thing. But based on several other results this election cycle and polling in upcoming races, that hope increasingly feels like betting against the Knicks.
For the pro-Israel community, there’s at least one bright spot: At least for now, they still have Ritchie Torres.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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