(New York Jewish Week) — In his campaign to unseat the Bronx’s pro-Israel congressman, Ritchie Torres, political organizer Jose Vega has referred to the New York City borough as “Gaza West.” 

In both Gaza and the Bronx, he’s said, young people’s lives are “being destroyed.” And in a recent video, Vega identified what he sees as the root of the Bronx’s problem: the concentration of power in Riverdale, the neighborhood where much of the district’s Jewish population resides.

“Rich people like to live in areas where they can buy the politicians easily — like Ritchie Torres, who is bought and controlled by Zionist influencers and millionaires, who all live in Riverdale,” Vega said in a recent video.

The video included photos of Torres meeting with Jewish leaders, with motion graphics highlighting the outline of a kippah on Torres’ head. It has drawn condemnation from Jewish leaders, who accused Vega of using antisemitic tropes.

“Just because you use the word Zionist instead of Jew doesn’t make it any less antisemitic,” said Eric Dinowitz, Riverdale’s Jewish City Council member. “Especially in your video when you have little traces around yarmulkes. Like, it is very clearly an anti-Jewish sentiment that is driving his argument.”

Rabbi Binyamin Krauss, principal of the Modern Orthodox day school SAR Academy, called the video “ugly, ugly, old-fashioned antisemitism.”

The video has served as a particularly contentious chapter in a Democratic primary race for Torres’ seat, which has often revolved around the incumbent’s support for Israel — and which could be a test of how strongly a Democratic primary campaign centered around Israel resonates with voters.

Torres represents New York’s 15th Congressional District, which covers a large part of the Bronx and is one of the poorest districts in the country. And in a moment when many progressives are hoping to take on moderate pro-Israel Democrats, he has made himself an obvious target.

A former City Council member who joined Congress in 2021, Torres is a vocal pro-Israel advocate who’s said he always has been and “always will be” a Zionist and has called himself “the embodiment of a pro-Israel progressive.” He’s received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, and been enthusiastically embraced by pro-Israel Jews in his district and across the city. In December, children from local Jewish schools serenaded him as he received the Shamash Leadership Award from the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, in a ceremony held at SAR.

Pro-Palestinian activists as well as some local constituents, meanwhile, have taken aim at Torres’ support for Israel, claiming he’s more focused on foreign policy than his own Bronx district. The Jewish and anti-Zionist podcaster Adam Friedland tore into Torres during an interview last year that went viral.

Torres’ spokesperson has said in statements that the congressman is focused on issues such as housing, affordability and standing up to Donald Trump. 

“Voters across the Bronx, no matter their religion, race, or background, trust Ritchie Torres to be their voice in Washington because he is a lifelong resident who delivers real results,” said Torres’ spokesperson, Benny Stanislawski, in a statement. “He remains focused on the issues that matter most to his community, from public housing to affordability, while forcefully pushing back against the harmful attacks coming from the Trump administration, whether they be ICE’s abuses or repeated cuts to the social safety net.”

Stanislawski continued, “Efforts to divide the Bronx and pit communities against one another will fail, because this borough knows who is fighting for them and who is simply desperately chasing relevance.”

But with a primary coming up in June, some of his challengers — and many of New York City’s progressive voters, who recently elected an anti-Zionist mayor in Zohran Mamdani — are hoping that Torres’ support for Israel will work against him. It is the first time Torres has faced a primary challenge since taking office.

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The three-term congressman’s challengers include Michael Blake, the former State Assembly member who recently ran an unsuccessful mayoral campaign; Vega, a 26-year-old political organizer from the LaRouche movement, which has been described as conspiracy-driven and “cultlike”; Dalourny Nemorin, a public defender and Democratic Socialists of America organizer; and TikTok musician Jon LaTona. 

Andre Easton, a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, is running as an independent in November’s general election.

The only challenger with a record of supporting Israel, State Assembly member Amanda Septimo, suspended her campaign soon after launching it, citing a recent lupus diagnosis.

Blake, who lost the primary against Torres for the same district in 2020, has made Torres’ donations from AIPAC his focal point.

A former vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, Blake said in a phone interview that Democrats, and “especially a true progressive Democrat should be opposed” to positions that AIPAC espouses, such as that the United States should provide military aid to Israel.

Blake kicked off his campaign with an endorsement from former mayor Bill de Blasio, and a launch video slamming Torres for taking donations from AIPAC. 

The video drew allegations of fanning the flames of antisemitism, in part because it featured Guy Christensen, an influencer who justified the killing of two Israeli embassy workers near the Capital Jewish Museum in D.C. last year. Blake has said including Christensen in the video was “a miss”; his campaign has since taken down the original video and reposted a new version that does not feature Christensen.

Skeptics pointed out that Blake himself had previously spoken at AIPAC events and attended a trip to Israel that it ran. But he has since spoken out against the organization and scrubbed posts from his social media profiles, while sharply criticizing Israel for committing a “genocide.”

Blake’s change of heart was convincing enough to earn him praise from Track AIPAC, the X account with more than 400,000 followers that works “to end AIPAC and the Israel lobby’s stranglehold on American Democracy” by documenting politicians’ campaign donation numbers from AIPAC and other pro-Israel lobbying groups.

“AIPAC’s Rep. Ritchie Torres has a serious, anti-genocide, anti-apartheid primary challenger in #NY15!” the account posted. “@MrMikeBlake is taking a courageous stand against Israel lobby corruption!”

Included in Blake’s launch video was a clip of Mamdani praising Blake; the two cross-endorsed each other toward the end of the mayoral Democratic primary, in which Blake finished eighth.

Mamdani, whose endorsement could boost a candidate’s profile among progressives, has not weighed in on the 15th district race — and until recently, Blake wasn’t the only candidate showcasing his relationship with the new mayor.

Septimo, who was elected to a second term in the State Assembly in 2024, told Politico that Mamdani, a former colleague in Albany, is “supportive of me and my efforts to deepen my work and the reach of my work.” During last year’s mayoral election, the New York Times wrote that Septimo was part of Mamdani’s inner circle and “brain trust.”

Unlike Blake — and unlike Mamdani himself — Septimo is a longtime supporter of Israel. She strongly opposed Mamdani’s failed “Not On Our Dime” legislation which was aimed at blocking nonprofits from funding Israeli settlements in the West Bank. She also went on an AIPAC-sponsored trip to Israel in 2016, and visited again following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack.

Septimo had said her campaign would focus on “centering people in the Bronx and what they’re facing on a daily basis,” rather than international issues. But she suspended her bid last week when she revealed that she had been diagnosed with lupus. 

By keeping international issues in the background, Septimo had taken a starkly different approach from Blake’s anti-AIPAC campaign — a move that might be more resonant with voters in the district, according to a political strategist.

“I don’t know if this is a winning approach for Michael Blake,” said Democratic strategist Trip Yang. “Ritchie Torres is a fairly well-liked incumbent in his district, and he has over $14 million in the bank.”

Yang added that it was affordability, and not Israel-Gaza politics, that fueled Mamdani’s rise.

Ross Barkan, a journalist and one-time State Senate candidate, said he doesn’t see Israel as being central to Bronx voters’ priorities in the way that it might be in more heavily Jewish districts, such as the 10th Congressional District race between Rep. Dan Goldman and Brad Lander.

“It’s just not a place where that many voters are emotionally tied to Israel,” Barkan said of the 15th district. “So whether you’re for Palestinian rights or for Israel, it might not resonate much either way.”

That characterization would be news to Jews living in Riverdale, one of the most Jewish neighborhoods in the city where Israeli flags hang on front lawns and synagogues and Ha-Makolet: Shoshi’s Market carries a wide range of Israeli products. The neighborhood is home not only to SAR but to a nondenominational day school, Kinneret, whose founders in 1947 included the Zionist leader Golda Meir — and whose portrait hangs in the hallway.

According to a 2023 UJA-Federation of New York community study, there are 16,000 Jewish adults and 4,000 Jewish children living in Riverdale and the adjacent Kingsbridge neighborhood. Jews are a small minority across the Bronx, though, with an estimated population of 29,000 in the borough of 1.4 million, approximately half of whom live in the 15th district.

Torres was already popular in the district before Riverdale was added in 2022. But the neighborhood has a special bond with him.

“As Jews in this community, we obviously support Ritchie, and would love that the vote gets out for him,” said Michael Brown, a Jewish Riverdale resident, in an interview. “It’s not just his support for Jews, but he’s been good for his whole constituency.”

Brown said his daughter attends SAR, where Torres has been a frequent guest. “I know, as a congressman, I’m not supposed to have favorites — but SAR is one of my favorites because it is a special and magical place,” Torres told the entire student body during a December 2023 visit, a day after he was heckled for his Israel views on the Upper East Side.

“I actually gave him a report card last year because he spent so much time here,” joked Krauss, the principal. Krauss said he’s been to Israel with Torres twice, including a 2024 trip with a group of Bronx leaders during which they met with Yoav Gallant, then the defense minister. 

Torres has consistently voted on pro-Israel positions in Congress, and in January 2024, he left the Congressional Progressive Caucus as his identification with Israel made him increasingly an outlier on the left.

Dinowitz, who represents Riverdale, Kingsbridge and a few adjacent Bronx neighborhoods, is the Chair of City Council’s Jewish Caucus, and left the Progressive Caucus in February 2023.

“With someone like Ritchie in Congress, a lot of us do feel safer, knowing that someone’s not going to shy away from their support of the Jewish community because it may be politically convenient at this time or that time,” Dinowitz said.

Thomas Gardner, the senior rabbi of the Reform synagogue Riverdale Temple, said everyone he’s spoken with has “been very positive about Ritchie Torres.” 

Gardner said Torres told him that the most frequent complaint he hears walking around the district is that he supports Israel despite the war in Gaza. Gardner pointed to Torres’ criticism of Netanyahu — that Netanyahu has done “irreparable damage” to Israel’s support among Democrats — as a sign of his alignment with a number of constituents.

“My personal feeling is that his statements were very much along the lines of what most of my congregants think,” Gardner said. “They’re very pro-Israel but they’re not pro-Netanyahu. They believe in Israel and hope that it is strong and exists. But they also hope that the Palestinians don’t suffer. Palestinians need better leadership. The Palestinians need peace.”

For many of Torres’ critics, simply being anti-Netanyahu falls short of the mark.

Jose Vega is taking a Michael Blake-like approach to capture those critics’ attention, having launched his campaign at a town hall called “The Bronx is ‘Gaza West’: Rebuilding Starts Here — and There.” 

Vega is part of the LaRouche movement, which follows the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche, who reportedly said that only one and a half million Jews died in the Holocaust, and that the Ku Klux Klan was founded on behalf of B’nai Brith. Vega has made a point of centering Torres’ views on Israel, and even confronted him in a Bronx restaurant about them.

“You are responsible for the death of thousands of Palestinian children, thousands of Ukrainian children — you love funding war,” Vega declared in a video that he took of the confrontation.

Vega posted another video on X of a billboard in the Bronx that featured a photo of Torres and the message, “For every Palestinian child that’s murdered… your Congressman, Ritchie Torres, gains a profit. Let the Palestinian children live.” 

Vega said the video was sent to him by a “Torres hater,” though JNS reported that the billboard’s message may have been AI-generated. (Torres called the message “lies and libels that are meant to incite political violence,” in a statement.)

A couple of weeks later, Vega appeared on a video podcast called the Jimmy Dore Show, and said with a smile that he “will not confirm or deny” whether he, in fact, took the video himself, though he did firmly state that “it’s not artificial intelligence, because I hate AI.” 

Vega was endorsed by the Anti-Zionist America PAC, a non-partisan group that has endorsed a range of candidates including Democrats, Libertarian independents and America First Republicans calling for mass deportations, on the basis of their anti-Israel views. 

His recent remarks about Riverdale Zionists controlling Torres and the district, which came during an interview with anti-Israel influencer Erik Warsaw, drew strong reactions from Jewish leaders such as Krauss, who said he was “sickened,” and Dinowitz, who called the video “frightening.”

“I mean, he wasn’t even trying to hide his antisemitism,” Dinowitz said.

There is no polling data yet for the race, and Vega, whose campaign has received about $101,000, is the only challenger to have reported receipts to the Federal Election Commission. Torres, meanwhile, has $14.3 million in cash on hand, rolled over from previous elections.

Dalourny Nemorin, a public defense attorney and DSA organizer, is running on domestic issues like housing, healthcare and immigrants’ rights, though she also criticized Torres for his AIPAC support in an interview with the Bronx Times.

His funding from AIPAC and pro-Israel views, she said in November, have led him to “deny the existence of genocide in Palestine, while we watch in real time as people starve to death.”

When asked by a Reddit user why her campaign site doesn’t emphasize her position on taking AIPAC money, Nemorin said she “wanted to highlight the issues Ritchie was ignoring and not further platform they [sic] people who keeps him preoccupied.”

Meanwhile, music TikToker Jon LaTona has said little about his candidacy. He has worn what appears to be a keffiyeh in unrelated videos, indicating an opposition to Torres’ pro-Israel stance, though the TikTok account for his campaign has been taken down.

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