Thank you for this brilliant quote from Lander: “I will be one of the Jewish members of Congress most willing to stand up for Palestinian human rights. And I will stand firmly against bigotry aimed at Jews. Those are not two different jobs. They are the same job,”
Lander does say the “g” word. So does Mamdani and so do the other candidates he endorsed. Rubin just doesn’t mention it.
Lander’s calling out of Israel’s genocide is probably part of what Rubin refers to when she writes of his “sometimes vicious tone about Israel”.
Instead, Rubin focuses on Lander’s criticism of AIPAC, which she agrees with, when the larger issue pulling Dem voters away from officials like Goldman is establishment Dem’s support for Israel’s genocide and apartheid generally. AIPAC is just one facet of this.
Of Dan Goldman's defeat Jen wrote of, "...the toxic image AIPAC has acquired."
It's not just an image. AIPAC's lobbying on behalf of today's Israel is toxic! It's not an image, it's AIPAC's reality. It's not the only toxic lobbying group, for sure. But Israel's war against Palestine has become so horrific that any lobbying group supporting the state of Israel, given its current governing regime, must be rejected.
Donna Woodward, it would be useful to lay out a paragraph on "today's israel" which I suspect is Netanyahu et al. Can there really be widespread support in Israel for a military opration which kills tens of thousands of civilians? Or here for that matter?
Maybe Jennifer could do a column on AIPAC, who it reprtesents and who it doesn't?
The people of Israel are like the people of the US. There are far right Jews who support the criminal head of their country who has been committing crimes for decades. Men in their sect dominate. And like our billionaires, they are not the ones who go to battle.
Racism, misogyny, self-absorption and Christian Nationalism are the reasons people voted for T, did not vote or voted for a 3rd party candidate who could not win. Obviously, religion and hate play a part in Israel's elections.
AIPAC is like all of the people & groups in the US who use money to control the narrative. Sadly we have 90% of our media/journalists who have been doing the bidding of the GOP since Reagan ended the Fairness Doc.
Genocide is wrong no matter who does it. The US & Israel have been guilty of both. Do you see the concentration camps in the US? Do you know the cruelty happening there?
Rubin’s framing is exactly right, and the distinctions she draws matter. Lander and Lasher represent something the Democratic Party badly needs right now: politicians who have demonstrated, through actual conduct under pressure, that they can hold complexity — fighting MAGA without abandoning either Jewish or Palestinian concerns, and doing so with the kind of earned credibility that no amount of messaging can manufacture. Lander’s line on election night — “those are not two different jobs, they are the same job” — is the formulation serious Democrats should be memorizing.
But Tuesday’s results carried a third signal that deserves scrutiny alongside the celebration. Darializa Avila Chevalier, 32, Columbia-formed, SJP-affiliated, encampment-veteran, just unseated a five-term incumbent in upper Manhattan. She did not win despite her views on Israel. She won with them. The distinction matters. Lander arrived at his positions through engagement, friction, and political reckoning. Chevalier arrived at hers through a theoretical framework assembled before the facts — one coherent enough that October 7th, Jewish indigeneity, and the Mizrahi dimension (more than half of Israeli Jews are refugees or descendants of refugees from Arab and Muslim lands) are not refuted by it. They are invisible to it. She is not extreme in the way that word implies recklessness. She is formed. And she represents not an outlier but a leading edge.
The party can hold Lander and Chevalier simultaneously. The question is which model it chooses to build on.
There are GOP groups, some pretending to be dem backed PACS who are purposefully supporting candidates like Chevaliar, because they believe that their GOP candidate will easily beat them.
It’s amazing to me that a person can’t be pro-Palestine human rights and pro-Jewish human rights at the same time. They do go hand in hand. No one group of people should face genocide. I’m happy for the ‘new’ democrats!
Sorry, Jen, but Lander is a catastrophe for Jewish New Yorkers and the rest of the community nationwide. Mamdani is a snake. After his Brooklyn speech analogizing Jews to monsters he deserves the metaphor. And Lander will do his bidding.
The mayor didn't 'analogize Jews to monsters', he was specifically talking about AIPAC and its support for the status quo [which includes the murder of children, a position that UNICEF also reported], not Jews in general. It's important to be accurate about what people actually said.
It’s also important to understand the genealogy of the discourse and its rhetorical function. Talking about the importance of accuracy, AIPAC does not support the murder of children. The very suggestion is antisemitic, full stop. You (and I) might not like AIPAC’s political stances, but “the murder of children” is one of the oldest anti-Jewish tropes on record. The mayor’s AIPAC hook is a subterfuge, for the purpose of deniability. And I guess the bloviation works, at least it did on you. But I know, as a scholar, the deep historical background of “Jews and monsters.” Mamdani has a staff, he has resources, he is an educated person. Yet he invoked historically loaded associations. The only conclusion is that he intended to be offensive to Jews, or that he didn’t care at all if he was. That speech was unpardonable. Moreover, Mamdani’s only reason for ousting Goldman and Espaillat, both stalwart progressives, was to insert an antizionist contingent in Congress. And Mamdani betrayed Espaillat specifically, for the mayor had promised his support and then reneged. Mamdani’s slate belies the simplistic notion that the mayor of NYC is a local office without major repercussions on the international stage and in US foreign policy. Mamdani’s slate was all about his antizionist ideological commitments; it had nothing to do with benefits to NYC.
I'm going to stop you with the first straw man argument: I never said that AIPAC supports the murder of children. FULL STOP. Don't put words in my mouth and expect to get away with it. If you start out by making a bad faith argument, I'm not going to engage any further.
Then why even raise the specter of the murder of children at all? What was the point of resorting to rank demonization? Progressive discourse thinks it can get away with assaulting and criminalizing Jewish identity because progressives imagine they are on the “right side of history”. But anti-Judaism is always, always framed as virtuous and redemptive. Just because MAGA, Trump, and Vance are odious does not mean I’m going to give the DSA a pass. With all my breath and with my “pen” I will expose their abhorrent anti-Jewish racism.
Ms. Rubin I am a generation ahead of you and have lived in NYC and its suburbs for most of my life. In politics what is currently au currant tends to fade almost as rapidly as youth. Today's messiah is tomorrow's insider with plenty to lose.
I have witnessed the rise and fall of many politicians who for reasons known best to themselves evolve in ways which run contrary to the current nature of things or don't evolve while the voters merely move on to the next shiny object. So, I wouldn't take too much stock in these election results as an accurate predictor of what the future may hold when the people who are elected in November and going forward become the rubber which will have to meet the road with an electorate pushing the accelerator to the floor thinking that speed alone will get them to their desired destination faster.
Dems are no longer monoliths, but neither are Republicans. Especially in congress. There’s MAGA, and there’s the Freedom Caucus who are far right conservatives and the Tuesday group or whatever they are called. Many have fallen in line with Trump are like fascists.
The so-called Freedom Caucus and MAGA are one and the same. The few remaining not-openly MAGA Rs are being driven out in republican primaries. Any republican who bucks Trump, not matter how long ago, is toast. Even republicans who vote with Trump 98% of the time aren't considered sufficiently loyal for Trump or MAGA. Just ask Bill Cassidy and John Cornyn.
For some time now, polling has shown that support for Israel has declined sharply among all voters, starting with the war in Gaza and even more precipitously since the Iran war. So, while it's true that Democratic support has fallen, that's only part of the picture: A majority of independents and even a third of republican voters think U.S. support for Israel is too high. AIPAC's strident and often ugly attacks on people who voice criticism of Israeli policies has made its brand toxic to many voters, not just Dems. I think it's important to make that clear. Israel's part in the Iran war has split even MAGA republicans.
It's still early days, but Mayor Mamdani has already demonstrated the political savvy and strength of someone twice his age and vastly more experience. That Rep Dan Goldman wouldn't reach out to his city's mayor and mend fences proved costly.
Some interesting observations. I would like to add another comment.The Democratic party has a branding problem. Mamdani brands himself as a Democratic Socialist. No-one knows what that means. If you look up the meaning of socialist, it looks a lot like Communist. If you dive deeper its roots you find at the core the redistribution of wealth to benefit the citizens rather than capitalism that stresses profits. Either one taken to extreme is bad. We are seeing now, capitalism raging out of control. As proof I offer all of the corporate CEO's making 10's of millions of dollars a year. Who is that benefitting? The corporate CEO's of course. Let's not forget the investors who are mostly institutional and whose CEO's fall into the same category as the corporate CEOs. Socialism, at its root, advocates for government ownership of all means of production for the benefit of all the citizens. This is where the communist movement got a bad name. They found out that this simply didn't work.
The problem? Most people equate socialism with communism and for good reason. Somehow, the Democratic party needs to define its brand if they are going to use the term democratic socialist if they are going to accept this as a party moniker. Somewhere between pure socialism and pure capitalism is the right answer. This is what the Democratic party needs to define, refine and educate the population about before the Republican party defines it for them.
Mamdani, Sanders, and the rest wouldn't be outliers in Europe, where the term "democratic socialism" is widely understood to mean something entirely different than communism. You seem to assume Americans can't be educated to understand that. Sadly, there are good grounds for that assumption.
You misunderstood what I was saying about educating the citizenry. It can happen but needs to happen quickly before the term is defined for us. Your point about Europe is a good one and we can learn from their definition and how it is implemented over there. Good comment, thanks.
I mistakenly took for granted that your pessimism matched my own, apologies. I am, however, pessimistic about rebranding democratic socialism here through educating the citizenry, as we seem to be a muleheaded bunch. Or perhaps I should say that rebranding, if possible, will be accomplished through deeds, not words, which could be what you have in mind. Thanks for your comment.
We have just demonstrated how misinterpretations and disagreement should be handled. Comment - clarification-adjust if necessary. Keep the comments coming.
Brilliant Jen❣️And hopeful and standing proud for the young fighters rising up in the Democrat party. I am independent and doing what I can to erase the orange stain from our midst here in CA. These candidates give me hope for our future.
Thank you for this brilliant quote from Lander: “I will be one of the Jewish members of Congress most willing to stand up for Palestinian human rights. And I will stand firmly against bigotry aimed at Jews. Those are not two different jobs. They are the same job,”
Palestinian human rights to not be genocided? With our tax dollars, even? It's okay to say it.
Lander does say the “g” word. So does Mamdani and so do the other candidates he endorsed. Rubin just doesn’t mention it.
Lander’s calling out of Israel’s genocide is probably part of what Rubin refers to when she writes of his “sometimes vicious tone about Israel”.
Instead, Rubin focuses on Lander’s criticism of AIPAC, which she agrees with, when the larger issue pulling Dem voters away from officials like Goldman is establishment Dem’s support for Israel’s genocide and apartheid generally. AIPAC is just one facet of this.
Of Dan Goldman's defeat Jen wrote of, "...the toxic image AIPAC has acquired."
It's not just an image. AIPAC's lobbying on behalf of today's Israel is toxic! It's not an image, it's AIPAC's reality. It's not the only toxic lobbying group, for sure. But Israel's war against Palestine has become so horrific that any lobbying group supporting the state of Israel, given its current governing regime, must be rejected.
..and anyone accepting support from that group. It should not be difficult to draw a line at supporting genocide and apartheid.
Donna Woodward, it would be useful to lay out a paragraph on "today's israel" which I suspect is Netanyahu et al. Can there really be widespread support in Israel for a military opration which kills tens of thousands of civilians? Or here for that matter?
Maybe Jennifer could do a column on AIPAC, who it reprtesents and who it doesn't?
And withal, I'm going to miss Dan Goldman.
The people of Israel are like the people of the US. There are far right Jews who support the criminal head of their country who has been committing crimes for decades. Men in their sect dominate. And like our billionaires, they are not the ones who go to battle.
Racism, misogyny, self-absorption and Christian Nationalism are the reasons people voted for T, did not vote or voted for a 3rd party candidate who could not win. Obviously, religion and hate play a part in Israel's elections.
AIPAC is like all of the people & groups in the US who use money to control the narrative. Sadly we have 90% of our media/journalists who have been doing the bidding of the GOP since Reagan ended the Fairness Doc.
Genocide is wrong no matter who does it. The US & Israel have been guilty of both. Do you see the concentration camps in the US? Do you know the cruelty happening there?
Rubin’s framing is exactly right, and the distinctions she draws matter. Lander and Lasher represent something the Democratic Party badly needs right now: politicians who have demonstrated, through actual conduct under pressure, that they can hold complexity — fighting MAGA without abandoning either Jewish or Palestinian concerns, and doing so with the kind of earned credibility that no amount of messaging can manufacture. Lander’s line on election night — “those are not two different jobs, they are the same job” — is the formulation serious Democrats should be memorizing.
But Tuesday’s results carried a third signal that deserves scrutiny alongside the celebration. Darializa Avila Chevalier, 32, Columbia-formed, SJP-affiliated, encampment-veteran, just unseated a five-term incumbent in upper Manhattan. She did not win despite her views on Israel. She won with them. The distinction matters. Lander arrived at his positions through engagement, friction, and political reckoning. Chevalier arrived at hers through a theoretical framework assembled before the facts — one coherent enough that October 7th, Jewish indigeneity, and the Mizrahi dimension (more than half of Israeli Jews are refugees or descendants of refugees from Arab and Muslim lands) are not refuted by it. They are invisible to it. She is not extreme in the way that word implies recklessness. She is formed. And she represents not an outlier but a leading edge.
The party can hold Lander and Chevalier simultaneously. The question is which model it chooses to build on.
The other point she made in this article about Upper West Side voters is also worth noting: matching the candidate to the district matters.
There are GOP groups, some pretending to be dem backed PACS who are purposefully supporting candidates like Chevaliar, because they believe that their GOP candidate will easily beat them.
It’s amazing to me that a person can’t be pro-Palestine human rights and pro-Jewish human rights at the same time. They do go hand in hand. No one group of people should face genocide. I’m happy for the ‘new’ democrats!
Small correction: Schlossberg is JFK's grandson. He would have been JFK Jr.'s nephew.
Sorry, Jen, but Lander is a catastrophe for Jewish New Yorkers and the rest of the community nationwide. Mamdani is a snake. After his Brooklyn speech analogizing Jews to monsters he deserves the metaphor. And Lander will do his bidding.
The mayor didn't 'analogize Jews to monsters', he was specifically talking about AIPAC and its support for the status quo [which includes the murder of children, a position that UNICEF also reported], not Jews in general. It's important to be accurate about what people actually said.
It’s also important to understand the genealogy of the discourse and its rhetorical function. Talking about the importance of accuracy, AIPAC does not support the murder of children. The very suggestion is antisemitic, full stop. You (and I) might not like AIPAC’s political stances, but “the murder of children” is one of the oldest anti-Jewish tropes on record. The mayor’s AIPAC hook is a subterfuge, for the purpose of deniability. And I guess the bloviation works, at least it did on you. But I know, as a scholar, the deep historical background of “Jews and monsters.” Mamdani has a staff, he has resources, he is an educated person. Yet he invoked historically loaded associations. The only conclusion is that he intended to be offensive to Jews, or that he didn’t care at all if he was. That speech was unpardonable. Moreover, Mamdani’s only reason for ousting Goldman and Espaillat, both stalwart progressives, was to insert an antizionist contingent in Congress. And Mamdani betrayed Espaillat specifically, for the mayor had promised his support and then reneged. Mamdani’s slate belies the simplistic notion that the mayor of NYC is a local office without major repercussions on the international stage and in US foreign policy. Mamdani’s slate was all about his antizionist ideological commitments; it had nothing to do with benefits to NYC.
I'm going to stop you with the first straw man argument: I never said that AIPAC supports the murder of children. FULL STOP. Don't put words in my mouth and expect to get away with it. If you start out by making a bad faith argument, I'm not going to engage any further.
Then why even raise the specter of the murder of children at all? What was the point of resorting to rank demonization? Progressive discourse thinks it can get away with assaulting and criminalizing Jewish identity because progressives imagine they are on the “right side of history”. But anti-Judaism is always, always framed as virtuous and redemptive. Just because MAGA, Trump, and Vance are odious does not mean I’m going to give the DSA a pass. With all my breath and with my “pen” I will expose their abhorrent anti-Jewish racism.
Well said!!
Ms. Rubin I am a generation ahead of you and have lived in NYC and its suburbs for most of my life. In politics what is currently au currant tends to fade almost as rapidly as youth. Today's messiah is tomorrow's insider with plenty to lose.
I have witnessed the rise and fall of many politicians who for reasons known best to themselves evolve in ways which run contrary to the current nature of things or don't evolve while the voters merely move on to the next shiny object. So, I wouldn't take too much stock in these election results as an accurate predictor of what the future may hold when the people who are elected in November and going forward become the rubber which will have to meet the road with an electorate pushing the accelerator to the floor thinking that speed alone will get them to their desired destination faster.
Dems are no longer monoliths, but neither are Republicans. Especially in congress. There’s MAGA, and there’s the Freedom Caucus who are far right conservatives and the Tuesday group or whatever they are called. Many have fallen in line with Trump are like fascists.
And they all vote in lockstep to back Trump most of the time. They even had a do-over last night of the Iran vote because Dear Leader had a hissy fit.
The so-called Freedom Caucus and MAGA are one and the same. The few remaining not-openly MAGA Rs are being driven out in republican primaries. Any republican who bucks Trump, not matter how long ago, is toast. Even republicans who vote with Trump 98% of the time aren't considered sufficiently loyal for Trump or MAGA. Just ask Bill Cassidy and John Cornyn.
For some time now, polling has shown that support for Israel has declined sharply among all voters, starting with the war in Gaza and even more precipitously since the Iran war. So, while it's true that Democratic support has fallen, that's only part of the picture: A majority of independents and even a third of republican voters think U.S. support for Israel is too high. AIPAC's strident and often ugly attacks on people who voice criticism of Israeli policies has made its brand toxic to many voters, not just Dems. I think it's important to make that clear. Israel's part in the Iran war has split even MAGA republicans.
It's still early days, but Mayor Mamdani has already demonstrated the political savvy and strength of someone twice his age and vastly more experience. That Rep Dan Goldman wouldn't reach out to his city's mayor and mend fences proved costly.
Please separate Road f. Kill, Jr from the rest of the Kennedys. They have.
Some interesting observations. I would like to add another comment.The Democratic party has a branding problem. Mamdani brands himself as a Democratic Socialist. No-one knows what that means. If you look up the meaning of socialist, it looks a lot like Communist. If you dive deeper its roots you find at the core the redistribution of wealth to benefit the citizens rather than capitalism that stresses profits. Either one taken to extreme is bad. We are seeing now, capitalism raging out of control. As proof I offer all of the corporate CEO's making 10's of millions of dollars a year. Who is that benefitting? The corporate CEO's of course. Let's not forget the investors who are mostly institutional and whose CEO's fall into the same category as the corporate CEOs. Socialism, at its root, advocates for government ownership of all means of production for the benefit of all the citizens. This is where the communist movement got a bad name. They found out that this simply didn't work.
The problem? Most people equate socialism with communism and for good reason. Somehow, the Democratic party needs to define its brand if they are going to use the term democratic socialist if they are going to accept this as a party moniker. Somewhere between pure socialism and pure capitalism is the right answer. This is what the Democratic party needs to define, refine and educate the population about before the Republican party defines it for them.
Mamdani, Sanders, and the rest wouldn't be outliers in Europe, where the term "democratic socialism" is widely understood to mean something entirely different than communism. You seem to assume Americans can't be educated to understand that. Sadly, there are good grounds for that assumption.
You misunderstood what I was saying about educating the citizenry. It can happen but needs to happen quickly before the term is defined for us. Your point about Europe is a good one and we can learn from their definition and how it is implemented over there. Good comment, thanks.
I mistakenly took for granted that your pessimism matched my own, apologies. I am, however, pessimistic about rebranding democratic socialism here through educating the citizenry, as we seem to be a muleheaded bunch. Or perhaps I should say that rebranding, if possible, will be accomplished through deeds, not words, which could be what you have in mind. Thanks for your comment.
We have just demonstrated how misinterpretations and disagreement should be handled. Comment - clarification-adjust if necessary. Keep the comments coming.
This may finally be the year that the 'Young Guns' send the party's aging and tired leaders to a well deserved retirement....
FYI, Jen, I think Jack Kennedy Schlossberg is JFK's grandson, not JFK Jr.'s grandson.
Why are you not doing coffee? Miss you?
Brilliant Jen❣️And hopeful and standing proud for the young fighters rising up in the Democrat party. I am independent and doing what I can to erase the orange stain from our midst here in CA. These candidates give me hope for our future.
PS: Missing you at Coffee💖