Jamaal Bowman's Primary Threat
U.S. Rep. Jamaal Bowman hoped a breakfast with Jewish constituents would help alleviate the criticism over his response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel. It didn’t go well, as I reported this week for The Wall Street Journal.
Invited rabbis publicly spurned the invitation. Bowman was forced to change venues after protesters showed up at a local church which initially agreed to play host. (The pastor told me he signed up for a “healing breakfast” including clergy, not something rancorous.)
When things finally got started, the Democratic congressman denounced Hamas but defended his opposition to a House resolution that condemned the attacks. Bowman said he voted against the resolution because it didn’t recognize Palestinian victims, according to people who attended the Monday gathering at his White Plains office.
Dozens of Westchester County and Bronx residents told him they felt unsafe living as Jewish people in their own community. After almost two hours in a windowless conference room, one attendee asked the congressman if, after hearing from concerned voters, he would act differently.
No, Bowman replied. He wouldn’t change a thing.
His stance—and the defiant streak that fuels it—has placed the 47-year-old former school principal at the center of the Democratic Party’s internal feud over Israel. Bowman is one of four House members in a progressive group known as the Squad facing potentially serious primary challenges next year after their criticism of Israel—as well as their calls for a cease-fire—put them at odds with Democratic leadership, which has supported Israel’s military campaign.
“When we compromise, the most vulnerable people continue to be hurt,” Bowman told me about his approach to politics. “And those compromises also present a lie or a myth that hurts the people that benefit from the compromise because it doesn’t create a society that works for all people.”
He told me he supports Israel’s right to exist, “but I also support a Palestinian state—in a real way, not in a lip-service way. Not in a mythological way and not in a way that also simultaneously undermines a Palestinian state which is what’s been happening over several decades.”
New York is home to the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, and a significant number of Jews live in Bowman’s district — which now encompasses the southern part of Westchester County and parts of the Bronx, but which could shift in New York’s somehow-still-ongoing redistricting process.(Some action on that is coming this week, as Josh Solomon writes in Sunday’s Times Union.)
After Bowman voted against the resolution—one of nine Democrats, plus one Republican, to do so—the Westchester Board of Rabbis released a letter “expressing frustration and anger.” An organization affiliated with the pro-Israel AIPAC lobbying group began running attack ads.
Prominent Jewish Democrats began courting Westchester County Executive George Latimer to challenge Bowman in a primary. Latimer, a longtime state representative who won his county post in 2017, and has never lost an election, is leaning toward a run and said he would make a decision by December.
The split over Israel’s campaign in Gaza already prompted Gov. Kathy Hochul to make a trip to the Middle East and it has progressive Democrats in particular thinking very hard about their rhetoric and actions. Nick Fandos had a good article in the The New York Times looking at the contrasting positions of Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ritchie Torres.
Bowman’s breakfast included several supporters who told me they were happy he held the event to broker a difficult conversation. But there were more people, according to the attendees I spoke with, who walked away unsatisfied. (Indeed, some of the people who protested ended up joining the confab.)
Diana Lovett, a 45-year-old business owner from New Rochelle, supported Bowman in 2020 and held a fundraiser for him last year. She told me she liked his positions on schools and affordable housing, and his relative youth.
She hoped face time at the breakfast might yield some common ground. It didn’t, and she said she was unable to continue supporting Bowman.
“I just don’t see a way forward,” she said.
THE QUESTION: It was once a maxim that to run for statewide office in New York, a candidate to had to visit “the three I’s.” What were they?
Know the answer? Drop me a line at jimmy.vielkind@gmail.com. Or just write with thoughts, feedback or to say hi.
THE LAST ANSWER: Adidas is the Nuremberg-based shoe company that designed the first cleats for the West German team in the 1954 World Cup.