A forum for candidates running to represent New York’s 12th Congressional District in the House turned unexpectedly spicy when front-runners Jack Kennedy Schlossberg and Micah Lasher began trading barbs.
Such fora are generally staid affairs, but the one held on Wednesday evening was sprinkled with audience laughter, as candidates made jokes and the front-runners jousted toward the end of the 90-minute event, held at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue.
Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, the Reform congregation’s senior spiritual leader and president of the New York Board of Rabbis, moderated the discussion.
Schlossberg fired first at Lasher, accusing the New York state Assembly member of taking super PAC money. Lasher batted back, noting that he has received emails supporting Schlossberg from political action committees, one of which he read aloud.
Lasher also took issue with Schlossberg’s math in his plan to charge U.S. President Donald Trump, once out of office, for the $300 million annual cost of securing Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan.
Once reimbursed, the cost of that security, which New York City currently pays, would go to the New York City Police Department, teachers and the public transit system, Schlossberg said.
Asked at one point if she had anything to add, Nina Schwalbe, a public health researcher, who has long led international vaccine efforts, said, “No. I’m happy to watch the boys fight.”
Schlossberg, 33, displayed plenty of sass, despite limited political experience. Lasher, 11 years his elder, wore a small kipah.
Lasher previously worked as New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s policy director, chief-of-staff in the state attorney general’s office, director of state legislative affairs under Mayor Mike Bloomberg and an aide to Rep. Jerome Nadler (D-N.Y.), who is retiring after 35 years in Congress.
He was raised on the Upper West Side, where he lives with his wife and three children—two of whom, Lasher said, have already celebrated their bar mitzvahs at Congregation Rodeph Sholom, a Reform congregation. The youngest is 10.
In December, Lasher and New York state senator Sam Sutton introduced a bill, which would establish a 25-foot “buffer zone” around houses of worship to prevent worshippers from being impeded by protesters.
“I do think we’ve normalized antisemitism,” Lasher said at the forum. “It is a terrible thing for the health of our society generally and of course, the safety of Jews in our society.”
“The most important thing that we need from our public officials is to speak with moral clarity about the antisemitism around us,” he said. “We need to provide ample funding for our institutions to deal with the safety challenges that are presented with.”
Lasher said that “antisemitism is a broad ‘othering’ of Jews and a broad scapegoating of Jews that takes many forms.”
“It takes the form of rabid hostility to the State of Israel, the one Jewish state we have in the world,” he told attendees. “We need to have a much broader understanding and conversation about antisemitism in its many forms.”
Schlossberg identified fully as Jewish during the forum. His father is Jewish, and he was raised in his mother’s Catholic faith. He is a grandson of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
The candidate acknowledged being raised in an interfaith family but referred to himself as part of the Jewish community.
He added that he is the grandson of two presidents—one of the United States and the other of his synagogue.
Schlossberg’s paternal grandfather, an Orthodox Jew, was president of Park East Synagogue, the site of a second angry protest a night earlier, when that congregation hosted a pro-Israel event—an outside rental.
Some 200 anti-Israel protesters, many with their faces covered by keffiyas, chanted “there is only one solution, intifada revolution.”
A protest outside Park East Synagogue last November led to the passage of a bill by the New York City Council creating buffer zones around houses of worship. Zohran Mamdani, mayor of New York City, vetoed a nearly identical bill that would have created the same type of protected zones outside educational institutions.
The houses of worship version passed in the City Council with a veto-proof majority.
Schlossberg said that, if elected, he would fast-track doubling federal funding for the Nonprofit Security Grant Program to ease economic pressure on synagogues, which need to provide intense security screenings due to rising Jew-hatred.
NYPD hate crime statistics for April suggested that nearly 60% of reported and confirmed hate crimes targeted Jews, although Jews account for only about 10% of the city’s population.
Schlossberg said, to applause, that “antisemitism has recently been pointed in my direction in the form of internet flurry.”
“I will just say, ‘I’m proud to stand up for what I believe in,’” he said. “‘I’m proud to be a Schlossberg more than I am anything else, and I’m proud to be here with all of you tonight.’”
The other candidate at the forum was George Conway, a longtime Republican turned Democrat who is focused on trying to impeach Trump. Another candidate in the June 23 primary, Alex Bores, cancelled due to what the campaign said was a scheduling conflict.
Schwalbe said at the forum that she has “a Jewish background” and grew up in an interfaith family, as her mother, who was Jewish, converted to Christianity. She drew laughter when she said that she is “99.99% Ashkenazi.”
Conway said that the increase in Jew-hatred is “proof about hatred, selecting Israel out as the one bad actor in a world that is full of many, many worse bad actors.”
“We have this fixation among many people in this city, including possibly the mayor, about this, this one international conflict above all,” he said.
Hirsch asked the candidates if there is something distinctive from other forms of hate about antisemitism.
“I think that the Jewish tradition is one that I learned and I was raised in, is making art, making comedy out of that oppression,” Schlossberg said. “We have contributed so much to the sciences, to the arts, to national politics, the labor movement, to building this city.”
“I think Jews are targeted not only because of a history that is told but also because of, in many cases, the success of Jewish people,” he said. “It’s incumbent upon us, as Jews and as the Jewish community here in New York, to make sure that all the contributions that Jews have made to this country, to the world, are known.”
Hirsch also asked the candidates if they would have voted for a resolution, which Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced last month to block $446 million in weapons sales to the Jewish state.
Despite growing Democratic support for the measure, the Republican majority and several Democrats defeated the anti-Israel bill.
“If there’s something we don’t like about what the Israeli government is doing, we have to work with our government, persuade the Israeli government what is in their interest and how we should work together with them,” Conway told attendees.
“But I don’t believe in cutting off Israel and letting it stand there alone,” he said.
“I would not have voted for the Sanders bill, because I don’t believe it would have actually improved the lives of people on the ground,” Lasher said.
“It would have contributed to the status of Israel as a pariah state,” he said. “I will not do that in Congress,” he added, to applause.
