JNS tagged along on a hot afternoon in early June, as volunteers for Jewish Voters Unite knocked on doors trying to mobilize Jewish voters to turn out in the Democratic mayoral primary, which is slated for June 24.
By many accounts, the group, whose founder and CEO, Maury Litwack, is a former Orthodox Union director of state political affairs, is having an impact.
The New York Post reported last month that the group has 700 volunteers and more than a dozen paid employees and that it spent half a million dollars on television and social media ads “to try to drive up turnout amid rising antisemitism.”
On the day that JNS tagged along, however, there were some hiccups. Several field managers and volunteers set out from the group’s satellite office in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Sheepshead Bay to canvas the neighborhood.
It turns out that the voter outreach software had mapped the turf out poorly, leaving it near impossible to canvas on foot, since the houses were so far apart. JNS was only able to observe a single house visit where someone answered the door, and the man informed that he had heard at his synagogue about when and where he ought to vote in the mayoral primary.
The man gladly accepted a lawn sign, and the group returned to the office to spend the rest of its shift phone banking instead.
Peter Svarzbein, the group’s national campaign director, told JNS he wasn’t particularly fazed by those bumps in the road.
As staff trickled into the office and settled near a table stacked with tote bags stating “Jewish. American. Voter” alongside water bottles, button pins and bracelets, Svarzbein said that the experience was part of a broader get-out-the-vote effort.
“If the community can organize to that level using a mix of grassroots relational organizing and the technology we’re bringing to the table, you’re talking about a method that can impact races across the country,” he told JNS.
“A few thousand additional votes can be the difference between a candidate who will stand up for Jewish concerns, values and public safety and one who won’t even address them,” he said.
Standing near a map of Brooklyn City Council districts, Svarzbein told JNS that the organization is deliberately nonpartisan, encouraging Jewish New Yorkers to vote without telling them for whom to vote.
“Voting needs to be something that everyone does. Not just seniors, not just young people,” he said. “For Jewish voices to be heard and issues to be addressed, we have to show up at the polls. Elected officials respond to the people who vote consistently.”
The group’s staff and volunteers come from across the Jewish spectrum, representing a wide range of backgrounds and levels of religious observance, according to Svarzbein. He told JNS that the most heated political debates in the office center on the Mets versus the Yankees.
“It’s not about party. It’s about community,” he said. “We have staff from different political backgrounds, ages and religions. But when we walk through the doors at JVU, we’re focused on one thing—Jewish lives, Jewish values and Jewish votes.”
‘Don’t kvetch, vote’
Litwack sat down with JNS at a Paris Baguette coffee shop near the group’s Upper West Side office. The group’s founder told JNS that the office was closed that day and the team was canvassing across Brooklyn.
Litwack explained the group’s slogan, which appeared on his navy baseball cap, “Don’t kvetch, vote.”
The motto captures the ethos of Jewish Voters Unite, which focuses singularly on mobilizing Jewish voters in every city, state and federal election amid rising Jew-hatred stateside—especially in New York City, he said.
“It’s something that I think makes people laugh a little bit,” he told JNS. “But it’s also a call to action that our community has been responding to.”
“As Jews we can sort of laugh at ourselves and say we don’t want to be kvetchers. We want to be doers, and voting is something that speaks to that,” he said.
Oct. 7 shifted how Jews view local politics, revealing a lack of attention to down-ballot races and state-level power, according to Litwack.
“People in the community really woke up to this reality that most of their elected officials from the local, state and federal level were either virulently anti-Israel, or absolutely apathetic about antisemitism and what to do about it,” he told JNS.
People called Litwack asking him why their mayor was commenting publicly on what is happening in Israel, or why the governor wasn’t doing more to curb Jew-hatred on college campuses.
“I always tell people your local state elected officials have more impact on your life than the president of the United States does,” he told JNS. “In states with a large Jewish population, they won’t have power to affect who the president of the United States will be, but they absolutely can determine who their mayor, city council member, state assembly member or governor is.”
‘Tactical advantage’
Litwack, who has worked in political advocacy for two decades, was inspired early on by senator Joe Lieberman’s historic run for vice president.
From his time as a young staffer on Capitol Hill to his role as CEO of the Teach Coalition, a Jewish education advocacy group that is part of the Orthodox Union, he realized that getting someone elected begins long before campaign season.
He founded Jewish Voters Unite after witnessing the power of Jewish voter turnout in last year’s Democratic primary in New York’s 16th District, where former congressman Jamaal Bowman, a progressive known for anti-Israel comments, was defeated.
That race underscored the need for a full-time infrastructure to support Jewish civic engagement, according to Litwack.
“I think that there are elected officials and political parties who would love for the status quo to exist and the Jewish community not to turn out to vote, because it upsets the apple cart,” he told JNS. “We’re basically ignoring that, and we’re listening to the community who wants this large turnout.”
“They want to volunteer and they want something to do,” he said.
Jewish Voters Unite is operating the single largest voter turnout operation for the Jewish community in New York state history, with five offices in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan’s Upper West and Upper East Sides, with more than 1,200 volunteers and 20 staff members in the field, according to Litwack.
“If you’re Jewish, you’re going to have a difficult time not hearing from us on the phone, getting a text from us, hearing from your shul, hearing from your school or or seeing our ads when you turn on the Mets game,” he said.
Litwack told JNS that voter mobilization can be challenging in an era when many feel less civic obligation and see voting as inconvenient. But the Jewish community has the potential to stand apart from these trends, he said.
“The Jewish community has a tactical advantage on voting that most other communities don’t have, which is that we are a relational organizing community,” he said. “One of my mentors in life told me that only in the Jewish community could you walk into almost any neighborhood and say, ‘I need hospitality,’ ‘medical care’ or ‘social services,’ and there is someone there to help you, whether that’s a community center or a synagogue.”
“Jewish geography isn’t just a fun game,” he told JNS. “It’s a way of life that makes the community primed more than almost any other to do voter turnout work.”
After working in politics for 20 years, Litwack believes it is dangerous for the Jewish community to be “wedded to one party or another.”
“I think the Jewish community, in general, tends to be made up of moderate voters,” he said. “They’re not extreme left or extreme right. What’s beautiful is that I believe the community includes more swing voters than people often give it credit for.”
Litwack thinks the group can build a lasting model of Jewish voter engagement that will extend well into the future.
“I believe that we are waking up a sleeping giant,” he said. “Once the Jewish community is civically informed, they are civically engaged, and I think June is going to be the month where people look back and say, ‘Whoa, the Jewish community really turned out to vote in significant manner.’”