Jamaal Bowman, George Latimer and The Israel-Gaza War at Home

An in-depth guide to the cross-currents of race, class and identity as the Democratic congressional primary in NY's 16th district comes into the home stretch.

Last November, Michelle Goldberg wrote one of her typically trenchant New York Times columns about how “The War in Gaza is Splintering the Democratic Party.” (gift link) She grounded her analysis by describing the conflicting forces at work in my home congressional district, New York’s 16th, which encompasses all of lower Westchester county and the snippet of the north-east Bronx that contains Coop City. We’ve been represented since 2020 by Rep. Jamaal Bowman, an outspoken progressive member of the Squad. When her piece came out, Westchester County Executive George Latimer hadn’t yet publicly announced his decision to challenge Bowman in this June’s Democratic primary. Latimer is a popular longtime local Democratic lawmaker who has been running the county since 2017, when the anti-Trump “Resistance” took out Trumpite Republican Rob Astorino.

So everything that Goldberg described in her piece—Bowman’s unexpected 2020 primary victory over longtime Democratic foreign policy hawk Eliot Engel in the wake of the George Floyd protests, Bowman’s insistence on speaking out on behalf of Palestinian rights from his first days in office, his troubled relationship with local rabbis over everything from his opposition to the Abraham Accords to his support for a congressional resolution commemorating the Palestinian Nakba, the way October 7 had traumatized many local Jews, and Bowman’s struggle to address their concerns about rising antisemitism since then—all of that was just foreshadowing of the storm to come.  

Now, the storm is here. And it looks like it will be a big one.

The Context

The Democratic primary in New York State is June 25, with early voting opening June 15. The district tilts bright blue, with just under 70% of its registered voters identifying as Democrats and nearly 30% as Republicans. A little more than half of its residents are people of color, with 27% Hispanic, 21% Black, and 7% Asian. The remaining 42% are white or multi-racial. Housing isn’t cheap. Just over 50% of the district’s residents own their own homes, which is below the national average (the rate goes up in the northern, more bucolic part of the county). But while Westchester is, overall, one of the wealthiest counties in the country, places in the district like Yonkers, Mount Vernon, New Rochelle and Portchester also have many people living in poverty.

Historically, voter turnout rises with people’s income levels. In 2022, according to the US Census, two-thirds of people making more than $100,000 a year voted, compared to just 33% of eligible voters with household incomes under $20,000. (In 2018, a year of historically high off-year turnout, those numbers were only slightly less skewed.) Housing ownership also affects civic engagement. In 2022, 58% of eligible homeowners nationwide voted in the midterm elections, compared to just 37% of renters. According to the Westchester Index, a project of the Westchester Community Foundation, 73% of whites across the whole county own their homes, compared to 37% of Blacks and 35% of Hispanics.

Westchester is also very segregated by race and class. Five school districts have student populations that are 90% to 100% students of color, including three in the 16th district (Elmsford, Greenburgh and Mt. Vernon); at the same time some villages, including Bronxville, Larchmont, Pelham Manor and Rye, are roughly 80% non-Hispanic white. Scarsdale, which is 71% white and 16% Asian, reported zero percent of its public school students were eligible for free or reduced price lunch in 2021, meaning there were no elementary school families at or below 185% of the poverty line.

How did the county come to be so segregated? As Richard Kahlenberg wrote in a recent report for the Century Foundation comparing Scarsdale to Portchester, a much poorer and heavily Hispanic village to its east, it’s the result of deliberate government policies. First, a history of racially restrictive covenants preventing the sale of property to Black, Hispanic, Asian or Native people, which were in wide use in the county until 1948. Second, decisions to place affordable housing in disproportionately Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. And third, Kahlenberg wrote: “flagrant income discrimination through exclusionary zoning (which disproportionately hurts people of color.” Census data shows that in the last decade, Westchester county has allowed fewer homes to be built, per person, than the regions around nearly every other major metro U.S. city.

Last year, Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul sought to cut through that third obstacle by requiring communities downstate to either increase their housing supply or provide fast-track approvals for higher density zoning near rail lines. Intense opposition, led by many Westchester electeds, killed the Hochul plan. Assemblywoman Amy Paulin, who represents Scarsdale, was one of the leading opponents, claiming Hochul’s proposal “would change the complexity of our county in a way that doesn’t make sense.” The number of homes in Scarsdale has barely changed since 1990. Latimer, too, opposed Hochul’s plan. As he told the New York Times, “If you want to go back 50, 60, 70 years, there was explicit racist and exclusionary policies, deed restrictions, redlining, but you don’t see that in Westchester today as you did before.” He added that for suburbanites, the attraction of their communities was partly the ability to control development. “We want a certain style, we want a small village with a small, little street,’” he said.

Do I need to point out the implicit meaning behind the word “we” in that sentence?

NY’s 16th Congressional district

No one knows what turnout will be like in this primary because we’ve never had a competitive Democratic contest in this district before. So far, the only polling that anyone has released has come from biased sources; one, done in April by the pro-Latimer Democratic Majority for Israel, had him beating Bowman by 17 points; a second one, done by Upswing for the Bowman campaign, found the two men neck-and-neck. In 2022, two challengers to Bowman, one a protégé of former Rep. Engel from north Westchester and the other a local councilwoman from Rye, split the opposition. He won with 52% of the vote. But only about 38,000 people voted in that primary, which was held in August due to a legal battle over redistricting.

This June primary will be different. If all the adult members of just Westchester’s ten biggest synagogues come out to the polls, they could easily tally 20,000 votes on their own. The same is true for Coop City, whose 50,000 residents are predominantly Black or Hispanic. Any polling is inherently suspect, because pollsters must make subjective judgments about how specific communities will turn out, and the two most significant voting blocs in the district, Jews and Blacks, are both getting highly charged up as the primary intensifies.

This clash did not have to happen, and I and other progressive Jews tried to head it off last fall, since the danger of inflaming intra-communal relations between Blacks and Jews are obvious, but it would take me a whole book to explain how things could have played out differently since 2020. Suffice it to say that since the 2022 primary, when leading members of the local Jewish political establishment reportedly begged AIPAC, the giant pro-Israel group, to anoint one of the two candidates challenging Bowman and it instead chose to stay neutral, they’ve been working towards the current scenario of a head-to-head clash with Bowman. As this October 16 letter from 26 local rabbis to Latimer shows, they’ve made up their minds about him. And that was before all the intensely emotional events of the last seven months.

(I suppose this is where I should disclose more fully where I sit in all this: I’ve supported Bowman since 2019; I’ve had close access to him and occasionally have offered him advice; I’ve been an active member of J Street Westchester and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ)/The Jewish Vote throughout their formal relationships with the congressman; and up through last December I’ve donated money to him. I’ve also met and talked with Latimer many times, as he has been a frequent attendee at NYCD-16 Indivisible monthly meetings. In 2022, I helped JFREJ pull together an ad-hoc “Jews for Jamaal” group and helped administer it through this fall, when it became an arm of his campaign. But since this winter, I took a step back from being actively involved. That said, I would still prefer him to be my representative over the alternative.)

What Progressive Coalition?

When Goldberg wrote her Times piece on the tensions in the Democratic ecosystem that dominates this district, she said that the brewing primary would “test the coalition between liberal Jews and people of color that is key to the progressive movement both in [this] district and in the country more broadly.” That was optimistic then. In formal terms the biggest expression of that coalition broke last winter, after Bowman had denounced Israel’s war as a “genocide” and then did an event in a local Islamic center with Norman Finkelstein, a prominent anti-Zionist academic who had praised the October 7 attacks back when he thought that only a few dozen Israelis had been slaughtered (remarks he now says he regrets). That led J Street, the liberal pro-Israel, pro-peace lobby that had backed Bowman since 2020, to take the unprecedented step of rescinding its endorsement. Now only more left-wing Jewish groups, like JFREJ, If Not Now and anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace, are backing Bowman. While the first two groups say they are agnostic about Zionism, they’re certainly friendlier to anti-Zionism than any Jewish institution based in the district.

But setting the primary solely in the context of Jewish and Black relations would be a mistake. There’s also an undercurrent of white privilege at work here. That was expressed most clearly by Latimer (who is himself Catholic) who recently told a rightwing radio show that the reason Bowman defeated Engel back in the 2020 primary was because of a surge in minority voter turnout in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, “abnormally high vote totals” which he said “skewed” the results. In fact, Bowman also won a majority of the vote in heavily Jewish Riverdale (which is no longer part of the district); everyone was feeling that the time for a change in representation had come. But racist attitudes about Bowman surface in other ways—in the ways that white Democrats complain about how he speaks, or in how they jeer at his “street” style, which is usually followed by a comment like, “But I really like Mondaire Jones,” Bowman’s somewhat more moderate, Harvard-grad colleague running to retake his congressional seat to the north. (To be clear, like Bowman, Jones also grew up poor, and when he was in Congress he was a member of the Progressive Caucus—but where Bowman runs hot, he runs cool, and his diction is more Ivy League.)

If anything, it’s clear that instead this primary shaping up as a battle royale between the progressive and moderate wings of the Democratic party, set on a playing field that heavily favors the moderate candidate but amidst a broader political climate that maybe, just maybe, offers the progressive a fighting chance.

Tensions over the race have been rising since Latimer’s announcement in early December that he would challenge Bowman. The fireworks very quickly started to center on one of the main topics dividing the two men: who is funding their campaigns. With significant help from AIPAC, which has a huge donor network including many people in Westchester’s large Jewish community, which is perhaps 10-12% of the district’s population, Latimer outraised Bowman in the last quarter of 2023, $1.4 million to about $725,000. More than 40% of that came via AIPAC’s donor portal. More has arrived since.

In late March, with AIPAC already threatening to spend as much as $100 million to support primary challenges to several Democrats it deems anti-Israel, progressives decided to close ranks. They announced the formation of Reject AIPAC, a coalition including Justice Democrats, the Working Families Party, Sunrise Movement, Our Revolution, Gen-Z for Change, Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, Peace Action, and Democratic Socialists of America, and pledged to fight back. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke at Bowman’s campaign launch and has also promised to help. So far, Justice Democrats has spent at least $165,000 on mailers attacking Latimer while the Working Families Party has put $118,000 behind mailers backing Bowman. It is a fraction of what the other side is spending.

AIPAC, which in addition to its self-named PAC has an affiliated super PAC called the United Democracy Project, is just the biggest player putting its thumb on the scale here. Another group, the Teach Coalition, the political arm of the Orthodox Union (the most rightwing of the major Jewish denominations in America), started early with a shrewd field strategy, putting somewhere close to $2 million into a “non-partisan” voter registration group with the unintentionally ironic name Westchester Unites. (It’s not clear where Teach Coalition got all that money, but one can assume it was a donor or donors in AIPAC’s network.) This past winter, with the slogan “antisemitism is on the ballot” (see below), Westchester Unites targeted Jews who were registered Republicans or independents, urging them to change their party registration by February 14 so they could vote in the upcoming Democratic primary. More than 2,000 made the switch. That development, which no one in the local Democratic party attempted to oppose, triggered outrage from Black Westchester, an online news-site with a major following in the district. It wasn’t just that Democrats weren’t trying to defend the integrity of their primary; local Black leaders also worry, quite justifiably, that this influx of Republicans will hurt candidates down-ballot, like a Black civil rights lawyer who is running for county district attorney against a white former judge who came up in politics with strong backing from Republicans.

Screencap from Westchester Unites. Believe it or not this is a non-partisan voter registration effort.

The AIPAC Attack

From early in the primary, Bowman has chosen to go on the offensive, painting Latimer not just as AIPAC’s puppet, but as the de facto ally of “billionaire MAGA Republicans” who have poured money into AIPAC’s coffers and who support the group because it endorsed more than 100 Republicans who are election-deniers and against abortion rights. Latimer, in turn, has slammed Bowman for allegedly “taking money from Hamas,” a quote that he only slightly backed away from, instead asserting that the incumbent “takes money from those who endorse Hamas' terrorism, those who try to justify the murdering of children, the kidnapping of civilian hostages, and the raping of women as acts of ‘resistance’.”

Guilt by association is a heavy-handed tactic that both are using to caricature the other. Latimer is not an Trumpie election denier nor a pro-lifer; Bowman has condemned Hamas multiple times and has never justified what it did on October 7 as legitimate resistance. But if you look at who is writing them checks and co-hosting some of their fundraisers, you can indeed find billionaire MAGA Republicans donating to Latimer or to super-PACs aligned with AIPAC and you can indeed find people who say October 7 was justified backing Bowman.

Last week, the gloves really started to come off. On Monday May 13, the two men had their first face-to-face debate hosted by News 12, a local cable channel. It was not pretty. In his opening remarks, Bowman attempted to frame the election as a choice between his progressive commitments to change versus a status quo that leaves too many behind, while Latimer painted his opponent as too interested in foreign policy and style over substance. Soon they were in the thick of it, with Israel-Palestine dominating the discussion. Asked if he thought the phrase “from the river to the sea” was hate speech, Bowman said no, but recognized that some felt that way. Latimer—who had already said Bowman was “anti-Israel”--said it was aimed at eradicating the Jewish state. Bowman said he agreed with Senator Chuck Schumer and his call for Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu to resign; Latimer, asked if a two-state solution was possible with Netanyahu in power, dodged an opportunity to criticize Bibi’s commitment to controlling the West Bank and instead put the onus for such a solution on the lack of a Palestinian partner for peace.

If Latimer’s responses confuse you, keep in mind, this is the sort of place where the mainstream of the Jewish community, the Westchester Jewish Council, along with many leading synagogues and communal organizations, just put out a flyer (see below) for an Israel Independence Day event and no one noticed that the map of Israel they used is one that shows both the West Bank and Gaza as part of the Jewish state. It’s also the sort of place where, last year, as pro-democracy protests against Netanyahu’s rightwing government swelled, leaders of the Jewish community here said nothing, but when Bowman boycotted Israeli president Isaac Herzog’s address to Congress, they were furious.

From the Westchester Jewish Council’s Facebook page

It’s also the sort of place where the much, much smaller pro-Palestine community, made up of local Arab and Muslim residents and a handful of radical anti-Zionist Jews, makes equally unbalanced images of Palestine. Bowman’s decision to speak before such groups at various rallies and events—even while denouncing Hamas and insisting that he supports a two-state solution—has definitely cost him.

From Westchester for Palestine’s Instagram page

So if the issue here is AIPAC’s role in the race, it’s not so much that “MAGA Republicans” are trying to buy the seat; most of AIPAC’s local donors are loyal Democrats. It’s that as loyal AIPACers, they think Israel—which has been led by Bibi for most of the last twenty years and whose Likud Party has been committed for decades to keeping control of all the land from the river to the sea—can do no wrong.

Latimer, whose main slogan is “results, not rhetoric,” spent a good chunk of his debate time talking about local projects he had completed in the county that improve the quality of life for residents and bragging about how he knew the names of all its local elected officials. Bowman, for his part, argued that not only had he brought home a lot of bacon for the district, but that rhetoric like his was what “created movements” that lead to “revolutions, which is what we need now in this moment.” The two men’s political philosophies couldn’t be more different, and it would have been interesting if, in a non-confrontational setting, they each were asked to talk about how we need both insiders and outsiders to move government in a better direction.

But Latimer basically jeered at Bowman’s idealism, telling the audience that the incumbent preferred to “preach and scream” at his fellow legislators rather than work patiently behind the scenes and across the aisle to get things done. (How he will do this if Republicans hold onto the House or take the Senate was not explained.) This led Bowman to interrupt and say he was painting him as “the angry Black man, the angry Black man—it’s the southern strategy in the north.” Translation: Latimer to Bowman, “You’re a buffoon.” Bowman to Latimer, “You’re a racist.”

If this primary is only about who can turn out their base, then maybe such schoolyard tactics and dogwhistles don’t matter. The open vitriol both men showed toward the other in that debate undoubtedly helps fire up each’s core supporters. And it matches the ugliness of the mailers they and their allies are sending out. Justice Democrats PAC, which wants Bowman to win, has sent mailers tying Latimer to anti-abortion (because of the connections between his GOP donors and politicians like Ted Cruz, Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis). The United Democracy Project sent a flyer that darkened Bowman’s skin color, noted his vote against Biden’s infrastructure law and asked “Why did Jamaal Bowman vote against us?”

The Fire This Time

Angry rhetoric can also lead to angrier action, which is what worries me most right now. In the middle of last week, the vice chair of the Democratic party in White Plains, one of Westchester’s larger cities, commented on Facebook that Bowman was indeed an angry Black man and she wished he would have a stroke. This earned her an indirect slap on the wrist from the county chair of the party, Suzanne Berger, who has made no secret that she—like nearly all the elected Democrats and many local district leaders—prefers Latimer to Bowman. Ideally, everyone—including the candidates—would agree to turn the temperature down a notch.

That doesn’t seem to be in the offing. Last Thursday night, about a dozen activists from the Sunrise Movement and If Not Now stood on the street outside a house in Armonk where David Bercow, a big Republican donor, was hosting a Latimer fundraiser.

As you can see from the videos they posted, a number of the people walking in to donate to Latimer said, yes, they supported Trump too. A middle-aged Jewish woman got agitated by the younger Jews’ insistence that the threat of rising antisemitism required solidarity with progressives like Bowman, blurting out that he was only “for his people…for Black justice” and not justice for all. It was an ugly moment. Putting it up on social media only had the effect of amplifying existing animosities. I was almost equally disturbed by a few shorter videos the Sunrise activists posted showing middle-aged Jewish men violently trying to tear away their banners and in one case temporarily stealing and running off with one kid’s cell phone. Seeing this level of aggression coming off people who I assume ordinarily would be placidly listening to their favorite podcast as they ride Metro-North to work surprised me. Everyone is more on edge since October 7; not only has there been an increase in antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents, more Jews are buying guns. I’m hoping everyone keeps their cool.

If I had to handicap this primary now, I have to say that I think Latimer has the edge. Not only does he have more money behind him, most of the local Democratic party is pulling for him. And it’s not just because the way the politics of Israel-Palestine cleaves things here. I think the moment when it became clearest to me that Bowman’s whole approach to politics faced an uphill battle here was after the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v Wade. About 500 people rallied in White Plains to denounce the decision, including Bowman. But after he led a chant—“Repeat after me: This is bullshit!”—I heard more than a few Democratic activists complaining, since people had brought their children to the demonstration. God forbid someone should upset the children! But that’s the privileged suburbs, where for many people comfort is everything. A congressman who chooses to afflict the comfortable because he wants to comfort the afflicted is a hard fit here.

That said, this race will test the question of whether organized people can beat organized money. In the first quarter of 2024, Latimer again outraised Bowman, pulling in another $2.2 million to his $1.3 million. And AIPAC donors continue to power his campaign; an analysis by Sludge found he was its number one beneficiary nationwide for this cycle. The United Democracy Project has spent $4.8 million on TV and digital advertising last week and this week, deploying a mix of anti-Bowman and pro-Latimer ads. Some hit Bowman for his vote against the Biden infrastructure bill (something he did with Nancy Pelosi’s permission, since it was going to pass easily, and as a protest against the abandonment of the Build Back Better spending package); others go for the jugular and claim that he “tried to erase from history what happened on October 7th.” You might be surprised that AIPAC and its allies aren’t sticking to their usual strategy of attacking candidates without mentioning Israel, but these ads are red meat for many Jews here, who are acting as if defeating Bowman will be their way of avenging October 7. Like I said, it’s not pretty.

In 2020, part of the reason Bowman beat Engel is that he had a gigantic GOTV effort, with hundreds of volunteers both local and from groups like Sunrise and If Not Now making more than two million voter contacts; Engel was caught completely flatfooted. This time Bowman again has volunteers helping with phone-banking and door-knocking from groups like Sunrise, If Not Now, JFREJ and Standing Up for Racial Justice, but Latimer also has plenty of volunteers. And the Westchester Unites team has built a state-of-the-art relational organizing effort targeted specifically to synagogues and their members; it claims that requests for early vote-by-mail ballots are up substantially from Jewish voters it has identified. All that said, until this past Tuesday many local Democratic activists, especially in communities of color, were focused on this week’s school board elections; their attention will now shift to the primary. Both men also have significant union endorsements: Bowman from 1199-SEIU, DC-37, UAW-9A and the NY Nurses Association; Latimer from the CSEA, LIUNA, the Mason Tenders District Council, Transit Workers Union Local 100, and two firefighters union. Latimer also has Yonkers Mayor Mike Spano and his political machine backing him, which no self-proclaimed progressive should be proud of, but it will also deliver him votes.

June’s vote will also test the general proposition that Democrats overall have become much more critical of Israel since October 7. Bowman cites polling showing that 69% of the district’s Democrats support a cease-fire in the war, a position he took very early last fall and something that Latimer has only cautiously endorsed, saying he backs President’s Biden’s efforts to achieve one. And it will also test Bowman’s belief that the district’s working-class voters recognize him as their champion and that some of its more comfortable residents appreciate being reminded that they shouldn’t be so comfortable with the status quo.

The final wildcard in the race are Democrats caught in the middle who actually don’t have a big personal stake in either Israel or Palestine and who aren’t paying intense interest to the conflict there or here. Will they simply vote along racial lines? Will they follow the lead of local Democratic officials, who have mostly endorsed Latimer? Or will they decide to sit this fight out?

There are still undecided voters to be had, including among people who are engaged and conflicted about the Israel-Gaza war. I know because I’ve talked to some in my own neighborhood—older Jews who supported Bowman in the past because they are generally progressive, but now they have doubts about whether he supports Israel’s right to exist and still wants a two-state solution. The one-state mirage that “from the river to the sea” rhetoric, chanted by many campus radicals, is not helping Bowman here. On the other hand, Latimer’s refusal to condemn Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu as an obstacle to peace, something he was given an opportunity to do during last week’s debate and dodged, as well as AIPAC’s overwhelming spending, may be keeping such people in Bowman’s reach.

Both men might be able to get such undecided voters, but right now neither is making much of a play for them. I’m also hearing about longtime Democratic voters who are so conflicted and torn by the polarization engendered by this rancorous primary that they are deciding not to vote at all. As I wrote a month ago in an oped for Lohud.com, the local newspaper, Latimer is doing his best to avoid taking clear positions on Israel-Palestine so he can be all things to people who have given up on Bowman. But to create a wedge between Latimer and some of his more liberal supporters, Bowman needs a different strategy than claiming that the county executive is a MAGA ally. He’s not—he’s well to the left of MAGA on everything from immigration and refugees to guns, abortion and climate change. What he is, given his refusal to say a word about the annexationist aims of the current Israeli government, is a de facto Netanyahu ally, which totally makes sense given his heavy reliance on AIPAC. And if Latimer wins this primary, that victory will be interpreted from Washington to Jerusalem as a sign that progressive criticism of Israel has reached its zenith. So if you like Netanyahu, root for Latimer. If you don’t, root for Bowman.