For Governor: Bruce Blakeman

New Yorkers will choose a governor on November 3, and for the Jewish community of this state the choice has rarely been clearer. We endorse Bruce Blakeman.

We do not make this endorsement lightly, and we do not make it on the basis of party. We make it on the basis of a record. For nearly five years as Nassau County Executive, Blakeman has governed a county of roughly 1.4 million people the way we wish Albany were governed: taxes held in check, police given the tools and the backing to do their jobs, and a Jewish community that has never had to wonder whether its government had its back.

Every challenger promises to lower taxes and ensure safer streets. Bruce Blakeman has already delivered them in a county where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by roughly 100,000. He won in 2021 by unseating a sitting Democratic executive, and voters returned him to office last November by a comfortable margin, with independents breaking decisively his way. That is not the profile of a partisan but of an executive whose results persuaded people who did not start out on his side.

Blakeman’s budgets have held the county property tax levy flat year after year while adding police officers and funding early intervention services for children. He has fought the state’s 2019 bail reform law from his first weeks in office, directing the county police to disclose when defendants released without bail are rearrested, so that the public can see the cost of the policy for itself. He has pledged to seek repeal of the law as governor. Our readers, who have watched assailants of visibly Jewish New Yorkers released within hours of arrest, understand exactly why that matters.

Four days after the massacre of October 7, 2023, while too many public officials were still searching for the right words, Blakeman stood in Eisenhower Park with some 6,000 Long Islanders at a rally for Israel and collected supplies for Israeli soldiers. That was not a campaign event. It was who he is.

It was also not new for Blakeman. As a Hempstead Town Council member in 2016, he led the passage of the first anti-BDS measure in New York State. As County Executive he signed Nassau’s Mask Transparency Act in August 2024 making it a crime to conceal one’s identity in public, with exceptions for health and religious reasons, at a moment when masked mobs were harassing Jewish students and worshippers across the region. A federal court challenge to that law was dismissed within weeks. While campuses and city streets elsewhere were surrendered to intimidation, Nassau County made clear that it would not be.

As governor, Blakeman has committed to push a statewide anti-BDS law through the legislature and to block any attempts to sever Cornell Tech’s partnership with the Technion as some on the left are pressing for. We believe him because he has already done at the county level what we want him to do and what he has promised to do statewide.

We have been fair to Governor Hochul in these pages despite thinking her words of support for Israel should have been far more forceful and confrontational with Mayor Mamdani than they were. This was especially so with respect to Israel’s compelling need to defend itself after Oct. 7 and Mamdani’s continuing anti-Israel, incendiary rhetoric.

Indeed, a governor’s words must be measured against a governor’s governing coalition. This year Governor Hochul accepted the endorsement of Mayor Mamdani and has built a working partnership with him on taxes, childcare, and policing. Whatever one thinks of the mayor’s municipal agenda, the next governor will be the principal check on City Hall on matters from policing to education to the treatment of our yeshivas. We are not persuaded that a governor who thinks she needs Mamdani voters will be that check.

However, Bruce Blakeman has plainly said that he will be – and his policies and actions tell us to trust that promise.

Hochul’s record on public safety gives us further pause. As noted here earlier this month, her use of the pardon power to shield convicted criminals from federal immigration enforcement reflects a set of priorities that places the concerns of offenders ahead of those of the communities they victimized. Another four years as governor for Kathy Hochul would not augur well for New York.

Blakeman is the first Jewish County Executive in Nassau’s history. He keeps a kosher home and davens at an Orthodox shul in Atlantic Beach. He has never treated the Jewish community as a constituency to be managed at election time. He is of it, and governs as someone who understands what it means to walk to shul in a kippah in 2026.

So, Bruce Blakeman’s appeal to Jewish voters is not rooted in abstraction: it is built on a tangible record of swift legislative action and a willingness to confront hostile political forces head-on. For a county looking for strong leadership to navigate an increasingly turbulent cultural and political climate, Blakeman represents a candidate who refuses to watch from the sidelines. His platform offers a clear promise: a New York where the safety, religious freedom, and dignity of the Jewish community are defended with absolute clarity and strength.