With the retirement of Senator Jack Martins (R – Mineola), one of the most hotly contested seats in the state is up for grabs. The battle for a Nassau County State Senate seat is shaping up to be a real brawl between two seasoned elected officials. The race pits Assemblyman Jake Blumencranz (R – Oyster Bay) against former Assemblyman and City Councilman Rory Lancman (D – Fresh Meadows, Queens). Running in a district with a significant Jewish population, both candidates are Jewish.
The Nassau County district extends from the Queens border to Woodbury and Plainview at the Suffolk County line. The town of North Hempstead is in the middle of the district, which also includes parts of Oyster Bay, Brookville, Glen Cove, Great Neck, Roslyn, Old Westbury, and a plethora of other neighborhoods. It also covers the north shore of Nassau County, part of which is known as the Gold Coast and includes Sagamore Hill National Historic Site, the home of President Theodore Roosevelt.
The larger Great Neck area comprises a residential community of some 40,000 people in nine villages and hamlets in the town of North Hempstead, of which Great Neck is the northwestern quadrant. Great Neck has consistently been recognized as one of the most affluent towns both regionally and nationally. Private schools in the region include North Shore Hebrew Academy and Silverstein Hebrew Academy. The battleground area to decide this race will likely be Great Neck, whose established Jewish community has attracted a large Iranian population. Both candidates have strong roots in the village.With a population of just more than 11,000 residents, Great Neck currently has the highest population since its formation in 1880.
As of 2000, the Village of Great Neck was the second-most Iranian community in the United States, with 21 percent of its population reporting Iranian ancestry, owing to an influx of Persian Jews who migrated after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. According to a study from the UJA-Federation of New York, more than 50 percent of residents are Jewish, with a significant proportion identifying as either Orthodox or Conservative (Masorti).
Lancman defends himself from accusations of being a carpetbagger, having moved from Queens to Great Neck six years ago. To counteract the carpetbagger image, he touts his record and his Long Island roots. He is a current member of the Great Neck school board.
“The bottom line is I live here. I pay property taxes, sales taxes, electric bills, insurance just like everybody else. My interests are just not being looked after by the person who I’m running against,” Lancman said. “I have a record of accomplishment on Long Island that far exceeds my opponent’s [accomplishments]. Not only was I elected to the Great Neck Library Board and saved it from censorship, I was the vice chair of Nassau County’s Financial Control Board as an appointee of the governor [Andrew Cuomo].”
Lancman spent an astronomical amount of more than $93,000 to win a seat on the village library board. “We had a group of people that were trying to take over the Great Neck Library board because they wanted to ban certain books. I take very serious offense to anyone telling me what I’m allowed to read or think. We ran a full campaign and we won,” Lancman told The Jewish Press. “It wasn’t for my position because it is a volunteer position. It was for whether or not the library was going to stand for freedom of expression or it was going to be a place where certain topics in certain books are forbidden. Book banning should not be permitted. When they were counting the votes and we started pulling ahead based on the absentee ballots, we were forced by the Republicans, who wanted to block the counting of the vote, to defend the counting procedures in State Supreme Court. We ended up spending about a month in court to get the counting of the ballots restarted. That wasn’t cheap either.”
The Senate district is known as purplish because it has had Democratic and Republican representation in the state Senate over the past 25 years. One of the indicators for a district to be deemed purplish is how much money a race of this size and magnitude costs. In this particular Senate race, the estimated amount for a competitive battle will likely exceed $1 million per candidate.
“We will raise as much as we can…[The] state has a public matching funds program. We are participating in that as well. So, $100 will grow to become $600, I guess, or $800, something like that,” Lancman said. “You have to do mail, you have to do digital ads, you have to do television ads and radio ads. Unfortunately, running for office is very expensive.”
Both Lancman and his opponent, Jake Blumencranz, will focus their campaign rhetoric on antisemitism, being pro-Zionist and the perennial issue of fighting crime.
Lancman lives and breathes the fight against antisemitism.
“My day job is as a senior counsel at a nationally prominent Jewish civil rights organization, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law. At the Brandeis Center, I focus on antisemitism in the workplace,” he said. “We’re going to remind people that I was one of the leading voices for enlarging the NYPD, and that crime, both in New York City and in the precincts that I represented, went down during my seven years in office. I’m very proud of keeping our community safe.”
Blumencranz blames the Democrats for not giving Nassau County a fair share of the budget pie.
“With the criminal justice platform, safety is a key component to making Nassau County a more affordable, more livable ecosystem for families, for young people, for seniors. Generally, Nassau County is left out of the conversation when it comes to affordability,” Blumencranz told The Jewish Press. “Nassau County has been left out of the conversation in Albany when it comes to funding from the state. Oftentimes, Nassau County is not considered when it comes to many of the criminal justice reforms that have continued to make Nassau County less safe.”
Blumencranz said fighting for safety includes fighting antisemitism. “Antisemitism, the defense and safety of our community, also means protecting our marginalized communities like the Jewish community. I think we’ve seen a lack of that from our leadership on the other side of the aisle in Albany and even this very budget process emphasizes that.”
Another law enforcement issue expected to heat up the campaign is cashless bail, which is a policy to prevent citizens charged with a crime from being put behind bars because the person could not afford bail for a non-violent offense.
“I’m in favor of letting judges decide whether a defendant should be remanded to custody based on whether that defendant poses a risk of danger to the public or a flight risk,” Lancman said. “We’re one of the only states that does not allow judges to keep someone in jail pending a trial if they pose a danger to the public. That’s the one reform the legislature did not make, which is really unfortunate and a mistake.”
Blumencranz defends his connections with the battleground area of Great Neck, even though it is not in his Assembly district. “My family is originally from Great Neck. Most of my family still lives in Great Neck, and I am no stranger to the community from the perspective of elections,” Blumencranz said. “It is an area that’s important. It’s an area that has consistently been rejected, over the course of the past few years, [by] the message coming from the Democratic Party.”
He maintains that when both houses are more than two-thirds Democrat, the Republican Party in the state Legislature is the conscience of the people.
“Our role has been to continue to fight back against a systemic marginalization of what we hope to maintain in Nassau County,” Blumencranz said. “Our priority is making sure we have a safe place to raise a family…to maintain a level of local control that allows us to keep that. There are many pieces of legislation that come with Democratic sponsors from Nassau County that seek to change the fabric of our communities and don’t necessarily keep in mind the fabric and nature of our communities that we hold so dear here.”
Blumencranz will be challenging Lancman’s record from his time as a member of the New York City Council from Queens. “It comes down to principles and who has been a principled fighter for both the Jewish community for many years, also knowing that the issues don’t begin or end there when it comes to protecting Jewish communities,” he said. “If you’re willing to say antisemitism is a problem, you also have to acknowledge the fact that you [Lancman] voted to close the Rikers jail system, that you are without a plan in place to fix it, that you’ve systematically dismantled the ability for police to do their job in New York City, that…many of your neighbors…moved out because they felt less safe.”
During the next six months of the campaign, he plans to focus on community safety.
“New York is not just a less safe place for Jews – it’s a less safe place for everybody because of the detrimental policies that came out of City Hall under the leadership of my opponent, and that’s something that needs to be considered,” he said. “We have championed homeowners and we’re able to pass through the budget language that would eliminate squatters and protect homeowners. We have consistently championed protections for children against child exploitation.”
While Lancman’s wife, Mojgan, is an Iranian Jew, Blumencranz is not ceding any ground to him even when it comes to the war with Iran.
“I think it’s really important to support the president’s initiatives and being the first executive to actually take action against the terror regime in Iran,” Blumencranz said, calling it “long overdue” and noting, “They have consistently and constantly called for the death and destruction of both our allies and seek to commit terror on Americans abroad and [domestically].”
“In conversation with many of my Iranian constituents and friends in the community, I echo many of their messages when it comes to the fact that this is something that we support and I hope to see a resolution – a swift resolution.”
The state budget proposed by Governor Kathy Hochul earlier this year was $260 billion. It has since ballooned to at least $268 billion. This is an amount Blumencranz has trouble fathoming.
“When Republicans lost control of the Senate in 2018, our budget was $100 billion less. No one can argue that there has been $100 billion in inflation, a doubling of the budget,” he said. “This was not due to any factor besides poor policy. New York doesn’t have a revenue problem – it has a spending problem, one that could be reined in fairly concisely with a level of leadership that is willing to make the hard decisions.
“[The Democrats] only care how they can receive more funding so they can continue to enrich programs that are not delivering results for New Yorkers. No one will tell you that one hundred billion plus dollars later, from 2018 to now, that our streets are paved a hundred billion dollars more, or that our hospitals are in $100 billion more robust shape, or that our schools are funded $100 billion more, or that people’s salaries are reflected accordingly,” he said.
Blumencranz echoed the Republican mantra that the state Legislature does not have a two-party system.
“When you have this one-party rule that is completely controlled by a New York City Democratic machine, it becomes a race to the left with no finish line. It becomes a perpetual march in the wrong direction and that march will continue to hurt individuals on Long Island,” he said. “That is why we cannot allow for an extension of that message from New York City by allowing another New York City politician [Lancman] to come and take a valuable vote from Long Islanders.”
Blumencranz also addressed the issue of lack of accountability among government agencies. “We are spending more than half of our budget on health care. Countless dollars are going to programs where we have very little oversight. Even though we fund the MTA, it consistently acts as a black box with very little transparency,” he said. “Having the ability for the public to see dollar for dollar where our money is going would be a fantastic first step in showing exactly where we need to spend our time, cutting as well as removing waste, fraud, and abuse within our [transit] system. And that is something that I have been focused on in the Assembly. It’s something I hope to champion and amplify even more so in the Senate.”
The general election is on Tuesday, November 3.