An ethnically diverse district in New York City features two Jewish candidates running for Congress: the incumbent is a polished veteran politician and his challenger is a neophyte just dipping his toes in the murky and often shark-infested waters of politics.
The 10th Congressional district, which has more Jewish voters than any other in the country, spans two boroughs (Manhattan and Brooklyn), 22 neighborhoods, and covers more than 30 square miles. Running this year to represent the district is the 24-year incumbent, Democrat Jerrold Nadler, and Republican Dr. Philip Rosenthal.
Nadler, a Conservative Jew, attends services at Congregation B’nai Jeshurun on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Rosenthal describes himself as a ba’al teshuvah who attends the West Side Institutional Synagogue, an Orthodox congregation.
Nadler, 69, is entering his 40th year of public service, having served in the New York State Assembly for 15 years before heading to Washington in 1992. Rosenthal, 50, is a physicist, lawyer, and entrepreneur.
Nadler graduated from Crown Heights Yeshiva, Stuyvesant High School, Columbia University, and Fordham Law School. Rosenthal graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, Yale University with a degree in physics, and Caltech, where he earned a Ph.D. in physics researching string theory and cosmology. Rosenthal earned his law degree from Harvard Law School. Nadler and his wife, Josephine, have one son, Michael, 31. Rosenthal is single but engaged to be married.
Nadler and Rosenthal seem to be engaging in a bit of one-upmanship on who cares more for Israel, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Nadler cites his 40 years of support for the Jewish state. Rosenthal, for his part, said he’s “very troubled by the way the U.S. has equivocated, threatening maybe, to allow the UN to try to impose a solution…. Let’s have some clarity. Let’s have a representative who will demand moral clarity in our foreign policy. Sometimes it feels there’s more clarity from some Christians about support for Israel. Christians United for Israel is one of the Christian groups fighting so hard for Israel. Everyone should care about Israel.”
Rosenthal told The Jewish Press the main reason he entered the race was Nadler’s vote in favor of the Iran nuclear deal. Of five New York Jewish members of Congress, Nadler was the only one who voted for the agreement. Nationally, the majority of the Jewish House members, 12 of 19, voted for it.
Defending his Iran vote, Nadler said that “Iran is an enemy. It’s going to be an enemy. We have to treat it as an enemy – but better a non-nuclear armed enemy than a nuclear-armed enemy. This [agreement) will keep them from having a bomb for 15 years and after 15 years it will put us in a better position to prevent them from getting a bomb than we would be in now if we didn’t do the agreement. That’s my conclusion.”
Nadler told The Jewish Press he didn’t expect the vitriol that came his way because of his vote.
“I was surprised by people whose reaction was, ‘Oh you’re a traitor, you’re anti-Israel, you’re a betrayer or you betrayed Israel.’ No. I may have a different judgment than somebody else. People just assume they are right; they know they’re right and it is so clear that they are right that anyone who reaches a contrary conclusion must know that he is wrong and therefore he is doing it for bad motives. I was more than disappointed in some people.”
Nadler told The Jewish Press he has more to accomplish in Congress and doesn’t want to retire any time soon.
“I have a lot of things I want to do. I want to be in the majority and chairman of a committee so I can get a lot of things done.”
One of the things Nadler wants to do is raise the cap on the Earned Income Tax Credit from three children to seven.
“It would be a tremendous boon to the chassidic and Amish communities,” he said. “It wouldn’t cost too much money because how many couples in this country have more than three kids? I’m pushing this and I think I have a fair chance when we get an overall tax bill which we will in the next couple of years.”
Another issue close to Nadler’s heart was the increase in infrastructure funding he secured in this year’s budget. Nadler says the increasing funding is a key element to boosting the flabby economy.
Among the issues Rosenthal is interested in promoting, if he makes it to Washington as an elected official, is the reinvigoration of the space program.
“If you want to go into space, hitch a ride with Russia,” he said. “Kids today are more interested in creating the next app rather than the next mission into space.”
Rosenthal, who while at Caltech was a consultant at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory where he worked on the Pluto Fast Flyby program that evolved into the mission to Pluto, lamented that “the best facilities were right here in the United States and now we’ve abdicated that leadership.”