Photos Jeff Antenore

Fifty years ago, Martin Cooper stood on a Manhattan street corner, pulled out a mammoth transmitter-like contraption, punched in a few numbers and dialed his competitor — who became the first-ever recipient of a cellular call. The disgruntled colleague shouldn’t have been too upset, though. Half a century later, he’s surely carrying an offshoot of that phone in his pocket. And as for 95-year-old Marty Cooper? He’s still trying to make the world a better place

Martin Cooper is the fellow who cut the cord, who unshackled humanity from the limitations of the telephone wire, who bequeathed the world with one of the top ten inventions of the 20th century.

It’s been 50 years since that day in April of 1973, when Marty Cooper, then an engineer at a tenacious technology company called Motorola, and head of its communications division, stood on a Manhattan streetcorner, punched a phone number into a large box with a digit panel that looked like the then-ultra-modern push-button phones, and put it to his ear while passersby wondered what on earth he was doing with that mammoth contraption.

Cooper dialed the number of Joel Engel, his counterpart at Motorola’s rival Bell Laboratories, the research division of AT&T. He couldn’t wait to hear Joel’s expression when he’d pick up.

The year before, Bell Labs had decided to double down on an engineering track to create a car phone in what it believed was the communication model of the future, but Cooper was worried. He didn’t want to see a phone tethered to a car as the standard of mobile communication — he believed it would be possible for a phone to be an extension of a person, who shouldn’t be relegated to being next to a wire on the wall or sitting in a car while connecting to another person. Cooper, for his part, set out to create a mobile phone that could fit in a person’s pocket. Within a year, his team had the first working cellphone system — an amazing feat of engineering, even if that early clunker couldn’t quite fit into a pocket or purse.

“Joel,” Cooper spoke into the box, “this is Marty. I’m calling you from a real handheld, portable cell phone.”

Cooper doesn’t remember Joel’s exact response, but he knew Bell Labs was pretty annoyed. At the time, Motorola was a small player on the fringe of AT&T’s monopoly, and they thought it was impertinent for a company like Motorola to go after them and compete on their turf.

While it took another ten years for the first commercial cellular phone service to begin operating in the US (the Motorola Dynatac 8000X, released in 1983, took ten hours to fully charge for 30 minutes of talk time and cost $4,000, plus 50 cents per minute of talking), and portable mobile phones didn’t make significant inroads with consumers until the early 1990s, Cooper’s Dynatac prototype was a technological breakthrough for Motorola, helping it achieve its goal of winning FCC permission for private companies to operate a wireless communications network over radio frequencies.

The post Wake-Up Call first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

Photos: Jeff Zorabedian

IT was time for the chuppah at a recent wedding in Boro Park. The singer, Levy Falkowitz, stood on the side singing the sublime “Dalet Bavos” composition of the Baal HaTanya, as the chassan, flanked by the candle-bearing unterfirers, was led down the aisle.

Several hours later, the chassan and his friends danced and waved their hands in the air as Falkowitz’s velvety voice belted out “Adir B’meluchah” and other electronically-generated contemporary dance hits. But it was during the meal that I noticed something unusual about this singer, when Falkowitz totally changed gears and captured the crowd with a rendition of a song composed by Reb Yom Tov Ehrlich a”h.

The compositions of Reb Yom Tov, who passed away over 40 years ago, are complex, inspiring… and long. Most would surely be forgotten if not for Reb Yom Tov’s whopping 36 albums. Products of a different era, they carry timeless messages of emunah and simchah, retain a charming level of disdain for luxury (“lukses”), and retell ancient stories in his inimitable style, all wrapped in a delightful Yiddish.

From the comedic to the whimsical to the thought-provoking, the music of Reb Yom Tov Simcha Ehrlich (of whom the Satmar Rebbe once said, “Wherever he goes is Yom Tov, he brings simchah, and he’s erlich”) lives on and still motivates, encourages, and speaks an underlying truth that’s ever-relevant.

The most significant modern barrier to these songs, though, is technology. The melodies were originally etched into the grooves of vinyl records at a Manhattan studio, and were later transferred to cassette tapes. The kings of Jewish music of the last generation invested in re-presenting Reb Yom Tov Ehrlich’s albums to a more contemporary audience, with Mordechai Ben David producing Ich Hob Gevart and Avraham Fried releasing two albums of Yiddishe Otzros. But with the American Jewish music scene having changed over the past two decades, as the Yiddish genre has shifted focus to sound more “chassidish” — i.e., a greater emphasis on Hungarian-accented lyrics — another voice was needed to take Reb Yom Tov’s creations further.

And who better than Levy Falkowitz? A Williamsburg-born Satmar chassid who lives today near Kiryas Joel, the 35-year-old with the golden voice has just produced an album of Reb Yom Tov’s creations that connects to the modern chassidish worlds of Williamsburg and Boro Park the same way they did when Reb Yom Tov Ehrlich’s accordion expanded and contracted to the music of his time.

“The way I look at it,” Falkowitz says, “is that I’m really living off the work that Avraham Fried and MBD did 20 years ago. My career was built around performing those big songs they rescued from oblivion. I sing the Yom Tov Ehrlich songs that they already popularized, and I add my thing.”

While Falkowitz is in high demand at live events around New York and New Jersey, the post-Pesach season is a time to recharge and work on the projects that fall by the wayside when there’s a performance every night. This was a good time to retell his incredible and quite unplanned story of how a Williamsburg kid became one of the most sought-after singers in the chassidish world.

The post Old Verses, New Vibes first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

Photos: Shlomo Stroh

IF you close your eyes for a moment and imagine the Pesach our ancestors enjoyed, the picture that comes to mind is one of singular family unity. For them, the holiday’s primary focus was a mitzvah that was as organic as it was critical; the Korban Pesach couldn’t be commercialized even if you tried.

Those days are over. Pesach is still a family time, but the tableware is ordered on Amazon, and the matzah, maror, and charoses can be picked up in any of the dozen grocery stores within a five-minute radius. Is there any way to recapture that sense of joint family effort in handcrafting the Yom Tov’s focal mitzvah?

There is. Believe it or not, do it yourself matzah baking has come into vogue. And while the thought of installing a burning furnace in your own backyard might sound intimidating, a motivated group of forward thinkers have gotten past the initial fear and are rolling up their sleeves and getting to work, all while their wives watch from the kitchen window.

In a recent seminar, a group of matzah enthusiasts, led by longtime matzah expert Rav Dovid Leibish Bochner, got together to discuss ideas, share trade secrets, and innovate new ones.

1. Taking Stock

When it comes to baking matzos, a perennial struggle is being able to ensure that the dough doesn’t stick to the stick used to insert the matzos into the oven. Most bakeries use paper, but that can be costly. Rav Asher Landau, a dayan who was present at the meeting, said he bought a special sock from a medical supplies company that is the perfect size to fit over the stick.

Duly impressed, the group decided to send out a mashgiach to the factory in Wisconsin that manufactures these medical socks and certify that they have no kashrus or chometz issues.

2. Keeping Dry and Moist

Another of the issues discussed was the need for washing hands every 18 minutes, to prevent the dough, which inevitably clings to fingers, from becoming chometz. The constant handwashing will often result in painfully dry skin over Yom Tov.

One of the participants at the meeting suggested wearing medical sleeves as an alternative to washing hands. They’re easily washable, and for a dollar a piece, make a sound investment.

3. Well Rounded

Rabbi Avraham Reit, who has written a booklet on the “zero crumb method” to baking matzah, addressed the issue of ensuring the matzos emerge as perfectly rounded as possible. His suggestion was simple as it was brilliant: rolling the dough out on silicone pastry mats. And although pie itself wouldn’t be recommended for Pesach, the pastry mats (previously unused) are perfectly Pesach friendly.

4. Kosher Cloths

There’s always room for enhancement when it comes to kashrus on Pesach. The matzah is rolled out on tables covered in paper-like tablecloths, and although there’s no glaring halachic concern regarding tablecloths, one participant informed the rest of the group that there are brands of this table covering sold with a hechsher on them, certifying that the materials contained within them present no chometz issues. The group did some due diligence and discovered that a store in Williamsburg had these table coverings in stock.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 956)

The post Rolling in the Dough       first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

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he obligation to provide children a sound education is on their parents, not their school.

This is how a state Supreme Court judge split her ruling, supporting the New York State Education Department by upholding the century-old law mandating that private schools be “substantially equivalent” to their public counterparts, while preserving parents’ right to determine their children’s schooling.

In the 21-page Solomonic ruling handed down last Thursday afternoon, Judge Christina Ryba agreed that the state had a compelling motivation to ensure that every child receives a sound secular education, but it did not have the authority to penalize or shut down schools that are not in compliance with the law. Legislation to grant the education department that power has been proposed several times in recent years but has languished in Albany, with virtually no cosponsors or support.

The law, Ryba wrote, “places the burden for ensuring a child’s education squarely on the parent, not the school.” She added that “certain portions of the new regulations impose consequences and penalties upon yeshivos above and beyond that authorized by the compulsory education law.”

The case centered on two thorny constitutional issues — whether the state may interfere in religious schools, and the scope of the education department’s mandate to enforce laws. Ryba ruled in favor of parents on both questions.

Avi Schick, a partner at the Troutman Pepper law firm who argued the case on behalf of three pro-yeshivah organizations, five of the state’s oldest yeshivos, and several parents, hailed the ruling as a victory for the cause.

“The court ruled that the state does not have the authority to penalize parochial schools that do not meet the state’s substantial equivalency standard,” he said. “More importantly, the court struck from the regulations the provision stating that a school found to be non-equivalent does not meet the requirements of a school under the compulsory education law. In other words, a yeshivah is a school, regardless of whether the state believes that its secular studies are lacking.”

If the state deems a school to be noncompliant with the law, Ryba said, its authority is limited to informing parents about the status of their child’s school. Parents may then supplement the secular education component with an after-school program or homeschooling.

The ruling left several gaps. It is unclear, for example, what would happen if parents were to ignore the state’s warning. Additionally, the ruling does not address a situation in which a child’s parents are divorced and have divergent desires about the child’s education.

This is the second round for Ryba on this case — in 2019, she struck down the state’s initial attempt to impose guidelines on yeshivos, directing them to first present them to the public for comments. Since then, two comment periods garnered nearly 450,000 comments, the vast majority critical of state interference in yeshivah education. In August, the Board of Regents and Education Commissioner Betty Rosa pushed them through anyhow.

The judge’s ruling was welcomed by Agudath Israel, one of the plaintiffs in the case.

“While not the complete victory many were praying for, Agudath Israel is grateful that the court recognized the egregious overreach the regulations sought,” Agudah said in a statement. “The prospect of forcibly shutting down schools, and of the state mandating which schools children should be reenrolled to, is not something one would typically associate with 21st-century America.”—

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 955)

The post New York Yeshivos Score Partial Victory first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

Photo: Flash90

Mike’s Bistro was Mike Pence territory for the evening last Wednesday.  The former vice president was on hand to sign his newly published autobiography, So Help Me G-d, at an event sponsored by the Israel Heritage Foundation.  About 100 people were at the upscale Midtown diner, some eager for a moment with Pence, some content to hear the Republican introduced as the “greatest vice president in the history of this country” talk about his love for Israel. Others just enjoyed the ribeye steaks while animatedly engaging in the “will he or won’t he” parlor game of Pence’s 2024 presidential ambitions.

The Israel Heritage Foundation, the event’s organizer, aims to be nonpartisan — “We invited some Democrats to come, and it’s still in the pipeline,” executive director Rabbi Duvid Katz told me.

1. Do nice guys finish last?

In his 13-minute speech, Pence barely mentioned Donald Trump’s name. There was a smattering of “Donalds,” a recollection of “standing beside the president,” a call “from that familiar voice,” speaking on a “call that I got every day” and ten “he saids.”

With Trump and Florida governor Ron DeSantis sucking all the air out of the race, Pence’s 4 percent support reflects the Republican base’s demand for a pitbull candidate.

2.The phone call that changed his life

Trump, Pence revealed, never formally asked him to join his team.

“The phone rang and I picked it up and I heard that very familiar voice,” he said. “And he said, ‘Mike, it’s going to be great.’ He started talking... for like five to seven minutes, without taking a breath. And then when he did, I finally said ... ‘Well, Donald, if there’s a question in there, the answer is yes.’ ”

He omitted one detail, revealed in his book: When he refused Trump’s demand to not certify the 2020 election, Trump retorted, “If you do that, I made a big mistake five years ago.”

3. Pence is loved by pro-Israel community

Pence’s pro-Israel record, stretching back decades, was on full display.

“Somebody said they should clone him,” Dr. Joseph Frager, the foundation’s executive vice president, told me. “If we had a million people like him, that would do great — no problems in the world.”

This may make Pence a first choice among evangelicals, though Nikki Haley’s star performance as UN ambassador in 2017 and 2018 may give her an edge.

4. Dirshu founder selected to introduce Pence

Dirshu founder Rabbi Dovid Hofstedter, who introduced Pence, several years ago launched a “Torah values caucus” in Congress. He told me Pence suggested he open a similar caucus to give religion a greater say.

“He was happy when I told him that I had already done so,” he said.

In his public remarks, Rabbi Hofstedter focused on anti-Semitism, for which he had a novel solution. “I just had the privilege of speaking to the vice president about personal civility,” he said. “It’s not about what we can do but what we can be.”

5. What does Pence’s future hold?

Engaging as it may be, Pence’s book is hardly what drew such a crowd on a workday evening. Guests tried to decipher his words as to whether he will seek the highest office, and he ignored a reporter who shouted the question.

“Maybe it’s time for a new lodestar,” Dan Hardt, Nassau County’s commissioner of bridges and a rising Republican star, wondered out loud in his speech. “Maybe it’s time for that lodestar to rise.” Pence leaned forward in his seat and politely applauded.

Hard Truths from Haley

Nikki Haley, whose foray into the 2024 arena was already seen as courageous, is taking on her party. At a donor retreat in Florida, she blamed Donald Trump and lawmakers on both sides for what she termed “trillion-dollar pandemic blowouts” and accused Republicans of abandoning their conservative market principles.

“Don’t let the media tell you Republicans and Democrats can’t work together,” she said. “They always seem to work just fine when they’re spending your money.”

She promised to “every single one of ’em” as president” and “stop the trillion-dollar spending sprees and halt our sprint toward socialism.”

Haley’s candor has cost her committee assignments in the past, but the same frankness helped her win the governorship of South Carolina. She’s betting her outspokenness will set her apart from what is sure to be a crowded 2024 field.

A word of advice from across the Atlantic, though — Rishi Sunak tried taking on his party, and lost. Party members have a history of shooting messengers bearing hard truths.

A Hand from Hungary

The news that Hungary will move its embassy to Jerusalem next month, the first European country to do so, is a boost with a sting in its tail. Viktor Orban, the populist Hungarian premier, has been a Bibi ally since he took office in 2010, blocking efforts to issue anti-Israel statements in the EU, and this gesture is the latest on his pro-Netanyahu record.

But Orban’s efforts to curb Hungarian judiciary and media independence have been controversial. Bibi will not welcome the parallels being drawn between Orban’s anti-judiciary moves and his own government’s attempts to cut the Israeli courts down to size. Amidst his domestic worries, however, the embassy move is a reminder that for all his faults, Bibi remains Israel’s foremost statesman.

The Lockdown Files

Some 100,000 leaked WhatsApp messages from the heart of pandemic-era British government reopened the juicy and exceedingly ugly can of worms labeled “The handling of COVID-19.” They exposed truths hitherto suspected, now proven.

Boris Johnson, whose former chief aide compared him to a careening shopping trolley for his indecision, prevaricated on restrictions based on the last person he’d spoken to.

Chief civil servant Simon Case, far from being an impartial implementor of policy, gleefully anticipated seeing those affected by travel restrictions “disembarking from first class and being herded into Premier Inns.” Then-health secretary Matt Hancock ignored medical advice on care home testing and later manipulated statistics to claim he’d reached a landmark testing target.

Most alarming was how anyone — including Cabinet ministers — who questioned the efficacy of restrictions, or weighed them up against economic or educational tradeoffs, was branded a reckless libertarian. Three years on, it remains a cautionary tale of unchecked groupthink.

—Y. Davis

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 952)

The post Feting Mike Pence’s Love for Israel first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

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potentially catastrophic law that could have led to women being drafted into the United States military has been averted for the second year in a row — due in no small part to the efforts of Agudath Israel.

When the United States abolished its military draft 50 years ago this month, it simply stopped calling up conscripts, never bothering to permanently end it. But to maintain the ability to reinstate the draft in the event of a national emergency, the US armed forces still require all 18-year-old men to register with the Selective Service system.

That requirement is limited to men — women have never been required to register. But with the blurring of the genders slowly infiltrating society, a bipartisan majority of lawmakers have been pushing to expand the requirement to females as well. For the second year in a row, the House and Senate voted to include the provision in the mammoth Pentagon budget. But Agudath Israel’s Washington representative, Rabbi Abba Cohen, has been a pivotal voice in pulling together a coalition to prevent it.

“It could very well have been passed and enacted,” Rabbi Cohen said. “It was a very distinct — maybe even more than a distinct — possibility. We basically dodged a bullet.”

Just days before the record $858 billion defense bill was signed by President Biden last week, it contained language that would have forced women to register if a draft were reinstated. This raised concerns among Jewish groups and community leaders as to where that could have potentially led. On guard because the same thing had happened the year before, Rabbi Cohen invested months of work, advocating and pigeonholing lawmakers, until it was taken out.

In Israel, the parshah of the female draft was a long and painful one, with the Chazon Ish famously taking the position that it was a yeihareg ve’al yaavor. A compromise was finally reached that exempted frum girls.

Historically, the United States has invoked military drafts on an ad hoc basis. Whenever hostilities broke out, Congress would authorize the president to call up a certain number of people. When World War II concluded in 1945, the draft remained in effect as the US faced down the Soviet Union everywhere from East Asia and Europe to Florida’s doorstep in Cuba and across South America.

Figuring that an end to the draft would sap antiwar protesters of a cause, President Nixon abolished it as of January 27, 1973. But the military kept collecting registration cards in the event it was reinstated.

“We have a voluntary military, but this is all about the future,” noted Rabbi Cohen, who has been Agudah’s DC delegate for 34 years. “The fact is that there’s been no serious effort on Capitol Hill to get rid of it permanently. It can be brought back if there is a military conflict or a national emergency. If this bill had passed, the stage would have been set for women to have to be part of the military.”

The effort to include women in the draft began in 1978, when President Jimmy Carter put forward the Equal Rights Amendment, a proposed addition to the US Constitution that sought to eliminate legal distinctions between women and men. The proposal failed to be ratified by two-thirds of the states and so never became constitutional law. Rabbi Moshe Sherer, then the leader of Agudah, raised the alarm at the time about what it portended for a religious lifestyle.

Although the ERA effort failed, Congress over the years gradually passed many laws that undercut the traditional view of women. That culminated, in a sense, when a bipartisan majority of lawmakers tacked onto the 2022 annual defense bill a provision requiring women also to register for Selected Service. Rabbi Cohen joined a coalition of traditional conservatives and religious right figures to eliminate it from the final bill.

“It was quite tense,” he recalled. “But there are still a lot of voices in society who are very uneasy with ending the separation of genders.”

The effort succeeded. When it came up again in the 2023 bill, only the Senate included it; the House didn’t. And the final bill stripped it completely.

Rabbi Cohen is confident that Congress will leave the issue alone for the next couple of years.

“It’s not unusual that after you try twice, you regroup to come up with new arguments,” Rabbi Cohen said, “but I’d be surprised with this Congress if it were to come back soon.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 943)

The post Women in US Dodge a Bullet   first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

Photos: Koszegi Zoltan
The heimish building boom is surging across the Hungarian plain. From Kerestir and Csenger to Kaliv and Ihel, complexes are rapidly rising to host accommodations for the thousands of annual visitors to mekomos hakedoshim. A tourist visiting one of these locations during any time of the year will easily find a hot meal, a comfortable bed, and a beis medrash with amenities that rival what he’s used to back home.

What the visitor likely won’t meet in any of these tourist hot spots is a local Hungarian Jew. Virtually all of Hungary’s native Jews live in Budapest, while to the average frum visitor, Budapest is merely a stop on the way to Kerestir.

The city’s off-the-radar status has churned up some bittersweet emotions among the small cadre attempting to revive a Torah atmosphere in this land of the Chasam Sofer and Rav Yehuda Assad, Rabi Akiva Eiger, and the Yismach Moshe.

“I never understood or appreciated the average Hungarian Jew’s thirst for Yiddishkeit,” says Yochi Herzog, the president of Kedem Wine. “There are a lot of people of Hungarian descent who are not aware of what’s going on. They should spend a Shabbos there. These are your own roots. Go help! It’s your achrayus.”

Herzog is a descendant of the famed Baron Herzog winemaker family from Slovakia, and his parents would regularly return to their hometown of Verbo to upkeep the cemeteries and shuls, provide chizuk to the few Yidden they met there, and visit the non-Jews who helped save the family during the war.

The tradition continues to this day, with the entire extended family going for a weeklong trip to Hungary every few years.

“We’re already the third and fourth generation of Herzogs who go back,” Herzog said. “We take a busload of cousins and we see the house where my father was born, we see the old Kedem winery. My nephews see me and they’re always asking, ‘When are we going back to Hungary?’ It’s such an exciting thing for them.”

The post The Eleventh Hour  first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

Photos: Naftoli Goldgrab

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re you bloodthirsty, swashbuckling, and have a killer instinct? If yes, you could have a future as the chief exterminator of New York City’s estimated between two and eight million rats.

Mayor Eric Adams took office setting out to solve three goals to make New York a “livable city”: by “fighting crime, fighting inequality, and fighting rats” – symbols of New York’s ongoing and out-of-control downward spiral. Now he’s looking for a rat murderer, and he’s willing to pay up to $170,000 for the right candidate.

Adams’s administration posted a job listing recently looking for a “rat czar,” a candidate to lead the city’s long-running battle against rats. The official job title is “director of rodent mitigation,” and the ideal qualifier should be “highly motivated and somewhat bloodthirsty, determined to look at all solutions from various angles, including improving operational efficiency, data collection, technology innovation, trash management, and wholesale slaughter,” according to the listing, which described New York’s rats as “cunning, voracious, and prolific,” who are “legendary for their survival skills.”

It might sound like a holiday joke, but the job is actually quite daunting, if not impossible. New York City leaders have been trying to control the multi-million rat population for over a century, with negligible results.

Local authorities in New York have long admitted that eliminating rats from the city is unrealistic, but have made various efforts over the years to control the rodents, with only marginal success. It used to be that after receiving complaints of rat infestation, officials would send exterminators to attack the scene with traps and rat poison – but that was often too little, too late. In recent years though, the city began to focus on preventive measures, although city rats managed to survive a multimillion-dollar effort under former mayor Bill de Blasio that focused on better trash pickups, housing inspections in targeted neighborhoods, and landlord fines.

A decade ago, municipal authorities announced a plan for mass sterilization of the city’s rats, using a chemical to neutralize the reproductive systems of female rats, who birth a new litter of up to a dozen pups every two months. The city also launched a program to use dry ice to suffocate rats in their hiding spots, and Adams, when he was Brooklyn borough president, once demonstrated a trap that used a vat of poisoned soup to drown rats lured by the scent of food.

New York City’s department of health already has an expert rodent biologist — renowned rodentologist Robert Corrigan, an office for pest control, and a citywide rodent task force. Still, the problem is worse than ever despite the past decade’s efforts: Since the beginning of 2022, New York has seen its worst infestation since rat sighting records were made public in 2010 – partly because of the abundance of food waste with pandemic-induced outdoor dining, and a Department of Sanitation policy relaxing the requirement for residential buildings to keep their waste in containers. Mayor Adams believes someone who can coordinate all the existing efforts will finally do the trick.

Mordy Fogel hopes the new “rat czar” will enlist his help, although he’s more than a bit cynical that this new position (which he actually applied for but didn’t meet the educational requirements) will become another bureaucratic bungle. An exterminator with more than a quarter century of experience, including working on some of the short-lived municipal initiatives, he’s even come up with a detailed plan to curb the city’s rat population once and for all.

To get a handle on how bad rat infestation really is, I accompanied Fogel around on his job.

Mordy Fogel is in an ongoing battle with cellar rats. “We close holes, the rats open them, we close them again. Really, the way to take care of this problem is not the way I’m doing it”

A Warm Home 

In New York, if you want to see a rat, you just have to head to the nearest subway station and peer at the tracks. Or you can go to some neighborhoods — such as Bushwick in Brooklyn — and a rat colony will visit you.

Mordy Fogel is the owner of Squish Pest Control (“as in squish a bug,” he tells me, adding by way of explanation that “'squash’ was taken already”).

We arrive at his first job of the day, an apartment building near Boro Park. There are 16 units there, all heimish people and mostly families of kollel yungeleit. It’s right across from a prominent yeshivah and looks just like any of the other dozens of similar buildings in the neighborhood.

Fogel asks the photographer to hide his equipment until we enter the basement.

“The people who live here all know there’s an issue, but thank G-d they don’t know the extent of it,” he explains. “I’ve been working on it for a year already. We come by every month. We close holes, the rats open them, we close them again. It’s an ongoing battle.”

We walk into the basement and I smell a rat. Seriously.

The basement is piled with succah paraphernalia, such as schach and panels. Fogel shines his flashlight around to survey the results of the past month, settling on a corner. “They’re having parties over here,” he mutters to himself. The floor is littered with hundreds of rat droppings. In some places, the rats have eaten through the concrete, chomping the floor into a pile of gravel.

“We only used wire mesh to cover the holes,” Fogel’s worker tells me, speaking in a Slavic accent. “They can eat up to a quarter inch of concrete. They have teeth like steel.”

The floor is strewn with glue traps, each one full of rat droppings. “This is not for the rats,” the exterminator says. “They slide right out of them. This is for the water bug situation.” Indeed, water bugs are all over the place, and larger than the average bug.

From the evidence, I estimate that a colony of dozens of rats calls the place home. And this neighborhood is not even on the city’s list of most infested — such as Chinatown in Manhattan, Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, and the Grand Concourse in the Bronx — nor is it near a subway station, which are notoriously overrun by the repulsive vermin.

The room is heavy with the scent of a dead rat. Fogel looks around and suddenly bends down and picks up a corpse, holding it by the tail with his bare hands. “See? This one just died,” he says. I cringe. Fogel drops it and continues rushing through the rooms in the basement. “I want to see if I can show you a live one scurrying across,” he calls after me. Okay, I guess I need that for the story, but every fiber of my being hopes it doesn’t happen.

“The way to take care of this problem is not the way I’m doing it,” Fogel admits. “I’m just putting on a Band-Aid. The right way to do it is for me to be here every day for two weeks straight, continuously putting out bait. Then I’d stick a shmatteh in the hole, and if after three days you see the shmatteh hasn’t moved, you know you’ve wiped them out and we close up the hole.”

“But these people can’t afford it,” he adds. “They’re all kollel yungeleit.”

Burrow Park

Rats want a place where they can hide, Fogel says. They look for rubble or a bushy area where humans rarely go, they find it comfortable and will make it their home. They reproduce at a startlingly rapid rate, they can crawl through a hole the size of a quarter (their skulls are made of separate bones instead of one plate so their heads can change shape and squeeze through), and can live treading water for three days.

Rats, more than possums and raccoons, are the worst type of urban pest. They carry up to 18 diseases, including salmonella, E. coli, bubonic plague, and Leptospira. A strain of the Covid virus was found last month in New York City rats. Given the close quarters shared by rats and New York City residents, the rat scourge could potentially be a recipe for a public health nightmare. The NYC Health Department recommends that people bitten by a rat seek immediate medical attention, as bacteria from the rat’s teeth can cause tetanus as well as rat bite fever, which can be fatal.

The Big Apple is without doubt a rat heaven. There are a million places to get comfy, where humans hardly disturb and where there is an abundance of food available within a few hundred feet. Rats only require an ounce of food and water a day to live, and curbside garbage disposal from residences and restaurants contribute greatly to their sustenance.

Estimates of how many rats live within the city’s confines range from as few as two million (the most definitive study) to as many 33 million, and this basement fits the bill for a rat abode. Although it has since been cleaned up, the rats have fully established themselves here, wandering regularly around the building’s four stories and spooking residents.

The first thing Fogel did was get the residents to clear out the basement.

“For many years,” Fogel tells me, “I had a problem getting into the storage rooms. The common areas I had access to, but once the rats got inside the private storage rooms, they crawled under the doors and started burrowing into the ground. I couldn’t get to where the burrows were to put poison there – the residents had their stuff piled up to the ceiling. The residents fought me for a long time, until new management came in and told them they had to get rid of their things.”

No Place in This City

Fogel expects any rat czar the city hires to do the same — find out where the rats are and move in for the kill. But he is under no illusions. City biologist Bobby Corrigan, he tells me, is considered one of the country’s greatest rodent experts, yet he threw his hands up in frustration after a bout of negotiations with former mayor Bill de Blasio.

When de Blasio became the mayor in 2014, the Pest Management Association, the official lobbying group for the industry, sent him a letter with an offer to help him become the guy who eliminated rats from the city. The association proposed providing the city with 200 veteran exterminators, each with a minimum of 20 years of experience. “Within two years,” the association promised, “you’ll see that we will cut down on the rat population.”

When several weeks passed with no response, the association tried again, figuring that the new mayor didn’t want to spend so much money on it. This time they halved the number of proposed exterminators, saying that 100 experienced pest control men could greatly ease the rodent problem.

There was still no response. The association tried a third time, offering 50 of the city’s exterminators. That got the de Blasio administration’s attention. The mayor then issued a press release announcing a crackdown on rats, saying he would be putting 150 men on the street to combat the scourge.

Those 150 men, the association soon learned to its dismay, were ticket agents, not exterminators. The mayor’s method of dealing with rats was through steep fines for homeowners who were caught with rat burrows on their property.

“Until today,” says Fogel, who was on all three lists of experienced exterminators offered to de Blasio, “this is how the city fights rats — by fining the property owner.”

With Adams, Fogel had his hopes a bit higher. Jessica Tisch, his administration’s sanitation commissioner, has popularized the slogan, “The rats don’t run this city — we do.” T-shirts and other merchandise with the phrase are being sold, and a press release claimed that “ever since this fall’s major announcement about the latest efforts to take back our streets from the Murine Menace, [the] phrase has been on every New Yorker’s lips.”

“I hate rats, as you know,” Adams said last month. “I’m scared of them and when I see one, I think about it all day. So, yes, I am fixated on killing rats.” Gothamist, a local news website, made a video mashup of Adams saying the word “rat” or “rats” more than 80 times since mid-October alone.

“When we started killing them in Borough Hall, some of the same folks that are criticizing us now called me a murderer because I was killing rats,” Adams said, referring to his vat experiment in his previous position as Brooklyn borough president. “Well, you know what? We’re going to kill rats. Rats have no place in this city.”

But for New Yorkers to reclaim their streets, they can’t rely on the Pied Piper to lead the rats away: Only a mass kill-off will work. Complaints to the city hotline about rats increased by 70 percent in the first eight months of 2022 compared to 2020. Last year, likely due to the extensive cleaning on account of the Covid pandemic, the number of calls dropped dramatically to fewer than 3,000. But they came roaring back this year, with more than 21,500 sightings reported.

A “rat information portal” set up by the city to report sightings tells me that the “map is currently undergoing updates and data is only current up to 1/8/2020. Please stay tuned while we enhance our system.”

The city advertisement appeared to be in response to that.

“Do you have what it takes to do the impossible?” it asked. “A virulent vehemence for vermin? A background in urban planning, project management, or government? And most importantly, the drive, determination and killer instinct needed to fight the real enemy — New York City’s relentless rat population?”

But when Fogel clicked on the job application and saw the requirements for a college education and knowledge of computers but not necessarily extermination, he realized the job would probably be more political than hands-on.

“We might not be computer literate, but at the end of the day we’re exterminators,” Fogel says, hoping the new position won’t be another political hack job. “I don’t want to see another situation where the city will have someone to point a finger at as an excuse, saying something like, ‘Look, we hired Joe Smith and he’s doing the best he can and we still can’t solve the problem.’”

He blames the city’s politically powerful environmentalist lobby, who advocates against using chemicals that are toxic enough to kill rats.

“We’re trained, we’re professional, we’re licensed, we know how to use the stuff,” he says. “But every year, they make more regulations to take things away from us. Either you trust us or you don’t.”

Two main concerns voiced by environmentalists are that the toxic chemicals may dissolve into the earth, and that birds of prey that are protected species, such as falcons or eagles, might ingest the poison together with the dead rats they’ll eat.

“Agreed, we don’t want to kill off other wildlife,” Fogel says, “but there’s a limit on how much you can do just to protect birds. What about humans?”

Environmentalists, Fogel charges, wants to limit exterminators to gas and dry ice, which can cost thousands of dollars to purchase and license and be too costly for many exterminators.

Furry Friends

Ironically, the one requirement of the city ad that Fogel does not possess is a virulence for vermin. In fact, he has several rats as pets.

“Rats happen to be extremely intelligent animals,” he reveals. “For the fun of it, I’ve gone to pet shops and bought rats, and within a matter of three days I’ve had my kids train them to sit on a shoulder and eat from a hand.”

More than Mordy Fogel found his calling, his calling found him. He has a fascination with animals and loves the challenge of going after them. He mostly gets calls to get rid of raccoons, mice, possums and rats, as well as an occasional snake. The snake calls are usually for harmless garter snakes, but he once had to corral a poisonous snake that escaped its cage, and another time had a call for a boa constrictor which was left behind when a tenant moved. “I took it home and kept it as a pet for a year,” he says.

Fogel studies the habits of his prey obsessively, but even he is sometimes surprised by their antics — such as the time he was called to a home in East New York and heard scratching from the inside of a kitchen cabinet. He opened the cabinet door and saw a rat sitting there. “It jumped over my head, clear across the room — it must have leaped at least ten feet in the air — it landed and just kept going,” he says. “I wasn’t ready for that. I didn’t know they could jump that far.” He’s also seen rats attack and chase away cats, the opposite scenario of what we generally expect.

Like in almost every area, the extermination industry is also now using some advanced technology. For example, as Fogel sets out rat traps and bait stations, he’ll be monitoring them in real time, getting a notification on his phone when a rat enters a bait station.

After a nerve wracking few minutes, we finally step out of the rat-nest and Fogel begins poking around the grass outside to look for any new burrows — a giveaway that the rodents are growing bolder. He finds none.

For the residents of this building though, life goes on in an ordinary way above ground, most of them oblivious to the underground tenants living it up in the pipes and under the floors. A yungerman pulls into the driveway. A woman stops to ask if she can park in a spot. Another woman walks up the stairs to her apartment, laden down with groceries. Fogel lowers his voice — he doesn’t want people to know how badly infested the basement is. Rats, after all, can’t be fought one building at a time. They must be eradicated through a citywide extermination effort.

And if the city doesn’t want to get the rats too comfortable, it should reconsider the way it handles trash. All those bags of yummy rat food put out on the street every night offsets the hard work of poisoning them or drowning them. Back in the day, New York City required the use of metal trash cans in order to avoid rats, but today’s collection system is a rat’s heaven.

What, I question him, would you do if you were appointed the rat czar?

He thinks for a minute – actually, he’s been thinking about it since entering the industry over two dozen years ago.

“Step one,” he says, “I would hire 200 exterminators with a minimum of 20 years of experience. There are good technicians out there who know where the burrows are and know what to do. And stop giving tickets to people. Fire the 150 ticket agents and hire that many exterminators. Walk around the city, map out where the most complaints are and start wiping the rats out.” —

Rachel Ginsberg contributed to this report.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 942)

The post Rat Race first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

Forget what you heard anywhere else. Republicans may be disappointed at the outcome of Tuesday’s election. But for the Orthodox community, it was a grand slam. Records for voter turnout weren’t just surpassed, they were swept aside in a stampede. It will be hard for any politician to ignore the community in the future, askanim suggest.

Here are five takeaways that came to mind as I watched the results trickle in.

1) Slumbering No Longer

The sea of black hats that headed to the polls was not just unprecedented, it was unexpected as well. For years, a 15 percent turnout in frum areas was the high water mark. “If we get that number,” one prominent askan deeply involved in get-out-the-vote efforts told me just Monday, “I’ll be thrilled.”

Instead, the 48th Assembly District, which covers Boro Park, got an eye-popping 50 percent — about 29,000 of the district’s 59,000 registered voters showed up at the polls, and the coming days will reveal how many more voted by absentee ballot.

“Awakened a sleeping lion,” tweeted Chaskel Bennett, an Agudath Israel of America trustee.

There are three reasons for these numbers.

Firstly, the anger many felt at former governor Andrew Cuomo, for targeting frum neighborhoods during Covid and ghettoizing them into the infamous “red zones,” never really dissipated. Hochul has distanced herself from her predecessor, but said nothing about the policy at the time, and has not since apologized for making the community a target.

Secondly, the state’s recently approved regulations on yeshivos incensed the community and created a significant amount of anxiety. They had submitted 300,000 comments — the vast majority against any government interference — and then watched incredulously as it was passed anyhow. Not many knew or cared that it was the independent Board of Regents that approved the regulations, and not the governor. They just saw that there were two candidates on the ballot: one who was outspoken on the issue, and the other who could barely bring herself to publicly praise a yeshivah education.

Thirdly, the national attention focused on frum areas fascinated people. Was this the first time a president had personally called a rebbe to ask him for an endorsement, as Joe Biden phoned the Skverer and Vizhnitzer Rebbes? Biden was followed by likely soon-to-be House speaker Kevin McCarthy, who personally came to New Square to lobby for the Rebbe’s support for his own candidate. He was turned down, the Rebbe explained, since he had already given his word to President Bill Clinton.

What an election season this has been.

2) “I Never Saw Such Lines”

Anger, however, does not translate into votes, as any askan will dryly note. This is the first time that a group of activists did more than bombard email servers with urgent notices or place ads with Rav Moshe Feinstein’s psak to vote. Instead, they hit upon the innovation of phone banks. Spearheaded by Yossi Gestetner in Monsey, Avi Schnall in Lakewood, and Josh Mehlman in Flatbush, they rented halls, provided food, and got local Bais Yaakovs to send over groups of girls, who made contact with tens of thousands of voters.

In Boro Park, about 25,000 people were reached. In Flatbush, 10,000 calls were made. In Lakewood, about 12,000 calls went out. Agudah sent out 13,000 text messages in the days leading up to the election.

The effort showed.

“I never, ever saw such lines at the polling site in all the years I’ve been doing this,” the manager of one of Boro Park’s voting areas told one askan. “People just kept coming and coming and coming.”

3) South Brooklyn’s Red Wave

Two years ago, Cuomo confined us into the red zones. Today, we painted those districts red. The thinking went that the community would vote for Lee Zeldin with the same numbers that it awarded Donald Trump two years ago — in the 70 percent range. It went much farther — 90 percent of the vote in Boro Park’s district went to Zeldin.

While Zeldin ultimately lost, the waves of votes he washed along with him swept other longtime Democrats into defeat — including some who were longtime friends of the Orthodox community. People came to the ballot and just marked Republicans straight down the line.

This was fatal for Assemblyman Steve Cymbrowitz, who had represented parts of Flatbush since the death of his wife, Assemblywoman Lena Cymbrowitz, 22 years ago. He lost to his Republican opponent, Michael Novakhov, by 19 percentage points. And in the district containing parts of Bensonhurst and Boro Park, Assemblyman Peter Abbate lost his bid for reelection after having been in Albany since 1986. In Queens, Assemblywoman Stacey Pfeffer Amato lost her contest.

These losses have hit askanim hard, particularly the loss of Amato, who has been one of the community’s closest allies in Albany, and Cymbrowitz, who as chairman of the Housing Committee has been extremely helpful to Orthodox interests and needs.

“This is devastating,” one askan told me. “Near catastrophic,” another said.

4) How Zeldin Came So Close

No Republican, we’ve been reminded in virtually every article, has won a statewide race in New York in two decades, and none stood a chance now, especially since the 2018 election colored the state a bright progressive blue.

Yet a MAGA Republican — an “ultra MAGA” Republican, as Governor Kathy Hochul insisted on referring to her opponent, Lee Zeldin — who refused to certify Joe Biden’s election in 2021, and appeared to stand against everything New Yorkers held dear, is currently within five points of the incumbent Democrat.

The tight race showed that, for one thing, personality matters. Hochul, who had a huge built-in advantage in a state where Dems outnumber the GOP two to one, was a uniquely poor campaigner, when she campaigned at all. Until two weeks ago, when polls began showing a potential Zeldin surge, she persisted with a Rose Garden strategy of not interacting with voters and just blanketing the airwaves with ads depicting her opponent as an ultra-conservative who wants to ban abortion.

She also refused to be interviewed. I can reveal that ahead of her primary election in June, her campaign promised me an interview. (At least two other frum media outlets received the same promise.) When that failed to materialize, I posted this on Twitter. I was contacted immediately by the campaign to assure me that the the interview was still on and would take place before the general election.

It never happened.

Zeldin, on the other hand, proved to be an energetic campaigner, appearing at subway stops to highlight soaring crime statistics and the fear people felt boarding trains. He made himself available to community leadership and newspaper editorial boards. People heard their concerns in his voice and responded.

But he peaked too early. Polls once showed him above the magical 30 percent he needed to win in New York City, but he did not reach that level in actual votes cast, and could not make up the difference in vote-rich upstate areas and Long Island, where his base was.

5) So, What’s Next?

Several askanim I spoke to in the hours after the election said that the frum community’s turnout allows them to forcefully make the case for more services and more recognition of their rights. They noted that along with the numerous endorsements that various kehillos gave to Zeldin came support for a host of Democrats as well, such as Senator Charles Schumer and Attorney General Letitia James.

Yossi Gestetner says he wants to expand on the phone banks for coming elections. “Hopefully,” he says, “there will be enough time and resources to contact 60,000 Orthodox Jewish households, which would be a reach of 120,000 potential voters, and then a larger reach down the road.”

Pinny Ringel, the Democrats’ new district leader in Boro Park, says he’s been in talks with the neighboring district leader, Councilman Kalman Yeger, about getting more polling sites and workers to Boro Park for future elections.

“My goal,” Ringel says, “is to show political leaders in Brooklyn, ‘Look, my community comes out and votes.’ Hopefully, next time they will look at out 30,000 votes and say, ‘Hey, maybe I can get those if I work with the community.’ ”

The post No Red Wave, but Definitely a Black One first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.

Photos: Elchanan Kotler

AS the 2022 New York gubernatorial race enters its final week, we’re in a very different place than when we started out. When Republican congressman Lee Zeldin declared his candidacy in April 2021, no one gave him much of a chance against the Democratic incumbent — Andrew Cuomo. Kathy Hochul replaced him in August of last year, but still held a huge lead over Zeldin for most of the campaign.

She has seen Zeldin whittle that lead down to a razor’s edge, and most analysts say it’s because crime has crept to the top of the list of New York voter concerns.

We’ve been told for decades that the law-and-order coalition that put Republicans George Pataki and Rudy Giuliani in power in the 1990s has long since dissipated.

George Floyd, apparently, has brought it back together. The race riots that engulfed the nation in 2020 have died down, but haven’t really completely ended. The crime rates that began soaring over the course of that summer have only continued going up — and up and up. And that has gradually bubbled to the surface as the biggest issue in the New York governor’s race, eclipsing even the flailing economy and rising inflation in importance.

That anxiety is causing many voters to give the Republican candidate a serious chance at leading New York, the bluest of blue states, in next Tuesday’s election. And it’s making national headlines.

Talking Past Each Other

Kathy Hochul and Lee Zeldin seem to be campaigning in two separate worlds. Hochul has done few actual events in person, preferring instead to reach voters through her Twitter feed and ad spending. Her stump speeches to Democratic donors are filled with dark denunciations of Zeldin as a threat to democracy a threat to women.

“Reminder: Lee Zeldin voted against certifying the 2020 election, spread the Big Lie, and opposed a commission to investigate the January 6 attack,” Hochul tweeted this month. “As even worse details emerge about that day, he continues to put his loyalty to Trump over New York. He’s a threat to our democracy.”

Zeldin, on the other hand, has been pounding the pavement, holding press conferences at subway stops to draw attention to rising crime rates.

He has amplified his campaign message by releasing daily videos showing senseless violence perpetrated against people minding their own business. A man waiting at a Bushwick subway platform last week was pushed onto the tracks before an oncoming train (he survived); a teenage girl was stabbed at a Washington Heights train depot the next day; and a man riding a Citi Bike in Bay Ridge was randomly attacked by two men.

The New York Post has kept a running front-page count of criminals who have been arrested and released within hours. Zeldin has blamed the leniency of progressive Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg for the crime wave, and he has pledged to fire him on the first day if he’s elected.

At their only debate on Tuesday, October 25, Zeldin charged that Hochul was minimizing the importance of locking up violent criminals. Her response — “I don’t know why that’s so important to you” — became headline fodder in the days following.

Zeldin himself was the victim of a crime over the summer, when he was assaulted by a knife-wielding man during a campaign speech.

“Whether I’m in a blue county or a red county or talking to Republicans, Democrats or independents, I hear about people who care about crime and public safety,” Zeldin told Politico earlier this month. “They want to take back our streets.”

Scrolling the Polling

Zeldin’s tenacity is having an effect. Three independent polls over the past two weeks have shown him closing the gap. A Siena poll found Hochul’s lead narrowing from 17 points in September to 11 points two weeks ago, and a later Quinnipiac survey found her with 50-46 lead, within the margin of error.

A coefficient poll even had Zeldin leading by one point, 46-45, and sweeping the independents by nine points. Perhaps most importantly, it showed him above 30 percent in New York City, a key threshold for Democrats to win the state. He leads all polls upstate.

Can Zeldin’s surge carry him past Hochul, making the congressman the first Republican to win a statewide position since 2002, when George Pataki was reelected to a third term?

Under fire: Zeldin has pledged to “end the war on yeshivos”

Who Is Good for Yeshivos?

With New York’s 440 yeshivos threatened by draconian reforms, Hochul has spoken in their defense — but only in private conversations. The governor, who attended religious schools as a child, hasn’t said anything in public other than platitudes about the value of yeshivos after the state education department passed onerous regulations last month. According to a source who attended her meeting with Jewish leaders in Monsey two weeks ago, she promised she would defend yeshivos if the topic came up at the debate. It did not.

In truth, there is little a governor can do about the state education department. Ostensibly to keep education free of political maneuvering, the state constitution places the entire department under the independent Board of Regents, whose 17 members are appointed by the legislature. The governor can only exercise power by refusing to approve the department’s budget.

It is unlikely Hochul will use that medium to fight for yeshivos. She does not have the heft that Cuomo had, and she lost the one battle she waged against the state education department. This past spring, Hochul attempted to transfer child nutrition and school lunch services from the state DOE to the department of agriculture, which is controlled by her. Betty Rosa, the education commissioner, lobbied the legislature against the move and ultimately emerged victorious.

“This goes to show,” one Albany insider said, “that when people say that ‘Hochul controls the education department, and why doesn’t she say anything in defense of yeshivos?’ — she fought over a relatively minor issue and lost. So certainly, a Governor Zeldin wouldn’t have major influence.”

The insider added, though, that he could see a coalition of moderate Democrats, those in the mold of Simcha Eichenstein, working to push Zeldin’s agenda through Albany.

Whither the Jewish Vote?

Views about the race in the frum electorate are mixed.

“The frum community never had such a friend in Albany as Zeldin will be,” said Moshe Gold, an upstate yeshivah administrator. “Despite the Democratic majorities in the Assembly and Senate, I think that a strong governor who cares and shares our values will be a fighter for us. Governor Hochul has said she thinks very highly of the yeshivah system, but she hasn’t said it in public. Zeldin has come out very strongly and said that every family has the right to educate according to their values.”

Taking the contrary view, Sender Rapaport, the executive director of Masbia and a media whisperer for the community, says that states with Democratic governors have lower crime rates and better economies per capita than those led by Republicans.

“I give Zeldin credit for very avidly speaking out for the yeshivos,” Rapaport said. “If he wins, I hope he remembers everything he said, because it sounds very promising, almost beyond what’s possible to deliver. But Governor Hochul is doing a very good job. I believe she earned the vote of the Jewish community. I believe the governor is good for yeshivos, good for the economy, and good against crime.”

The friend who has alliances in Albany took a more nuanced view. He noted that the next governor will face a legislature that is strongly Democratic, possibly with a veto-proof majority. When it would come to changing bail laws or protecting yeshivos, he would have a bully pulpit at best.

“I would love to see Zeldin win,” he said, “although Hochul is not the monster she’s been made out to be.”

Photo: Chaim Krengel

A MAGA Governor?

No state has competed with New York more ferociously or bitterly than Florida. During the Covid pandemic, then-governor Andrew Cuomo and Florida’s Ron DeSantis traded barbs when one state’s infection rate rose or fell, each touting their own method of combating the virus — Cuomo through a strict lockdown policy and DeSantis by opening up and allowing people the right to decide how to live with Covid.

DeSantis was on Long Island this weekend, promising that a Zeldin administration would make New York more like the Sunshine State.

“I’d like to see him get in there and unleash your own energy here in the state of New York,” DeSantis told a cheering crowd. “So I think this is an important choice for the state of New York. Do you want to continue down the path that you’re on — the path that’s seen you hemorrhage people, wealth, you name it? Or you want to try a different direction?”

The appearance of DeSantis — widely presumed to be eyeing America’s top political job — underscored how the outcome of the race was increasingly becoming a national focus.

The Nation, the flagship progressive news site, whose editor in chief, Ross Barkan, was poached earlier this year from the unabashedly socialist Jacobin magazine, wondered how things unraveled so fast after Democrats seized a veto-proof majority in the legislature in 2018.

“Why isn’t Kathy Hochul running away with her race for reelection?” Barkan wondered in a piece for the site. He noted that Zeldin voted against certifying Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 election, was an early Trump supporter, “and has never, at any point, recanted.”

Peggy Noonan, a former Ronald Reagan speechwriter, provided an answer in the Wall Street Journal, painting a dire picture of people “alarmed at the cost of things. They are afraid of crime. They don’t like what they see of the schools. You don’t want to be hit on the head on the way to the store... and you don’t want to be constantly doubting your kids are safe.”

In the face of all this, she added, “the Democrats don’t have a plan. This leaves voters thinking: We can’t turn it around with them.... With the Republicans, maybe their plans will work, maybe not, but at least they’re talking about what you’re thinking about, at least there’s a possibility they’ll come through.”

New York of 2022 is not the centrist Democratic state that once elected Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller and George Pataki. It has moved so far left that it has joined Oregon, California, and Vermont in the progressive zone.

If Zeldin wins, it would send a tremor through any Democrat who two years ago called to defund the police or thought that easing the fight on crime would be a winning issue.

Closing the Gap

Despite Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin’s packed schedule in the campaign’s waning days, Mishpacha’s Omri Nahmias managed to catch up with him and get him to expound on some of the issues he’s been running on that are of prime importance to New York’s Jewish community.

Rising anti-Semitism and rising crime rates have become central issues to voters. What would you do as a governor to reassure the New York Jewish community?

We have to combat anti-Semitism on our streets, in our schools, and in the halls of government. On our streets, it is important that we end this catch-and-release policy that we see. There are other pro-criminal laws that have been passed that are very dangerous. We need to make sure that law-abiding New Yorkers are back in control of their streets again.

I will declare a crime emergency on my first day in office. I will suspend some pro-criminal laws and force the state legislature to come to the table to work with me on enacting long-term fixes. I believe that we need to provide more support to our men and women in law enforcement, and that district attorneys need to enforce the law. And right now there are district attorneys who have been getting elected and refusing to enforce the law, like we’ve seen with [Manhattan DA] Alvin Bragg. I’ve pledged that on my first day in office, the first thing I will do is notify Alvin Bragg that he’s being removed for his refusal to enforce the law.

It’s not just on the streets where we’re seeing the rise in anti-Semitism — we’re seeing it everywhere, even in the universities.

We need to stick up for Jewish students and Jewish faculty in higher ed institutions like the City University of New York, where the culture needs to be vastly improved, and where currently Jewish students and Jewish faculty feel like they are unwelcome and are being targeted. And I’m going to speak up on their behalf to identify, confront, and crush anti-Semitism in every form. It needs to be called out in the halls of government, and wherever it rears its ugly head inside of schools. And that includes on the streets.

Is it the governor’s role to address crime in New York? Or is it more the mayor’s role?

It’s everybody’s job to do absolutely everything in their power to combat crime. This isn’t about one elected official saying that they have no responsibility and it’s someone else’s job. This is about everybody understanding that it’s everyone’s job to do their part to make our streets safe again.

New York’s 440 yeshivos have been targeted for unprecedented sweeping and intrusive reforms by the state education department, which the Orthodox community regards as very dangerous. What do you do plan to do in office to address this issue?

I have vocally opposed the substantial equivalency push. My mother was once a fourth-grade yeshivah teacher in Brooklyn. This was something that my family has cared deeply about through the generations. And I’m going to do my part to advocate very strongly on behalf of yeshivah students and yeshivah parents and educators to tell the rest of the story and to end this war on yeshivos.

I believe that much of the positive story about yeshivah education hasn’t been told by people in government, including the current governor. And even if she was unwilling to speak out in favor of yeshivah education in opposing the substantial equivalency push, she could have at least said that there was another part of the story to be told that included how yeshivos teach right from wrong, the law-abiding lives that are lived by yeshivah students and graduates, the continuing education, the high attendance rate, and much more.

And when she was asked the morning of the vote to weigh in on this, she said that she’d rather not, because it was getting too hot. And she says it was outside of the purview of her office. The governor can have an opinion on anything, can weigh in publicly on that opinion, and can move public opinion with the governor’s position and reasoning. So her desire to stay silent while Albany was declaring war on yeshivos is totally the opposite approach from what I would have taken.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 934)

The post Is New York Seeing Red? first appeared on Mishpacha Magazine.