by Shmuel Goppen
The numbers from this month’s
Maryland primary are a measurable, countable record of a community that showed
up too late and in too small a number for a moment that mattered more than
almost any in recent memory.
State Senator Dalya Attar, the
first Orthodox Jewish woman ever elected to the Maryland Senate, lost her seat
in the District 41 Democratic primary to Delegate Malcolm Ruff by roughly 3,700
votes out of just under 18,000 cast. Baltimore County Executive candidate Izzy
Patoka, the only Jewish candidate in that race and a longtime advocate for the
community, finished second to Julian Jones, trailing by nearly 6,900 votes.
Both losses are now permanent, at least for this cycle. Both losses were close
enough that a modestly larger Orthodox turnout could plausibly have changed the
outcome in District 41, and even in the county race, organized turnout would
have mattered far more than it did.
This is not simply a story about
two lost elections. It’s a story about what happens when a community that
prides itself on civic engagement, chinuch (education), tzedaka,
and communal organization treats electoral politics as optional. Lest you think
sitting on the sidelines right now is optional, let us look at what has
happened so far around the country this election cycle and then we will zero in
on our own community.
A Pattern, Not an Accident
What happened in Baltimore did not
happen in isolation. It is part of a national pattern that should alarm anyone
paying attention, regardless of where they sit politically.
In New York, three candidates
backed by the Democratic Socialists of America and Mayor Zohran Mamdani swept
their congressional primaries this June. Two of the winners, Claire Valdez and
Darializa Avila Chevalier, were described by the Times of Israel as
anti-Israel candidates backed by the far-left DSA. I will let their own words
speak for how much of a threat they pose to Jews in America and Israel.
When Avila Chevalier, who won the
Democratic primary for NY’s 7th Congressional District, was pressed
by a progressive endorsement committee, one sympathetic to her broader politics,
to simply condemn Hamas and its October 7 massacre, she would not. The Broadway
Democrats, a left-leaning Manhattan political club, wrote afterward that when
asked to condemn Hamas and its October 7th attacks at their own
endorsement meeting, she point-blank refused, turning the question into yet
another attack on Israel. This was not an isolated moment of evasion. She has
pointedly refused to condemn the terror group or its brutal October 7th
attack, claiming that being asked to do so ignores what she calls “75 years of
occupation that the Palestinian people have endured.” And in 2020, in a post
later deleted, she responded to a prompt asking what people would feel if
Israel vanished by writing flatly: “Trick question – Israel doesn’t exist!”
Claire Valdez, who won her primary
in NY’s 13th Congressional District, has been similarly unambiguous.
As a candidate seeking the DSA’s own endorsement, Valdez committed in writing
to refrain from any affiliation with what the organization labeled “Zionist
lobbying groups,” including J Street, AIPAC, and Democratic Majority for Israel.
In the immediate aftermath of the October 7th massacre, Valdez liked
a post celebrating the violence that read, “Glory to the resistance and the
people of Palestine.” She went on to appear for nearly an hour on the show of a
streamer who has openly described Jewish identity in dehumanizing terms, the
same streamer who, in remarks later resurfaced online, called Jewishness “this
constructed ethnicity, this demonic ethnicity… wholly invented.” Valdez did not
push back on her host’s framing but rather told him she loved being a member of
the DSA precisely because it allowed these kinds of conversations.
One week later, the wave moved to
Denver. Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old DSA member and first-time candidate,
unseated Diana DeGette, a 15-term incumbent who had held her seat since 1997,
in Colorado’s First Congressional District. Kiros had described Hamas’s October
7th massacre, in which more than 1,200 people were slaughtered, as
the “inevitable consequence of apartheid,” and she stood by that
characterization on camera in the final stretch of her campaign. When a local
television reporter pressed her on whether the 2025 firebombing of a Boulder
vigil, where people had gathered to call for the return of Israeli hostages,
was antisemitic, she declined to say so, telling the interviewer she couldn’t
know what was in the attacker’s heart or even what the victims themselves
believed. One member of the Boulder Jewish community died in the attack. Kiros,
who cannot call this terrorist attack antisemitic, will now be in Congress. At
her victory party, far-left Turkish streamer Hasan Piker, who has publicly said
he would vote for Hamas over Israel “every single time,” was in attendance.
And the movement is not stopping at
the coasts or in the mountains. In Michigan, where the Senate primary is
scheduled for August 4th, Abdul El-Sayed is the frontrunner in a
competitive Democratic primary for an open Senate seat. When CNN’s Manu Raju
asked him directly whether the Israeli government was as evil as Hamas,
El-Sayed answered: “Yes, killing tens of thousands of people makes you pretty
evil.”
When pressed in a separate
interview about whether Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state, he
declined to answer, saying he “struggles” with the question. He has barnstormed
Michigan’s college campuses alongside Hasan Piker, and after a gunman rammed a
car into a Michigan synagogue in March 2026, his response was “hurt people hurt
people.” He now has the endorsement of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and leads the
primary polling. He may well be the next United States senator from Michigan.
The language of these antisemites who,
within the next several months, will be sworn in as members of the United
States Congress representing districts in New York City, home to the largest
Jewish population in America, Denver, and possibly as a senator of the state of
Michigan, will have subpoena power, committee assignments, and a vote on every
piece of legislation touching aid to Israel, antisemitism funding, hate crimes
enforcement, and education policy nationwide.
These are not fringe outcomes
anymore. These antisemitic positions are functioning as a political asset for
these campaigns rather than a liability. The DSA’s own organizing arm has been
explicit about its ambitions. Specifically, it is not a protest movement
content to stay on the sidelines. It is a movement built to capture the
Democratic party’s machinery from within, district by district, primary by
primary. Baltimore’s 41st District was simply the local front of a
fight playing out from Manhattan to Colorado to Michigan.
And let’s be clear about something
else: This poison does not respect party lines, even if its current and most
visible vector happens to be running through Democratic primaries in New York
and Maryland. It shows up wearing different costumes, sometimes draped in the
language of democratic socialism, sometimes in the language of “America First”
isolationism, sometimes in the language of campus social justice activism. The
labels differ. The conclusion these movements keep arriving at is that Jewish
self-determination is illegitimate, that Jewish American institutional power is
suspect, and that Jewish communities in the United States asking for solidarity
or support are, at best, an inconvenience and, at worst, the enemy. A community
that only watches its left flank or only watches its right flank, will be
blindsided by the flank it wasn’t watching.
Why Baltimore’s Orthodox Community
Has No Choice but to Engage as Democrats
Baltimore has a Jewish community of
approximately 100,000 Jews, 20,000 to 30,000 of whom are Orthodox. The
uncomfortable structural reality that many in the Baltimore Jewish community,
specifically the Orthodox community, would rather not confront is that Maryland
does not have an open primary. Unlike states where any registered voter can
participate in either party’s primary regardless of registration, Maryland
restricts primary voting to registered party members. In a city and county
where the Democratic primary is, for nearly every meaningful local office, the
only election that matters, Republicans often don’t even field candidates. In
this environment, registering as anything other than a Democrat means
forfeiting any say in who actually governs.
This is true even though, as many
in the Orthodox community will readily acknowledge, their values and policy
instincts often align more naturally with conservative positions than with the
progressive wing now ascendant in the party. That tension is real. But it is
beside the point. The Vaad HaRabbonim and others in rabbinic leadership engaged
on this exact question this cycle. Rabbi Ariel Sadwin of Agudath Israel’s
Mid-Atlantic region worked with the Vaad HaRabbanim of Baltimore to launch a “shul
captain” system, assigning captains in congregations to drive voter
registration and primary turnout. That effort reflected a correct read of the
structural reality, which is that, if you are not registered as a Democrat in
Baltimore, you do not have a vote that counts in the elections that actually
determine who holds power over your schools, your streets, your safety, and
your community’s interests in Annapolis, on the City Council, and on the County
Council.
The math bears this out. The
Attar-Ruff margin was about 3,700 votes. A regional Orthodox population
estimated at 20,000 to 30,000 people, concentrated heavily in the Park Heights,
Cheswolde, and Pikesville corridor that overlaps significantly with District
41, had more than enough latent voting power to have closed that gap many times
over, if even a few thousand more eligible voters had been registered as
Democrats and had shown up. They didn’t. And now the seat is gone, and this
community will not only have no representation in the Maryland State Senate but
will be represented by someone whose campaign was surrounded by those openly
hostile to the Jewish state and to Jewish communal life itself.
What Happens Now: A Leadership
Vacuum
The deeper problem is not just this
election. It’s what comes after it. For nearly a decade, two figures have done
the on-the-ground work of representing Orthodox interests in Baltimore’s halls
of power: specifically, Dalya Attar in Annapolis and City Councilman Isaac “Yitzy”
Schleifer in Baltimore City Hall, where he has represented District 5 since
2016. Attar is now out of office. Schleifer, meanwhile, is approaching the end
of what the city’s voter-approved term-limits law allows. Baltimore voters
capped City Council members at two terms back in 2022, and Schleifer’s tenure
means he is on a clock that will eventually run out.
When that clock runs out, who
replaces them? Right now, there is no clear answer. No obvious successor has
been cultivated, no bench of younger Orthodox candidates has been built, no
pipeline exists to ensure that when these two seats turn over, they turn over
to people who understand and will fight for the community’s interests. There is
quite literally no political infrastructure in this community to build winning
candidates. This is not a hypothetical problem for some future election cycle.
It is the problem facing Baltimore’s Orthodox community today, with the most
visible of those two seats already lost.
Worse, the community isn’t simply
facing an absence of representation. As mentioned earlier, it’s facing the
prospect of representation that is actively hostile. The Ruff-Attar race, by
multiple independent accounts, surfaced rhetoric that crossed from policy
disagreement into something else. Even the Baltimore Jewish Council’s
leadership was troubled by what he called antisemitic rhetoric from some Ruff
supporters, drawing a distinction between legitimate debate over district
priorities and language suggesting “we can’t let the Jews control this district,”
rhetoric which they said crosses the line into antisemitism. A Ruff-aligned
policy group described the race in stark ideological terms, framing it as a
clash between Black self-determination and what it called “Zionist political
forces.” None of this means that every elected official who emerges from this
political environment will be hostile to the Orthodox community specifically.
But it does mean that the community can no longer assume good faith or
sympathetic representation by default. That assumption, reasonable for much of
the last decade, no longer holds.
In Baltimore County, Julian Jones,
a candidate who called Israel’s defensive war in Gaza a “genocide, immoral and
unjust,” who committed to ending Baltimore County’s institutional and financial
support for the Maryland Israel Development Center, and who stated firmly that
he would not agree to any training programs involving the Israeli Defense
Forces for Baltimore County police, saying “I don’t see any reason for us to
receive any training from the Israeli Defense Forces,” won the Democratic
primary and is expected to easily become the next Baltimore County Executive
after the general election in November.
Let’s Paint the Picture
We need to be realistic and honest
about what happens to the Jewish community of Baltimore if this goes unanswered
politically, because abstractions don’t move people and vague warnings don’t
either.
Picture a Baltimore and a Maryland
where the elected officials who hold power over your city council, your state
delegation, your school board appointments, and your zoning decisions are
people who share the worldview expressed above, i.e., that Zionism itself is an
illegitimate ideology, that Jewish institutional life is something to be
treated with suspicion rather than support, and that even asking a candidate to
condemn an attack that murdered 1,200 people is met with refusal. That is not
hypothetical anymore in parts of this country. It is a sitting reality in
Congress as of this June.
In that world, here is what it can
plausibly look like, locally, for us in Pikesville: Jewish communal organizations
and institutions become quietly radioactive for any kind of public funding or
partnership the moment they can be construed as supportive of Israel in any
way. A shul that expresses solidarity with Israel after an attack, a day school
that runs a Yom Ha’atzmaut program, a community organization that takes a trip
to Israel or hosts a speaker who supports the Jewish state – any of these
becomes a liability rather than a neutral fact of communal life, something that
can be cited to justify excluding that Jewish institution from grants,
partnerships, or goodwill from the people who hold the levers of local
government. This isn’t really an attack on the State of Israel at that point.
Israel is, for almost the entire Jewish community, inseparable from Jewish
identity and peoplehood, which is exactly why a movement that treats support
for Israel as disqualifying is not actually drawing a line around foreign
policy. It is drawing a line around Jews.
If this sounds like hyperbole, look
at how fast the rhetoric has moved – not over decades but over the past two or
three years. Look at how many politicians who would have proudly stood at a
pro-Israel rally a decade ago now visibly avoid the subject, hedge their
language, or quietly distance themselves from past statements of support. Look
at a sitting member of Congress who, by her own account to a left-leaning club’s
endorsement committee, refused even the minimal act of condemning Hamas. That
shift did not happen by accident, and there is no particular reason to believe
it stops at the New York City line or that Baltimore is somehow immune to the
same currents that just swept through the Bronx, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and
Denver.
The Real Fix Isn’t Just Turnout. It’s
People
Better turnout in this past primary
might well have saved Dalya Attar’s seat. But turnout alone is not a durable
strategy. Turnout is what you do with a candidate already on the ballot. The
harder, more urgent task now ahead of us, and the one Baltimore’s Orthodox
community has badly under-invested in, is building the next generation of
candidates and political operatives from inside the community itself, years
before they’re needed, not in the panicked weeks before a filing deadline.
Right now, that pipeline barely
exists. There is no clear answer to who runs for Councilman Schleifer’s City
Council seat when his term-limited clock runs out. We have no real
representation in Annapolis, at the state-level, to speak of. There is no bench
of younger Orthodox lawyers, organizers, and public servants who have spent the
last several years building relationships in Annapolis, City Hall, and the
County Council, waiting for their moment. There is no functioning campaign
infrastructure, donor networks, volunteer corps, message discipline, opposition
research, comparable to what groups like NYC-DSA have spent a decade building
from the ground up, specifically so they would be ready when their moment came.
They were ready. Baltimore’s Orthodox community, this cycle, was not. And, we
are handing an open lane to the DSA and other antisemitic organizations to
control our community at a political level. Why do you think virtually every
rabbi in the community spoke about the importance of political engagement in
the Shabbosos before the election?
That has to change, starting now,
not after the next loss. It means identifying young people in the community
with the talent and temperament for public service and actively encouraging
them toward it, the way other communities have long treated political careers as
a legitimate and honored path rather than an afterthought. It means building
real campaign infrastructure like fundraising networks, volunteer
organizations, a farm system of school board seats, Central Committee
positions, and other lower-profile offices that train people for bigger roles
later. It means partnering, where interests align, with other communities who
are watching the same currents with the same alarm, rather than going it alone.
And it means treating voter registration and turnout not as a
once-every-few-years emergency response but as permanent, year-round communal
infrastructure, the way the “shul captain” system this cycle began to do. The
problem for this election cycle was that the efforts were years too late and at
far too small a scale to change this particular outcome.
What’s Actually at Stake, Beyond
the Hypothetical
It’s worth being concrete about
what losing political representation means, because “advocacy” can sound
abstract until you trace how it affects a community.
First, it creates safety. A state
senator or city councilman or any other political representative with real
relationships in Annapolis and City Hall is the difference between rapid
response and being an afterthought when there’s a spike in antisemitic
incidents, vandalism, or harassment near synagogues and schools. And Baltimore,
like the rest of the country, has seen that risk rise, not fall. It assists
with school funding, state and city dollars for nonpublic school
transportation, security grants, and other support that flows through political
channels and depends on someone in the room fighting for them. It creates responsiveness
on zoning, on policing priorities in Jewish neighborhoods, on state grants for
community institutions, and on a hundred quieter administrative decisions that
never make headlines but shape daily life. And it provides a seat at the table
when state and local government decide how to respond to antisemitism itself, whether
incidents get treated as a priority or get lost in the shuffle of a hundred
other constituencies competing for attention.
Without that representation, the
existence of our whole community becomes harder, slower, more uncertain, and contingent
on the goodwill of officials who owe the community nothing, rather than the
advocacy of officials who answer to it directly. This is especially true now
more than ever when the Jewish people’s place in American society is being
questioned by some of the highest governmental officials.
The Clock Is Not Quite Out, But It’s
Close
Off-year and municipal elections
are coming. Councilman Schleifer’s seat will eventually open, and there is
still time – barely – to identify and cultivate the next generation of
candidates rather than discovering in election season that no one is ready to
run. There is still time to fix the turnout problem that cost Attar and Patoka
their seats. Registration drives do not need to wait for the next contested
primary to begin.
But time is not unlimited, and the
trend lines, locally and nationally, are not moving in the community’s favor. Without
mincing words, our community is in real trouble. What happened in District 41
was not a fluke. The battlefield has shifted, and the community has not yet
shifted with it, and that gap, left unfilled, will cost far more than a single senate
or county or city council seat. The DSA and those who despise the Jewish
community and Israel figured this out. The question is whether this community
does, too, before it’s too late to matter. The work that will determine this
community’s future must happen in political organizations, precinct captain
lists, voter rolls, and voter registration drives, and right now, the other
side is doing that work, and the Orthodox community largely is not. The window
is barely open, but it will not stay that way, and history has never been kind
to communities that waited until the threat was undeniable before deciding to
fight back.
This community has the numbers. It
has, by reputation, some of the highest civic engagement instincts of any group
in the country. What it lacked this cycle was the organized follow-through to
turn that potential into outcomes; it lacked a bench of trained, committed
people ready to run when the moment came. Our community has a last chance to change
this trajectory by registering to vote where it actually counts, by showing up
to vote when it counts, and by raising the next generation of people willing to
fight for it through political clubs and organizations – because there is no
cavalry coming from outside to save us. There never was. There is only this
community we have, this moment, and the choice of whether to meet it or surrender
to it.
