A Litmus Test Backfires

Elliot Cosgrove, the Manhattan rabbi who last fall said from his pulpit that Zohran Mamdani “poses a danger to the security of New York Jewish community,” dedicated his sermon this past Saturday to threatening New York elected officials who didn’t plan to march in the next day’s pro-Israel parade on Fifth Avenue.

“Barring a cataclysmic personal event which I wish upon no one, there is no defensible reason why anyone deserving of the Jewish vote would fail to show up on Fifth Avenue tomorrow and post the fact of their attendance on their website and social media for the world to see,” Cosgrove said from his pulpit at Park Avenue Synagogue. “It is rare that the good Lord provides us with such a clear and unambiguous litmus test.”

Elected officials who turned up the next day, hoping to pass the test proposed by Cosgrove and other Jewish establishment leaders, found themselves marching in the same parade as the fascist Israeli minister Bezalel Smotrich. By Monday morning, the parade had spiralled into political disaster, as senior elected officials rushed to post tortured statements explaining that they didn’t like Smotrich. “I was unaware that Bezalel Smotrich attended the parade yesterday nor did I see him, and I am disgusted that he was there,” Rep. Dan Goldman, who’s struggling to beat back a primary challenge from Mamdani ally Brad Lander, told Jewish Currents. Lander, who is firmly to Goldman’s left on Israel, did not attend the parade.

Jewish establishment figures, aided by right-wing tabloids, had sought to make political hay of Mamdani’s refusal to attend the parade. Instead, they wound up looking like they had tried to snag their allies in a trap: Insist politicians march in the parade as a general matter of solidarity with American Jews—and then surprise them with one of the few consensus villains in American political life.

If it was a trap, it was one that anyone with eyes to see, and a bit of political will, could have spotted miles away. The Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) of New York, which organizes the parade, has sought to frame it as an apolitical celebration of Jewish pride: The group says that 50,000 people attended this year, including many from day school and synagogue delegations. But the parade is firmly in the grasp of the pro-Israel right. Liberal Zionist groups, which have often sought to claim space at communal pro-Israel demonstrations, have long given up on this one: Jill Jacobs, the rabbi who leads the progressive rabbinic organization T’ruah, told Jewish Currents on Monday that T’ruah used to march with a progressive bloc, but that the bloc hasn’t participated since before 2020.

“It became really clear we were being used,” she said. The progressive groups would be hurried down the parade route, alongside a bloc of queer Jewish organizations, she said, before the parade really started. A few liberal Zionist groups have marched in recent years alongside families of Israelis being held in Gaza, but none participated this year.

The JCRC meanwhile—which didn’t respond to my request for comment—is saying it didn’t know Smotrich was coming. But even so, the pre-parade list of confirmed Israeli officials included Yitzhak Kroizer, a member of Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party, who last month wrote on social media that “the time has come to get rid of all the mosques and work to construct the Temple.” Also on the RSVP list was Knesset member Ariel Kallner, who in the days after the October 7th attacks said that Israel’s response should be a “Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48.”

The parade itself, meanwhile, was full of floats from US funders of illegal West Bank settlements. The One Israel Fund, which sends US donations to West Bank settlements to pay for “security command centers,” drones, and “patrol vehicles” for settlers, had a float rolling down Fifth Avenue. So did the Hebron Fund, which supports the illegal Israeli settlement of the West Bank city of Hebron. The announcers on the JCRC’s parade livestream said the Hebron Fund “supports and strengthens the Jewish community of Hebron by . . . supporting soldiers and local security needs,” a string of euphemisms serving to obscure a situation in which Palestinian daily life has been made untenable by the restrictions Israel has instituted to defend the settlements. A float from Friends of the IDF, which sends tax-exempt US donations to support the Israeli military, was topped with a larger-than-life cutout of a saluting Israeli soldier. Marchers in green FIDF shirts waved flags of the Israeli military’s combat brigades.

The JCRC on Tuesday was busy pretending all had gone smoothly. In a press release, the group listed more than 30 elected officials who had been in attendance at the parade, including New York Governor Kathy Hochul, Senator Chuck Schumer, Attorney General Letitia James, and many others. It’s a list of the most powerful people in New York State. It’s also a list of people whom the Jewish establishment just burned. Maybe they’ll show some fortitude when the next invitation comes around.