Go vote!

Election Day is November 4.

It’s hard to say if this has been the most actively contentious, polarized, hate-filled election season in living memory, because those are hard things to quantify.

Certainly the 2024 and 2020 elections were cesspools of incivility, incredulity, and at times overt neighbor-loathing. For most of the country, this is an off year, so only those people who really care about politics are paying attention. But for those of us here, in New Jersey or New York City — and for voters in Virginia, California, and a few other places — these elections are as fraught as they come.

Much emotion has centered around Zohran Mamdani, the young, inexperienced, overtly Israel-hating and arguably antisemitic Democratic candidate for mayor. His candidacy has also brought up rifts in the Jewish community. There’s the split between the far left, often but not always very young anti-Zionist Jews who do not think that Israel should exist. and the rest of us. That one’s easy. But there’s also a very different kind of split, between the rabbis who think that the need to endorse a candidate trumps the need to maintain peace in the community but not making such an endorsement.

Until fairly recently, that would not have been in issue. The Johnson Amendment prohibited such endorsements. But in 2017, President Donald Trump signed an executive order telling the IRS not to enforce it. That change no doubt pleased the evangelical preachers who’d been urging that it be made, but it’s made big problems for other clergy members, including rabbis. Many of them do not want to endorse anyone, no matter how strongly they feel about candidates.

That split has been clear this election season, particularly when it comes to Mamdani. Some rabbis feels that he presents such a clear and present danger that they must speak out against him. Others feel that their congregants are sophisticated enough to read, listen, evaluate, and make their own decisions, and they fear that the split in many communities, even Jewish ones, will make the anger fester and infect them long after the election and even the winner’s term is over.

That is why we at the paper do not endorse candidates. Many of us have very strong feelings about who would provide good representation, who isn’t so good but is better than the alternative, and who would be a full-on disaster. But we don’t think that it is appropriate to share those ideas with our readers. No one would benefit from that. Not us, and not you.

There is one piece of advice we can give, though. Go vote. We hope you chose to vote for the worthy candidates, but that’s your business. But please, go vote.

—JP

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