NEW YORK — Three staffers from the get-out-the-vote campaign Jewish Voters Unite set up a table with election information in a conference room at a Jewish center for the elderly in Queens on Wednesday, days before early voting begins in the New York City mayoral primary.
The political organizers urged the dozen attendees, seated at a row of tables next to stained glass windows, to make plans for voting, telling them that candidates listen to communities that turn out, and that “antisemitism is on the ballot.”
One of the attendees, a petite woman with curly blonde hair, identified herself as a 94-year-old Holocaust survivor.
“I wouldn’t have dreamt that in my lifetime there would be so much hatred,” she said.
“When are you voting?” Peter Svarzbein, the national director of Jewish Voters Unite, asked her.
The seminar at the senior center in Holliswood was part of the organization’s push to get Jewish voters to the ballot box ahead of the primary, which will likely decide the winner of November’s general election in the mostly Democratic city, home to the world’s largest Jewish population outside of Israel.
Early voting starts on Saturday and election day is on June 24.
The election comes amid a global rise in antisemitism, including in New York City, where Jews are targeted in hate crimes more than all other groups combined. Jewish issues and Israel are a central theme for candidates in the crowded primary field.
The frontrunner is former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who has said combating antisemitism is a priority and repeatedly voiced support for Israel and Jewish communities during his campaign. His leading opponent is New York State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, a harsh critic of Israel who has identified as an anti-Zionist.
Jewish Voters Unite cannot endorse candidates due to its nonprofit status. The group’s message is simple — research the candidates and make your voice heard.
“Our elected officials will see what communities come and support them and which don’t,” staffer Sam Verstandig told attendees at the senior center. “If we’re not electing those people that care about our issues, who am I to complain?”
Jewish Voters Unite has its roots in a related effort in Westchester County, north of New York City, last year. That campaign, like the mayoral race, pitted a centrist, pro-Israel Democrat, George Latimer, against the anti-Israel, far-left Jamaal Bowman. Bowman alarmed Jewish voters with his anti-Israel rhetoric and repeated attacks on AIPAC during the campaign, leading to an increase in Jewish turnout pushed by the advocacy group Westchester Unites.
The vote was seen as a referendum on the far left and its anti-Israel policies. Latimer’s victory and the successful get-out-the-vote effort have inspired similar initiatives in other local campaigns, including New York City. Some of the Jewish Voters Unite activists participated in the Westchester campaign; others took to canvassing in Manhattan a day after working on elections in New Jersey that wrapped up the day before.
Westchester Unites operated under the Orthodox Union. Maury Litwack, who led the effort, then spun off the voter work into independent groups like Jewish Voters Unite. The New York City effort began with a group called the Jewish Voters Action Network at the start of the year that urged voters to change their party affiliation to Democrat to vote in the primary. Once the registration deadline passed, the focus shifted to getting people to the polls. The groups are related but independent, are nonpartisan, and have their own community-driven donor funding, Litwack said.
Jewish Voters Unite, with its 22 staff in four offices around the city, aims to make it as easy as possible for voters to cast their ballots. The group informs Jews and non-Jews about voting procedures, election dates, polling places and the importance of the primary vote, helps them register and assists with absentee ballot applications. The group said it has registered more than 2,300 voters.
Staffers are most commonly questioned about the city’s ranked-choice voting system. The complicated scheme allows voters to rank up to five of the 11 primary candidates, in order of preference. After the election, in successive rounds of counting, the candidates with the fewest votes are eliminated, and votes are reapportioned to the remaining contenders, until one candidate reaches a majority. The city introduced the system in 2021, so the primary is the second citywide election to use it.
Volunteers said many voters they spoke to did not know what ranked-choice voting was or how it worked. Others had misconceptions, including that they must rank five candidates, or that they could rank the same candidate multiple times. Some of the staffers’ seminars include a ranked-choice voting simulation, using favorite foods instead of candidates.
“It’s a freaking disaster because nobody understands it,” one of the Upper East Side volunteers said.
The group is using an array of tactics to reach Jewish constituents, from phone banking to canvassing outside kosher stores and visiting synagogues.
Svarzbein started his day at the organization’s office on the Upper East Side, where volunteers were making phone calls and writing postcards to potential voters. The office was littered with hats, flyers, pens and pins with the group’s motto, “Don’t kvetch. Vote.” Maps marked with the locations of voter outreach efforts leaned against the wall.
Joelle Halperin, who was phone banking with the campaign for the first time, said the war in Gaza and antisemitism had inspired her and others to get involved.
“I think October 7 has awakened those people who are Jewish to the fact that they can’t take their ability to be Jewish and not be discriminated against, or not be safe, for granted,” she said, referring to the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led onslaught on southern Israel that saw some 1,200 people brutally massacred and 251 abducted to the Gaza Strip.
Svarzbein then drove to Queens for the visit to the senior center.
“What we’re here to do is make sure that our people come out and vote, and our people are all New Yorkers,” Svarzbein told the attendees. “The thing that kills communities is not whether they vote Republican or Democrat, it’s that they’re apathetic.”
From there, he headed back into Manhattan to stop at the Jewish Voters Unite office on the Upper West Side, where he chatted with staffers and organized “care packages” for synagogues that contained pins, information on ranked choice voting, and flyers with election dates.
After that, Svarzbein stopped at the Six 60 One kosher market on Amsterdam Avenue, where staffer Julian Stancescu was canvassing on the sidewalk. Stancescu, who had been campaigning in New Jersey the day before, approached passersby to ask them to share their contact information with Jewish Voters Unite so they could volunteer or receive election updates. One sheet was mostly filled with names, and a series of tally marks at the bottom of the page counted those he approached who declined to share their information.
After canvassing, Svarzbein dropped off election material at Shearith Israel, the city’s oldest congregation, then headed to a Staten Island Ferryhawks baseball game, where volunteers had set up a table overlooking the field for the team’s Jewish Heritage Night.
The goal is to meet voters where they are, he said. The campaign has also put flyers in food pantry deliveries, visited Jewish women’s groups, canvassed at kosher pizza spots and stopped at delis. Phone banking is ineffective for many voters because they screen calls, and not everyone attends a synagogue, Svarzbein said.
The goal is a long-term, “generational shift with Jewish voters to increase our numbers,” he said.
“There’s a million Jews in New York City. They’re not a monolith, but if they can be organized in a large amount, that’s a lot of votes that will come in, and you’ll have to have leaders and elected officials that have to respect and listen to us,” he said.
The staffers are seeing some success on the ground. After their presentation at the senior citizens center, an elderly, non-Jewish woman told the group that her father had cleared out concentration camps in World War II.
“You all need to kick ass because you’re going to end up like Europe,” she said. “I want to see some action.”
The Holocaust survivor told Svarzbein, “Of course I’m going to vote.”
“It’s a privilege to be free and not to be afraid and to be able to participate,” she said.
