By: Moshe Spern

What happens in Manhattan now walks into our classrooms, our WhatsApp chats, and our Shabbos tables. Jews get jumped leaving shul. Synagogues get surrounded. Jewish kids get harassed in public schools. The mayor of New York spent years calling Israel’s war a genocide. And the man who wants to represent the most Jewish district in America endorsed him anyway.

That is why United Jewish Teachers endorsed Caroline Shinkle for Congress in New York’s 12th District.

NY-12 is the Upper East Side, the Upper West Side, Midtown, Hell’s Kitchen, Chelsea, Union Square, and Stuyvesant Town. It has more Jewish residents than any other House seat in the country. Jerry Nadler is leaving. The Democratic nominee is Assemblyman Micah Lasher. He is Jewish. He talks like a moderate. He also endorsed Zohran Mamdani for mayor, after rabbis on the Upper West Side told him what that endorsement would mean to their communities.

When reporters asked Lasher if Israel was committing genocide, he would not reject the charge. He called it a “definitional debate.” That is the whole problem. The genocide libel is not a vocabulary exercise. It is the sentence that turns Jewish self-defense into a crime and turns Jewish kids in our schools into fair game. A man who will not say that sentence is a lie is not prepared to fight the thing that sentence produces.

Caroline Shinkle is not Jewish. She is a Zionist. She lived in Jerusalem. She worked at the Bank of Israel. She marched in the Israel Day Parade. She says out loud that the genocide charge is a smear and that Jewish New Yorkers deserve a member of Congress who will treat antisemitism like a public safety emergency, not a talking point for a primary.

People in our community are used to measuring candidates by last names and shul boards. I understand why. For a long time that was a decent shortcut. It is not a shortcut anymore. A Jewish Democrat who endorses Mamdani and hides behind “definitional debates” is not safer for Jews than a non-Jewish Zionist who will actually say the words. Identity is not courage. Endorsements are not liturgy. Record is record.

Shinkle is 33. She lives in Midtown. She went to MIT and Harvard Law. She worked at the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, and the Bank for International Settlements. She is running a grassroots campaign in a district the consultants call unwinnable. That is fine. United Jewish Teachers did not endorse her because a model said she would win. We endorsed her because Jewish teachers and parents asked us a simple question: who will not look away?

In August we released a report documenting more than 250 antisemitic and anti-Israel incidents in New York City public schools since October 7, 2023. Harassment. Threats. Assaults. Swastikas. Lessons that sound like rallies. We asked City Hall to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, call the NYPD when hate graffiti appears, and publish the numbers. We are still waiting. The same political class that shrugs at that report is the class Lasher belongs to. He can give a nice speech after a Jew is stabbed leaving shul and still have been the man who helped put this mayor in City Hall.

Five Towns families work in that district. We daven there. Our kids go to school and college with kids from there. When Manhattan sends another member of Congress who treats the genocide libel as a matter of tone, it does not stay in Manhattan. It shows up in the hallway. It shows up in the curriculum. It shows up in the excuse an administrator gives you when your child comes home scared.

I am not asking anyone to become a Republican. I am asking people to stop confusing a Jewish biography with a Jewish spine. Caroline Shinkle has the spine. Micah Lasher had a choice. He endorsed Mamdani. He would not condemn the libel. That is the choice on the ballot on November 3.

United Jewish Teachers is a grassroots network of Jewish educators and staff in New York City public schools. We endorsed Caroline Shinkle because she treats Jewish safety like a job. That is the only test that matters now.

Moshe Spern is a New York City public school teacher and president of United Jewish Teachers.