Reynoso’s Jewish Solution to his Socialist Problem

Big Congressional election in Brooklyn’s District 7 this week– the local “progressive” organization is fighting the incoming DSA and Mamdani endorsed slate, to see who gets to control and define the Democratic Party moving forward.  Curiously, most of the debate and discourse in this election been revolving around loyalty to, and willingness to take money from –Israel–.

But not quite in the way the aspiring candidates and their fans have been suggesting.

All the candidates running have been trying to disown Israel but Claire Valdez has been doing it for longer, despite entering NYC politics much more recently than the veteran Williamsburg scion and Brooklyn Boro President. Valdez has accused Antonio Reynoso of taking AIPAC money, and, to a lesser degree “real estate developer money”– his people have functionally denied it– while using language not usually tolerated by AIPAC.

Antonio Reynoso is NOT however, ultimately betraying his base for AIPAC; but for Hassidic Real Estate Developers, the ones who installed him and Nydia Velasquez before him into power.

Let me tell you how I know.

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I grew up a non-Hassidic Orthodox Jew in South Williamsburg. My parents were very involved in local organizing around housing justice, since my father was the legendary  “Judio Maravilloso”– an Orthodox displaying lawyer for poor people with housing issues.

His office, Brooklyn A, became one of the major loci for organizing for Latinos in South Williamsburg, and many local activists and politicians got their start just hanging around him and asking questions, meeting the other idealists, and making plans.  This included, for the last 20+ years, Antonio Reynoso.

I grew up with Antonio as the great hope of representation in our community of South Williamsburg. My parents, who knew him first as a kid at the local schools where my mom taught, and then as the most enthusiastic, smart and capable chief of staff a local representative could hope for, loved and supported him in every way they could until about two years ago. 

The very last time Antonio Reynoso ever spoke to me directly was at Julia Salazar’s inauguration.

Julia defeated Tommy Torres to become our State Senator despite a vicious campaign against her that tried to slander her as a liar and carpet-bagger, pretending to be Jewish for political reasons.  She asked my dad to swear her in in light of his seniority as a community icon, the longest active activist in most of those offices by that point… as well as his visibility as an orthodox kippa wearing Jew. A housing rights lawyer who had secured the rights of thousands of people in our neighborhoods to their own homes in perpetuity by organizing tenants into co-op boards.  It turns out, tenants can just organize against landlords and win their building as coops for their trouble and willingness to build a trust and a community together. This inspired many of the young activists in Los Sures i.e. South Williamsburg… both Latinos as well as Hasidic dissidents from Yeshivas and organizations that had, in whatever ways, failed or disappointed them.  

I found an old Zohar; Sefer Shmot– it might be the oldest book in the shul, from early 1857 or so. This is what Julia Salazar was sworn in on.  It agrees: law can only describe a hope and a failure and a failure that could lead to a hope.

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Chuck Schumer was not invited to this inauguration quite exactly. He did wind up speaking on stage eventually, with a mix of humility and hostility, after his people negotiated with Julia’s people and the surrounding DSA: the victory, during Trump 1 especially, was too big a deal for Schumer not to insist on taking the stage and the throne too fresh to have enough reason to refuse him, as the party chair, despite how bad Gaza already was by then, and how clear the divide between the DSA/NKD bond was at that point.

He called my father out from the stage “These kids don’t remember what it used to be like. Do they Marty?”

Dad was caught off guard. There was a message here.

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I saw Antonio in the staircase after the inauguration. I thought we’d have a second.

But he was moving quick. Not too quick to give me a hug and say “Hey! Take care of your dad!”

I understood immediately what was happening.

I responded, jauntily “No! YOU take care of my dad”

He responded, a bit defensively “I AM taking care of him”

But I knew then it wasn’t true and wouldn’t be true ever again.

We could already see the developer money priority transformation by then; it was already early 2019 after all. The rezonings had already started, the construction reactivated– and the problem in the shul became a little clearer.

Williamsburg was the nightmare expected

Without the rezoning, he imagines, “we would have probably seen more of a balance, maybe, a mixture of the working-class community along with a new population that would be living side by side.”

While he hasn’t been following de Blasio’s rezonings of other neighborhoods too closely, Olechowski says that based on his experience in Williamsburg, he has reasons to be skeptical.  “I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t work out as well as he had intended,” he says.” Community Boards Reflect on their Votes For, and Against, Bloomberg Rezonings – City Limits

Nydia Velasquez, as well as Antonio Reynoso, had been genuine community activists before they were elected. But then– so was Vito Lopez once upon a time.

Vito Lopez started as an anti-poverty activist, working with my father, a housing lawyer for poor people, as well as organizing with the Latino progressive organizations. He built what had been the Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens center as an organizing hub for what was the most reliable base for political organizing: older immigrants, conveniently centralized and dependent on you for food and entertainment.  From this beginning, Vito pivoted to autocracy and abusiveness, until he was hated enough to be targeted by a young and hungry crew of aspiring leaders: an academic from far away, Lincoln Restler, as well as young Antonio– and the already existing Congressista, elected since 1992.

Lopez wanted more unconditional fiat to make any kind of decision, and rally any kind of pressure against anyone, in an L. Ron Hubbard sort of absolutist way. So the community re-organized against him.  So he made a deal with Satmar; then still united.

But cash and committee chairs weren’t the only currency in Quinn’s campaign for Lopez’s support. She also steered a Lopez-backed rezoning project through the Council: the redevelopment of the  in downtown Williamsburg, where thousands of members of an Orthodox Jewish sect, the Satmar, live. The plan for an 1,800-unit housing development was critical to Lopez – mostly because it was the foundation of his political alliance with the Satmar, whose bloc voting make them an electoral chip coveted by public officials. Ridgewood Bushwick was also the  formal  of the Satmar organization that had been selected by the city to sponsor and run the development, which was being built largely on city-owned land. That made Lopez a major stakeholder.

(…) the mechanisms included limiting a preference for residents to neighborhoods the Satmar dominated and requiring large apartments best suited to their big families. Ironically Lopez himself once vigorously opposed the project as a boon to the Satmar, but he’d switched sides. “

Tangled Dealings Link Quinn, Lopez and His Brooklyn Machine | WNYC

So, in order to exist, the New Kings Democrats coalition described above had to find a split within Satmar– which, fortunately for them, existed by then.  Initially, and for some time Nydia and the community organizations around her resisted this new fiat. Were defined by their resistance, organized around that resistance.

Some demographers have noted that if the city’s Broadway Triangle plan were to be implemented, less than three percent of residents in the new housing will be Afro-American,” said including Rep. Nydia Velasquez.

Activists Say Brooklyn Development Is Discriminatory, Favors Hasidic Residents | WNYC

It was, it turns out, Nydia Velasquez personally who sold us out to the Hassidic Developer money. This happened QUICKLY, once the Aronites starting making deals.

“Abraham, after being introduced by Restler, gave an endorsement that referred to a rift in Williamsburg between the Hispanic and Hasidic communities. He said he knew Velázquez for around 25 years, since well before she was recently redistricted into representing their section of Williamsburg, and said she could help bridge the gap.

(…)He credited Velazquez for finding money to finish an escalator at the Marcy Avenue subway station, and said wished her luck “although it disappoints me that a big part of your resume now is that you’re great because Vito is against you, which is an insult to all of us.”Standing off to the side was influential Aroynem and controversial landlord Moishe Indig, who framed Velazquez’s alliance with the group as a promising investment, comparing what he said was just 1,500 votes a couple of years ago with the 4,000 the group apparently produced on June 26.

“I think every, every businessman, if you’ll try to sell him the stocks of a company and you’ll show him the way its grown, if its going to be the way we’re growing over here, our community, our coalition, everybody will invest as much as they can in such a company because this has grown very fast and very strong,” Indig said.

Plotting Vito Lopez’s downfall at a Velazquez event in Satmar Williamsburg – POLITICO

The Satmar are the largest Hasidic sect in the United States, with its stronghold in Williamsburg, but with the death of Moses Teitelbaum, the Satmar grand rabbi, in 2006, their ranks have been sundered by a dynastic battle between two of his sons, Aaron and Zalman. And politics has become a favored way for each side to demonstrate its ascendancy.

Two days after Representative Velázquez’s triumph in the June 26 primary, the Aroynem, as Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum’s followers are known in a transliteration from the Yiddish, issued a news release claiming that their “political muscle” in marshaling 4,000 of her 16,000 votes spelled the difference in Ms. Velázquez’s victory over City Councilman Erik Martin Dilan.

Satmar Rift Complicates Politics of Brooklyn Hasidim – The New York Times

 At this point, the contrast between the Bushwick-of-then and the Bushwick-of-now suddenly became less stark. Distinctions began to blur. Martin Needelman, (…) recalled the ways in which landlords would harass tenants until they moved out of their homes. In the ’70s, it was blockbusting that fueled white flight by singling out families of color who were newcomers to a neighborhood as seedlings of decay. Brokers and real estate agents encouraged white families to sell their homes at low costs before it was “too late.” The Hasidic community was notorious for singling out Latino newcomers and harassing families until they moved away. 

 Needelman said that today, though the endgame is different (landlords force out low-rent tenants in favor of high paying newcomers), the means are the same. He recalled an incident back in the ’70s where a landlord offered him thousands of dollars to convince his client to leave the building. When Needelman refused the bribe, the landlord sent someone back to throw a Molotov cocktail through a window. The building caught fire. “It’s crazy,” he said. “Because it’s the same tactics today.”

Incidents of tenant harassment are all too common, and the sense of instability they inspire isn’t too far from the insecurity residents felts in the ’70s. While disgruntled landlords are probably more reluctant to burn down a (now much more valuable) building today, they’ve proven to be just as flippant as their predecessors were about the lives of the people they’re hoping to force out.”

For Many Residents, Bushwick is Still Burning – BKMAG

.Antonio, like many others in the neighborhood, were introduced to politics and activism in the context of my father, the local advocate, an Orthodox Jew defending low-income people, mostly Latino, from mean and exploitative landlords and public housing monopolies.  He used to say stuff like:

We don’t have to accept a bad plan just because affordable units are included,” countered Antonio Reynoso, the council member for the neighboring Community Board 3. “I want to be clear that the people who you’re dealing with know exactly what their doing and they’re not here for the public’s interest.”

Brooklyn Housing War Pits Orthodox Against Latinos

Antonio Reynoso was part of a cautious, concerned consensus amidst the community that rezoning, gentrification, and displacement were bad, actually, since developers tended not to be responsible to keep promises they’d made. Since then however: his rhetoric has pivoted VERY hard to the pro-development.  So much so, that he has become the face of silencing and purging any and all hostility to new construction, rebranding as an “Urbanist” and “anti-NIMBY” The problem is, abuse of developer privileges never ended– it just upped it’s game:

Meanwhile, Reynoso and Velasquez’s Aronite allies have run rampant through the city, conducting a number of deed-theft spectrum crimes–  davka of shuls! With a curious degree of collusion from both local police and local political organizations.This led to the targeting of my parents synagogue for destruction and thieving by overtly Aronite Satmar forces– most notably Marcos Masri and Gary Shlessinger, who became close to the New Kings Democrats from the beginning

They destroyed our shul, and tried to steal it, and none of the elected officials who we had stewarded into office even acknowledged it.  This is when the degree and depth of the betrayal of our elected officials became clear: Police were instructed to ignore us, and every check in we’d make, with Antonio, with his chief of staff, with his local legacy people like Jennifer Gutierrez– would come back with no response.

Until we’d hear the developers brag about why.

Antonio told me to watch out for my dad, because he was not going to be doing so. On the contrary: he agreed, with a number of other local officials, to refuse to do or say anything about it at all. Despite our repeated pleas, calls, and check ins.

This is who he is, and who he will be as a congressman: an advocate for wealth, against whoever believes in, and trusts him. This is not the Judaism of my father, but it is the Judaism of Satmar, who came only as refugees from Hungarian communism. Immediately given specific privileges in exchange for functioning as a voting base, the ethos is simple and transactional.

That’s what makes it disappointing. I was hoping we were operating from a better moral tradition: that of rejecting wealth and comfort for the sake of justice, caring for the weak and downtrodden.  I think he understands that but alas, faith in the developers can seem like the wiser idealism.  This is the big problem of Jewish-Identified morality under capitalism: We have a number of overlapping moral traditions: Love the Stranger but also– displace “Canaanites” mercilessly. 

This is part of why Israel and Zionism wind up being such a big part of this Congressional election season– in the absence of “actual” Zionists!  We cannot talk about the local displacement, exploitation or trickery campaigns conducted by our most visible supporters– we can only talk about the OTHER Jews, the ones we don’t need to impress–because we have more authentic displaying Jews in our pocket, legitimizing us in ways that no Zionism ever could.

Peter Beinart wrote about this, almost prophetically, back in 1997 (at the New Republic!)

Had large numbers of Latinos and Jews not broken with African-Ameri cans and backed candidates like Rudy Giuliani, Richard Riordan, and Christie Todd Whitman, these law-and-order fiscal conservatives could not have won election in traditionally liberal Democratic cities and states, no matter how overwhelming their support from white ethnics. And, although Italian and Irish voters might not mind much, these politicians cannot make overtures to the cultural right because of their need for Jewish and Latino support” 

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This has been the classical solution to the challenge of representing Jews and Latinos, against a Black and Asian population less effectively able to organize hence the targeting of Blacks in the Deed Theft epidemic managed by, on it’s higher scale, expensive lawyers, politicians and police all paid off, one way or another, by developers.  This is the reality that Nydia, Antonio, and Lincoln have signed on for– in the name of pragmatic functionalism.

Municipal Socialism’s “YIMBY” Problem – Spectre Journal

To the degree that whoever wins this election will be working with the same cynical developers– it’s hard to understand what moral high ground the DSA candidates can hope to project.  So it’s framed in terms of Zionism, AIPAC and Palestine– to avoid the obvious problem of an ethno-national displacement crisis ALREADY IN PROGRESS IN NYC. It’s nice that Zohran put up a deed theft website– but it feels performative, in the abscence of consequences for the Aronite Developers who keep claiming impunity

It’s a shame for the moral learned from the Orthodox Jews of NYC to be something like a pragmatic cynicism, the Torah of the Books of Numbers and Deuteronomy, rather than the classic liberation model of Exodus that was the public face of progressive Jewish activism in NYC for so long.

My dad embraced Orthodoxy as an identity, I think largely in the hopes and faith that an authentic traditional Judaism did NOT actually demand or encourage cynical abuse of the most vulnerable people: blacks, immigrants and refugees. Alas, the (Aronite) Satmar have a different tradition, and even more tragically, it’s a tradition that has corrupted some of our best local politicians.