Cameron Kasky, Jewish Parkland shooting survivor, is running for Congress on platform to ‘stop funding genocide’

Cameron Kasky speaks at the March for Our Lives protest on June 11, 2022 in Los Angeles, California. Photo by David McNew/Getty Images

(JTA) — Cameron Kasky, the 25-year-old Jewish activist and school shooting survivor, has entered the race to represent one of the United States’ most Jewish congressional districts — on a platform that includes stopping Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza.

“We need leaders who aren’t going to coddle their billionaire donors, who won’t support a genocide and who aren’t going to settle for flaccid incrementalism,” Kasky said in the launch video posted on Tuesday for his campaign to represent New York City’s 12th Congressional District.

The video’s caption includes the three main points of his campaign: “Medicare for all. Stop funding genocide. Abolish ICE.”

While Kasky’s anti-Trump positions are likely to go over well with the district’s largely liberal populace, his stance that Israel is committing a genocide — and the apparent centrality of that stance to his campaign — could be an issue for constituents. The district includes the Upper West and East Sides of Manhattan, where many voters sided with the pro-Israel Andrew Cuomo over Zohran Mamdani in the city’s recent mayoral election, as well as Midtown Manhattan.

Kasky’s messaging may, however, speak more to young voters in the district. A New York Times/Siena poll from September found that 66% of New York City voters ages 18 to 29 found that Mamdani, an anti-Zionist, “best addressed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” among the mayoral candidates.

A democratic socialist, Kasky was a vocal supporter of Mamdani throughout the mayoral election — and an aggressive critic of fellow Democrats who objected to the mayoral candidate’s anti-Israel stances.

“‘Vote blue no matter who unless it’s a Muslim who criticizes Israel’s extremist far right nationalist government’ is not ‘vote blue no matter who,’” he wrote in one tweet.

In another, he wrote that Democrats who refused to endorse him after the primary should “go get a consulting gig and stop disrespecting your own voter base.”

Kasky had teased entering the crowded race for months, ever since Rep. Jerry Nadler, Congress’ most senior Jewish member, announced he would not be running for reelection.

In that time, Kasky has also weighed in on the viability of Micah Lasher, the Jewish state Assembly member and former Nadler aide who launched his own campaign for the seat earlier in the fall.

Lasher is unable to “fight fascism” because of his “genocide denial and free speech attacks on students,” Kasky wrote, with a screenshot of a Lasher tweet from Oct. 28, 2023, that criticized what Lasher called the “awful use of the word ‘genocide’ by some westerners to describe Israel’s actions.” (As the war in Gaza neared its two-year mark this summer, a poll found that half of Americans believed Israel had committed genocide, a claim that Israel and the United States both reject.)

Kasky also reposted a poll according to which Brad Lander, Mamdani’s most prominent Jewish ally, would beat the moderate congressman Dan Goldman, who is Jewish and withheld an endorsement due to “some of the rhetoric coming from Mamdani.”

“Needless to say, I am looking forward to working with Brad Lander,” Kasky wrote.

Kasky is the co-host of the “For You Podcast” with Tim Miller, which attempts to “break down the politics of the TikTok generation,” for The Bulwark, a center-right, anti-Trump media company.

One of Kasky’s podcast guests over the summer is now his opponent: Jack Schlossberg.

Schlossberg, who is the grandson of President John F. Kennedy and has said he is “at least 100% half Jewish,” announced his own candidacy for the 12th Congressional District last week.

Kasky remarked on their podcast that many women in his life have crushes on Schlossberg — and Schlossberg replied that the two men have a similar appeal.

“I always say, when you go unhinged politics Jew, it’s hard to go back,” Kasky said.

Kasky was thrust into the national spotlight as a survivor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, in 2018. Together with other survivors, he led a march in Washington and spurred a national movement that is seen as crucial to the 2022 passage of the most significant federal gun control legislation in decades.

Kasky, a junior at the time of the shooting, is credited with having selecting the name and hashtag #NeverAgain — which has long been linked to Holocaust commemoration — for the student-led gun control campaign. (Another co-founder of Never Again MSD is David Hogg, who recently stepped down as the youngest-ever vice chair of the Democratic National Committee.)

Before the shooting, Kasky said he played Motel in a school production of “Fiddler on the Roof.” The quality of his performance was proof, he joked, that he was not a paid actor in the protests, as some conspiracy theorists accused.

Kasky attended Hebrew school growing up, which he referenced when speaking on MSNBC about the “No Kings” protests against Trump.

“This kind of reminded me of my education growing up — when you go to Hebrew school, you learn about fascism a little bit younger than the other kids,” he said. “And you find yourself asking, in the face of authoritarianism, in the face of seeing a genocide happen before the entire world, what would I do? How would I react?”

He moved to New York City to attend Columbia University, where he later dropped out, and lives in the 12th Congressional District that’s been described as a “crown jewel” of New York politics.

Now, Kasky is running on a progressive agenda that emphasizes fighting Trump and stopping U.S. military aid for Israel, referring to the country’s actions in Gaza in no uncertain terms as a “genocide” — a response which he says has been informed in part by his Jewish identity.

“I am always surprised when people ask me why I focus so much on Palestine,” he wrote. “Beyond my Jewish identity making me strongly opposed to genocide, I’m a school shooting survivor-turned-activist. I started my adult life demanding an end to American-made weapons slaughtering children.”