Jamaal Bowman, Eliot Engel Image by Getty Images

We have a red-hot race going on in the 16th Congressional District, which I call home. Long-time Democratic Congressman Eliot Engel, born and raised in public housing, a former school teacher, and now head of the House Foreign Relations Committee, is facing a primary from Jamaal Bowman, also an educator, and an African-American man who brings a fresh face to local politics in a moment when systemic racism is seriously challenged by weeks of protests in the streets.

Earlier this week, NPR reported that two Black men were found hanging from trees in California, cases that the police wrote up as suicides. Cue Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.”

Raised in a family that believes deeply in the black-Jewish connection, whose parents made us listen to and understand the significance of Paul Robeson singing in Yiddish, who worked actively to bring high-achieving black teenagers from the Deep South to live in our home so they could attend better schools in the Northeast (despite our house being egged, our car tires slashed, and other kids on the block being forbidden from playing with us), it is no small task to parse this Congressional race.

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Some are endorsing Bowman in a hearkening back to that fuzzy, sweet picture of Martin Luther King walking arm-in-arm with Abraham Joshua Heschel to oppose the Vietnam war. But that’s not what this race is about. Nor is it about Israel, another topic that’s been brought up in this context. This Congressional race is about experience, political power, and the social safety net.

Let me explain. The pandemic we are now slowly coming out of here in New York City has pushed unemployment rates to Depression-era levels. Our small businesses and eateries are in grave danger, and all levels of government, from the City of New York to the state, are facing yawning deficits. Without federal funds, Medicaid, unemployment assistance, food stamps, mental health programs, early childhood and public-school education, and affordable housing such as it exists today are all in jeopardy.

Engel was criticized by The Atlantic for spending the first weeks of the coronavirus lockdown in Washington. But this criticism mystifies me. He spent these days helping Nancy Pelosi get much-needed stimulus bills through both Houses of Congress instead of taking a photo op with his staff handing out food packages. You tell me which one mattered more and which Engel, in particular, should have been doing.

Then there was the famous “hot mic” incident in which Engel was apologizing to the Bronx Borough President for being pushy and asking to speak at a rally which he usually wouldn’t do because he was facing a very tough primary, which critics unfairly cast as a sign of his lack of care for the district.

As we all know, the 16th Congressional District is home, in part, to one of the poorest counties in the country and the worst-off of all the New York City boroughs. It desperately needs the further stimulus that the House has already passed (with Engel’s aid) in the three trillion-dollar Heroes Act and that the Republican-led Senate is refusing to take up.

For the next two years, we need an experienced, high-ranking representative to get that fourth stimulus bill through. We need his relationships across the aisle, that only someone with 30-plus years in Washington can lay claim to. We need his understanding about how the game is played and his skill to play it.

And when this latest stimulus bill — G-d willing — does make it through the Senate and is signed (hopefully) by the president, we need that horse-trading Congressman of ours to make sure adequate money from it comes to New York City and New York State and doesn’t only go to the Red States to help the Republicans win in November.

I know that I said you can never trust a politician; that they will always break your heart. And I believe that just as much about Engel as I do about any other back-slapping, ward-heeling Democratic pol. But this is not the time to go with a completely inexperienced freshman former school principal who moved to the district in the last couple of years and spent most of his adult life without any connection to the Democratic Party.

The Bronx desperately needs aid. With the stakes this high, we should go with the candidate who is the most likely to get it.

Jacqueline S. Gold is a writer, editor, and political strategist. She lives in New York City with her two daughters.

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