When I worked at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia a decade ago, I delighted in giving tours around the permanent exhibition, especially the part that highlighted the different things a U.S. citizen can, and in some cases should, do. Serve on a jury. Serve in the military. Vote. Run for office. It was an…
The community activist mounting a challenge to State Senator Simcha Felder, a controversial legislator who is the one man standing between the Democrats and total control of Albany, said in an interview that the upcoming primary contest will test the power of Orthodox voters in Brooklyn. “The majority of the district is not Orthodox Jewish,”…
Last week, Governor Andrew Cuomo picked up the phone and called the spiritual leader of the New York Hasidic village of Kiryas Joel, Satmar Grand Rabbi Aron Teitelbaum, to try to shake a compromise out of a recalcitrant state senator. According to two people familiar with the negotiations, the call was part of an effort…
Through the extreme efforts of a rogue lawmaker who held the entire state budget hostage, New York’s powerful Hasidic groups may have found a way to derail a movement to force them to improve the secular education they give their children. A provision forced into New York state’s budget by Simcha Felder, and supported by…
A top aide to a New York State Senator cited a bizarre “false flag” conspiracy theory claiming that the man whose car-ramming attack killed protester Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia was a “left wing operative” trying to start a civil war, the news site Kings County Politics reported. Sen. Simcha Felder’s director of operations in…
A $5.8 million proposal being pushed by some Brooklyn lawmakers would order New York school busses to drop yeshiva students much closer to their homes, a new report said. The Daily News reported that the budget add-on would mandate school busses to drop children off within 600 feet of their homes if they leave school…
New York’s state Senate is in disarray, due in part to two Jewish politicians who have broken away from the Democratic Party to which the state’s Jews have been historically bound. Democrats thought they would win control of the New York Senate this year, allowing the party to completely dominate the state’s legislative and executive…
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