New York congressional candidate Attorney Dan Goldman, left, is joined by New York City Comptroller Brad Lander during a news conference outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn on Tuesday, Aug. 16, 2022.

In what might be described as a delayed reversal of fortune, Dan Goldman, a former federal prosecutor who served as the Democrats’ lead counsel in the first Trump impeachment trial, is now riding a wave of momentum as a frontrunner in the highly competitive race for an open House seat in Lower Manhattan and northwest Brooklyn. Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump — who, despite Goldman’s best efforts, was ultimately acquitted of two impeachment charges in February 2020 — is facing a mounting list of criminal inquiries, culminating last week in a high-profile FBI raid at his Palm Beach residence. “Republicans are descending into an unforeseen and unpredicted place of complete anti-democratic demagoguery,” Goldman said in an interview with Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel at an outdoor café in Tribeca, the Manhattan neighborhood where he lives with his wife and five children. “Where we are today is far worse than where we were two years ago, and that genuinely scares me for our country and for our democratic institutions and the rule of law.”

NYT nod: With less than a week remaining until next Tuesday’s primary, Goldman has recently emerged as the frontrunner in the race, where he is among a dozen Democrats jockeying to represent the newly drawn 10th Congressional District. On Saturday, he snagged a coveted endorsement from The New York Times — a major coup for the neophyte candidate, who had been polling neck-and-neck with two local elected officials running to his left. The newspaper’s imprimatur may resonate with conventionally liberal Times readers in Park Slope, Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill, among other neighborhoods in the district.

Borough Park boost: Political observers had speculated at the beginning of the race that Goldman’s high-profile role as a Trump prosecutor — coupled with his gig as a legal commentator for MSNBC — might be a liability in Borough Park rather than a selling point. But Goldman, who is himself Jewish, persisted in courting the Orthodox community, retaining local operatives and meeting for discussions with Jewish community leaders earlier than most candidates in the race, according to Ezra Friedlander, a Democratic consultant who lives in the neighborhood. Goldman’s efforts paid off on Tuesday, when he notched a big endorsement from a coalition of 25 Hasidic leaders in the district, effectively consolidating support within the sizable Orthodox community, which could prove decisive. Turnout is predicted to be lower than usual in the late-summer primary, for which early voting began on Saturday.

What they’re saying: Mordy Getz, a Hasidic businessman in Borough Park whose Judaica store, Eichler’s, is a well-trodden campaign stop for political candidates on the stump, met Goldman in July, and found he was attuned to “the needs of mom-and-pop stores and small businesses that comprise the majority of Boro Park businesses,” he wrote in a recent WhatsApp exchange. “He seems like a real mensch and a candidate who understands the needs of the community,” Getz said. “Although it may seem challenging to overcome his role in Trump’s impeachment in a community with a majority of Trump supporters, I think the recent news about Trump helps leadership realize that working with Trump opponents is inevitable.” Alexander Rapaport, who lives in Borough Park and is the founder of Masbia, a network of local soup kitchens, has found Goldman’s amiable if somewhat improbable alliance with Orthodox leadership “amusing,” he said bluntly in an interview with JI. “They’re going to wind up voting for the person who was in charge of Trump’s first impeachment.”

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Ken Burns visits SiriusXM Studios on September 10, 2019, in New York City.

In his deeply researched and lyrically paced documentaries about the Civil War, jazz, baseball, Thomas Jefferson and the national parks, among others, filmmaker Ken Burns has gone in search of the American character — what makes us Americans. Now that search has taken him to the Holocaust — not what happened in the killing fields of Europe but what happened on these shores as those fleeing Hitler’s noose sought sanctuary in America. “This is a huge reckoning that we have to understand,” Burns told Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch in a recent interview. “The U.S. brought in more people than any other sovereign nation. But if we had done 20 times that amount, we would have failed.”

America’s problem: “This is not another film ‘about the Holocaust,’” said Lynn Novick, a frequent Burns collaborator who co-directed this film, along with Sarah Botstein. “This is about America’s response, America’s obligations, responsibilities, failures. What did the American people do and not do about this crisis as it unfolded?” The six-hour film premieres on PBS on Sept. 18.

History rhymes: The idea for the project came from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which was in the process of creating an exhibition — open now — called “Americans and the Holocaust.” The museum approached Burns in 2015, a time when the political tides in the U.S. had begun to shift toward xenophobia and away from tolerance. “It was a really different world, in which the rhymes, if you will, the echoes of the story that we’re going to try to tell, seemed present but not overwhelming,” said Burns, referring to an oft-cited quote from Mark Twain that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Now, Burns continued, “almost every sentence of the film rhymes with the present in terrifying ways.”

Lessons learned: The documentary’s goal is not to chastise Americans, but to urge viewers to consider how to learn from America’s inaction. “It is probably not so productive to just judge and say, ‘I know I would have done something different,’” said Novick. She hopes viewers come away from the film with a more charitable understanding of who could be American, and what obligation we have to people who are different from us. “We’re living in a time where we hear a lot about us and them. You know, ‘The other people, we can’t let them in, they’re not like us,’” she explained. “That was true then, it’s true in the 1850s, it’s going to be true 100 years from now. So I really hope we can get to a time when we aren’t so focused on us and them.”

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An Israeli and a Palestinian nurse work together in an Israeli hospital.

Walk into any Israeli hospital and one might be forgiven for thinking peace between Israelis and Palestinians has already broken out. Arabic and Hebrew are heard in equal measure from both practitioners and patients, and any nationalistic or religious differences are set aside. While the healthcare system is a unique bubble of coexistence amid an intractable conflict, it is also a powerful reminder that peace between the two peoples might one day be possible – a small ray of hope that the Biden administration is choosing to build upon, Jewish Insider’s Ruth Marks Eglash reports. 

Medical community: During his visit to the region last month, President Joe Biden announced that a $2.21 million United States Agency for International Development (USAID) grant was being awarded to the Jaffa-based Peres Center for Peace to create a three-year program to build a cross-border medical community. The grant is part of the Nita Lowey Middle East Partnership for Peace Act (MEPPA) Partnership for Peace Fund, which was enacted in late 2020.

Sustainable impact: The Peres Center, which was founded by Shimon Peres, the late Israeli president and Nobel Peace Prize winner, is using the grant to lay the foundation for an assortment of initiatives ranging from peer-to-peer training, shared workshops and specialized conferences it hopes to launch later this year. “Medicine is a really good field to focus on because when a program is developed well, you can really see the sustainable impact,” Yarden Leal-Yablonka, the center’s deputy director general, told JI in a recent interview.

Peacebuilding: John Lyndon, executive director for the Alliance for Middle East Peace, welcomed the MEPPA grant, saying the Peres Center program working with healthcare professionals will have a very positive impact on grassroots peacebuilding efforts elsewhere. “We’re very pleased that USAID and MEPPA are prioritizing the health sector in this way,” he said, adding, “We’ve found that work focused on health can be especially effective.”

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