What a glorious time to be a New Yorker

We have an opportunity in this moment. A responsibility. To insist on everyone’s humanity, all the way through.

Sharing the remarks that I delivered last night at my election night party in Brooklyn:

What a glorious time to be a New Yorker.

These past few weeks, a powerful energy has been moving through this city. A generosity of spirit. A refusal to give up, even when the odds seemed long. A feeling of joy, out in the streets, shared by every kind of New Yorker there is.

Our win tonight belongs to those streets. To the people who organize there. Who never give up on their neighbors.

It was my name on the ballot today. But tonight’s victory belongs to everyone in this room.

We’ve been organizing together for thirty years. We stopped the evictions of seniors and families. We won the PPW bike lane. We brought participatory budgeting to New York City. We desegregated our middle schools. We rezoned Gowanus. We won justice for fast food workers, Uber drivers, deliveristas, and freelancers.

And we are standing up to ICE — in our neighborhoods, and in our immigration courts – I’ll be back at 26 Federal Plaza tomorrow morning.

I wish I could thank every one of you by name. I have to settle for a few people who stand in for this whole, incredible team:

Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Public Advocate Jumaane Williams. Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. The Working Families Party — my political home. JFREJ, Indivisible, Brooklyn Resisters, MoveOn, Stonewall, Lambda, 504 Dems. Unions including NYSNA, CWA, 32BJ, PSC-CUNY, Workers United, Local 100. A campaign team for the ages, led by Luke Hayes. Thank you Emmitt, Katy, Emily, Lauren, Harry, Luke, Connor, Neil, Emma, Dana, Riya, Cal, Grace, Penelope, and Alison. And to the Fight, Deliver, GSG, and Melted Solids teams as well.

And my family: My Mom and Dad, from whom I learned most of what I know about care & listening. To my incredible kids, Marek & Rosa; both of you inspire me every single day. And the most extraordinary person in my life, Meg Barnette, who I am beyond lucky to be married to.

I also want to thank Dan Goldman, for a hard-fought campaign, and for your service to this community and to our country. I intend to preserve the triage center you set up for immigrants abducted by ICE, and to build on the fierce questions you asked Kristi Noem and so many others.

And I want to specifically praise how you responded to the toxic rhetoric that you & your staff faced over the past couple days — with gratitude and grace. That’s an approach we need more of in public life.

I want to say to those who cast their votes for Dan: though we have some differences, I feel strongly that we actually have more in common. I know you want to rescue our country back from Trumpism and renew our democracy. I know you want to find a better, more humane path for us on the world stage. I will always endeavor to listen thoughtfully to you, and to represent you – and everyone in this amazing district – with great care.

Last Thursday, I gave a name to the spirit that’s been moving through this city: solidarity. I said it was the force we need to beat our biggest foes — and no, I don’t mean Wemby and the Spurs. I mean Trump’s fascism. I mean ICE. I mean the billionaires rigging our economy against us.

This campaign was born out of solidarity. Solidarity is not the same as unity. Unity means we already agree. Solidarity is a practice of building bridges, even when we don’t.

We did that last year, when we joined together to defeat Andrew Cuomo and elect Zohran Mamdani mayor, to win a city everyone can afford. We proved politics doesn’t have to be a cage match. It can be a team sport for the values we share.

We ran this campaign like a team sport, because that’s what it takes to stand up to billionaires and bullies.

And that’s what I intend to do in Congress. Our team of progressive champions has been winning across the country, and our ranks will keep growing, tonight and in the months ahead.

Now — when you’re insurgents, you spend a lot of time criticizing. But coming out of the primary, our job is to do two things at once: take the lessons voters just taught us, and build the unity Democrats need to take back Congress this fall.

So, I’m going to lay out a few of those lessons. And I’m going to ask, in the spirit of solidarity, for a few minutes to do it.

When I launched this race, I said it wasn’t progressives versus moderates. It’s fighters versus folders. As we head into November, here are four lessons that I believe are worth fighting for.

First: we have to fight, hard and visibly, against a system the American people have already concluded is rigged.

The clearest evidence of that rigging is corporate money in our elections. It is time for the Democratic Party to walk away from dark money — from PACs funded by crypto, Wall Street, AI and AIPAC. People can see through this. They have seen through it for a long time.

If we’re going to stand against Trump and his cronies corruption, we cannot blur that line. We have to make it as sharp as it actually is.

Second: we have to focus, relentlessly, on delivering for working families — on housing, health care, child care, on jobs that pay enough to build a life.

Heading into this fall, Democrats have to show people clearly what we’re fighting for, not only what we’re fighting against. That’s one of the lessons of Zohran’s win, and of his first months in office.

So here’s a proposal for Democratic unity: one of the best things Democrats did last year was turn the government shutdown into a fight over health care subsidies. Let’s do that again, but this time, hold strong to the end. Let’s be clear: we will only vote for a budget that restores the health care subsidies Republicans cut last year. Let people know they can count on us to be the party that delivers for them.

Third: we cannot compromise on anyone’s humanity.

This one should be straightforward, but alas, it sure doesn’t feel that way right now. Democrats are painfully divided by our differences about the U.S. relationship to Israel and Palestine, and we have to face up to it squarely.

Our party needs to admit that Joe Biden’s “hug Bibi” strategy was a catastrophic mistake. I believe it made us complicit in genocide. Bombs we paid for killed more than seventy thousand Palestinians — most of them women and children. Tanks we paid for left a million people homeless. Humanitarian aid still is not getting in.

We cannot keep paying for Netanyahu’s wars with our tax dollars. Democratic voters are saying this, loud and clear.

What we need instead is a politics of shared safety. One that sees Palestinian kids in Gaza and the West Bank as made b’tzelem Elohim — in God’s image — exactly as fully as Marek and Rosa. One that understands Israelis will not be truly safe until Palestinians are free.

That politics of shared safety must include Jews, too, of course — in the U.S. and in Israel. American Jews have stood on the front lines of civil rights struggles for generations. As New Yorkers, Americans, Democrats, progressives, socialists. Let’s keep it that way.

You can criticize Israel and not be antisemitic. You can be an anti-Zionist and not be antisemitic — many Jews are, and non-Jews too. But too often, people use “Zionist” as a slur for Jews. Check my mentions if you don’t believe me. Antisemitism rises with fascism, and it rises in wartime — both are happening now. Progressives should be the ones standing against it, not looking away from it.

There is so much trauma here. So much grief, so much fear. We hold onto all of it so tightly, and fear so rarely brings out our best selves.

But we have an opportunity in this moment. A responsibility. To insist on everyone’s humanity, all the way through.

Last week, at a synagogue in Brooklyn, I met three Israelis who do something called “protective presence” in the West Bank. They put their own bodies between Palestinian families and the settlers trying to drive them from their homes.

The Palestinians they work alongside couldn’t be there with them — they can’t get visas to travel here. But they do this work together anyway, because they know their fates are bound up together.

In Congress, I will try to carry a fraction of the courage that they carry.

I will be one of the Jewish members of Congress most willing to stand up for Palestinian human rights. And I will stand firmly against bigotry aimed at Jews.

Those are not two different jobs. They are the same job.

That’s the job Rabbi Hillel gave us, two thousand years ago:

Im ein ani li, mi li? If I am not for myself, who will be for me?

Uchsheani l’atzmi, mah ani? But if I am only for myself, what am I?

V’im lo achshav, eimatai? And if not now — when?

Hillel put this idea another way, and it brings me to my fourth and final lesson:

B’makom she’ein anashim, hishtadel l’hiyot ish. In a place where no one is acting human — strive to be human.

Because that is exactly the moment we are living in.

On one side, our empathy is being hacked by a fascism that needs someone to blame — immigrants, trans kids, women — for problems it has no intention of solving.

On the other side, algorithmic social media — and now AI — are coming for something quieter, but just as real: our attention, our judgment, our capacity to sit with each other’s complexity instead of optimizing each other away.

So here is the fourth idea I think Democrats should run with this fall. Not just a platform. A spirit. Call it a New Humanism — one built for this exact moment, when the loudest forces in our politics and our technology both have an interest in making us less human, not more.

A new humanism doesn’t ask what’s efficient. It asks what’s worthy of us.

It says dignity isn’t a value you balance against other values — it’s the floor everything else stands on.

It says joy is not a luxury for after the fight is won. Joy is part of how we win it — you saw that in these streets these past few weeks, and you should never let anyone tell you that was frivolous.

And it says purpose comes not from being right alone, but from being bound up with other people — all other people, including the ones an algorithm or an administration finds it convenient for us to ignore.

Pope Leo, in his recent encyclical on AI, made a version of this same case. You don’t have to share his faith to recognize the instinct: that there is something in us — call it soul, call it dignity, call it whatever you want — that neither a fascist nor an AI can take from us.

That’s the spirit that’s been moving through this city these past weeks.

It’s the spirit I’ve tried to practice, alongside every one of you, for thirty years now.

It’s the spirit we won this campaign with.

It’s the spirit I’ll carry into the United State Congress.

Thank you.