The Price of Admission
I’m a registered Democrat.
At YU, that eight-letter word can end a political conversation before it even begins. Assumptions arrive instantly: anti-Israel, radically progressive, naïve, perhaps even disloyal. “Democrat” is treated less like a party affiliation and more like a confession — something one might reluctantly admit, but certainly never proclaim with pride. That needs to stop.
New York’s Jewish community has spent the past year watching the political ground shift beneath it. We have complained about Mamdani, antisemitism and a city that increasingly feels hostile to the values we hold most dear. Just recently, on July 24, a visibly Jewish man was stabbed in the chest with a screwdriver after leaving an Upper West Side synagogue. In the aftermath, Jewish leaders — including YU President Ari Berman — urged Mayor Zohran Mamdani to temper his rhetoric toward Israel, warning that it was contributing to an increasingly hostile climate for Jewish New Yorkers. Their message was clear: The political environment surrounding Jews and Israel is not confined to speeches, protests or social media. Jewish New Yorkers are forced to live within it.
That political shift may be clearest in NY-13, the district Wilf Campus calls home, where Darializa Avila Chevalier recently defeated incumbent Congressman Adriano Espaillat in the Democratic primary. On October 8, 2023, the day after Hamas’ massacre, Avila Chevalier attended a pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square. That same day, Espaillat helped hold a vigil, standing alongside Jewish leaders and declaring his solidarity with Israel while denouncing terrorism.
We can continue to complain, post on social media and reassure one another that everyone around us has lost their minds. But outrage is not action.
No politician is perfect. Still, YU and the Jewish community just lost an ally — one from a list that seems to grow shorter by the day. These relationships are not merely ceremonial; among other projects, Espaillat helped secure $1 million in federal funding for renovations in Belfer Hall and was paramount in the creation of the public area outside Glueck. Now, that ally is gone.
I was in the room with Espaillat after he lost. The moment hurt, but his concession was not what drove my anger. That began a little over two weeks earlier, when YU finally realized what it stood to lose and scrambled to assemble an effort to get more students to vote. I helped them coordinate a phone-banking initiative intended to call every eligible student that began on June 9. The deadline to register for the June 23 primary was June 13. By then, however, we were not building a foundation of political engagement. We were attempting to manufacture one overnight. We had four days.
New York has a closed-primary system, meaning that only voters enrolled in a political party may participate in that party’s primary. Registering as a Democrat does not obligate anyone to vote for a Democrat in November. During the general election, every voter remains free to support a candidate from any party. Party enrollment simply determines which primary a voter may enter.
In NY-13, that distinction is not merely technical; it is decisive. By the time November arrives, the real choice has already been made. The district is so overwhelmingly Democratic that the winner of the Democratic primary is, for all practical purposes, our next representative. A Republican name on the general-election ballot does not make the race competitive.
For students who were already registered as Republicans or unaffiliated, our last-minute phone calls were nearly four months too late — New York’s deadline for changing party affiliation was February 14. A phone-banking initiative can remind registered voters to cast a ballot. Unfortunately, it is not a time machine.
The numbers are grim. Approximately 1,257 YU students were eligible to register in NY-13. Only around 250 of them — about 20% — were registered. Of those students, only 49 actually voted.
Forty-nine out of approximately 1,257. Just 3.9% of eligible students participated in the election that would almost certainly determine who represents our university and the neighborhood many of us call home for most of the year.
Avila Chevalier defeated Espaillat by 2,737 votes. To be clear, even if every one of those 1,257 eligible YU students had voted for Espaillat, we could not have erased that deficit alone. But that misses the point. YU may not have possessed enough votes to control the election, but we had more than enough to matter. A voting bloc does not need to decide every race to command attention; it needs to participate consistently enough that candidates cannot afford to ignore it. Instead, a community that constantly speaks about its vulnerability contributed barely 50 voters to one of the most consequential elections affecting it.
The university enjoyed the benefits of political participation without cultivating the electorate needed to sustain them. It accepted the funding, access and relationships that came from having an ally in Congress, but waited until June to recognize that allies must be protected through votes. By the time YU woke up, many students had already missed the only deadline that could have given them a voice.
It would be convenient to place all the blame on the administration; however, it would let students off far too easily. YU may have slept at the wheel, but the administration cannot register for us, and it cannot cast our ballots.
I am not asking anyone to abandon their political beliefs. If you are conservative, remain conservative. Criticize every aspect of the Democratic Party if that is what your convictions demand. Vote Republican in every general election for the rest of your life.
But register as a Democrat.
Being a Democrat on paper does not need to become your ideological identity. Your principles describe what you believe; your party registration determines whether you are allowed into the room where your representative is selected. One is a statement of belief. The other is a tool. Refusing to enroll does not punish the Democratic Party or make New York more responsive to Jewish concerns; it simply removes your name from the list of people whom Democratic candidates must persuade.
Pride in one’s beliefs is admirable. Pride that leaves one politically powerless is vanity.
We cannot demand that New York’s leaders take Jewish concerns seriously while voluntarily excluding ourselves from the elections that select them. We cannot complain about the officials chosen to represent us after declining to participate in the contest that chose them. And we cannot mourn the loss of political allies while refusing to do the most basic work required to protect those relationships.
I am not a Democrat because the party always gets it right. I am one because I have accepted the situation and decided to play the cards New York has dealt us. Here, Democratic registration is not an ideological declaration; it is the price of admission.
Photo Caption:
Photo Credit: iMattSmart / Unsplash
