By Tamar Warburg
Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
Since Oct 7, Teaneck Jewish community members have met pro-Hamas agitators head-on at countless Teaneck Town Council meetings and Board of Education meetings. Time and again, these community members give of their time and sit through meetings that often stray past midnight, and respond to haters with great courage and eloquence. We should all commend them for their efforts.
But after many months, we need to question whether showing up and speaking at these meetings is the solution to our local problems. Months later, the haters still show up. Elected officials’ sympathies have not changed. So, what are we accomplishing? Some may enjoy the political theater, but many find the show increasingly exhausting and just want it to stop.
Our community needs to change tactics. We need to take a pause from the meetings and stop the speeches. We need to be strategic. We need to think about the bigger picture. We need to be proactive rather than reactive. We need to channel worthy civic engagement into action that will enable our community to control its own destiny.
Teaneck’s Jewish community needs to vote.
Elections are the whole ballgame. If our community cannot win elections, nothing else matters. All the letter writing campaigns, council speeches and rallies are utterly irrelevant. They matter only if they represent political power. Without political power, our speeches and rallies are simply noise, and our elected officials will continue to ignore us.
On the eve of the Teaneck High School walkout, community members flooded Teaneck’s Board of Education with emails to protest the walkout. According to some reports, the board received as many as 3,500 emails in the span of 48 hours.
How did the board respond? They invited the students to hold their walkout during school hours on school grounds.
Our elected officials, in effect, called our community’s bluff.
Study our community’s voting patterns and you’ll see why. In the 2022 primary, in Teaneck’s District 4, a district with almost 1,300 voters, only 72 people voted for committee members in the Democratic primary. That means 94% of eligible voters in that district stayed home on primary day. The turnout was similarly abysmal in other districts and in other years.
Even when we do vote, we often fail to vote as a community. In doing so, we dilute our effectiveness. In the 2022 Teaneck Town Council race, for example, our community’s vote split over a contentious expansion of Holy Name Medical Center. The big winner? Denise Belcher, who exploited our internal divisions to obtain a position of communal authority for which she has proven to be totally unfit.
In short, we do not vote and our community’s elected officials (and antagonists) know that.
There is a reason there are so many car rallies in Teaneck — but not in Lakewood, Monsey, Far Rockaway or Lawrence, New York. Those communities vote. They vote together and their elected officials know that well.
In those communities, elected officials would never tolerate what Teaneck’s representatives allow. They cannot afford to tolerate it. But Teaneck’s elected officials believe they can. They do not seem to believe that Teaneck’s Jewish community will either support them or hold them accountable. And that — more than any car rally or obnoxious pro-Palestinian speech — is terrifying. It means that our inaction makes our community an attractive target and puts all of us in danger.
We must change that. Urgently. We need to vote. All of us. Thankfully, we soon can. In the next few weeks, a primary election will be held in which an unprecedented number of Jewish community members are seeking seats on Teaneck’s Democratic Municipal Committee (TDMC) and Republican Municipal Committee (TRMC). In some cases, they are challenging incumbents whose seats have not been challenged for years. Our community needs to show up to support these candidates.
For those of you who are registered to vote by mail and are affiliated with the Democratic or Republican parties, you should have received your ballots in the mail. Check out the right-most column to see who is running for TDMC/TRMC in your district. If you are unaffiliated with a political party, make sure to show up in person to your polling station on June 4 or to the Rodda Center during early voting week (May 29-June 2), declare affiliation with a party, and vote.
This election, let’s send a message that will be heard not only in Teaneck but in Trenton — Teaneck’s Jewish community votes. The days of our political apathy and inaction are over.
Tamar Warburg is an attorney living in Teaneck. She is a candidate for the TDMC in District 4.
