A transgender rabbi who was once booted from a Biden White House pride party is headlining a new ad campaign on behalf of Zohran Mamdani.
Rabbi Abby Stein, a biological man, took part in a “Jews for Zohran” video campaign sponsored by Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), a far-left group considered outside mainstream Judaism. Stein also had a sit-down with Iran’s president less than a week before Tehran launched a barrage of missiles at Israel.
“We know Zohran will fight to make our city affordable and safe for our families,” Stein said in the video. “As Jews, as rabbis, as New Yorkers, we believe that all people deserve to thrive. Zohran agrees.”
Stein, raised in a Hasidic Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, attended the 2024 White House pride celebration, where she began chanting for an end to U.S. support for Israel.
“We addressed Dr. Biden and our fellow attendees respectfully, introduced ourselves as queer Jews, and chanted our support for a permanent ceasefire, an end to arming Israel, and asserted that there can be no pride in genocide,” Stein wrote in an essay for a lesbian blog called Autostraddle.
Stein’s radical politics extend far beyond Israel and into the broader Middle East. She sat down for an interfaith dialogue with Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian during the United Nations General Assembly in October 2024, just days before the Islamic Republic launched nearly 200 missiles at the Jewish state.
The video featured three other rabbis, all of whom are biological women and equally as left-wing as Stein. Among them was Rabbi Emily Cohen of Manhattan’s West End Synagogue. Her official biography describes her as a scholar of Reconstructionist Judaism, a radical progressive branch of the religion. She lists her professional experience as “baking challah” and “developing curricula for adult education classes on Judaism and social justice.”
She has made social justice a central part of her work from the pulpit. Some of her sermons, which can be found online, include “From Narrowness to Expansiveness: Pesach & Pronouns 2021” and “Choose Life: Mishpatim #ReproShabbat 5782,” in which she argued that those who support abortion access are actually “pro-life.”
Cohen also participated in the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, working as a “cop watcher” during the riots.
Another Reconstructionist rabbi featured in the video, Miriam Grossman, declared her opposition to Zionism in 2021. In April 2024, she organized a “Seder in the Streets” event dedicated to praying for Palestinians. Attendees held signs accusing Israel of committing a “genocide” in Gaza and calling Zionism a “golden calf.”
Grossman’s work “educating Jewish youth about the intersections of structural racism and economic injustice” earned her an award from the Jewish Educators Assembly in 2011, according to her biography.
The fourth rabbi in the video was Rachel Goldenberg of Queens, who runs “an open, outreach-driven community around authentic, yet experimental, ecstatic and contemplative Jewish spiritual practices.”
Goldenberg has advocated that Jews be more accepting of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel and has met with figures like Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.).
She has also served as cochair of the JFREJ Rabbinic Council.
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