Chevruta: Voting

Should leftists vote for the Democratic nominee in the 2024 presidential election? Many have balked at supporting an administration that has funded and armed Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza: Some are refusing to vote outright, while others are conditioning their vote on a dramatic shift in policy. Although President Joe Biden has now dropped out of the race, and will almost certainly be replaced by his vice president, Kamala Harris, this question remains live for many. 

American leftists have long debated our relationship to electoral politics, and to the Democratic Party in particular. Do we choose the lesser of two evils, hold our nose, and “vote blue no matter who” in order to avert the catastrophes that would result from a Republican presidency? Or are there acts that are too morally outrageous to permit such a utilitarian calculus? And regardless of what we choose, are there ways to think about the meaning of voting that go beyond the pieties of mainstream liberal discourse?

In this episode, Jewish Currents contributing writer Raphael Magarik explores these questions with Rania Batrice, a first-generation Palestinian American and political strategist who has devoted her career to electoral work, including as Bernie Sanders’s 2016 deputy campaign manager. The conversation—recorded while Biden was still running—examines a legal responsum by Rabbi Menashe Klein, the spiritual leader of the Ungvar Hasidic community in Brooklyn, about whether one is responsible for the actions of a candidate one votes for. Through engagement with Klein’s responsum, Magarik and Batrice turn over their own ambivalences, grappling with competing ways of thinking about voting.

This podcast is part of our chevruta column, named for the traditional method of Jewish study, in which a pair of students analyzes a religious text together. In each installment, Jewish Currents matches leftist thinkers and organizers with a rabbi or Torah scholar. The activists bring an urgent question that arises in their own work; the Torah scholar leads them in exploring their question through Jewish text. By routing contemporary political questions through traditional religious sources, we aim to address the most urgent ethical and spiritual problems confronting the left. Each column includes a written conversation, podcast, and study guide. You can find the column based on this conversation and a study guide here. 

Thanks to Ilana Levinson for producing and to Nathan Salsburg for the use of his song “VIII (All That Were Calculated Have Passed).”