There is a particular kind of American politician who treats prejudice the way a snake treats its skin — something to be shed and replaced as the season demands — but a candidate in Central New Jersey seems to be angling for President Donald Trump’s support, with Islamophobic and antisemitic remarks.
Lifelong Republican Sue Altman, who is a carpetbagger seeking the Democratic nomination in New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District, has made something of an art form of this practice, and the people of New Jersey deserve to know about it before they pull any levers on her behalf.
Cast your mind back to September 2021. Congressman Josh Gottheimer, a proudly Jewish Democrat from New Jersey’s 5th District, was doing the unglamorous work of retail politics — visiting businesses in Glen Rock to talk up the federal infrastructure bill.
Altman led a group of protesters to give him a piece of their mind about his refusal to support President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda until the infrastructure bill had cleared the chamber first. At the time, Altman was serving as the New Jersey Working Families Party’s State Director.
What happened next is not in serious dispute, though Altman has done her level best to make it so.
“Not long ago, I held an event in my district to talk about the benefits of the bipartisan federal infrastructure bill, only to have members of the Working Families Party disrupt the event by screaming ‘Jew’ at me,” said Gottheimer, who heard someone in that crowd scream at him a slur for the crime of being Jewish in public while holding a political position that his critics disliked.
Gottheimer did not let it pass. He brought the incident to a speech at Rutgers University months later, asking a question that deserves to echo: “What has our country come to?”
What indeed.
Altman denied Gottheimer’s claim and said that “spurious and false allegations of antisemitism are extremely dangerous; they cheapen real ones.”
Altman’s response was not contrition. It was not an investigation, or a denunciation, or even the minimal decency of saying that slurs have no place in political protest, regardless of what one thinks of Gottheimer’s voting record.
Instead, she issued a statement accusing the Congressman of sharing “inaccurate information” and suggesting he had misled students at Rutgers.
She denied Gottheimer’s claim and asked him — the man who had been on the receiving end of the slur — to retract his account of what he heard with his own ears.
“That doesn’t make it right to mislead a group of students about where we stand,” Altman wrote, as though the problem were Gottheimer’s testimony and not the conduct of the people she was leading.
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo confirmed that she heard the hateful slurs.
“Antisemitism is wrong, reprehensible, and unacceptable. I join Congressman Gottheimer in condemning these hateful attacks that have absolutely no place in our politics,” Raimondo said.
Secret Service agents protecting Raimondo expressed concern for Gottheimer’s safety after hearing the antisemitic slur.
“This was a combative crowd,” according to InsiderNJ, which reported that “verbal insults were hurled at the congressman and that one protester intentionally bumped into a Gottheimer staffer.”
“I am far closer to Gottheimer than I am to Progressive Left Democrats such as Working Families State Director Sue Altman,” wrote Alan Steinberg, who added: “There are elements of the Progressive Left in the House of Representatives that are VERY antisemitic…”
“This was not a misunderstanding, and that slur is hateful. Instead of denying the incident, they should join me and reject hate speech,” said Gottheimer, who was unambiguous.
Altman did not join him. She moved on.
And now, some four and a half years later, Altman has moved on quite dramatically — in the opposite direction, and at considerable speed.
She is now accusing her Democratic primary opponent, Dr. Adam Hamawy, of “cheerleading and wishing for the deaths of Israeli children.”
She has declared it “clear” that more dead Israeli civilians represent Hamawy’s “policy goal.” She has called his position “beyond the pale” and said she is “disgusted” by it.
What did Hamawy actually say to earn this verdict?
He said, on a political livestream, that he does not support American taxpayer funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system.
He argued, using a metaphor that is blunt but not irrational, that giving a prosperous nation defensive military technology insulates it from the consequences of its own choices and removes pressure to pursue peace. He asked what distinguishes Israel from Russia or Iran in terms of American military subsidies.
These are policy opinions. They are shared, it is worth noting, by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Representative Ro Khanna, the liberal Zionist lobbying organization J Street, and Brad Lander, a Jewish Democratic congressional candidate who previously supported Iron Dome funding and has since changed his position.
Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, America’s most prominent Jewish member of the US Senate’s Democratic Caucus, has repeatedly tried to stop American funding for the Israeli military over the years, denouncing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government for waging a genocide that claimed the lives of tens of thousands of children in Gaza.
These are opinions one may agree with or dispute, but they are the considered views of a man who spent three weeks in Gaza performing surgery on children with shrapnel wounds while bombs fell around him, and who refused evacuation because he would not abandon his team.
This is the man Altman has accused of wanting children to die.
The geometry here is worth studying carefully, because it tells you something important about how Altman’s mind works — or rather, how her ambitions work.
In 2021, when the target of bigotry was a Jewish congressman and the perpetrators were people whose organizational support she needed, Altman denied the incident and accused the victim of lying.
In 2024, at the height of Netanyahu’s genocidal attacks, Altman said, “Israel has every right to defend itself. I support continuation of arms sales and aid to Israel.”
In 2026, when the target is a Palestinian American surgeon whose policy positions threaten her electoral prospects, she has decided that calling someone a cheerleader for child murder is simply the natural language of political disagreement.
She was born and raised a Republican. She became a progressive when that suited her.
She took support from the Democratic Majority for Israel during her 2024 campaign.
Now she tells Jewish Insider she’s shifted her positions considerably.
The Iron Dome, she now says, probably doesn’t need American subsidy — Israel can afford it — but she absolutely wants it to exist, and anyone who questions its American funding is apparently wishing death upon civilians.
“From my standpoint, all voters matter. And that includes republicans and people who didn’t vote for me. If anything, I want to step up my game for those folks– so they vote for me!” said Altman during a 2024 Reddit AMA session. “One of the best parts of this campaign so far has been meeting people who are lifelong republicans who find our campaign to be a breath of fresh air.”
One struggles to keep up.
What is not difficult to keep up with is the underlying pattern.
When Altman perceives political advantage in looking the other way at antisemitism, she looks the other way. When she perceives political advantage in weaponizing the charge of antisemitism — or its cousin, the insinuation that a critic of Israeli military policy is indifferent to Jewish lives — she reaches for it without apparent hesitation or shame.
This is not a politician who has wrestled seriously with any of these questions. This is a political chameleon who has learned to perform the wrestling, to furrow the brow and speak of lost sleep and horror at atrocities, while keeping one eye perpetually fixed on the donor class and the other on whatever the polls say this week.
Among those endorsing Dr. Adam Hamawy in the race for New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District seat are U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, former Congressman Jamaal Bowman, Rep. Ilhan Omar, and former NJ-12 candidate Elijah Dixon.
Hamawy is also backed by leading progressive groups like Justice Democrats, Common Defense, A New Policy, Veterans for Responsible Leadership, Our Revolution, Climate Revolution Action Network, PAL PAC, CAIR Action, Organize for Peace, Progressive Victory, Beyond the Ballot, Track AIPAC, Americans for Justice in Palestine Action, and New Jersey Muslim Civic Coalition Activate, and more.
American Priorities PAC, a super PAC backing progressive candidates nationwide, announced plans to spend $2 million to promote Hamawy. The super PAC is funded by some of the biggest contributors to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign.
The people of New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District are being asked to send someone to Washington who will speak for them when the money is arrayed against them, when the lobbyists are in the room, and when the comfortable position is also the wrong one.
They are being asked whether they want a representative or a weathervane.
Sue Altman has answered that question herself, more clearly than any opponent could.
She told a Jewish congressman that she didn’t believe him when he claimed a slur had been used against him at one of her own organization’s events, and she told the press that a combat surgeon who operated on dying children in Gaza wants Israeli children to die.
Both things cannot be the act of a person operating in good faith. Both things are, however, entirely consistent with the act of a person who has decided that winning matters more than honesty, and that the voters she needs to fool are unlikely to remember what she said last time around.
Voters should remember. The record is right there, and it has the virtue of being true — which is more than can be said for very much else that Sue Altman has offered the people of New Jersey.