Co-governance Expectations:

We look for candidates who are enthusiastic about co-governance both during the campaign and once in office, with JFREJ and with other movement organizations. This includes: 
 

• Collaborating proactively to set and update legislative and budget priorities.
• Collaborating with JFREJ members, especially when drafting legislation or speaking about JFREJ’s key campaign issues.
• Showing up and championing movement priorities through actions, media, statements, sponsoring legislation, and organizing colleagues to do so as well.
• Collaborating with other movement candidates, electeds, and organizations. Rejecting dog-whistles or scapegoating that divide and undermine members of our coalition.
• Meeting with JFREJ members and spending time with our organized base at least twice a year.
• Rejecting corporate, real estate, carceral, and fossil fuel money and endorsements.

Strengthen the Left, Stop Adams & Cuomo: Movement Politics in 2025

We are looking for candidates who will use their 2025 campaign to uplift movement demands, build power with marginalized New Yorkers who have not seen themselves or their needs reflected in our political system, and contribute to our ultimate goal of replacing Eric Adams with a progressive mayor.

 Our candidates:
 

• Reject corporate, real estate, carceral, and fossil fuel money and endorsements.
• Build an unstoppable coalition, with a Ranked Choice Voting strategy:
   
  • All candidates: Engage your voters in Ranked Choice Voting as a winning, coalition strategy. By the time voting starts, ask your voters to rank up to four other candidates who share most of your values, and co-endorse with other candidates.
  • Mayoral candidates: Focus attacks on Adams, Cuomo, and the powerful right-wing forces trying to buy our elections and undermine our democracy Do not attack fellow progressive candidates or stoke divisions among progressive voters.
  • Council candidates: uplift progressive mayoral candidates through your campaign, endorse up to five of them, and instruct your voters not to rank Adams or Cuomo.

Priority 1: A Feminist, Caring Economy

We are working towards a New York where everyone can access affordable care at every age and stage of life – from childcare to home care – and an economy that treats care work as essential infrastructure.

Our candidates fight for:

• Universal child care, including universal 2K.
• Universal home care for disabled people and older adults.
• Great pay and working conditions for care workers.
• Protection of our communities from COVID and future pandemics.

Read our full care platform here.

Priority 2: Freeze the Rent, House the People - Housing & Tenant Justice 

We need a mayor and city council who will bring down the skyrocketing cost of living in the city, to make housing a human right and a permanent social good – creating a city full of homes that are permanently affordable, controlled by residents, green, well-built, and beautiful.

Our candidates fight to:

• Protect & increase affordable housing: Freeze the rent! Appoint Rent Guidelines Board members who will support a rent freeze; Increase HPD capital budget; Expand CityFHEPS.
• Hold landlords, banks, and city agencies accountable: Get abusive landlords out of business; Build community and tenant power; Level the playing field in housing court and in the housing search; Prevent and respond to homelessness; Create tenant-focused incentives for repair.
• Build the city we deserve: Create deeply affordable social housing; Invest in NYCHA; Make homes green and resilient by fully implementing local law 97.
• Support NY State policies that complement the above: the Social Development Housing Authority, Clean Hands Legislation, and the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase act.

Read our full Housing Justice platform here.

Priority 3: Immigrant Justice

We elect leaders who will protect all New Yorkers, no matter our race, no matter where we came from or when we got here. We reject policies and rhetoric that blame and shame new immigrants, dividing us as we all struggle to find safe and affordable housing and build a future in the city we love. 

Our candidates fight to:

• Uphold and expand sanctuary protections: Protect immigrants against ICE surveillance and arrest, and actively block NYC participation in ICE’s deportation machine. Restrict the DOC & NYPD’s ability to communicate and collaborate with ICE (Intro 396, Intro 395, & Intro 214).
• Stop evicting immigrant New Yorkers: End the current 30/60 day shelter stay limits and affirm the city’s long-standing Right to Shelter legal obligations,
• Fund services for immigrant New Yorkers: Including legal services & right to counsel for immigration services, language access, mental health services, and benefits and aid access.
• Protect street vendors from criminalization: Support the Street Vendor Reform Package.

Read our full Migrant Justice platform here. 

Priority 4: Addressing Police Violence, Investing in Real Safety 

New York City has the resources to make our city safer – they’re just not going to the right places. We need elected leaders in office who care more about cracking down on corruption than on fare evasion; more focused on moving people into housing than into jails; who prioritizes responding to people in crisis with healthcare, not handcuffs. This is what it means to invest in real public safety. 

Our candidates fight to:

• Invest in non-police public safety alternatives, like mental health & youth services, violence interrupter programs, supportive housing, and harm reduction.
• Decarcerate, decriminalize, and divest from policing and prisons.
• Stop Cop City: Remove NYPD from supervision, management and training of other city agencies; Cancel construction of Training Facility in College Point; reallocate funds to city services; Enforce NYPD compliance with laws around sharing data.
• Reduce wasteful spending on NYPD: Dismantle the Strategic Response Group; Dismantle DCPI (the NYPD’s 80-person public relations team); Reduce/constrain unlimited NYPD overtime.
• Enforce Police Accountability Measures: Bring the NYPD into compliance on the How Many Stops Act; Give the CCRB more power and authority; Fire abusive officers.

Read our full Policing & Public Safety platform here.

Priority 5: Combating Antisemitism & Hate Violence in NYC 

We know that Jews are safest in multiracial, pluralistic, open democracies with freedom of speech, religion, assembly, and equal protections for minority groups. In solidarity with Muslim, Arab, Asian, Black, brown, and LGBTQIA+ partners, JFREJ speaks out and organizes against antisemitism, hate violence and bias incidents. We reject carceral and police-based responses to hate violence in favor of investments in communities and prevention.

Our candidates:

• Speak out, name, and condemn antisemitism when it shows up in New York, with the understanding that antisemitism is part of the same machinery of fear and division that fuels racism, sexism, xenophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and all forms of oppression.
• Attend a JFREJ training on antisemitism - we will coordinate with campaigns directly to schedule a training for candidates and staff.
• Invest in hate violence prevention through increased funding for the P.A.T.H. Forward initiative.
• Reject carceral and police-based responses to antisemitism and hate violence. For example, we oppose expanding hate crime charges, and mask bans, which are both ineffective at decreasing hate violence while further restricting peoples’ freedoms.
• Oppose efforts to codify the IHRA definition of antisemitism into law. Our candidates understand that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are not one and the same, that anti-Zionism is not inherently or automatically antisemitic, and efforts to conflate the two undermine the fight against antisemitism.

Learn more about JFREJ’s approach to and resources on antisemitism and hate violence prevention.

Priority 6: Protecting Democracy, Free Speech, and the Right to Protest

Our candidates are committed to defending democracy against fascist & white Christian nationalist movements, false charges of antisemitism, and efforts to stifle free speech & labor organizing, criminalize protest, and attack publicly-funded institutions of higher learning. 

Our candidates:

• Speak out about and condemn white supremacy, fascism, and authoritarianism, especially when it rears its head in New York.
   

Our candidates oppose & reject:
 

• McCarthyism & blacklisting: Targeting, doxxing, expelling, or firing individual New Yorkers for speaking out for Palestinian rights and freedom, or on other issues.
• The criminalization and suppression of protest: including the SRG, or for example this bill that turns common protest tactics like blocking bridges and tunnels into felonies.
• Targeting public services and institutions under the guise of combating antisemitism: like threats to defund CUNY and other higher education.
• Threats to organizations: threats to revoke the tax status and go after the leaders of groups organizing around Palestine.

Priority 7: Israel/Palestine as a local issue

JFREJ was founded to focus on local organizing for racial and economic justice in NYC, and our members hold a variety of views on Israel-Palestine. However, we engage with Israel-Palestine as a local issue, and have been an active part of the movement for a permanent ceasefire, the release of all hostages and prisoners, humanitarian aid, and the rebuilding of Gaza, and an arms embargo. We organize because it’s personal, because it is impacting our local communities and politics, and most of all, we organize because we cannot stay silent in the face of a genocide carried out and defended in our name as Jews. Locally, we reject AIPAC, and support Not On Our Dime.

While local electeds are not responsible for U.S. foreign policy, below are the things we expect from all candidates seeking our endorsement:

• Believe in dignity, safety, human rights, and equality for all Palestinians, and for all Israelis.
• Want to see an end to the occupation & apartheid in Israel-Palestine.
• Do not diminish or erase the pain, suffering, or death toll of Israelis or of Palestinians on and since 10/7/23 when speaking out about Israel-Palestine.
• Meet with Palestinians, Muslims, and Arabs, as well as with Jews and Israelis, when learning about Israel-Palestine, and seek to do that learning locally and on a continuous basis.
• Reject punishment for engaging in BDS: such as this bill in the NYS legislature. 
• Reject donations and connections with AIPAC (federal), Solidarity PAC (local), and any other special interest groups that (1) intervene in U.S. elections to demonize left-leaning candidates who express sympathy for Palestinians, or (2) advocate for a U.S. foreign policy that supports the violation of Palestinian rights, including the unconditional flow of US military funding and weapons to the Israeli government.