Today is the tenth anniversary of the death of Ed Koch, who served as mayor of New York City from 1978 until 1989. Best known for his role in bringing the city out of its crime-ridden and near-bankrupt nadir of the 1970s, Koch was rarely soft-spoken about anything, and certainly not about being Jewish. Tevi Troy surveys the career of this “happy warrior.”
When Koch died in February 2013, he asked that the words of the murdered journalist Daniel Pearl be put on his tombstone: “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish.” This might have surprised many people who thought of him both as an entirely ethnic and an entirely unreligious figure, but Koch’s Jewishness was a key factor in determining many of his primary targets—people who did things or said things that were either offensive to Jews or damaging to Israel or both.
This became clear during the 1977 Democratic primary for the mayoralty, which pitted Koch against Bella Abzug, a Communist with “outrageous hats and more outrageous positions,” as Troy puts it.
She and Koch had served together in the House of Representatives, and she was one of Koch’s first notable enemies. Both were Jewish, but Koch expressed his Jewishness in the form of staunch support for Israel, whereas Abzug saw progressivism (she had led several Stalinist front groups) as the manifestation of her Jewishness. In 1976, Abzug signed a congressional letter opposing the sale of U.S. jets to Israel. Koch pounced, putting both his supportive letter as well as Abzug’s opposing one in the Congressional Record. He also bragged in his autobiography that he had his congressional office mail both to “every Jewish group I knew.” In doing so, Koch was hurting a political rival and a critic of Israel, a double bonus for him.
Almost as bitter was his feud with Jimmy Carter, in which Koch’s Jewishness again played a role. Even though Koch was largely aligned with Carter on domestic policy, they strongly disagreed on Israel, and Koch was not shy about pointing out their differences. Carter was particularly irked when Koch referred to five senior Carter-administration officials . . . as an anti-Israel “gang of five.” . . . At a fundraiser in 1980, Carter grabbed Koch and said to him, “You have done me more damage than any man in America.”
Troy observes that in the feud with Carter, much like a later one with Jesse Jackson, Koch demonstrated his ability to identify the failings of other public figures well before they were apparent to most.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentary.org/articles/tevi-troy/ed-koch-political-career/