Ronald J. Edelstein is the son of Holocaust survivors and a lifelong Jewish activist, writer and speaker. He is the chairman of Ron Properties, a real estate company in New York.
On November 3, 2026, I will cast my vote for Bruce Blakeman for governor of New York.
I will do so not merely because I believe New York needs a change in political leadership, nor because of the familiar partisan divisions that inevitably accompany a gubernatorial election. I will vote for Blakeman because New York has reached a consequential crossroads, and the fundamental responsibilities of government - protecting its citizens, preserving public order, defending religious freedom, maintaining economic viability and ensuring that ordinary families can afford to remain here - demand leadership of considerably greater clarity, conviction and resolve.
Above all, I am voting for Bruce Blakeman because New York’s escalating antisemitism crisis requires something far more formidable than sympathetic pronouncements, ceremonial condemnations and bureaucratic half-measures.
It requires action.
For Jewish New Yorkers, this is not an academic debate. The proliferation of anti-Jewish hostility, particularly in the years following the October 7, 2023 barbaric Hamas massacre in Israel, has profoundly altered the atmosphere in which Jews live, study, worship and participate in public life. Anti-Israel agitation has repeatedly spilled beyond legitimate political disagreement into intimidation, harassment and conduct that Jewish communities perceive as threatening.
Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration has failed to respond with the decisiveness required by the moment. Rep. Elise Stefanik and New York City officials have publicly accused Hochul of insufficient leadership in confronting rising antisemitism. Critics have also demanded accountability at the City University of New York, arguing that university leadership has failed to deal adequately with anti-Jewish hostility.
Warnings are not enough. Statements are not enough. When Jewish students are afraid to express their identity, when congregants require elaborate security merely to enter houses of worship, and when anti-Israel demonstrations cross the line into unlawful intimidation, government cannot retreat into ambiguity.
This is where Bruce Blakeman offers a dramatically different philosophy.
1. Blakeman has called for New York State to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, providing government institutions with a clearer framework for identifying contemporary manifestations of anti-Jewish hatred.
2. He supports buffer zones around religious institutions to protect worshippers from harassment.
3. He opposes the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign targeting Israel and rejects efforts to sever relationships between New York institutions and their Israeli counterparts.
Perhaps most importantly,Blakeman understands that laws and definitions mean very little without enforcement.
1. He has pledged to deploy State Police and, when necessary, the National Guard if local officials fail to control unlawful or dangerously disruptive demonstrations.
2. In Nassau County, he signed legislation restricting the use of masks in public spaces amid concerns surrounding anti-Israel protests, an effort intended to increase identification and accountability.
3. He also established the Nassau County Antisemitism Task Force to investigate hate incidents and educate young people.
One may debate the particulars of any enforcement mechanism. But one cannot plausibly accuse Blakeman of treating antisemitism as an afterthought. He recognizes it as a public-safety crisis. That distinction matters enormously to me.
New York is home to one of the largest and most consequential Jewish populations anywhere in the world. Jews should not have to wonder whether their government possesses the political courage to defend them when doing so becomes controversial.
A governor must make unequivocally clear that Jewish New Yorkers will not be abandoned to intimidation because officials are frightened of offending radical activists. Bruce Blakeman has demonstrated that clarity.
Kathy Hochul’s record, by contrast, raises troubling questions about whether New York’s government has confused public statements with effective governance. The criticism extends well beyond antisemitism.
Transparency
New York Focus filed a lawsuit challenging the Hochul administration’s refusal to release the governor’s official calendars. Lawmakers and watchdog organizations also criticized a budget provision exempting nearly $1.5 billion in spending from important legislative oversight, allowing contracts to be awarded without traditional fiscal review. Earlier in Hochul’s tenure, critics challenged her continued reliance on emergency pandemic powers to circumvent ordinary contracting procedures, generating accusations surrounding expensive vendor selections and potential political favoritism.
This is hardly the transparent government New Yorkers deserve. Ethical questions have accompanied the administration as well. Critics questioned recusal arrangements concerning Hochul’s husband, Bill Hochul, and his employment with Delaware North, arguing that his position created at least the appearance of potential conflicts. Meanwhile, one of Hochul’s earliest consequential political selections, former Lieutenant Governor Brian Benjamin, resigned after being arrested on federal bribery charges.
Cost of Living
Then there is the issue confronting New Yorkers every time they open an electricity bill, pay their taxes, purchase groceries or contemplate whether they can still afford to raise a family here. Affordability.
New York’s crushing cost of living is no longer merely an inconvenience. It is an existential threat to the state’s middle class. The Hochul administration has failed to adequately address the combination of high taxation, expensive utilities and relentless living costs that has encouraged residents and businesses to seek refuge in less punitive jurisdictions. Her shifting posture toward Manhattan congestion pricing became emblematic of an administration too frequently caught between competing constituencies and unwilling to establish a coherent course.
New York already imposes an extraordinary combined state and local tax burden. Yet state spending has continued to expand dramatically, while ordinary residents are expected to absorb the consequences.
Even Hochul’s critics on the political left complain that her fiscal policies are inadequate, albeit for precisely the opposite reason: they want substantially higher taxes on wealthy residents to finance a larger social welfare state.
New York families, meanwhile, remain caught in the middle.
Bruce Blakeman offers a fundamentally different economic proposition. His gubernatorial platform proposes approximately $35 billion in statewide tax reductions. Under his plan, single filers earning $50,000 or less would pay no state income tax, while married couples earning $100,000 or less would likewise be exempt. For those earning above that threshold, the first $100,000 would be excluded from state taxation under the proposal. His campaign projects that families could save approximately $4,000 to $7,000 annually.
That is not cosmetic relief. For a working family struggling with mortgage or rent payments, groceries, transportation, childcare, insurance and utility bills, thousands of dollars retained annually can mean the difference between remaining in New York and leaving it.
Blakeman’s philosophy is refreshingly straightforward: government should stop treating taxpayers as an inexhaustible source of revenue. His energy proposals are similarly ambitious. Blakeman has pledged to cut electric and utility bills in half. His plan calls for using approximately $2.4 billion in unspent energy tax funds, eliminating the System Benefit Charge and expanding New York’s energy supply through natural gas, hydrofracking in the Southern Tier and increased nuclear generation.
Contrast that with the criticism surrounding Hochul’s energy record. The Public Service Commission under her administration has approved repeated utility-rate increases, leaving New Yorkers confronting electricity and heating costs considerably above national averages. The implementation timetable associated with the state’s climate policies threatens to impose substantial additional costs upon consumers.
The administration’s response has included energy rebates of as much as $200 for some households. But there is an obvious question New Yorkers should ask: Would they rather receive a one-time government check or have substantially lower energy bills month after month?
Blakeman’s answer is structural reform rather than temporary consolation.
Public Safety
The same philosophical divide emerges on public safety. Blakeman wants to replicate his Nassau County approach across New York by expanding law enforcement, hiring additional police officers, repealing cashless bail policies he regards as excessively favorable to offenders, imposing tougher consequences on violent criminals and fentanyl traffickers, increasing prison capacity and strengthening cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
His approach begins with an elementary principle that New York’s political establishment has too often complicated beyond recognition: government’s first obligation is to protect law-abiding people.
There can be compassion for the mentally ill without surrendering subway cars and sidewalks to disorder. There can be criminal-justice reform without creating a revolving door for repeat offenders. There can be immigration policy without expecting taxpayers to finance an indefinitely expanding infrastructure of emergency accommodations.
And there can be respect for constitutional protest without tolerating intimidation, vandalism or threats masquerading as political expression.
Blakeman understands these distinctions.
Hochul’s public-safety record has generated criticism from virtually every ideological direction. Bail reform and parole policies have been too lenient toward repeat offenders. Others have criticized expensive deployments of State Police and National Guard personnel in the subway system as exercises in political optics rather than durable solutions. Civil-liberties advocates, meanwhile, have attacked her proposals for involuntary hospitalization of severely mentally ill homeless people as excessively coercive.
When an administration is simultaneously accused of being too weak to restore order and too heavy-handed in its improvised attempts to demonstrate action, something fundamental has gone wrong.
The Corrections Crisis provides another illustration. The Hochul administration dismissed approximately 2,000 correction officers who failed to return following an illegal three-week strike precipitated by disputes involving dangerous prison conditions and deaths in custody. Eliminating so many officers during an existing staffing crisis risked further compromising institutional safety.
Blakeman’s instinct is different: restore institutional capacity rather than continually diminish it. That is the recurring theme of his candidacy.
- More police where police are needed.
- More prison capacity when dangerous criminals must be incarcerated.
- Lower taxes when families cannot afford to remain.
- Greater energy production when utility bills are crushing households.
- Clearer protections when Jews are being intimidated.
- Stronger enforcement when protests become unlawful.
- And unmistakable solidarity with Israel when ideological movements seek to isolate the Jewish state.
New York desperately needs that clarity. For too long, Albany has behaved as though decline must simply be managed - as though astronomical taxes, population flight, deteriorating public order, rising utility bills and growing antisemitism are unfortunate but immutable characteristics of contemporary New York.
They are not. They are problems produced, exacerbated or tolerated by policy choices, and different choices can produce different results.
That is why this election matters. I am voting for Bruce Blakeman because I want a governor who understands that restoring New York requires more than rearranging the machinery of Albany. It requires changing its priorities.
I want a governor who regards taxpayers as citizens to be respected rather than wallets to be emptied. I want a governor who understands that affordable energy is not a luxury. I want a governor who believes law-abiding New Yorkers possess a right to safe streets, safe subways and functioning public institutions.
And as a Jewish New Yorker, I particularly want a governor who will confront antisemitism without hesitation, euphemism or political calculation. There should be nothing controversial about protecting a Jewish child walking into school. Nothing controversial about ensuring that a family can enter a synagogue without running a gauntlet of intimidation. Nothing controversial about opposing efforts to economically isolate Israel. Nothing controversial about giving law enforcement the resources necessary to stop unlawful conduct. And nothing controversial about establishing a clear definition of antisemitism so that public institutions can recognize the hatred they are supposed to confront.
Bruce Blakeman understands that Jewish security cannot depend upon the ideological disposition of whoever happens to control City Hall or a university administration. It is a fundamental responsibility of government.
That, more than anything else, separates the choice before New Yorkers this November.
Kathy Hochul has had the opportunity to demonstrate what her model of government can accomplish. The criticisms detailed across transparency, contracting, affordability, utilities, corrections, public safety and antisemitism reveal an administration that too often appears reactive where New York requires leadership.
Bruce Blakeman is offering something different: lower taxes, cheaper energy, stronger policing, a tougher criminal-justice system, explicit protection for Jewish institutions and unapologetic opposition to antisemitism and the campaign to delegitimize Israel.
New York was once synonymous with boundless aspiration - the place where families came to build, entrepreneurs came to create, immigrants came to begin again and people of every background believed that hard work could produce a better life.
That New York is worth fighting for. Restoring it will require more than nostalgia. It will require a governor prepared to reject the policies that have made the state increasingly unaffordable, disorderly and inhospitable to the people who built their lives here.
For Jewish New Yorkers, the stakes are even more immediate. We need to know that when hatred appears at our schools, synagogues, universities or on our streets, the governor of New York will not merely express concern.
We need a governor who will act. On November 3, my choice will therefore be unequivocal. I am voting for Bruce Blakeman because New York does not need another four years of managing decline. It needs restoration. It needs security. It needs affordability. It needs accountability.
And at a moment when antisemitism has become one of the defining moral and public-safety challenges confronting our state, New York needs a governor willing to say, without qualification or apology, that Jewish citizens will be protected and those who threaten them will encounter the full authority of the law.
Bruce Blakeman has made that commitment central to his vision for New York.
He has earned my vote.
I therefore urge my fellow New Yorkers to join me on November 3 in voting for Bruce Blakeman for governor. This election is about far more than party affiliation; it is about the kind of New York we intend to leave to our children and grandchildren.
A Blakeman administration promises to let working families keep more of what they earn, reduce punishing energy costs, restore law and order, strengthen the institutions responsible for protecting our communities, and confront antisemitism with the seriousness and resolve this escalating crisis demands.
Whether you are worried about paying your utility bill, keeping your neighborhood safe, protecting your children, preserving your livelihood or ensuring that Jewish New Yorkers can worship and live without intimidation, the stakes are profoundly personal.
Bruce Blakeman offers New Yorkers an opportunity to replace resignation with renewal and decline with restoration. For the security, prosperity and future of our families, I ask New Yorkers across this state to stand with me, vote for Bruce Blakeman, and give him the opportunity to build a safer, stronger and more affordable New York for all of us.