Democratic Candidate for Ohio’s 11th Congressional Seat Is an Old-School Black Cleveland Democrat, and That’s How She Won the Jewish Vote

On August 3, Shontel Brown, the chairperson of the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party and a mainstream Democratic candidate, defeated the frontrunner, progressive candidate, Nina Turner, former state senator and co-chair of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, in the Democratic primary for Ohio’s 11th Congressional district in the Cleveland and Akron area. Thirteen candidates—Black and white—ran in the race, but these two Black women were the only ones to galvanize significant support among voters.

Brown won with 50.4% of the vote to Turner’s 44.1%. Turner claims she “didn’t lose this race, evil money manipulated and maligned this election,” a reference to the support for Brown from the pro-Israel lobby, especially the Democratic Majority for Israel PAC, as Turner herself retweeted.

Turner should have a little more introspection, because the truth is that she did lose the race, and it’s not that hard to see where and how it happened.

Ohio’s 11th congressional district is the only majority-minority congressional district in the state. It’s home to a large Black community and the heart of the largest and most vibrant Jewish community in Ohio. Cleveland’s Jewish community is close-knit, with extensive ties both to Israel and the local Black community.

Turner lost for many reasons, among them that she openly disdained the Democratic establishment— famously referring to voting for Biden vs. Trump as eating half a bowl instead of a whole bowl of excrement. And she alienated the Congressional Black Caucus. But she also lost because the Jewish community voted in force for her main rival. Heavily Jewish suburbs like Beachwood (at 31% turnout) voted at twice the rate of non-Jewish suburbs like Seven Hills (17%), Maple Heights (15%), and Garfield Heights (13%). And even within Beachwood, heavily Jewish precincts like precinct A voted at more than twice the rate (36.7%) of the less Jewish precinct I (15.5%).

Even more telling, precinct A voted ten to one for Brown, while precinct I voted only two to one for Brown. Similar patterns can be found when comparing precincts in University Heights and other suburbs with significant Jewish populations. Crucially, race does not seem to have been the deciding factor, as Maple Heights, with three fourths of its population Black, voted for Brown over Turner at roughly the same rate as nearby Seven Hills (former home of John Demjanjuk, the infamous Nazi deathcamp guard), where 94% of its population is white. What is dispositive is a correlation between Jewish areas and both the rate of voting and the margin of victory for Brown.

While Turner would have us believe Cleveland’s Jews were manipulated by “evil money,” I would say that she sealed her own fate, and that statements like that one, which Cleveland Jews are all too used to hearing as thinly veiled antisemitism, show how deaf she is to the role she played in her own political demise.

While Turner would have us believe Cleveland’s Jews were manipulated by “evil money,” I would say that she sealed her own fate, and that statements like that one, which Cleveland Jews are all too used to hearing as thinly veiled antisemitism, show how deaf she is to the role she played in her own political demise.

I grew up in Beachwood, which has the distinction of having the second highest percentage of Jews of any city or town in the world outside of Israel. At the time, while the suburb itself was over 90% Jewish, the school system was “only” 80% Jewish, since it was (and still is) a destination suburb for minority families with school-age children, especially Black families. While relations weren’t perfect (as conversations with Black high school friends have since informed me), there was a camaraderie among the Jewish and Black populations of Cleveland with a general sense of acceptance and the need to have each other’s backs.

Brown graduated high school shortly after I did. While, as far as I know, she didn’t go to Beachwood or any other heavily Jewish school, through her significant outreach to the Jewish community she tapped into a sense of camaraderie and allyship that historically extended far beyond the Jewish suburbs. I remember how tense the situation could get when I was on the swim team (a sport not usually known for physical altercations) and we would race against mostly white Christian high schools. We knew not to be surprised when we would encounter a certain “quiet antisemitism,” just as our Black student council members knew not to be surprised when they were offered watermelon (a reference to a racist stereotype) when they were among our delegates to a nearby mostly white Christian suburb. Ohio is polite, but it’s still bigoted.

But when we raced against Shaw high school in East Cleveland, an almost entirely Black school with virtually no Jewish students, we could all relax and let our guard down. We knew we weren’t going to have to deal with antisemitism from them, and they knew they weren’t going to have to deal with racism from us. Once, when we raced Shaw, midway through the 50- or 100-meter butterfly, one of their swimmers gave out a blood-curdling scream as his right arm popped out of the socket. The two Beachwood students on his right and left stopped immediately, jumped into his lane, popped his arm back in, and only after they had determined he was alright did they finish the race. Even at the young age of fourteen, I recognized this not as some kumbaya moment that we can all get along, but as the fulfillment of a silent pact between our two communities, that even testosterone-filled teenage boys hell-bent on winning a race would drop everything if a member of either community was hurt or in trouble.        

We knew we weren’t going to have to deal with antisemitism from them, and they knew they weren’t going to have to deal with racism from us.

My first encounter with antisemitism from the Black community came when I visited New York City a few years later in the fall of 1990. I was wearing my yarmulke, and I remember hearing “There’s a f—ing Jew!” as I entered the subway car. I turned around expecting to see a white person, only to be utterly shocked when I found myself face-to-face with an elderly Black man. The subway doors closed, separating us before I could compose myself enough to ask why he would say that to me, though I would get my answer ten months later when the Crown Heights riots broke out. That was when I learned that Black-Jewish relations were not the same in other parts of the country.

I don’t know Brown well, but her outreach to the Jewish community made it clear that she grew up with a Cleveland sense of Black-Jewish relations. Most of the Cleveland Jewish community lives within Ohio’s 11th congressional district and has been represented by a Black congressperson for over half a century, beginning with Louis Stokes in what was then the 21st congressional district, followed by Stephanie Tubbs Jones and Marcia Fudge in the redistricted 11th district. Fudge was reelected in 2020 but vacated when she was appointed by President Biden to be Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Cleveland’s Jewish community is not univocal, but one of the fundamental understandings behind the decades-long Jewish support of these Black candidates has been the trust between the two communities, the notion that together we can end bigotry for all of us. For the Cleveland Jewish community with its strong and historic ties to Israel (Abba Hillel Silver was a prominent Cleveland rabbi and a staunch supporter of the founding of the state of Israel) that has included not demonizing Jews or Israel. Of course, behind closed doors, most of us have plenty of criticism for any number of Israeli policies and politicians (don’t get my aunt started on Bibi). But there’s a general concern around airing our dirty laundry in public and incurring antisemitism.

Cleveland Jews know all too well that when we leave our Eastside enclave and go to the Westside of Cleveland, we may “jokingly” be asked for our passport. We also know that this is a barely disguised reference to the fact that we have left our Pale of settlement and ventured out past the area in which we are expected to be found.

Nina Turner may have grown up in Cleveland, but she has made a name for herself as co-chair of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign. While Sanders is Jewish and a senator from Vermont, he is culturally still very much a liberal Jew from New York, with many of the sensibilities that that brings with it—sensibilities that are often blind to the sensitivities of Midwestern Jews. Like the silent pact between Cleveland’s Jewish and Black communities, Sanders’ progressive wing of the Democratic Party also has a pact of solidarity between oppressed communities to fight oppression. This pact, however, increasingly sees Israel as the quintessential oppressor. This particularly came to a fore during and after the Gaza war this past May. Cori Bush gave an impassioned speech on the House floor linking police violence against Black people with Israeli apartheid and militarized occupation of Palestine. Days before the special election, Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush, and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez voted against the House bill that included security assistance to Israel (which by definition included funding for the Iron Dome).

Turner lost for many reasons, but alienating the Jewish vote was a primary cause. I am a case in point. I should have been a reliable vote for her. While I come from Cleveland, I have spent the last quarter of a century as part of the New York intellectual left that is a cornerstone of the progressive movement Turner champions. From January 2017 through July 2020, I went from the Women’s March to BLM marches and numerous rallies in between to stand up for the rights of immigrants and minorities.

Turner lost for many reasons, but alienating the Jewish vote was a primary cause.

So when Turner announced her candidacy in December of last year, soon after I had moved back to the Cleveland area to be closer to my aging parents during the pandemic, I felt excited and energized. But the more I read the literature and advertisements sent by her campaign committee, unqualifiedly aligning Turner with Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, and Cori Bush, the more I began to question my vote for her. Nowhere in any of that messaging, neither in the mailed literature nor in the targeted Facebook advertisements, did she suggest that while she aligned with them on domestic issues, she differed on Israel. The weekend before the elections, as the Cleveland Jewish News was reporting that her allies were voting against security assistance to Israel, she made no effort to distance herself from them on their vote.

On the contrary, the day after that CJN article came out, Turner posted her solidarity with Cori Bush on Facebook without any qualification about Bush’s vote on Israel the day before. And she failed to speak out in the late spring and summer on behalf of Jews as the Gaza conflict sparked antisemitic attacks across the U.S., or reach out to the Jewish community in Cleveland during this trying time. This sealed her fate.

So, no, “evil money” didn’t “manipulate” the Jewish vote. Democratic Majority for Israel may have helped get the word out, but many Cleveland Jews were perfectly capable of reading the literature sent to them by both candidates regarding their respective positions on issues near and dear to voters’ hearts. And those voters were able to see that while both candidates expressed notions of solidarity, only one shared their old-school Cleveland sense of Black and Jewish solidarity, and it was for that candidate that the vast majority of Cleveland Jews voted. In her concession speech, Turner likened herself to Moses, unable to get into the Promised Land. The book that tells that story also promises the Israelites that they will get to live in peace and security in the land of Israel. Ironically, it was because Turner couldn’t convince her would-be Jewish constituents that she would protect their Israeli brethren’s right to live in peace and security in that very land, that she failed to make it.

David Brodsky is the chairperson of the Department of Judaic Studies at Brooklyn College, City University of New York.