Rep. Nita Lowey on Capitol Hill last October. TOM WI LLIAM S/CQ -ROLL C ALL, I NC VIA GET T Y I MAGES
‘An Extraordinary Opportunity to do Good’ Nita Lowey, retiring after 32 years in Congress, will finally get to spend more time with her family.
Ron Kamepas JTA
W
ashington — Nita Lowey, who is retiring after 32 years representing Westchester and Rockland counties in Congress, fields a question about her legacy as a Jewish lawmaker. No trouble there — she talks about Israel and her Jewish pride all the time. Then there’s one about her legacy as one of the pioneering women in Congress. That one goes down easy, too: Her office is plastered with photos signifying how far women have come in American politics. But when a reporter asks a question combining the two — about her legacy as a female Jewish lawmaker — the New York Democrat has to ask an assistant to find some tissues. “Oh, I have to stop and get emotional,” she said in an interview late last year after she announced she wouldn’t be seeking re-election. Why does Lowey choke up over the question? It goes back to her mother, Beatrice Melnikoff. “I grew up in the Bronx, where my mother was active in all kinds of Jewish communities, the synagogue, and it was something that was handed on to me, l’dor v’dor,” Lowey told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in her office on Capitol Hill, using the Hebrew expression meaning from generation to generation. “This has been an extraordinary op-
portunity to do good.” At 82, Lowey is the second most powerful lawmaker in the U.S. House of Representatives, behind only the speaker, Nancy Pelosi of California. Along with Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas), the Appropriations Committee’s ranking member, Lowey was one of 50 women named to InStyle magazine’s “Badass list” this summer. She launched her congressional career in 1988, when a Jewish man — Lowey doesn’t say who — talked her into running for Congress. The field already included two men. “You’d be the best candidate,” he told Lowey, then a longtime assistant secretary of state for New York. The tale recalled a time when women had to be persuaded to join the political fray. Lowey had emerged as a Jewish leader as a student at Mount Holyoke College. There were religious services for Christians, but not for the Jewish women. “I organized Friday night services for 15 women, and although back in the Bronx I didn’t go to Friday night services, I organized Friday night services and I thought that was important,” she said. Lowey says her Jewish identity as a lawmaker has been defined on the Appropriations Committee, where she became the senior Democrat in 2013 and the committee chair since the beginning of this year. Upon taking the helm, Lowey had the option of chairing a subcommittee. It was narrowed to two choices: Labor, Health and Human Services,
which controls $150 billion, including spending on many of the women’s issues she favors, or Foreign Operations, which deals with just over a third of that amount. She chose the latter. “I took that committee because I felt that it was important to make sure that the partnership between Israel and the United States remains strong,” she said. Lowey and Granger have appeared together at annual meetings of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to argue that bipartisan support for Israel is vital — and more broadly, that foreign aid generally is critical to American security. That position, once mainstream among Republicans, has put Granger at odds with the Trump administration. The New York legislator spoke regretfully of the fraying relations between Democrats and the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for which she blames Republicans and also — gently — Netanyahu. She recalled pleading with Netanyahu in 2015 not to accept an invitation from then-Speaker John Boehner to use Congress as a stage to slam President Barack Obama’s efforts to negotiate a deal to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions. “I said, ‘I’ll arrange private meetings for you in the House and Senate. This was not a bipartisan invitation, and I believe passionately for Israel and the U.S. to maintain a bipartisan alliance. Don’t come within a framework that has been partisan,’” Lowey recalled. “He said, ‘I’ll think about it.’ He never got back to me.” She considered Netanyahu a friend, Lowey said, and it was clear his snub still stung. Since then, Lowey has pivoted from being the kind of stalwart pro-Israel lawmaker who would never utter a word of criticism of its government to one who more proactively promotes policies that Israel rejects. Netanyahu, following the lead of President Donald Trump, has retreated from the two-state solution. Lowey robustly promotes it. Lowey pressed AIPAC hard to join J Street, the liberal Jewish Middle East policy group, and the Alliance for Middle East Peace in backing a bill that would budget $50 million to support grassroots peace programs for which the Trump administration has eliminated funding. The Netanyahu government and its allies have derided some of the NGOs that would receive the funds as inimical to Israel’s interests. Disagreeing with Israeli government policies is not such a big deal, Lowey said. “If there have been disagreements with Israel, we can talk about it openly and honestly,” she said. Still, Lowey beams with pride in recalling the wonder that members of the Congressional Black Caucus expressed when they learned during a trip to Israel that Lowey led in the 1990s about Israeli efforts to assist developing African countries. The country’s medical and science innovations, she said, “make me so proud to be a Jew, as a Jewish member of Congress having the opportunity to work for peace, work for good relationships between Arabs and Jews. It’s been a privilege.”
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9 Retirement Living ■ The Jewish Week & NJJN ■ April 2020
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