Congressman Goldman Responds to Village View Article
By Arthur Schwartz
In our February issue we published an article titled Brad Lander Takes On Congressman Dan Goldman in Battle Over How to Best Fight for Sanity. In that piece I described what I thought was despicable conduct by Congressman Goldman when he ran his first campaign in 2022 and beat former Assembly Member Yuh-Line Niou by 1,200 votes in a 10 candidate race. I wrote “In 2022 he spent $7-8 million of his own money and was aided by another million or so from the Israeli PAC ─ AIPAC ─ which sent five mailings as NY Progressive PAC. Those mailings each contained ugly photos of then-Assembly Member Yuh-Line Niou, who was labeled “antisemite,” “anti-tenant,“ “NIMBY,” and “child hater.”
On February 2 Goldman sent me a text. Our exchange follows:
Goldman: Arthur, someone sent me your article today. You certainly are free to write articles critical of me ─ as you have in the past ─ but this one was full of outright lies. If you are interested in correcting the record, I’m happy to have my staff send you over a list of the false statements with citations to the truth.
Schwartz: You moved up some notches in my consideration by sending your text. I am not an ideologue, but I have certain principles. One of them is that I detest negative demeaning campaigning (having been victimized by it myself when I first ran for district leader) ─ and the stuff attacking Yuh-Line back in 2022 was some of the worst I ever saw. Distorted photos, assertions that she hated children, was anti-tenant, and was antisemitic, all targeted by AIPAC-related folks who were supporting you. Had you denounced that stuff I wouldn’t have held it against you. I was bothered by how much money you spent; elections shouldn’t be bought. I have been annoyed by your generally unwavering support for Israel
I am totally available to talk. As I said, I have been surprised about having no contact with you for your first four years. I think as a 25-year district leader who gets very involved in local issues (including as a lawyer) and who publishes a monthly paper which now has a circulation of 30,000, you might have reached out if you were interested. Not to mention my role as TWU’s principal lawyer for 25 years, my role as GC for CIDNY, and my role as a founder and leader of NYPAN after doing Bernie’s election work in 2016.
I don’t want your staff to write. I welcome you to write for (and advertise in) The Village View. And you are welcome to be a guest on my radio show which is on Wednesdays on WBAI. Brad was on recently. Wednesday I’ll have the editor of The Nation and Analilia Mejia who is running in a special election in Essex County. And I did a show last week for Holocaust Memorial Day. I have many values, some flowing from having four kids, the youngest is 20. I don’t abhor people with money. Feel free to call.
Goldman: Arthur, I had nothing to do with the negative ads against YLN and had no idea who was behind them until after the campaign. And I find it odd that you hold that against me, but apparently saw nothing wrong with Mondaire’s slanderous attack ad against me. (AS: Mondaire Jones was another candidate who I supported in the race; he came in 3rd.) But that is the past. As I said, you can certainly speak out against me — as you have done since the very beginning — but as a publisher/editor of a newspaper, you should do it truthfully. My support for the state of Israel as the only Jewish state in the world is unwavering, but I do not support this Israeli government (just like I support the United States but not Donald Trump). And I have spoken out against this Israeli government numerous times on all sorts of issues, including as a leader in Congress in opposing the settlements in the West Bank and their increasing expansion and escalating settler violence. This is just one of many instances where your accusations are patently false. Since I know you care about your paper’s credibility, I would assume you would want to correct those lies.
Schwartz: And what I would like is a piece from you. Not just now, but any time.
A Brief Comment On The Exchange
Congressman Goldman says he had nothing to do with the ugly attacks on his leading opponent, who was an Assembly Member at the time. But he never spoke out against them or demanded that his supporters at AIPAC apologize to Yuh-Line, who was 39, and autistic, and was devastated by those attacks. When I urged her to run on the Working Families Line against Goldman in the general election (he won the primary with only 24%) she started crying. (She has recovered and is running for election this year ─ see article: Another Primary). And he has never explained why he didn’t support the Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani against Andrew Cuomo ─ and never said a negative word about Cuomo.
He remains welcome to write, as frequently as he wants, in The Village View.
