By Shmuel Legesse, JNS
We are not spectators. We are the people who write just laws, pave safer streets and make sure that every neighbor is seen.
University Heights, Ohio, is not Jerusalem. It is a small suburb of Cleveland, not a global capital. Yet what happened there this week should reverberate through every synagogue, campus Hillel and Jewish kitchen table in America.
Michele Weiss, an Orthodox Jewish woman, stood before her community and took the oath of office as mayor. In a nation where Jews are often told to keep their heads down, where visibly Orthodox Jews have been attacked on American streets and vilified online, an observant woman put on the mayoral sash and said, in effect: We are not leaving. We are leading.
She is being described as the first female Orthodox Jewish mayor in the United States. That alone is historic. It follows a path blazed, in a different era and context, by figures like Meyera Oberndorf, the longtime mayor of Virginia Beach, Va., who was raised in an Orthodox Jewish home. But Weiss represents something even more urgent for this moment: a rejection of Jewish fear and passivity at a time when both have become dangerously tempting.
This is not an isolated story. In November, the village of Bal Harbour in Southeast Florida swore in an Orthodox Jewish mayor, Seth Salver, making him the third Orthodox mayor currently serving a municipality of Miami‑Dade County. Orthodox mayors now serve in multiple cities and suburbs across the country, including in New Jersey, New York State and Florida. And this same week, as Weiss took office in University Heights, another Orthodox Jew, Justin Brasch, was inaugurated as mayor of White Plains, N.Y. Taken together, these inaugurations mark more than a demographic fact. They pose a moral challenge.
For years, too many Jews in America have internalized a destructive message—that our role is to apologize, to keep a low profile, to rely on “them” the authorities, the media, the universities, the NGOs to protect us. The Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the wave of open antisemitism that followed on American campuses and in city streets shattered that illusion.
Weiss’s election is an answer. Jews are not just victims or commentators. We are actors. We are not a helpless minority waiting to be defended. We are citizens, covenantal partners, and, as Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks insisted, bearers of a responsibility to be a “light unto the nations” wherever we live.
That calling is not poetic decoration; it is a job description. It means stepping forward to run for office rather than only lobbying those who hold it. It means writing budgets instead of merely complaining about them. It means taking responsibility for protecting our communities, not only begging others to do it for us. And it means advocating for the needs of all our neighbors—black, Latino, immigrant, Christian, Muslim, secular—precisely as Jews, not in spite of our Judaism.
Sacks spoke of the Jew as a “moral agent in history,” a “human mosaic messenger” of dignity, justice and hope. That is exactly what a mayor is supposed to be at the local level—the one who sees each resident not as a number but as a neighbor; the person who says, “The broken sidewalk, the unsafe street, the underfunded school, the hateful graffiti these are my problems to fix.”
Weiss, Salver, Brasch and their Orthodox colleagues in other cities have chosen to step into that role with their kippahs, sheitels and Shabbat observance intact. They are not hiding their identity to gain power; they are using public power as an expression of that identity. That is precisely what makes their election so provocative. It cuts directly against the narrative, popular on both the antisemitic far right and the anti‑Zionist far left, that Jews are somehow alien to the societies in which we live—that we are permanent outsiders, tolerated guests or sinister manipulators.
The reality is different. We are mayors. We are council members. We are school board leaders. We are the people who pick up the phone when a streetlight is out, when a small business is collapsing, when a teenager has nowhere safe to go after school. Far from being the problem, Jews who follow the ethic of covenant and responsibility are often the ones who step up to fix problems.
The rise of Orthodox mayors in the United States across red states and blue states, in suburbs and cities, should embolden Jews everywhere, and not only the religiously observant. It should encourage us to run for local office even when the climate feels hostile; to speak openly as Jews about safety, justice, education, housing and communal responsibility; and to insist that protecting Jewish life and protecting the dignity of every human being in our cities are not competing agendas but the same moral project.
Weiss takes office at a time when many American Jews feel cornered by campus mobs, by online hatred, by the shocking ease with which people can chant for our destruction. Her answer is not retreat, not cynicism, not silence.
New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, Phoenix, Seattle: If University Heights, White Plains and Bal Harbour can choose Orthodox Jewish mayors, so can you. If these places can entrust their future to an openly Jewish leader, so can a thousand other towns where Jews have lived quietly for generations.
The message of this moment should be seared into our political and spiritual memory. We are not just the people who remember pogroms and Oct. 7. We are the people who rebuild. We are not only the people who mourn injustice. We are the people who write just laws, pave safer streets and make sure that every neighbor is seen.
Michele Weiss did not simply win an election. She exposed an excuse. To American Jews who say, “It’s too dangerous; they won’t accept us; we have no power,” her victory and those of Salver, Brasch and others respond: We are not hopeless. We are not spectators. We are here to repair.
That is what it means, in the words of Sacks, to carry moral diplomacy into the town hall and the city budget. That is what it means to be a Jew in University Heights, in Bal Harbour, in White Plains and in every place on earth where Jews still dare to believe that our task is not only to survive history, but to shape it.
