For the first four years of his term, U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff has been noteworthy for the news he hasn’t made. The youngest member of the Senate is no longer on TikTok. He doesn’t appear on cable news with hot takes. On any given day, he’s far more likely to be talking to a small-town Georgia mayor than chasing headlines.
But the headlines found Ossoff last week after he, the state’s first Jewish senator, cast two procedural votes that would have limited certain weapons sales to Israel for eventual use in its war against Hamas.
The votes were essentially symbolic. All involved knew the effort led by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and joined by Georgia’s U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, didn’t have the votes to pass. Ossoff also voted to approve the overall effort sending $13 billion of additional military aid to Israel. But that didn’t prevent some high-profile members of Georgia Jewish communities from seeing the narrower votes from Ossoff as a betrayal from one of their own.
“This really hit people in a way that I think is deeper than someone might have anticipated,” Rabbi Joshua Heller, the senior rabbi of Congregation B’nai Torah, told me. “If you have a friend who is true nine times, and then on the 10th leaves you hanging, it doesn’t necessarily undo the first nine, but it makes you wonder, ‘What’s going to happen on time 11?”
Ossoff’s allies have said that he is a leader for the entire state, including the young and progressive Democrats, Black, Jewish and otherwise, who agreed with his votes.
Nobody is more ready to defend the votes than Ossoff himself. And in an interview from his Washington office, he said he wasn’t surprised by the reaction to his latest votes related to Israel.
“I am criticized every day of every week for the decisions that I make, and I welcome criticism, it’s part of public life,” he said.
It hasn’t been only Jewish Georgians angry with him at points in the year-plus since Hamas attacked Israel and the Israeli government responded. After calling the initial Hamas attack “an act of unconscionable brutality,” Ossoff’s office and home were picketed by pro-Palestinian protesters. A sit-in unfolded in his Washington lobby. Black faith leaders recently ran a full-page ad in the AJC urging him and Warnock to push for a ceasefire. But he said none of that swayed his thinking.
“Then, as now, it didn’t influence my vote,” he said. “Because when it comes to U.S. national security, my job is to vote according to my assessment of our national interest — not to navigate domestic politics or worry about short-term political blowback or criticism, but to do what I think is right for the country.”
The country he’s talking about, of course, is the United States. But as the first Jewish senator from the state, he also has the weight of what many in Georgia’s Jewish communities want him to do to protect and defend the Jewish state of Israel.
His position is detailed and nuanced, but detail and nuance are not attributes that are always rewarded in today’s political climate. And for some Jewish Georgians, there is no room for either in what they see as an existential war against Hamas where they believe Ossoff is either with them or against them.
Ossoff said all of his work related to Israel — his statements of support, his votes to fund its war efforts, and his most recent votes to limit the sale of some arms to the country — are exactly who he is. And he’s confident he’s doing the right thing.
“This is who I am,” he said. “I made the decision when I was elected that I was going to make decisions on the merits, that I was going to pursue substantive solutions, and that I was going to vote according to my well-informed and good-faith assessment of America’s national interests and Georgia’s interests,” he said. “That’s what I’ve done throughout my tenure. That’s what I will continue to do.”