In another district or another time, Representative Daniel Goldman of New York City would probably coast to re-election for his safely Democratic seat.
He is a well-spoken former prosecutor with liberal bona fides and a vast personal fortune. He won plaudits as the House’s chief investigator during President Trump’s first impeachment, and could reprise that role if Democrats take back the chamber.
But as he formally begins his campaign for a third term on Tuesday, Mr. Goldman, 49, is instead girding for the fight of his political life as he faces a primary challenge from Brad Lander, a popular former city official.
These are not easy times to be a Democratic incumbent, after all. With Mr. Trump upending Washington and rattling the world order, the party’s voters are actively reconsidering how their leaders should fight back and what they should stand for on issues including the economy and Gaza.
Mr. Lander, 56, has spent weeks contending that Mr. Goldman’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza has defied the residents of his Brooklyn and Manhattan district, and that his lawyerly approach is too timid for the moment. The challenger has the backing of the city’s politically powerful new mayor, Zohran Mamdani.
Now, Mr. Goldman is ready to have his say.
He will declare his candidacy on Tuesday, the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, with a video highlighting his successes constraining Mr. Trump in court and Congress and his support for left-leaning policies like Medicare for All and a tax hike on the wealthy.
In an expansive interview over lunch at a diner in Manhattan’s Chinatown, Mr. Goldman pointed to a successful lawsuit he helped bring that forced Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to grant members of Congress access to immigration holding cells as proof of concept.
“My approach to the job is to get results,” he said, “not revolutions.”
Mr. Goldman took swipes at Mr. Lander, arguing that his rival was only running for Congress as a fallback after Mr. Mamdani did not hire him for his administration. (Mr. Lander has rejected that suggestion.)
The congressman also questioned whether the activist tactics Mr. Lander had embraced — he was arrested last June at the immigration courthouse at 26 Federal Plaza while trying to escort a migrant facing detention — were actually effective.
“Civil disobedience is a very valid and important way to protest,” he said. “But I don’t know whether a single person has benefited from that other than perhaps Brad Lander, because he gets a lot of attention for it.”
And Mr. Goldman said he had resigned himself to the fact that his support for Israel, which he called central to his faith and his worldview, could come at a political cost as polls show Democratic opinions moving against the American ally after years of war.
“I understood that ran the risk of engendering a primary,” he said. But, he added that he had tried to make decisions around the conflict based on “what I genuinely thought was best for the state of Israel, the people of Israel, Palestinian civilians and the future state of Palestine.”
The showdown is one of a half dozen or more competitive Democratic primaries that have bubbled up around the nation’s largest city in recent weeks. Progressives inspired by Mr. Mamdani are also challenging Representatives Adriano Espaillat and Ritchie Torres in Manhattan and the Bronx, while Democrats from across the spectrum are competing for other open seats.
But the race between Mr. Goldman and Mr. Lander in New York’s 10th District may be among the highest wattage.
Connecting Lower Manhattan to Brooklyn, the district leans clearly to the left and voted decisively for Mr. Mamdani in November. It includes Wall Street, two Chinatowns, liberal affluent neighborhoods of brownstone Brooklyn and the Orthodox Jewish community of Borough Park.
Mr. Goldman, a Levi Strauss heir with little background in city politics, narrowly won the seat in 2022, when he spent nearly $5 million of his own money and progressive support fractured among three other candidates.
Since then, he has had one of the most liberal voting records in Congress. Like Mr. Lander, Mr. Goldman supports Mr. Mamdani’s proposals to provide universal, government-funded child care; to raise taxes on wealthy New Yorkers; and to create a new department of community safety to shift some responsibility from the Police Department.
His work on immigration has not been limited to court. He has turned his Lower Manhattan office, which sits just across the street from 26 Federal Plaza, into a triage center to help connect families of migrants who are detained with social and legal services.
“There are folks who believe that because of my presence there, far fewer arrests are made,” he said.
But progressives have always been wary of Mr. Goldman — of his wealth, his relatively shallow ties to community groups and, above all in recent years, his positions on Israel and the war in Gaza.
Mr. Goldman has repeatedly voted to send American military aid to Israel, and he declined to endorse Mr. Mamdani over concerns about his sharp criticism of the country. (Mr. Goldman says he wrote in State Senator Zellnor Myrie’s name on Election Day.)
Progressives were particularly upset when, not long after the war began, Mr. Goldman voted to censure Representative Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, for her statements relating to it.
Many are now backing Mr. Lander, who raised his profile while running in the Democratic primary for mayor last year. Like Mr. Goldman, Mr. Lander is Jewish and considers himself a Zionist.
But he has moved leftward with his party’s base, supporting putting conditions on certain U.S. military aid to Israel and blocking the transfer of bombs and other heavy weapons outright. More than two years after the war began, he started calling Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide, a position few other Jewish elected officials have taken.
Among Mr. Lander’s supporters is Assemblyman Robert Carroll, a Brooklyn Democrat who endorsed Mr. Goldman in 2022, and now calls that decision “one of the poorest choices I made.”
“He did not just turn a cold shoulder on his constituents,” Mr. Carroll said recently. “He told his constituents he knew better.”
In the interview, Mr. Goldman argued that his views were more nuanced than his critics suggested. He said he had no love for Israel’s right-wing government and raised concerns that it had “unnecessarily jeopardized innocent lives” in Gaza. He supports the creation of a Palestinian state.
But Mr. Goldman, who was in Tel Aviv for a family bar mitzvah on Oct. 7, 2023, the day Hamas attacked Israel and killed about 1,200 people, said that he worried others in his party were too willing to turn on a longtime ally that was created “to be a refuge” for Jews after the Holocaust and look past rising antisemitism.
He said he was not ready to conclude whether Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza, where, according to local health officials, more than 70,000 people have been killed. “I believe very strongly there must be an investigation,” he said.
As for his censure vote against Ms. Tlaib, Mr. Goldman said that if it came up now, “I would look at it a very different way, and most likely vote differently.”
Nicholas Fandos is a Times reporter covering New York politics and government.
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