The adage goes that a conservative is a liberal following a mugging. In House of Representatives Ritchie Torres’ (D-NY) case, it was being mugged not by a criminal but instead by a willingness to see reality as it is, not as it’s hypothesized to be.
“I am celebrating the 10-year anniversary of my Zionism,” he says. “The first time I went to Israel was in February of 2015,” when he was in his first term on the New York City Council. He describes the visit—his first trip abroad—as “one of the most formative and transformative experiences of my life.”
In Sderot, a city of some 30,000 northeast of Gaza, he “came to realize that Israel faces a level of insecurity that has no analog to the American experience,” he recalls. “I come from the Bronx, where families live in fear of bullets and guns. But no one anywhere in the United States lives…
