And Some Advice for the West Orange Election
My friend Matt Dragon has an excellent, timely piece on his blog about Justin Goldsman, a candidate for Town Council in West Orange and Favorite Son in local West Orange politics. Wherever Justin goes, adulation follows: he walks into every Council meeting to broad smiles and big hugs and “great to see you’s,” everybody’s little hometown hero. The scandal here is an open secret in West Orange, something that almost everyone, and surely everyone within the Council, knows. Justin has a decades-long history of plain, open, unapologetic social media bigotry, from the n-word to casual Islamophobia, to “I am going to kill this girl or castrate myself, whichever gets her off my dick sooner.” But work through it yourself via the bolded link above, if you have the patience. It’s an eye-opener, even if it’s all par for the course in West Orange.

I have my own forthcoming post about race relations in West Orange, a topic that I know well from long, intensely personal experience. For now, I’ll just say this. There are many intelligent, committed, worthwhile candidates for office in West Orange, but if a candidate can’t publicly condemn Justin Goldsman, they don’t deserve your vote. It doesn’t matter what they have to say about zoning, or development, or traffic, or sewers, or the rest: vote them down, and shut them out. No negotiations. No compromise. No more second chances. Profligacy with second chances is how we got here in the first place.

Goldsman trundled this garbage on his social media when he was a member of West Orange’s so-called Human Relations Commission. The Human Relations Commission is tasked with overseeing “human relations” in West Orange, but the sad truth is that it can’t seem to get its own shit together at the level of ordinary personnel management: a Human Relations Commission with Justin Goldsman on it is both a self-parody and a contradiction in terms. If they think Justin Goldsman deserves their respect, they deserve none themselves. The simple truth is that Goldsman needs to be canceled, and needs to be driven out of public life. We’ve heard more than enough from him. We don’t need to elect him to office to hear any more.

Matt alludes to Amy Gallatin, another member of the HRC. Here is a screenshot from Gallatin’s Instagram that I took back in February of this year:

I wear a keffiyeh every day. Does this make me a Nazi? It does, according to a member of the West Orange Human Relations Commission. Casual, brainless defamation is a way of life with these people. They’ll say whatever rubbish comes into their heads because they can. The rubbish is tolerated because toleration is itself a cost-free proposition. This is the same asshole Council that in a year and a half was unable to pass migrant defense legislation of any kind. In short, every day is an accountability-free game for the people who inhabit West Orange politics. The question facing the West Orange electorate is how long this game is supposed to go on.

This past January and February, I spoke at West Orange Council to criticize a proposal pushed at the November 12, 2025 meeting to create an Anti-Semitism Task Force.* (Council President Joe Krakoviak allowed Sheila Lefkowitz, the person making the November 12 proposal, to go a minute over her allotted time in making her case, a procedural violation calmly taken for granted by the Council.) When I did, Councilwoman Joyce Rudin responded by professing herself “disturbed” that I had claimed the right to judge between what was and what wasn’t anti-Semitic. If only she’d been there to lecture the judges at Nuremberg.

At no time has Joyce Rudin ever professed herself “disturbed” at Justin Goldsman’s presence in Council. Just the reverse. Justin, as everyone in West Orange knows, is the Hero of the Battle of the West Essex Highlands, the William Wallace of West Orange. Amazing that no one in Council has proposed giving him a medal for valor displayed there. In any case, it’s both classic and predictable that independent judgment disturbs Rudin, but Goldsman’s use of the n-word doesn’t. Easy enough, I guess, if no one has ever called you a “nigger,” and in Rudin’s case, I doubt anyone has. By way of contrast: I spent my whole childhood in West Orange being called the “nigger” of St Cloud–the irony being that they called me that for lack of any actual African Americans in the neighborhood to use it against.

This, in the end, is what West Orange is about: you grow up there being called a “nigger” in an all-white neighborhood; you grow up watching the white people who use that word finding their way into the DPW, the Police Department, and the Detective Bureau; and then you reach the point at which, when their use of that term finds its way to the public domain and is discovered, the excuses roll down like waters, and the evasions in an ever-flowing stream. When Justin Goldsman uses the n-word, well, his friends have given him a n-pass to use it, so it’s A-OK. In fact, let’s elect him to Council while we’re at it. That sequence tells you all you need to know about these people’s “standards” and what “disturbs” them. What should disturb the rest of us is that people of this caliber hold office, keep seeking it, and manage to get it.

At some point, the cycle has to end. These people have to go–Rudin, Krakoviak, Goldsman, Gallatin, the HRC itself, and everybody who stands with them, or by them, or frankly, anywhere in their vicinity. West Orange Council and the HRC et al need thoroughly to be purged and replaced with people who begin to approximate decency. Once it does, it’ll be possible to start over and have conversations worth having. As it stands, the Council can only be dealt with in a frankly adversarial way. There’s a limit, and we’ve reached it. Come November, kick these people to the curb and wish them good riddance, Goldsman above all. In a formula: shut up, get out, fuck off. Enough is enough.

*I fixed one minor factual error after posting: I had erroneously referred to the meeting as taking place on November 14; it took place November 12.