I am not writing this as a political adversary. I am writing this as the man who taught Cory Booker Torah at Oxford University, where we became inseparable like brothers and where he served as my student president of the Oxford University L’Chaim Society, a position that would next be held by Ron Dermer, Bibi’s closest aide. Cory and I didn’t merely discuss Judaism in theory. We lived it-thousands of hours immersed in sacred Jewish text, wrestling with God, suffering, justice, exile, dignity, and survival.
I took Cory into synagogues across America. We spoke together about Jewish pain, Jewish destiny, Black-Jewish relations, and Jewish and Christian moral responsibility. I introduced him to the most powerful donors in the pro-Israel world and we raised tens of millions of dollars from the Jewish community for his campaigns. I brought him to the biggest supporters of AIPAC.
The Jewish community didn’t merely support Cory Booker-it helped build and elevate Cory Booker, a fact he openly acknowledges. Cory spent hundreds of Shabbat dinners at my home and would regularly bring a close circle of friends and family. In fact, to my wife and children, Cory was family.
And then he broke our hearts.
He voted along party lines to give Iran roughly $150 billion so that they could create terror proxy armies around the world and murder hundreds of thousands, especially Jews. To give you an idea of just how much money that is, the growing number of MAGA antisemites complain that Israel gets $3b a year from America. It would take Israel half a century to get what Cory Booker gave Iran in a single vote.
That vote did not merely destroy friendship. It financed a war against my people.
Cory thought that given our unbreakable bond, I’d be silent about his treachery. Boy was he wrong. Friendship dare never demand silence in the face of enabling murder.
This was not a theoretical policy disagreement. This was not a matter of nuance. Iran is the most aggressively antisemitic regime on Earth. Its Supreme Leader calls Israel a “cancer.” Its missiles are stamped with promises of Jewish annihilation. It openly funds, trains, and directs Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad.
And on October 7, 2023, we all saw the harvest of that funding.
Babies burned.
Women violated.
Families executed.
Teenagers hunted at a music festival.
That massacre was not spontaneous. It was financed.
By Iran.
With money American senators-Cory included-helped unlock.
And yet history has intervened in a way no political argument ever could. Cory is now married to a Jewish woman. God willing, he will be the father of Jewish children.
And now the danger is no longer abstract.
Iran’s genocidal ideology now threatens his wife by name-not only my people in theory. And Hamas, now Iran’s most powerful proxy, has a charter that openly and passionately calls for the murder of Cory’s wife Alexis Lewis and every other Jew on earth, from Jerusalem to Newark, New Jersey and Washington, DC.
Let us stop pretending Iran’s hatred is symbolic. It is operational. It has budgets, weapons factories, terror tunnels, drone fleets, and martyrdom brigades. The same ideology that fires missiles and rockets at Jewish nurseries in Israel fuels threats against Jews in New Jersey, Brooklyn, London, and Paris.
Iran's antisemitism is not territorial. It is total.
If Cory thinks Tehran distinguishes between Jews in Tel Aviv and Jews in Teaneck, he is catastrophically mistaken.
The Torah teaches, “Kol Yisrael arevim zeh lazeh”-all Jews are responsible for one another. What strikes one Jewish child in Israel echoes in every Jewish home on Earth. Cory once knew this. He studied that covenantal responsibility with me. He spoke about it with reverence.
Which makes his Iran vote not merely tragic-but incomprehensible.
The money he helped Obama release did not build schools and hospitals. It built rockets, tunnels, and slaughter squads. It financed October 7th. And those same killing networks would gladly see his own future children burned in their beds if given the chance.
Ironically, Cory was in Israel on October 7th, jogging in the morning as the rockets fell. He and his staff made calls to the White House who allegedly bumped booked passengers off of flights to help Cory hightail it out of Israel. It was not his fight, but that of the Jewish people. So he escaped and ran. But now, with a Jewish wife, there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. As Alexis has no doubt experienced already, Jews in America are under constant attack and threat.
What once endangered ‘the Jewish people’ now endangers Cory’s own family.
When Cory ran for office, I got tons of Jewish donors to max out for him. Rabbis vouched for him with their reputations. Synagogue leaders endorsed him not because he was perfect-but because they believed his moral core was unshakable.
They were not naïve.
They were faithful.
And faith, once shattered, is not easily restored.
I defended Cory when others doubted. I took personal risks on his behalf because I believed my student would become a senator of conscience. I believed he would never bankroll those who dream of Jewish genocide.
Then he did exactly that.
October 7 erased every illusion left standing about what that money would be used for.
This column is not about vengeance. It is about reckoning. It is about my long term love for Cory and his ability to repent, repudiate his vote, condemn Iran, and join in the fight to protect his Jewish wife and family.
A man becomes different the day he becomes a husband. His moral universe changes the day he becomes a father. Arguments die. Abstractions collapse. Every danger becomes intimate.
Diplomacy ends where your child’s life begins.
Cory can no longer hide behind policy memos and State Department talking points. The woman he loves now embodies the people he once risked. His future children will carry a target drawn not by geography-but by identity.
And so I am calling for something that is long overdue: a full, public, unequivocal repudiation of the Iran deal and an apology for his vote.
Not a “clarification.”
Not a soft revision.
Not another speech about “lessons learned.”
A moral declaration that empowering the most antisemitic and hate-filled regime on Earth was a catastrophic error-one that must never be repeated.
The Torah teaches, “Lo ta’amod al dam re’echa”-do not stand idly by the blood of your fellow. Silence now would be complicity. Ambiguity now would be surrender.
Cory once asked me at Oxford what covenantal responsibility truly demands. Here is the answer: You do not fund those who vow to murder your people. Ever.
The Jewish community has buried too many to tolerate another generation of illusions. We have seen where “engagement” leads. We have seen what happens when tyrants are fed rather than resisted.
History will record whether Cory Booker corrected this error or tried to outrun it.
But something far more important will record it first: his wife and future children’s lives.
He once stood beside me and spoke of the Holocaust as if it were personal. Now history has placed that responsibility not at the podium-but at his dinner table.
The question is no longer whether Iran threatens the Jews. The question is whether Cory Booker will finally admit that it threatens his family.
He can still choose differently.
He can still speak with the moral clarity he once promised.
He can still honor the Torah he studied.
And he can still prove that the covenant he once revered is not merely an academic memory-but a living obligation.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach-“America’s Rabbi”-is the international bestselling author of 36 books and is described by The Washington Post and Newsweek as “the most famous rabbi in America,” by The New York Observer as “the most famous orthodox Jew in the world,” and by The Jerusalem Post as one of the 50 most influential Jews alive.Founder of the Oxford University L’Chaim Society, the second-largest student organization in Oxford’s history, he mentored many of today’s world leaders who were his students. Follow him on Instagram and “X” @RabbiShmuley.