Government & Politics

The Citizen-Doctor-Politician Challenging George Latimer For A Seat In Congress

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Dr.Miriam Levitt Flisser in her Bronxville office

October 15, 2024

By Barrett Seaman–

Dr. Miriam Levitt Flisser, the Republican candidate for Congress in the 16^th District, has a life story that fits the classic mold of assimilation into American society through hard work and playing by the rules.

Born in Soviet-occupied Lithuania after the war, she spent two years as a child in a displaced persons camp in Germany and arrived in New York harbor on a Marine troop ship. She was educated entirely in the Bronx, including at the prestigious Bronx High School of Science, where a teacher pulled her aside and offered her dialect coaching to erase her thick Eastern European accent, which she largely succeeded in doing.

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She earned her medical degree and has practiced as a pediatrician in Westchester for more than three decades, while at the same time raising three children. In the early 2000s, a zoning controversy in her hometown of Scarsdale drew her into local politics, first as a trustee and then as mayor. In addition to her medical practice, she was and remains the Medical Director of the School District in Bronxville, where she keeps her office.

Now, for the second time, she is running for Congress, an effort that typically comes with a grueling schedule. How does she handle all this? “I raised three kids under the age of two,” she replies, “I’m on vacation now, folks. This is so much easier than being a mother for three small children that it’s not that difficult for me. I’m very well organized.”

Whether such efficiency and compartmentalization will be enough to defeat her Democratic opponent, County Executive George Latimer, a candidate with broad and deep support in the county, is doubtful. But Levitt Flisser exudes a cheerful confidence and offers a political agenda that largely—but not entirely—avoids the most divisive positions of MAGA Republicanism.

In this race, the issue of support for Israel a year into the Gaza War is not the factor it was for Latimer in his scrappy primary against incumbent Jamaal Bowman, an outspoken defender of Palestinians. Both Levitt Flisser and Latimer express strong support for Israel, defense of which, says Flisser, is a guardrail against what she predicts could be “another 9-11.”

It should be noted that her first run for Congress in 2022 was against Bowman, who won, albeit with a lower victory margin than his previous election.

Like many who immigrated from Europe during and after World War II, she is a believer in a rigorous and predictable path to American citizenship. “We joined the American dream,” she says of her generation. “You can’t have anybody just walk in. It has to be carefully reviewed.” Asked if she would have supported last year’s bipartisan immigration bill, she focuses on the need to protect children, with no acknowledgement of the Trump administration’s much-criticized child separation policy.

She takes a traditional Republican stance on fiscal responsibility but adds that she is “always in favor of cutting taxes. I think that the best way to improve the economy is to have people spend [their own] money,” she contends. “The best government is the government that’s closest to you.”

Behind that philosophy championing local government is her experience in Scarsdale, where she was drawn into a fight over a plan to build a high-rise apartment building on top of the Metro North tracks. She and fellow opponents of the plan eventually won, leading to her eventual election as the village’s mayor.

When it comes to affordable housing, she says “I believe in local zoning laws…. I don’t think it’s up to the federal government to tell me what should be built down the block from my house.” That position echoes the efforts of former Republican County Executive Rob Astorino to fight federal dictates over how many and where affordable housing units should be built in the county. It should be noted that Astorino went on to lose to George Latimer.

She is less doctrinaire on gun control, stating that she believes “absolutely that criminals should not have guns” and that red flag laws are acceptable—a position somewhat tempered by a family history that included both her parents being armed clandestinely in their partisan resistance to the Soviet state before they were forced to flee.

Where she is most in line with the current GOP agenda is in her opposition to “Prop One,” the equal opportunity amendment that is on the New York State ballot. Democrats strongly favor approval because of its language enshrining reproductive rights into the state constitution. Levitt Flisser expressed no quarrel with the reproductive rights clause but takes issue with what she and other Republicans see as a laundry list of causes including sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression.

Claiming her views are rooted in her experience with public schools, Levitt Flisser stated that “there are faculty that encourage gender confusion” and “librarians who present porn” to students. Prop One, she asserts, will strip parents of the right to prevent their children from being “able to sign up for enabling surgery on themselves.”

Closely tied to Prop One opposition among Republicans, including Dr. Levitt Flisser, is a campaign to “Save Girls’ Sports,” based on the fear that permitting transgendered males to join girls teams will destroy the competitive balance insured by single sex participation.

The GOP uniformity of opposition to Prop One and the campaign to protect girls sports strikes Levitt Flisser’s Democratic opponent, George Latimer, as an intentional campaign construct. “When I hear all the candidates falling in line behind something like this, I see a political strategy,” Latimer told The Hudson Independent. He labeled it “an attempt to emotionalize an issue.”

“How many cases [of teachers encouraging gender confusion] can they point to?” he asks, submitting that the answer is “practically speaking, zero.”

Latimer and Dr. Levit Flisser have met in a handful of informal settings, most recently in Mamaroneck, and will be interviewed in a League of Women Voters forum this Thursday, October 17^th.

While these issues will likely come up in that exchange, Latimer believes that the topic most on Westchester voters’ minds is affordability, which is currently hurting Democrats. The cost of housing, food and insurance is a common subject of kitchen table conversations but one not easily or directly addressed by members of Congress. “Inflation, says Latimer, “is not something an individual congressman can do anything about unilaterally.”

Latimer has made restoration of the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction a top issue on the argument that it is something a member of Congress can (and should) address.

The other issue that Latimer hopes to exploit is the low standing Donald Trump has in the district. While her positions on other issues important to Westchester voters may be reassuringly moderate, she does not shy away from supporting Trump. “I feel that Donald Trump is an American patriot,” she told The Hudson Independent. “I really feel that I can trust him.”

–with reporting by Solace Church

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