A private plane owned by a Satmar philanthropist left New York on Thursday morning, carrying two men most American Jews could not pick out of a photograph.
One leads a movement that regards the State of Israel as a religious error. The other spent the past month defending New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani against the charge of antisemitism.
They were flying to the Oval Office. The man who invited them is also someone most American Jews have never heard of.
His name is Martin Marks. He is 43, his title is Special Assistant to the President and Director of Jewish Engagement. According to Belaaz, the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) news site that broke the story, he made the calls himself and spent months on the arrangements. He has not commented publicly.
I want to write about him, not Satmar. Satmar’s position on Zionism has not moved since 1948 and is not news. What is new is that someone in the White House decided that this delegation was worth US President Donald Trump’s time in the week before Rosh Hashanah.
An unusual resume for the job
Marks – identified by The Jerusalem Post a year ago as one of the world’s most influential Jews – is the son of Lana Marks, the handbag designer who was US ambassador to South Africa in Trump’s first term. He advised his mother through her confirmation and then informally in Pretoria.
The Marks family has belonged to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago for decades, and it tells the story of joining when other Palm Beach private resort clubs would not take Jews.
Before all that, Marks wrote. He earned a bachelor of arts degree in writing seminars and Near Eastern at Johns Hopkins University; a master of fine arts degree at New York University, where he taught in the writing programs. He wrote humor in The New Yorker, had bylines in Vanity Fair and The Wall Street Journal, and was editor-at-large at The New York Observer.
After a rare spinal condition and about a dozen operations, he trained as a yoga instructor and opened a studio in Palm Beach. He filed for a Florida congressional seat in 2022, outraised his primary field, and withdrew when redistricting moved the lines. In 2024, he ran Jewish outreach for the Trump campaign.
None of that runs through the organized American Jewish world. He did not come up through a federation, a defense organization, or a denominational body, and he took the job without the reflexes those places install. That may be a defect. It may also be why he got it.
He has done real things in the role. Nathan Diament of the Orthodox Union credited him with unfreezing security grants for synagogues and community centers. He put a Jewish student suing Harvard on the Republican convention stage. He organized the president’s visit to the Ohel on the first anniversary of the October 7 massacre. This is not a man with a grudge against Israel.
There are about 7.5 million Jews in the United States. About 9% of Jewish adults identify as Orthodox. A 2025 study using census methods put the total American haredi population near 650,000, with some 150,000 households, and about 63% of them are hassidic.
The courts in the Oval Office on Thursday – the two Satmar factions, Bobov, Skver, and Vizhnitz of Monsey – plausibly account for 200,000 to 300,000 people directly.
Rabbi Malkiel Kotler’s reach through Beth Medrash Govoha in Lakewood, New Jersey, the largest yeshiva in the country, is real and impossible to count – maybe 3%-5% of American Jewry. Hassidic courts publish no membership rolls, so anyone offering a firmer number is guessing with more confidence than the data allows.
These are serious communities, and they are the fastest-growing part of American Jewry. They are not a cross section of it, and nobody in that room would say otherwise.
What the White House was buying
An administration official explained the guest list this way: The Faith Office brings believing Americans together to meet the president, and Trump has won close to 100% of the vote in these enclaves.
The second half is where the mistake is. These communities do not vote Republican. They vote transactionally.
Kiryas Joel is in New York’s 18th district, represented by Democrat Pat Ryan, and Satmar backed him. Its leader, Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum, one of the two Satmar Rebbes, also endorsed Kathy Hochul for governor in 2022.
New Square, in Republican Mike Lawler’s 17th district, endorsed Lawler in 2024 after backing his Democratic opponent the cycle before.
Last month, a Kiryas Joel faction endorsed Mamdani, while Rabbi Zalman Leib Teitelbaum, the Satmar Rebbe in Williamsburg, publicly rejected the antisemitism charge against him.
A bloc that gives Trump 100% at the top of the ticket and supports Democrats underneath it is negotiating, and it renegotiates every cycle. If Marks read those margins as allegiance, he misread his own instrument.
Speaking to his students in Kiryas Joel on Friday night, Aaron Teitelbaum said he had nearly declined because of Elul, the month of preparation before the High Holy Days, and changed his mind because he remembered meeting a US president some 30 years ago and being able to help a Jew in trouble. He said he hoped to do the same again.
Days later, rabbis who serve Jewish inmates in federal prisons went to Williamsburg to ask Zalman Leib Teitelbaum to raise the situation of Jewish prisoners with Trump directly.
Put those side by side, and a purpose appears that has nothing to do with Israel. A president can grant clemency. A congressman cannot. It is the one thing a rebbe could carry home from Washington that nobody else can deliver.
Where I might be wrong
The strongest case against everything above is demographic. Nine percent of Jewish adults badly underestimates the Orthodox share of Jewish children. A White House that organizes Jewish access around concentrated, disciplined, growing communities is not misreading American Jewry. It is reading where American Jewry is going. In 20 years, Thursday may look less strange than it does now.
There is precedent, too. Trump hosted 14 Chabad rabbis in the Oval Office last September for about 20 minutes, and nobody objected, because Chabad is not anti-Zionist. So, the complaint this week was about ideology rather than narrowness, and we should say that instead of dressing it up as an argument about representation.
I have made the representation argument anyway, because I think both are true. The delegation was ideologically narrow and demographically unrepresentative, and the photograph taken in that room turns six religious authorities into American Jewish leaders in every wire caption that runs.
Not a Washington story
Reading this in Jerusalem, the easy move is to file it under American political theater and get back to the campaign. I would file it somewhere else.
The seat Marks occupies is small, and the man in it is new. But someone now sits at a desk in the Faith Office, deciding which Jews get the room, and he is sorting by religiosity and by votes that can be delivered.
Peoplehood is not one of the inputs. Neither is Zionism. Run American Jewry through that filter, and you get the six men who flew to Washington on Thursday, and you get them again next year.
The organized American Jewish center did not lose an argument this week. As far as I can tell, it was not in one. The loudest objections came from Laura Loomer and a New York radio host. The Conference of Presidents, the ADL, and the AJC said nothing at all.
The people who spent 70 years building the address for Jewish access to power did not notice it move. That is our problem, not Washington’s.