Rep. Frank Hornstein presents the transportation bill in 2023. He’s retiring this year after 11 terms. Photo by Andrew VonBank of House Information Services.
When Rep. Frank Hornstein saw his first grandchild earlier this year, he sobbed.
“It’s this new life. This new generation,” Hornstein marveled to me.
In Hebrew, the phrase that conveys the continuity of the human family goes, “la dor va dor,” or from generation to generation, as Hornstein told his House colleagues during his retirement speech in May, following 11 terms representing Minneapolis. He’ll officially leave office early next year.
Hornstein’s tears of joy for the birth of baby Lusia fall upon the scroll of his family history, smudging away the old, allowing for a new story even if it will always bear traces of the tragic past.
All four of his grandparents and five uncles and aunts were killed in the Holocaust.
His mother, also Lusia, used fake papers — forced to deny her Jewish identity — to escape what is now Ukraine. She then hid “Anne Frank style,” as Hornstein put it.
A Nazi once let her go because he didn’t think she was Jewish. “I could smell a Jew a mile away,” the Nazi said, according to Lusia’s account, which she shared with Hornstein in an extensive oral history he created while an undergraduate at Macalester College.
Lusia joined the Polish secular resistance and fought the Nazis in the sewers of Warsaw.
Hornstein’s father Stephen was in a forced labor camp in Hungary when the commandant sent him to Budapest to retrieve some pharmaceuticals. It’s a mystery why he’d send a prisoner, but he did, and Stephen Hornstein slipped away from his minder at the train station, and Stephen survived.
Stephen and Lusia met on a train in Germany after the war. Just 25 years later, 5th grader Frank Hornstein was in Cincinnati, listening to FM radio — he can talk (and sing!) Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen for hours — when he heard about the first Earth Day. He made a sign condemning littering. He picked up litter and walked home instead of getting his usual ride from school.
Thus began a long career as a community organizer for the cause of peace and justice, both here and in Israel, where he has cousins and has brought legislators to see the occupation of the West Bank.
For Hornstein, the situation in Israel and the United States has rarely been more perilous. Whenever I see him, though, his presence is bizarrely leavening: His smile begins at the eyes and radiates outward, like a joyful orb, even as he implores us to help our neighbor and engage in the work of “tikkun olam,” i.e., repairing the broken world, both by policies and relationships.
Paradoxically, as Hornstein leaves the Legislature, it’s never needed people like him more than now.
Hornstein’s beloved Minnesota House will likely be deadlocked 67-67 next year, and both parties have become home to partisan bomb throwers as interested in social media clout as they are in governing.
“If credibility and sincerity were currency, then Frank Hornstein would be the wealthiest man at the Capitol,” said former GOP Rep. Pat Garofalo.
“He’s a legend,” said Rep. Mohamud Noor, DFL-Minneapolis. His assessment is particularly notable given the fissures in the DFL coalition following the Hamas attack on Israel last year and the ensuing counterattack, which has left tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza dead, and hundreds of thousands homeless. Hornstein worked with Jewish and Muslim colleagues to keep dialogue open and respectful.
“He understands the conflict, and I appreciate his leadership and guidance and humanity,” Noor said.
Hornstein traveled to Israel in 1982 when his now-wife Marcia Zimmerman was in rabbinical school. Israel was at war in Lebanon, and then-Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon was implicated in the Lebanese massacre of civilians at Sabra and Shatila. Hornstein joined the Israeli peace movement on a march and protested at a settlement in the West Bank. He’s been back 20 times or so and has made connections with groups like Standing Together, which unites Israeli Jews and Palestinians to work against the occupation and for peace and justice.
What I find astounding is how Hornstein keeps going in the face of such a grim reality both here and in Israel, where a cousin had to abandon her home after the Hamas attacks and other cousins farther north lived with air raid sirens as their daily soundtrack due to the war with Hezbollah, while the scale of Palestinian suffering is unfathomable.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with settler fanatics in his cabinet, appears firmly entrenched. His ally Donald Trump will be president. Attacks on Jews from from both the left and right have soared since Oct. 7, 2023. (Hornstein, as is his way, is quick to point out that attacks on Muslims have also multiplied.)
Just last week, at Temple Israel, which is Hornstein’s own synagogue and where Zimmerman is the senior rabbi, someone spray painted a swastika on a pillar and another on a door at the front entrance.
War in the Middle East. A U.S. president-elect calling for mass deportation. His top adviser is the richest man in the world.
My question to Hornstein in our most recent talks: Why bother? Why keep going when all of your work of the past 40 years is being obliterated?
The answer, he says, is in the binding ties to the past, one that is ancient and tragic, but ultimately redeemed by the ceaseless urge to find meaning through human connection and the hope for a better world.
“In good time and tough times, you remember and feel — even in your body physically — the presence of your ancestors,” he said in his closing remarks at the Minnesota House.
He relies on a 2,000 year old Talmudic text called “Pirkei Avot”:
“It is not your responsibility to finish the work, but you are not free to desist from it either.”
This should resonate with us strongly in these times. There’s no final victory or defeat, and the obligation to make gentle the light of this world never ends. You do the work because the work needs doing, not because it’s going to lead to some imagined outcome.
In a more colloquial, American context, Hornstein said he is leaning on Barack Obama’s 2009 inaugural: “Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.”
To be sure, there’s been victories along the way. Decades of organizing and legislating helped him achieve what Hornstein calls the “transportation bill of my dreams” in 2023, including a gas tax increase and other new revenue to fund improvements for all types of getting around. (Hornstein doesn’t drive, and by his own account we’re all safer for it.)
And, of course, plenty of joy. His oldest daughter is a rabbi — “she joined the family business” — while another daughter is a teacher and a son is trying his hand at standup comedy in Brooklyn.
And now a granddaughter to dote on, her face and name forever a reminder of the woman who raised Hornstein after she fought with the resistance in Poland.
Hornstein expects to be back in the activism space soon, continuing to work on transportation and climate issues, or maybe — this is where I hope he lands — combatting hate crimes and hate speech.
“I’m particularly worried about our immigrant communities and the transgender community right now. Look at the advertising of this last election and the type of policies that are being talked about. Those are the groups that right now, I feel particularly, are the most vulnerable,” he said. His empathy comes in part from the Jewish community’s own sense of fragility in a fraught moment, he said.
He’s keeping in his mind a passage from Exodus.
“You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”