Suffolk’s Leader Wins a Following on Immigration
By PAUL VITELLO
“I don’t want to hurt him with his own party, but I don’t know if he even sees himself as a Democrat,” said United States Representative Peter King, a Long Island Republican whose views on immigration mirror Mr. Levy’s. “He’s a populist. I think people see him doing the right things on the immigration issue, enforcing the law.”
His seeming sure-footedness in straddling different worlds hark back to a life of fusion thinking, beginning perhaps by growing up with a Jewish father and Roman Catholic mother. Mr. Levy says he is a practicing Catholic.
After the family moved from Queens to Holbrook in Suffolk, their appliance store in Brooklyn was looted and destroyed during the 1977 blackout. Mr. Levy said that his father was “devastated, never really got over it,” and that his parents worked three jobs each just to get by.
“I know what it means to struggle, believe me,” he said. “I think it has helped me to understand people of all races, and to understand the burdens placed on our taxpayers.”
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