JTA — US Rep. Steve Cohen, the Jewish Democrat from Tennessee at the center of a controversial Republican-led redistricting push, announced Friday that he will not seek reelection.

In his press conference announcing his decision, the congressman also took a swipe at a Republican rival for referring to him as “an old, white Jewish guy.”

Cohen, whose Memphis-area district is being splintered into three different districts, is one of a handful of Jewish Democratic casualties of the mid-decade redistricting sprint engineered to push the GOP’s House advantage in this year’s midterm elections.

“I don’t want to quit. I’m not a quitter. But these districts were drawn to beat me,” Cohen told reporters during a press conference in his Washington office.

In addition to Cohen, a cohort of three Jewish Democratic US representatives in Florida is facing new uphill battles for reelection following that state’s GOP-led redistricting. Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Lois Frankel and Jared Moskowitz have all seen their districts become more favorable to Republican challengers after the state’s congressional map was redrawn.

But the Tennessee state house’s last-minute redrawing of Cohen’s district, which is majority African-American and the state’s sole Democratic US House seat, has spurred the most controversy. Tennessee’s 9th has one of the highest concentrations of Black voters in the country.

“The fact that each of these new districts was drawn to divide almost exactly into thirds the Black voting population of the 9th District suggests serious racist and unethical intent and raises legal issues about the use of race being the true........

© The Times of Israel