Legislature Pauses To Remember Jonathan Brostoff

State Rep. Jonathan Brostoff (D-Milwaukee) at a press conference on restoring public school funding and phasing out the state voucher program. Photo courtesy of Rep. Brostoff’s office.

Editor’s note: If you or someone you know is contemplating suicide, call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org.

On a day of contentious legislative debates and an annual ceremonial custom to recognize Wisconsin’s tribal communities, members of the Wisconsin Legislature united to remember a former colleague this week.

More than one lawmaker made clear it was an event they fervently wished would not have been necessary.

Former State Rep. Jonathan Brostoff took his own life on Nov. 4, 2024, with a gun he had purchased just an hour earlier. He was 41 years old. Brostoff served in the Assembly for eight years, leaving in 2022 after he was elected to the Milwaukee Common Council.

Tuesday, the Wisconsin Assembly and Senate each voted unanimously to pass a resolution in Brostoff’s memory. The votes were cast in each chamber in a two-part secular memorial service of sorts, with heartfelt eulogies from Brostoff’s former colleagues. Many wore green ribbons in recognition of mental health awareness.

“Jonathan was well known for his honesty,” said Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer. “He never held back if he thought we were heading in the wrong direction or missing something important — often crossing his eyes and staring you down. With Jonathan, you always knew where you stood, and he helped us grow as a caucus and as individual legislators.”

Sign language bill

One story was told repeatedly: Brostoff’s campaign to pass a bill that would tighten state standards for American Sign Language interpreters. The legislation established a tiered licensing system to ensure that people interpreting between doctors and patients or lawyers and clients had a higher level of skill, Brostoff said at the time.

Frustrated when the legislation stalled, he vowed not to cut his hair until it was signed into law. In an April 2019 Wisconsin Public Television interview, Brostoff — who normally favored a close-cropped cut — sported a curly afro that surrounded his face.

It wasn’t a protest, exactly, he told interviewer Frederica Freyberg. “Especially for the deaf community, it’s a visual indicator saying I’m with you and we’re not going to stop until we get this done,” Brostoff said.

“I would send him pictures of Richard Simmons,” Rep. Lisa Subeck said on the Assembly floor Tuesday. “He sent me back pictures of Bob Ross.”

Gov. Tony Evers signed the bill in July 2019. Sen. Dianne Hesselbein was a member of the Assembly at the time. In the Senate Tuesday, she recalled Brostoff’s Assembly floor speech on the day the measure finally passed.

“He signed the entire thing, and it was long, and he could do sign language of the entire thing without looking at notes,” Hesselbein said. “He knew what he wanted to say, and he was careful, and there was silence, absolute silence and respect.”

Colleagues described the diminutive Brostoff as intense, funny, passionate about causes and smitten with his four children.

In the Assembly, Rep. Jodi Emerson recalled hearing Brostoff break into the “Itsy bitsy spider” song while changing a diaper in the midst of one of their phone calls discussing their work in the Capitol.

Those phone calls were a regular feature of her drives home to Eau Claire from Madison at the end of a busy week in the Capitol. She said she spoke before Tuesday’s session with Brostoff’s father about those calls.

“I was thinking about that last week, and really wish I would have been able to talk to Jonathan last week,” Emerson said. “I had my own version of a conversation with him,” she added wistfully, “but the reception wasn’t clear from wherever he was.”

Passion and compassion

Brostoff was first elected to the Assembly in 2014. Rep. Christine Sinicki related a memory from Brostoff’s campaign that year. She had not endorsed him in the four-way Democratic primary, and at a neighborhood parade both attended that summer, a Brostoff volunteer sidled up to her and made a “snide remark,” she said.

“I went over to Jonathan and I said, ‘I really did not appreciate that.’ The next day, that volunteer was at my door, apologizing,” Sinicki recalled. “That was the kind of man that Jonathan was. He had so much integrity.”

Rep. Supreme Moore Omokunde, who met Brostoff when both were at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, nicknamed him “JoBro.” But Brostoff had his own self-applied nickname: Honey Badger, after a viral YouTube video and internet meme — “Honey Badger Don’t Care.”

“He’s getting into like, messing with bees and snakes and all types of things, because Honey Badger don’t care and he’s gonna do what he wants to do anyway. That’s Jonathan Brostoff,” Omokunde said.

Brostoff was passionate about the causes he adopted, his colleagues agreed.

Omokunde referred to a comment moments earlier, when Subeck “called him tenacious.” He paused. “However, let’s be honest,” he continued. “Jonathan was annoying … and everybody in this body who ever came across him knows he was annoying.”

Affectionate laughter greeted his candor.

“Sometimes he could make me crazy,” Sinicki said. “That’s only because he had such passion and such conviction for the things that he wanted that nothing was going to change his mind, nothing at all.”

For all his fervor as a Democratic lawmaker, Brostoff endeared himself to Republican colleagues.

GOP Rep. Paul Tittl found Brostoff, who was Jewish, to be “a deeply spiritual person” who asked to attend a regular Capitol Bible study that Republican lawmakers, all Christian, organized. “He always added to the conversation.”

In the Senate, Sen. Andre Jacque recalled both Brostoff’s participation in the Bible study program as well as his enthusiasm for the gaming community. “One thing that always struck me about Jonathan is that he was somebody who was unafraid to put himself out there and have conversations,” Jacque said. “I’m going to miss him.”

Vetting candidates and repairing the world

Brostoff took it upon himself to vet prospective candidates.

One was Rep. Robyn Vining, ahead of her first election to the Assembly in 2018. At a Colectivo Coffee near UWM, “Jonathan grilled me with questions, and was very clear on his priorities,” Vining said. “He was also very clear that he would not be supporting me if I did not pass his test.”

They talked. “What I didn’t realize was that after I did pass that test, Jonathan was going to jump on board and fight for me, which is exactly what he did,” Vining said. “We finished my vetting, and he said, ‘OK, let’s go knock some doors.’”

First-term Rep. Sequanna Taylor was another such candidate. Friends from before she decided to run for the Assembly, she and Brostoff and their families were dining together early in her campaign.

“In the middle of him eating, he was like, ‘Give me your spiel,’” Taylor said. She was caught off guard, but he persisted.

“And so, you know, I went into my little spiel, and he took a moment and he looked at me. He was like, ‘You’ll be good,’” she said. “Then he was like, ‘Next time somebody asks you this, though, I want you to be able to say this in 30 seconds flat.’”

Brostoff was always straightforward, Taylor said. “You never had to worry about a gray area with JoBro, because there was no gray area with him.”

Sen. LaTonya Johnson recalled a riot in Milwaukee’s Sherman Park neighborhood, part of her district, after an officer-involved shooting 10 years ago. She was visiting the scene the second night of unrest — “I was not brave enough to go that first night,” she confessed — when Brostoff showed up with big packs of chewing gum.

“This is de-escalation gum,” Johnson recalled him saying. She was skeptical, “but lo and behold the longer we were out there, when things became confrontational, Jonathan would walk up and he said, ‘You want gum?’ And people would stop, and they would take it.” And, she said, it helped redirect people’s attention.

Subeck said she and Brostoff were two of three Jewish members of the Assembly when they both took office in 2015. She described the Jewish value of Tikkun Olam, to repair the world.

“This is a concept that is built on our guiding principles of social justice, of making the world a better place, of taking care of our world and taking care of its people,” Subeck said. “And Jonathan, more than just about anybody else I know, lived up to that principle.”

Acknowledging struggles, seeking change

Brostoff was candid about his own mental health history, Subeck added. “He brought his own struggles, and he shared his very personal struggles with all of us here in the Legislature, and I believe that they made me, and hopefully made many of you, a better legislator.”

There were also calls to address directly how Brostoff’s life had ended.

“I hope that we will recommit ourselves to preventing needless deaths in this state and to doing what Jonathan would want us to do, and enacting policies that will save other lives, even though we are too late to save his,” said Sen. Mark Spreitzer. “I will miss my friend Jonathan Brostoff, may his memory be a blessing.”

“Jonathan’s story is one that too many Wisconsin families know the pain of,” said Sen. Jodi Habush Sinykin. “In 2022 alone, 530 Wisconsinites died by suicide with firearms.”

Habush Sinykin read to her colleagues a statement from Brostoff’s widow, Diana Vang-Brostoff, and his parents, Alan and Phyllis Brostoff. Earlier, Rep. Deb Andraca read the same statement in the Assembly.

“Once again, we want to thank the Wisconsin Legislature for today honoring the memory of our husband and son,” the statement began.

Their statement recounted the circumstances of Brostoff’s death as well as a commentary Brostoff wrote in October 2019 that was published in the Wisconsin State Journal and Urban Milwaukee about his failed suicide attempts as a teenager. Brostoff had just served on a Legislature task force on suicide prevention.

They quoted Brostoff’s column, in which he wrote that access to a firearm for someone contemplating suicide “is like having your own personal permanent delete button.” In the essay he had acknowledged that if had had access to a gun at the time of those teenage attempts to kill himself, “I would not be here today.”

“Our family believes that had Jonathan been required to wait perhaps a day or two or any amount of time after entering that gun store last November to make that purchase, his life may have been spared,” their statement concluded.

“And so now, in the interest of saving other lives at risk for mental health issues, domestic violence or other circumstances, it is our hope that you find the collective will to reinstate a reasonable waiting period for finalizing gun purchases. Doing that would enhance your thoughtful and kind honoring of his memory today.”

Wisconsin legislators pause to remember former colleague Jonathan Brostoff was originally published by the Wisconsin Examiner.