By Spencer Ackerman\Zeteo
Photos: YouTube Screenshots\Wikimedia Commons
At least the capitalists can say what about a Zohran Mamdani mayoralty threatens them. The assemblyman, scoring the biggest upset in the history of New York politics, won the Democratic nomination for mayor by promising to finance an affordable city through taxing the rich. Finally, New York’s working people have a political leader who will counterattack in the class war.
But Mamdani’s Zionist opponents, whose ire against him grows by the day, cannot even describe how the socialist assemblyman is supposed to threaten Jews like, well, me. And so, to their enduring shame, they must rely on the kind of disgusting innuendo that Jewish political leaders have historically received.
The clear strategy to keep Mamdani out of New York City’s Gracie Mansion in November – and, if he wins, to cripple his mayoralty – is to portray him as a violent antisemite. The would-be thugs of Betar, fresh from threatening Jewish intellectuals Peter Beinart and Norman Finkelstein, “urged all Jews to evacuate New York City,” not realizing how laughable they look, quivering at a Bronx Science grad. More respectable voices have no stronger theory of their case. Rep. Dan Goldman, heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, called on Mamdani to condemn “anti-Jewish hate,” as if Mamdani hadn’t repeatedly done so. Deborah Lipstadt, the Biden administration’s antisemitism envoy who considers anti-Zionism to be antisemitism, conceded to the New York Times that “It’s not that [New York Jews] expect to be run out, or they expect that the N.Y.P.D. won’t be there to protect them.” But, she continued, his victory is “just another hit in the jaw, that these very deep-seated concerns could have been so easily brushed off by so many people.”
Got that? Lipstadt couldn’t credit the idea that Jews would be physically unsafe under Mamdani. But it’s a “hit in the jaw” – note the violent imagery – for Mamdani’s voters not to reject him due to “very deep-seated concerns” that she cannot even voice. Between the lines, we’re expected to understand that a Muslim who believes Israel should provide all its citizens equal rights endangers Jews.
In Lipstadt’s defense, that is indeed how mainstream US politics has worked until now. The shift represented by last week’s primary led the august Jewish publication The Forward to interview anti-Zionist Jewish figures like IfNotNow co-founder Simone Zimmerman, Sophie Ellman-Golan of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, and, well, me about it. But perhaps the most revealing account in the Forward piece came from Andrew Cuomo supporter Rabbi Marc Schneier – for Rabbi Schneier had the integrity to say exactly what he meant.
“Just imagine Mamdani as mayor when there are student protests going on at Columbia or NYU, imagine Mamdani as mayor when Israel faces another war with its neighbors, imagine Mamdani as mayor when the prime minister arrives in New York,” Schneier told The Forward’s Arno Rosenfeld.
I thank the rabbi for his candor. Here is what I should apparently be afraid of: Mayor Mamdani may not call in the New York City Police Department (NYPD) to arrest and disperse the overwhelmingly nonviolent students, Jews proudly included, who demand the end of their schools’ complicity with Israeli crimes. He may not have pro-Palestinian demonstrators arrested when they demand an end to Israel’s expanding regional bellicosity. Mayor Mamdani may instead call in the NYPD to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court, if the Israeli prime minister visits New York City, as he has noted he would, saying New York “is a city [where] our values are in line with international law. It’s time that are actions are also.”
None of these potential measures remotely threatens Jewish New Yorkers. At most, they represent an end to the use of the US’ largest police force against pro-Palestinian New Yorkers. The potential loss of that power so frightens the rabbi that it seems to have shaken his faith in democracy. “I don’t know if we have the political clout in a democracy of one man, one vote to really stop and prevent this avalanche from taking place,” Schneier told the Forward’s Rosenfeld. Remind me what other state considers a democracy of one man, one vote a threat to Jewish interests?
Make no mistake: the unaffordability of New York fueled Mamdani’s victory, not anything to do with Israel, no matter how many oligarchs and the politicians they fund seek to obscure the class interests at stake. But what Schneier, Lipstadt, Goldman, Betar, and the rest cannot face as they watch the “avalanche” advance is that Israel deserves the outrage it is reaping. Its genocide, its pogroms to entrench apartheid, and its regional aggression is the cause of the world’s opprobrium, not some eternal antisemitic hatred. If Israel wants to transform its reception, it must dismantle its operations and institutions that oppress Palestinians. This is and has always been the only path to genuine, enduring Jewish safety in Israel/Palestine. If American Zionists want their college-aged children not to hear Israel described with discomfiting accuracy and passion, then they must pressure Israel to stop its genocide, not cheer as the cops advance on their classmates.
There is something else they wish not to see in Mamdani’s primary victory. That is the estimated 20% of us New York Jews, per Israeli news site YNet, who backed him. I don’t know if that figure is accurate, but it roughly corresponds to the estimates of American Jews who aren’t Zionists. We are the ones whom the Tablet and the Jerusalem Post call “un-Jews” and “anti-Zionists with Jewish surnames.” They have no choice, for they need the myth of Jewish unanimity behind Zionism to maintain the lie that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. They will never stop hating us for refusing to debase our righteous traditions in the killing fields of the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation,” in the rape camp of Sde Teiman in Israel and in the violent theft of Masafer Yatta in the occupied West Bank. They cannot accept that there is Jewish community to be found in rejecting Israel. But there is spiritual uplift, desperately needed in this bereft moment, when, say, Jewish Voice for Peace hosts a seder at an encampment.
The denial of this reality, and fear of its political implications within Jewish politics, drove Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League to say on MSNBC this week that Mamdani “doesn’t get to pick and choose which Jewish people he talks to. He needs to come to us.” Responding to that mask-off moment was IfNotNow co-founder Yonah Lieberman, who observed: “You’re watching a real time feed of the ADL panic about losing access and influence in the most Jewish city in the world. [Mamdani] has no obligation to meet with the ADL, who represent and smaller and smaller slice of US Jews whose primary concern is support for Israel.”
Mamdani’s embrace by Brad Lander, the senior-most Jewish elected official in city government and himself a Zionist – and apparently someone insufficiently Jewish for Greenblatt – is sufficient to refute the lie that Mamdani threatens Jews. But that slander most certainly threatens him. Mamdani has gotten emotional describing the death threats he has received. Now the White House is flirting with his denaturalization and deportation. And Mamdani is hardly the only one threatened by this strategy of frivolously claiming Jews are imperiled by anti-Zionist speech. The deliberately false depictions of campus protests endangering Jewish students fueled thousands of arrests, and even the kidnappings of people like Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Oztürk, Mohsen Mahdawi, and Badar Khan Suri, to the disgraceful applause of the Anti-Defamation League. It is past time that all of this self-victimization, which actively threatens our neighbors, finally stops.
When Mamdani revealed the threats he and his loved ones have received, he did not reserve his emotions only for himself. “Antisemitism is such a real issue in this city,” he said, “and it has been hard to see it weaponized by candidates who do not seem to have any sincere interest in tackling it, but rather in using it as a pretext to make political points.” That sure applies to Andrew “These People And Their Fucking Tree Houses” Cuomo and Mamdani’s next opponent, incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, who is running on a ballot line called “EndAntiSemitism” while sharing cigars with antisemitic streamers. The cynicism on display is a sad testament, in an age of the antisemitic “Great Replacement” theory that truly threatens Jewish safety, that Jewish institutions like the ADL consider anti-Zionism not only antisemitism, but the only antisemitism that matters.
Beyond that hypocrisy, I was moved to see Mamdani’s face display pain when he discussed the unaddressed need to confront genuine antisemitism. It lent context to Mamdani’s call for an 800% funding increase in hate-crimes prevention programs, “to do more than talk about” eradicating antisemitism and other bigotry in the city, as he’s put it. Mamdani talks about a livable New York, for all New Yorkers, with greater insight and humanity than any politician in the four decades since I was born here – although in a city that produces Rudy Giulianis, Donald Trumps, and Eric Adamses, that’s admittedly a low bar. Yet it is against such a leader, Rabbi Schneier told Rosenfeld, that “the attack must continue.”
To put it bluntly, when you have a “feeling” that a politician from a different race, ethnicity or religion threatens you, and you are unable to articulate how that threat is supposed to plausibly manifest, and you ignore the avalanche of evidence – his words, his record, his associations – that no such threat exists, that feeling you have is called racism. Contrary to Lipstadt, people are right to brush that off. And many more Jewish New Yorkers than she assumes are eager – motivated, even – to scrape it off our shoes.
Spencer Ackerman is a Pulitzer Prize and National Magazine Award-winning reporter and the author of Reign of Terror: How The 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump. He is also the author of the FOREVER WARS newsletter on Ghost.
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