I’m sharing a post a friend of mine, Victoria Cook, wrote on Facebook about the New York City mayor’s election and Jews and Israel. That whole thing. It’s not a TPM Reader email but I’m posting it in the same vein. This is her piece, not mine. So, in the nature of things, I wouldn’t write everything in the same way or agree with every individual point. But, for me. she wrote with great subtlety about how some Jews experience this bundle of issues. She also captured something that is quite salient to me, which is that this conversation often gets clogged up on the very binary question of whether some thing or some person is antisemitic. Obviously, some people really want it to land there or insist that it not land there for their own reasons. But on these issues, for me and I guess for Victoria too, that’s often kind of beside the point.
In any case, some of this is very internal to the Jewish experience and a specific variant of Jewish experience. And TPM isn’t a site about Judaism. So if you’ve already heard enough on this topic, I get it. But, as always, I share what is interesting to me in the hope and expectation some readers may find it interesting as well. For me this helped illuminate some of my own thoughts and feelings about this that I hadn’t been able to tease apart on my own.
WARNING, this is a very long post. If you are going to react by responding with anti-Arab or anti-Islam comments I beg you to scroll on by, you are not welcome here.
I think the issue of whether Zohran Mamdani is antisemtic and carries personal animus towards Jews is a distraction (although, footnote, I’m not sure why this particular view of being anti-a certain group has to be intentional when we don’t accept that for anyone else when a society is built on an “ism” and yet after millennia of supercessionist world imperial religions and their respective influenced cultures, from their holy books to classic literature to current popular music, certainly created a society in which the “Jew” is the most evil character somehow that is not seen as being in the water we swim and the air that we breathe, so I’ll stick with “intentional Jew hater”). I do not think he is an intentional Jew hater. He clearly has Jewish friends, grew up with many Jewish people, and I believe him when he says he cares about antisemitism which I also believe he can recognize in many although not all of its forms and that he does not wish ill on Jews and genuinely wants to create a more inclusive and diverse thriving NYC.
I want to emphasize that I am not scared of Zohran as a person, I probably would really like him if I met him, in a million ways he seems like an older version of my son’s awesome smart and funny precocious friends from Bronx Science, I agree with most of his agenda, I voted for Brad Lander, but would love a younger vibrant brilliant communicator version who himself is an immigrant to lead this city of immigrants, especially now, but I am indeed scared of the ideology of some of his activism.
The issue of concern for me and I think for many Jews is that the worldview of his activist community — which worldview he shares at least in part as is clear from his own longtime and current political activism in these communities as well as some of his own rhetoric and certainly that of the organizations whose support he centers as endorsements and a core part of his coalition in his movement politics — is engaged in an agenda of not only dismantling Zionist Israel but it also operates sometimes knowingly and sometimes unwittingly to simultaneously be creating a category of “good Jews” and bad Jews (i.e., Jews like me), and my fear is that this worldview is being rewarded and normalized by the electorate. Moreover, by having the mayor of the city with the most amount of Jews in the world, a city where our mayors become global stars, be himself a proponent of that even unintentionally is troubling.
When it comes to the question of what he could do on the ground in NYC as he’s only a mayor, I am concerned about his stated commitment to Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) as a form of political resistance. This worldview does not support coexistence measures because that is “normalization”but instead supports cultural boycotts. This could mean that based on the BDS principles (which are also expressly shared by DSA) we could have a city policy of not welcoming Israeli academics to City colleges, canceling semester abroad programs at City colleges, not allowing city museums to sponsor exhibits with Israeli artists, not permit city sponsored international dance events to include Batsheva, not allow the Mayor’s Office for Film & Television to cooperate with an Israeli film that wants to shoot NYC scenes locally, etc. Even if the mayor does not have the full authority to do these things, City Council will be informed by his agenda and I don’t want the vibrant cultural and academic life of NYC to be caught up in Mamdani’s commitment to BDS. If he were to publicly expressly say he will bifurcate his personal commitment to BDS from that of the City then I would be less concerned but I expect that a not insignificant part of his constituency will pressure him to bring it with him to Gracie Mansion and it will be an ongoing issue in the public discourse.
But much more scarily to me is that this worldview connects the litany of not only global but local city ills to the Jewish State, like police abuse in NYC is because of Israel (the “Deadly Exchange”), the water crisis in Ferguson was because of Israel (“From Ferguson to Palestine”), the fires in LA were because of Israel (climate change because of the war, war spending meant no money for LA fire department, take your pick), NYC libraries are underfunded because of funding for Israel (cities have no impact on funding any part of the Israeli military) — these are not just random signs at marches, they are part of scholarly journals and part of the talking points of the leaders of the movement(s) which then end up as Instagram infographics — and to Within Our Lifetime, even cancer hospitals should be targeted by marches accusing them of collaborating with genocide because of a donor also giving money to Israel. In this way of looking at the world’s ills, since everything is ultimately interconnected, the message is often expressly but most of the time implied, that if we could only get rid of this one thing — Zionism and the Zionist state (not the fantasy Israel he is ok with existing, the one with all of its issues like all nation states that currently actually in the real world exists where half of the remnant of world Jewry live most as refugees from the Judenrein world) then we could not only free, free Palestine but we could free the whole entire world from all its evils. I hear the message of this logic loud and clear. Maybe to others they can’t hear it because they agree with it, or it sounds like a mere whisper but to me it is quite literally shouting in my ear that the “Jewish Problem” still exists and eradication is the only solution.
Not only does it echo with every ancient antisemitic trope and conspiracy theory since time and immemorial, that type of rhetoric and the politics behind it are expressly used to demonize “Zionism” and its proponents (
) (although their definition has very little to do with mine) here in NYC making them unwelcome in polite society, although in this modern day version, it’s righteous society, the good people society. And mainstream Jews with their petty worries about their own survival after millennia of near constant attempted destruction should just get over it and sit down and stop centering themselves and anyway we’ve given you an opportunity to enter our embrace, just reject that place and those people and unlearn your “lifetime of indoctrination”, and how you see your religion and ethnic identity, and accept not only another narrative as essentially important and open your eyes to often ugly truths that must be reckoned with and work together to create a better future out of shared trauma, but instead accept as the only truth the opposite one, replace your myth with our myth, and work to dismantle everything you think is important about you to you, make your religion universalist, and that place where your family lives, where your religious texts and language started, where your religious calendar and holidays are based, that you know is a complicated beautiful diverse place, it is really a white supremacist caricature, it is the root of all evil and you have just a made up colonial connection to it. Just say those words and you can come sit at our table and you can even practice your religion just the version that ends every seder with “Next Year in Jerusalem” as only a metaphor. Echoes are loud sometimes.
All of this at the same time that the politics are — for good reason! I believe in much of the policy goals — anti bankers, developers, and “money interests” and once you add to that “Zionists” are working against the campaign and it all feels very, very familiar. Suffocatingly familiar.
And it is also a fact that this worldview’s rhetoric, including phrasing that Mamdani has defended and parsed despite his own usage on social media as far back as 2015, has been used in connection with actual violence against Jews including murder only last month so there is that kind of fear in the background too while important thought leaders like M. Gessen try to convince us that is not antisemitic violence so again stop centering yourselves Jews! It’s not antisemitism! It’s just anti-Israel! Tell that to the elderly couple who were firebombed for trying to remind the world about the hostages.
But then, of course, like clockwork, the anti Arab and anti Muslim racists and bigots come out in force from within our community and we have an embarrassment of plenty of those, and the right wing uses their fake concern for us while they also freely use the most intense antisemitic rhetoric like Tucker Carlson & Candace Owen becoming besties and Steve Bannon now calling a Fox News broadcaster “Tel Aviv Mark” so we are just fucked from all sides and an important conversation about electorate concerns is now drown out by all the stupid haters and instigators and influencers who are a toxic cancer in my community.
So that’s my fear. I am also fearful of the current discourse. I pray that Mamdani stays safe in this time of political and racist violence and the voices that are adding heat to this fear shut the f*&k up. I also have hope. My hope is that Mamdani engages with the mainstream Zionist community on these issues from his own highly critical anti-Israel perspective, I am not asking him to change his politics and I would welcome such a moment with open arms since it is not erasure but dialogue. And despite my fears, I am very glad we are as a city finally talking about housing, income inequality and especially immigrants rights as we are sinking further and further into autocracy as a country. That part of his platform should be celebrated and amplified.
I’m not even sure why I’m posting this other than to try to help people understand what at least some of the Jews are worried about and for the discourse to calm the fuck down. I do not want the Trump and MAGA people to further divide us but I desperately want people to hear this concern and not to dismiss it as merely part of that right wing agenda and I simultaneously desperately want to try to at least in my small corner of the internet disrupt the scary reductive racist binary conversation.
