My Fellow New York Jews and I Know Zohran Mamdani Does Not Threaten Us
It's time we all speak out against Jewish self-victimization and not fall into the trap of Islamophobic tropes.
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.