A recent Fox News poll found that 38% of Jewish New Yorkers intend to vote for Zohran Mamdani for mayor, setting aside whatever reservations they might have about the candidate’s views on Israel. At least a few of those voters will support the 34-year-old state Assembly member not despite those views, but because of them.
That’s their right as Americans and as Jews. But I feel sure that for almost any Jew among the 42% who plan to vote for Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor, or the 13% who support Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate, Mamdani’s views are more than disturbing.
Readers of this column, particularly those inclined to vote for Mamdani, should at least pause to consider the reasons.
A good place to start is to concede that nothing in the public record suggests Mamdani is antisemitic — taking the narrowest view of what the word implies. He has spoken of the “crisis of antisemitism” in New York as “something that we have to tackle.” He has condemned the hate crimes this year in Washington and in Boulder, Colorado. And he’s reached out to Jewish communities of various stripes, promising that Zionists would be welcome in his administration.
But Mamdani is also a longtime anti-Zionist of a peculiarly obsessed sort. Three lesser-known points of his biography stand out.
First, as an undergraduate at Bowdoin College, where he helped found the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, he broke off collaboration with the student arm of the left-wing Jewish group J Street, which supports Palestinian statehood, opposes Israeli settlements, and is roundly critical of the Israeli government.
Why? Because J Street supports Israel as “a democratic homeland for the Jewish people.” This was too much for Mamdani and his comrades in SJP, for whom working with J Street was a form of normalization. Mamdani, who to this day does not support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, also called for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. Bowdoin’s president rightly dismissed that notion for “stifling discussion and the free exchange of ideas.”
The second was a rap song Mamdani wrote in 2017, called “Salaam.” “My love to the Holy Land Five, you better look ’em up,” he crooned.
His critics did: The Holy Land Foundation was an ostensible charity convicted in 2008 of funneling $12 million to Hamas; the five defendants in the case received prison sentences of 15 to 65 years for crimes including money laundering, tax fraud and support of terrorism.
Finally, a few months before the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas, Mamdani introduced a bill in the state Assembly that could have jeopardized the tax-exempt status of virtually every pro-Israel charity. The bill, noted Alex Bores, a fellow Assembly member and a Democrat, “is not aimed at improving regulations of nonprofits broadly, or even applying standards which would apply across the board,” Rather, it “singularly applies to organizations providing aid to a specific country and its people. This is immediately suspicious.”
What stands out about this list is the affinity for extremists, the double standards, and the monomania. Especially the monomania.
One of the ways anti-Zionists tend to give themselves away as something darker is that the only human-rights abuses they seem to notice are Israel’s; the only state among dozens of religious states whose legitimacy they challenge is Israel; the only group whose suffering they are prepared to turn into their personal crusade is that of the Palestinians. What gives? Has Mamdani sponsored bills to oppose, say, the persecution of Uyghurs in China or Kurds in Turkey or gays in his native Uganda, where he was photographed in July with a notoriously homophobic official? Did he ever rap his “love” for the people of Iran fighting their regime?
This is not the only thing that scares so many Jewish voters. An article of faith among many self-professed anti-Zionists is that they are not antisemitic. But Jews don’t live in a world of fine-grained semantic distinctions. The man accused of killing Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, the young couple fatally shot in May outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, yelled “Free Palestine.” Many of the thousands of antisemitic incidents nationwide since the Oct. 7 attacks also have had at least a patina of anti-Zionism. The homes and businesses of prominent Jews have been attacked or vandalized, some by pro-Palestinian protesters, adding to the sense of threat.
What does it mean for Jewish New Yorkers that a mayoral candidate who pledges to fight antisemitism also proudly avows the very ideology that is the source of so much of the hatred Jews now face? Why, right after Oct. 7, could he do no better than to issue a mealy-mouthed acknowledgment that Jews had died the day before? Why couldn’t he even denounce the perpetrators of the most murderous antisemitic rampage in the past 80 years?
Even that’s not the deepest worry. “The painful truth,” Elliot Cosgrove, the rabbi of Park Avenue Synagogue, observed in his Saturday sermon, is that “Mamdani’s anti-Zionist rhetoric not only appeals to his base but seems to come with no downside breakage. What business does an American mayoral candidate have weighing in on foreign policy unless it scores points at the ballot box? I don’t doubt that Mamdani’s anti-Zionism is heartfelt and sincere, but its instrumentalization as an election talking point should frighten you in that it says more about the sensibilities of our fellow New Yorkers than it does about Mamdani himself.”
In the long, sorry tale of anti-Jewish politics, it hasn’t just been the prejudice of a few that’s led Jews to grief. It’s been the supine indifference of the many. That’s what frightens Jews like me.
Bret Stephens writes a column for the New York Times.
