Having now won a contentious Democratic mayoral primary, Zohran Mamdani says he wants to bring the city together, but it is unclear if he himself is capable of the change he says the city needs.
Mamdani can’t just say he’s not antisemitic and that he wants to protect all New Yorkers. Those are hollow words that he continues to undermine by his actions, by using and supporting language and positions that fuel the fires of hate. His candidacy and naïve, even cartoonish, positions on the Mideast have rightly sparked fear among Jewish New Yorkers.
Mamdani says he wants to reach out to the Jewish community but will need to bring more than glib promises to the table. He will need to change his approach and his language, which are harmful to the New Yorkers he hopes to lead. He must disavow the language of hate.
A Muslim who back rights for Palestinians, Mamdani accuses Israel of committing “genocide” against Palestinians in the war in Gaza, which is the intentional extermination of a people. The false charge is even more hurtful to be laid on one of the few world populations, the Jews, on whom a real genocide was inflicted.
The chant, “Globalize the Intifada,” even if Mamdani didn’t himself say it, is a call to attack Jews everywhere and must be denounced, which he pointedly won’t do. Pushed before a national audience on “Meet the Press,” he doubled down. He says that he doesn’t want to be the word police, which is a clear cop out. He wouldn’t denounce anti-immigrate or racist slogans?
Mamdani supports a total boycott of Israel, along with divestment, and economic sanctions, what is called the BDS movement against Israel. But he doesn’t support such punishment against places like China. Only Israel is singled out. Only the world’s sole Jewish state.
There was a time — well before the Hamas Oct. 7 terror attack slaughtered 1,200 Israelis — that many in Israel supported the idea of an independent Palestinian state in exchange for lasting peace. Mamdani wants that — but refuses to support an independent Jewish state.
Zionism is Jewish national self-determination in the land where the Jews originated. For many American Jews, it is an intrinsic part of their Jewish identity. For 2,000 years, the Jews did not have their own country and suffered persecution as the minority everywhere and the majority nowhere. Are all the other peoples of the world to have a homeland except for the Jews?
This is going to be a difficult for Mamdani. He has shaped his political identity around opposition to Israel and continues to parse specifics of language while completely ignoring the way words are used to stoke the hatred of Jews. Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim were gunned down in Washington by a gunman shouting “Free Palestine.”
You cannot simply disavow violence, you must disavow the words and beliefs that drive the hatred.
New York is home to more Jews than any other city in the world, including Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and most of those Jews have a deep attachment to the Jewish state. And those Jews of New York are also afraid of rising antisemitism in this city and country. They have good reason to be afraid.
In his victory speech last week Mamdani said “there are millions of New Yorkers who have strong feelings about what happens overseas. I am one of them. And while I will not abandon my beliefs or my commitments grounded in a demand for equality, for humanity, for all those who walk this Earth, you have my word to reach further, to understand the perspectives of those with whom I disagree and to wrestle deeply with those disagreements.”
Mamdani was making it clear that he sees the problem.
Now he must accept the hard truth that he is adding to the problem and stop using his skills as an orator to dance around that truth.
