For the past 20 years, I have been teaching a course called “Propaganda and Genocide” to first-year students at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Penn. While we largely cover content that has occurred in the past, every so often something in the current environment pops up that makes me, as a teacher-scholar, take notice.
In recent days, New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has continued using dangerous rhetoric to dehumanize Jews, disparage Israel and create a hostile environment for his would-be Jewish constituents, specifically with a tactic known as “Holocaust inversion.”
Trying to leverage the recent disdain among many on the left with the Trump administration, Mamdani, when asked on a podcast about banning the use of certain terms, like “globalize the intifada,” claimed that such censorship would be akin to a Trump-style approach to governance. But, more significantly, he argued that “intifada” simply means “uprising” and, therefore, could be used in the context of the famed Warsaw Ghetto Uprising itself.
The reality, however, is that those of us in the Jewish community know exactly what is meant by “globalize the intifada,” and that is, quite simply, the killing of Jews. The Palestinian intifadas led to the murders of thousands of Israeli civilians. In recent months, it has become a call to randomly assail Jews and Israelis, such as those who were murdered or injured in recent attacks in Washington, D.C., and Boulder, Colorado, in the name of “resistance.” This use, as I would tell my students, is a textbook case of Holocaust inversion.
Holocaust inversion is the inversion of reality. In this case, the reality of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising has absolutely nothing to do with the intifadas that have been going on in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. It is used by people like Mamdani to try and draw parallels to events of the Holocaust and distort history, as if history has not been distorted enough already by the unsavory groups and individuals Mamdani has associated with for much of his political career.
Rebuffed by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum for his use of the term, Mamdani recently turned on the waterworks to try and deflect from his foray into deliberate use of the inversion technique. When called out on his actions, in a city with nearly a million Jews, Mamdani quoted famed novelist Toni Morrison by stating that “the function of racism is distraction” and focused on the discrimination he has faced as a Muslim American. Of course, the true distraction was Mamdani’s use of the appalling horror of the Warsaw Ghetto to shift concerns about the existential violence happening right now to Jews across America and the globe.
With some branches of my family tree destroyed in the Warsaw Ghetto, let me assure propagandists like Mamdani that no Jews participated in anything at all resembling an “intifada” by any stretch of the imagination. Anyone who has studied the Holocaust for any length of time knows that there are zero parallels to be drawn between the Warsaw Uprising and the intifada. None. Zero. Zip.
With his rhetoric designed to appeal to the uneducated masses who get much of their news and information about the conflicts in the Middle East from TikTok videos and Instagram reels, Mamdani choose to use the word “intifada” out of context in a clear effort to equate what happened in World War II with the current events in Gaza. It is a common trope used by many to deliberately distort the facts, this includes, sadly, Wikipedia editors who have given cover to propagandists like Mamdani.
Instead of constructing a dialogue with the Jewish people of New York, including its many Holocaust survivors, Mamdani has only attempted to defend his use of the term in his ghastly context. In this respect, Mamdani has demonstrated what type of environment he plans to create for New York’s Jewish community if he were to be victorious.