Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of New York City’s Park Avenue Synagogue said it best.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s just-released plan to address antisemitism in the city “without addressing anti-Zionism is like writing a report on lung cancer without mentioning smoking,” he told JNS correspondent Debra Nussbaum Cohen.
Quite. One might even go further and say that entrusting Mamdani with tackling the epidemic of antisemitism in the city is akin to entrusting lung cancer research to a tobacco manufacturer.
As has been widely reported, Mamdani’s strategy has been panned by mainstream Jewish groups because it entirely ignores the role of anti-Zionism—better understood as “antizionism”—in stirring hatred and discrimination against Jews. Make no mistake: The omission is deliberate.
The 33-page report outlining Mamdani’s plan issued by MOCA, the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism, is light on analysis but heavy on the personality cult the mayor is assiduously cultivating. The title page reproduces an excerpt from Mamdani’s inauguration address with the addition of strategic photos, among them Mamdani hugging a guy wearing a kippah, Mamdani looking solemn at a Shoah commemoration, Mamdani addressing a synagogue gathering. In other words, the authors of the report are anxious that its readers, many of whom will be skeptical, should adore the mayor in the same manner that they do.
How does the report understand antisemitism?
Significantly, it does not take as its starting point the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition because this includes several examples of how anti-Zionist tropes are also antisemitic. It mentions the IHRA definition, but only in the context of two other definitions, the Nexus Document and the so-called Jerusalem Declaration, the first of which is critical of Zionism and the second of which is uncomplicatedly anti-Zionist. In the end, the definition used is one supplied by the former Biden Administration, which echoes the IHRA definition’s introductory wording but crucially leaves out the intersection of antisemitism with anti-Zionism.
The central task now is to understand what Mamdani’s game really is. Some of his acolytes in the pro-Hamas solidarity movement are furious that he’s even mentioning antisemitism, as they see this as a diversion from Palestinian suffering, a betrayal of the Palestinian struggle and an olive branch to the “white, privileged” Jews they loathe. But Mamdani is smarter than that, and is clearly following Lenin’s dictum, as articulated in “Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder,” that “to reject compromises ‘on principle,’ to reject the permissibility of compromises in general, no matter of what kind, is childishness.”
Mamdani knows that he can’t just ignore the problem of antisemitism when he is running a city with the largest Jewish population outside of Israel. Better, then, to reframe the problem as he is doing now, and thereby repeatedly tell New York Jews that he has their best interests at heart even as he dismisses their concerns about the anti-Zionism which he has actively promoted.
Indeed, it was instructive to hear Mamdani’s evasive, mealy-mouthed answer to a journalist who asked him whether his own inflammatory rhetoric against Israel, most recently expressed in a laughable threat to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was part of the problem. “Criticism of a prime minister, criticism of a government policy, is distinct from bigotry of a people,” he replied.
Mamdani, however, is not an ordinary “critic” of specific Israeli policies. He is the same Mamdani who, in a short-lived career as a rapper, penned a line declaring his “love” for the “Holy Land Five,” namely the five leaders of the Holy Land Foundation, a Muslim charity, who in 2008 were convicted of funneling millions of dollars to the rapists and murderers of Hamas. He is the same Mamdani who enthusiastically supports the movement to subject Israel to a campaign of “boycott, divestment and sanctions” (BDS) as a prelude to its eventual elimination. He is the same Mamdani who told the Democratic Socialists of America that “the struggle for Palestinian liberation was at the core of my politics and continues to be.” And yet, despite this dismal record, he thinks we are gullible enough to be swayed by his self-description as a mere “critic” of the current Israeli government!
Mamdani’s ultimate goal is to transform how antisemitism is defined and appraised. He realizes that, for political reasons, he has to be seen to oppose it, so he requires a definition that can sit comfortably with his support for the eliminationist ideology promoted by Hamas and its ilk. The outcome is a definition that locates antisemitism as one of many social prejudices, like racism, homophobia or anti-Muslim bigotry. In this way, he strips antisemitism of the key characteristic that makes it unique: its focus on, and hostility towards, the empowerment of Jews, since “Jewish power” is, for the antisemite, the source of all social ills.
Antisemitism has had to constantly adapt to stay relevant: hence the increasing focus over the last century on Zionism, the movement to secure Jewish national self-determination, and the substitution of the word “Jew” with “Zionist” in antisemitic propaganda, as pioneered by the Soviet Union. In that light, one wonders whether the Jews aiding Mamdani in developing his plan realize that they are playing a similar role to such Soviet organizations as “Committee of Anti-Zionist Public Opinion,” whose leaders were selected by the communist regime precisely because they were Jews.
Encouragingly, Jewish groups like UJA Federation, the Anti-Defamation League and the New York Board of Rabbis have all distanced themselves from Mamdani’s plan, on the grounds that its omission of anti-Zionism as a source of antisemitic agitation fatally undermines it. But that is not enough.
The challenge at the heart of Mamdani’s plan is not that it is well-intentioned but badly misguided. It is far more insidious than that. Mamdani wants to dictate to Jews how and when they should perceive antisemitism—a principle that would amount to an ideologically heinous offense if applied to other minority groups, but which is laudable in this context.
There is only one answer: The plan, like Mamdani himself, should be shunned unless and until it accepts the reality that anti-Zionism is the principal driver of hostility to Jews today. Don’t be fooled otherwise.
