The Guardian’s recent defense of New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, relies on a striking and emotionally resonant historical analogy. We are invited to see Mamdani not as a radical break, but as the heir to an old and venerable Jewish tradition: Yiddish socialism, embodied by the Bundists and Jewish radicals who helped build New York and were once themselves denounced as dangerous extremists.
It is a powerful story. But it is also the wrong one.
The Jewish socialists of the early 20th century were engaged in fierce internal debates about Jewish life. They argued passionately about religion, socialism, language, class and nationalism. Many were secular; many were anti-Zionist; many rejected traditional Jewish authority altogether. Jewish history is rich with such disagreement, and New York, in particular, was shaped by it.
Despite such deep ideological divisions, there was a moral line that was never in doubt: movements that endangered Jewish lives were not allies.
The Jewish Labor Bund, so central to the Guardian’s narrative, did not arise from abstract ideological theory. It emerged in response to pogroms. Its activists bore the scars of violence directed explicitly at Jews. Figures such as Baruch Charney Vladeck did not carry Cossack sabre wounds as badges of fashionable radicalism, but as reminders of what happens when Jewish safety collapses. However universalist their politics, Bundists understood that Jewish survival was not a secondary concern to be subordinated to broader causes.
They did not march alongside movements that glorified the killing of Jews.
They did not excuse attacks on Jewish civilians as “resistance.”
They did not dismiss Jewish fear as hysteria, paranoia or political smearing.
Whatever their disagreements with religious Jews or Zionists, they recognized antisemitic violence for what it was, and they opposed it without qualification.
The analogy is tempting, but it does not hold. Internal Jewish radicalism in the early 20th century is not the same as contemporary debates about movements and rhetoric that normalize violence against Jews. Conflating the two obscures more than it clarifies.
This is where the Guardian’s argument breaks down. The concern raised today by many Jewish New Yorkers is not about socialism or criticism of Israel. Jewish New York has always included socialists, anti-Zionists and every political tendency imaginable. Internal Jewish dissent is not the issue—and never has been.
The concern is about rhetoric and political environments that, in our own time, have come to normalize or romanticize violence against Jews, and about the reluctance of public figures and their defenders to draw clear moral boundaries around such language. When slogans that have accompanied real-world attacks are treated as merely provocative or when alliances with movements that justify Jewish bloodshed are waved away as misunderstandings, Jewish communities take note. They do so not out of hysteria but out of experience.
In a city that has seen synagogues attacked, Jewish students harassed and visibly Jewish residents targeted, ambiguity is not neutral. Language does not remain theoretical. What is defended in editorials as radical critique migrates quickly to campuses, protests and streets. History has taught Jews, including Jewish radicals, to pay attention to all this.
The article does not actually refute these concerns. Instead, it reframes antisemitism primarily as a reputational accusation—something cynically deployed to delegitimize political figures. But antisemitism is not merely an insult or a smear. It is a pattern of hostility that manifests in intimidation, exclusion and violence. A history of false accusations against Jews does not answer the question of whether Jews are endangered now, nor by whom. It merely reassures those who would prefer not to confront uncomfortable realities.
I write as the international liaison of a U.S.-based Jewish organization from the United Kingdom because New York is not just another city. It is the largest Jewish city outside Israel and a global cultural signal-setter.
What is normalized in language, alliances and moral framing rarely stays just there. It travels quickly across the Diaspora, including to Britain, where Jewish communities already face rising antisemitism on campuses and in public spaces. When Jewish concerns are dismissed in New York, that dismissal is cited and echoed elsewhere.
Jewish history deserves better than to be used as a shield against Jewish voices in the present. The radicals of the past argued fiercely about how Jews should live, and they helped shape a pluralistic New York. But they did not make peace with movements that sought to kill them, nor did they treat Jewish fear as an inconvenience to be explained away.
That distinction mattered then. It still matters now.
