Zohran Mamdani’s historic run will also help free Jews, and U.S. politics, from Zionism

Zohran Mamdani at the Resist Fascism Rally in New York City’s Bryant Park on October 27, 2024. (Photo: Bingjiefu He, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

Zohran Mamdani’s historic run for New York mayor is a huge moment for Jewish identity, boosting Jews who argue that Judaism is not synonymous with Zionism.

According to polls, two out of three young Jews are expected to vote for Mamdani, and overall, a substantial minority of Jews will support him (43 percent).

These Jews accept or even celebrate Mamdani’s Palestinian solidarity. Mamdani takes positions that were previously a third rail in politics: He supports BDS against Israel, he says Israel committed a genocide in Gaza, and he says he would seek to arrest Netanyahu as a war criminal if he came to New York.

The New York Times is compelled to quote Jewish Voice for Peace, the anti-Zionist group that hails Mamdani’s campaign as a fight “for the humanity, dignity, and freedom of all people — from NYC to Palestine.” JVP has generally been invisible or the subject of scare commentary, banished from Columbia University under pressure from donors.

Zionists are, of course, fighting back. More than 1,000 rabbis have rallied against Mamdani, saying that the assemblyman is fanning the flames of antisemitism. These rabbis say that supporting Israel is central to Jewish religion, and this view represents the Jewish majority and “the Jewish future.” And some of those rabbis are J Street rabbis — so-called liberal Zionists.

If Mamdani does what he’s expected to do – win with Jews on the dais — anti-Zionists will gain a strong voice inside the Jewish community to raise important questions: Why is Jewish nationalism an article of religious faith — and not just some ethnosupremacist ideology, no different from Jim Crow? Is it good for Jews to be associated with apartheid and ethnic cleansing and the massacres of children?

Until the rise of Mamdani, liberal Zionists successfully defined the limits of Israel criticism in the Democratic Party. They said that BDS is antisemitic, and we’ll cancel anyone who supports it, and though we hate the occupation, we will never put any pressure on Israel to end it. Today, many liberal Zionists are moving away from those positions.

This crisis, in faith and discourse, is long overdue. For over 75 years, the organized American Jewish community has willingly agreed to whitewash Israel’s atrocities. The Jewish establishment (all the leading organizations and religious bodies, under the Conference of Presidents umbrella) enforced simple rules about Israel. We must speak in one voice and never disagree publicly (because we are a tiny minority), and we affirm whatever the Israeli government says.

So the most liberal, wealthy, highly educated religious cohort in American society signed off on apartheid and scolded and ostracized Jimmy Carter for even using the word. Virtually the entire Jewish community backed the slaughter in Gaza– congregations, leadership organizations, charitable organizations, liberal Zionists. The exceptions were noble young Jewish groups, Jewish Voice for Peace, and IfNotNow.

Aligning the Jewish religion with a brutal apartheid government is very bad for Jews. Not only has it destroyed the Jewish tradition of promoting civil rights, but it has also generated resentment and fueled antisemitism.

So Mamdani’s rise is a liberation. It grants space to anti-Zionist Jews to espouse essential liberal principles that the Jewish establishment has trashed—boycotting persecution, prosecuting war criminals.

The liberal media are going to resist this trend as long as they can. The New York Times continues to paint Israel as a robust democracy, though maybe Netanyahu went too far – as if the repeated massacre of non-Jews is not an essential feature of Zionism. Just the other day, the Times published an insane declaration by an Israeli leader that Israel has enforced its ceasefire in Lebanon by “attack[ing] more than a thousand times” in one year. Times columnist Ezra Klein then responded to the savage assertion respectfully. NPR is almost as blind.

Disentangling Zionism and Jewish culture will not happen overnight, there’s going to be a fierce generational battle.

Miss Rachel, the YouTube star who has emerged as a leading voice for Palestinian humanization in mainstream media, related this week that she was repeatedly turned down when she tried to rent a play space in New York to welcome the arrival of Rahaf, a Gaza child who lost both legs to Israeli bombs. Miss Rachel doesn’t say who slammed the door, but the racist pattern she describes is characteristic of the Jewish Zionist community in New York. Not long ago, the 92d Street Y canceled a speaking engagement by a Palestinian author, Izzeldin Abuelaish, who had lost three daughters to Israeli bombs, because it could not “balance” Abu Elaish with a pro-Israel voice. The year I started this site, the New York Theatre Workshop canceled a play based on Rachel Corrie’s idealistic writings.

It is an antisemitic conspiracy theory to say that Jews control foreign policy, Ben Lorber said on the NPR media show this week. Sure, such blanket statements are antisemitic, but Lorber’s comment serves to defend the Israel lobby from criticism. He is implying that it is antisemitic to ascribe outsize power to an organized faction of Jewish Zionists.

The reality is that an organized faction of Zionists in public life has dominated policy-making in the Middle East for the last 60 or 70 years.

As Trump told the Knesset this month, the Adelsons came into his office whenever they wanted, and “were very responsible for so much”. That included trashing the Iran deal and recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

That organized faction explains the fact that Obama did nothing to thwart the occupation but forced the Democratic Party to call Jerusalem the “undivided” capital of Israel in 2012, defying the base. That organized faction explains why Biden and Harris refused to acknowledge Israel’s genocide, let alone lift a finger to stop it, for more than a year, even as the Democratic base recoiled. It explains why Hakeem Jeffries waited till last week to endorse Mamdani—Jeffries, who once declared during the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza, “Israel today, Israel tomorrow, Israel forever.”

That faction rose inside the Jewish community – yes, out of sincere fear for Jewish safety – and disdain for Palestinian safety — and it has morphed into a power bloc that destroyed careers and bound Democrats to the mast. Just this week, Michael Bloomberg, a supporter of Israel, put another $1.5 million behind Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani’s opponent. As NY governor, Cuomo repeatedly acted to ban BDS.

The lobby’s power must be addressed if we are ever going to have peace in the Middle East, and the lobby will have to be taken down inside the Jewish community.

Jewish anti-Zionists can’t do this work on our own. A scorned minority in the Jewish community, we have always depended on non-Jews for support and learning. Mamdani is the latest such ally, and likely the most revolutionary.