Mamdani and the Jews
One thing about Mayor Zohran Mamdani: he will be doing battle about the Jews until the cows come home. It has been braided into his mayoralty from the very beginning, and it is now the issue that won’t go away. To make the obvious comparison with Timothee Chalamet, it’s a little bit like the kerfuffle about opera/ballet. Once you say it, you can’t unsay it, and there will always be people like Conan O’Brien to remind you. Pointedly. Sarcastically. In front of millions of people.
The issue this time is Susan Abulhawa, a truly scurrilous anti-Semite. She is a prominent essayist on the fanatic fringe, trafficking in the classic tropes of Jew-hatred, as common on the right as they are on the left. Jews are a cosmopolitan, parasitical people, imposter-Semites, a stunted growth. She calls us “vampires.” She calls us “ghouls.”
Her message this past fall was that Israel was a monster, a "cultureless, rootless human aberration in the form of a manufactured 'nation.’" The crowning insult named us “jewish supremacist demons." Notice that “jewish” is never capitalized, as if an upper-case J would grant us dignity. She seems to know that some people distinguish between Jews in general and the behavior of a particular government, but it’s all the same in her violent mind. She “doesn’t give a sh-t if people collapse the distinction.” Zionists and Jews are one in the same. That’s how you get to Temple Israel in Michigan. If every preschooler is an oppressor-in-training, no form of violence is off the table.
I can’t stand Abulhawa or anything she says, especially her verbal venom, her gift for abuse. I hate her notion that Zionism is evil, that it does not carry a promise of redemption. So what does this have to do with Mamdani? His wife, Rama Duwaji, an artist activist, recently illustrated an essay by Abulhawa. I haven’t seen either the essay or the image, but when the episode recently came to light, Mamdani immediately made things worse. He first insisted that this had nothing to do with him, that he abhorred prejudice in any form. He then pointed to the truth, that his wife is not the mayor, but a private person entitled to her views. That’s fine with me, but not the way of the world. We are all tarred—and burnished—by the views of those closest to us.
But then he suggested that Duwaji was unaware, that she was commissioned by a third-party agent for her work, who had not, presumably, shared the identity of the author. To put the matter plainly, that’s a pile of sh-t. Duwaji is not a child of the forest, but a politically aware citizen-activist who follows the discourse on Palestine closely. She really likes people who defend Palestinians, even at the cost of Israeli lives. Please don’t tell us that she was a deer in the headlights or a faerie among the ferns.
The result is that Mamdani is taking his lumps. I still believe in his democratic socialism. I still believe that he was a gifted candidate, who made his opponent, Andrew Cuomo, look like an ancient leather bag. But he keeps getting in bed with the wrong kind of people. One of his appointments, Catherine Almonte Da Costa, had to resign her post before he took office because of anti-Semitic remarks she had made in the past. Mamdani, himself, keeps trumpeting his anti-Zionism, a new and distressing take on virtue-signaling, as if it were the job of an American mayor to take a stand on the legitimacy of the Jewish State.
Note to Zohran: it’s not your responsibility, and there is a very good chance that you will get caught in the vise grip of unnecessary controversy and pointless tumult. That is no way to make a political career.