Mamdani Derangement Syndrome
In the American imagination, all Jews are New Yorkers. That’s especially true about the codes of anti-Semitism. New Yorkers are brash, loud, and disrespectful. They presume intimacy and take up too much space. They’re clever, but conniving and breathe through their mouths. It’s a way of talking about Jews without saying the word.
I’m a different kind of Jew (?!), although I sometimes breathe through my mouth. I also confess to being New-York-o-centric. I go as often as I can and follow the news, especially the part about politics and culture. This week, it was all about Zohran Mamdani, the Socialist Democrat running against Andrew Cuomo for mayor. I was actually there when the primary vote was counted.
In case you’re behind, Mamdani won. Cuomo’s campaign was dour and lifeless. Disgraced in his tenure as governor of New York, he managed to communicate a brand of repellent entitlement. He also confirmed a Democratic stereotype, that we are a geriatric party of cold, dead hands which cannot release the future to its inheritors.
Mamdani, in contrast was fresh and new, like a crisp green salad with ginger-sesame dressing. He is impossibly handsome, freakishly articulate, and untouched by either wisdom or experience. But most people put the inexperience aside and allowed themselves to be swept away by his enthusiasm, even if he cannot possibly deliver. Every one of his simple, attractive proposals will cost a fortune and alienate the plutocrats. I think he’ll win, but maybe not.
About the only people who seem seriously troubled, are the Jews who’ve reacted loudly to his candidacy. They don’t like his principled stand on Gaza, and his judgments about Netanyahu and ethno-nationalists in general. In a remarkably impolitic comment on a recent podcast, he dismissed the language of “globalizing the intifada” as the sincere expression of Palestinian aspiration. For Jews, of course, it is a call to slaughter, of a Judenrein Palestine from the river to the sea. Already there is talk about crushing Mamdani, by oligarchs who hate his confiscatory Socialism and Jews who hate the sound of his sympathy for Palestinians.
But that, remarkably, is not the whole of this story. What I learned from friends, from broadcasts, and commentators, is that many Jewish voters are not troubled at all. We are not, of course, a monocultural bloc, but Mamdani won votes on the Upper West Side, Park Slope in Brooklyn, and in other Jewish enclaves. He partnered with City Comptroller Brad Lander, and had many Jewish campaign workers and strategists.
Some of these people are no doubt far-left ideologues, but many seem to think—and rightly so—that Mamdani’s pro-Palestinianism is immaterial. The mayor of New York is traditionally a pro-Israel figure, but that has little effect on American foreign relations. It’s just not part of his urban portfolio.
Apart from that, they seem to take him at his word. Zohran Mamadani is something new. He argues convincingly that he is not anti-Semitic. He takes the sensitivities of American Jews seriously and will not allow Jew-hatred to flourish uncontested. At the same time, he has a heart for Palestinians and belives that they have experienced an historic injustice. In other words he rejects the conflation of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, or even the critique of Israeli policy toward Gaza.
That’s something for all the rest of us to be thinking about. Netanyahu has asked us to see everything as a blood libel. Someone who thinks “bad” thoughts about Gaza and the West Bank is perforce a sinister, dangerous anti-Semite. I don’t think I respond to that call any longer, and neither do many of the Jews of New York. Mamdani has much to teach us about campaigns, but he also says something interesting about Jews.