A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

This Friday’s Zoom call will be at 1 PM Eastern, our usual time. Our guest will be Jonathan Mahler, a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine and author of the new book, Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990. With New York on the verge of electing a socialist, Muslim, anti-Zionist mayor, I want to ask Jonathan how the city has changed over the last three decades, and how those changes enabled the rise of Zohran Mamdani.

Ask Me Anything

Our next Ask Me Anything session, for premium subscribers, will be this Tuesday, October 28, from Noon-1 PM Eastern time.

Cited in Today’s Video

Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, and Bret Stephens attack Zohran Mamdani.

According to CBS, Mamdani is winning 38 percent of the Jewish vote.

According to the Washington Post, 39 percent of American Jews think Israel is committing genocide.

Mamdani has called both Narendra Modi and Vladimir Putin war criminals.

When apartheid South Africa’s prime minister complained about “double standards.”

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Suzanne Schneider analyzes the Trump administration’s grant to a neoconservative Jewish group.

Waleed Shahid on Mamdani’s lessons for Democrats.

Nathan Thrall on what Israelis and Palestinians have learned since October 7.

Rabbi David Polsky argues that starving Palestinians in Gaza violates Jewish law.

I’ll be speaking on November 2 at Tzedek Chicago, November 6 at Columbia Journalism School, and November 10 at Congregation Tikkun v’Or in Ithaca, New York.

See you on Tuesday and Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, as we get near the New York mayoral race, the attacks on Zohran Mamdani have been become more intense, and in particular from a number of rabbis and Jewish commentators. And it’s really interesting to look carefully at the nature of these attacks on Mamdani to see what they say and what they don’t say.

What you notice is the attacks on Mamdani do not actually engage in a substantive critique with any actual evidence against the positions that Mamdani has taken, for instance, that Israel’s committing genocide, or that the New York City should support the International Criminal Court’s indictment of Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes, or that Israel should be a state that treats all its citizens equally rather than one that gives Jews legal superiority. None of these arguments are actually made. What you see instead is a series of techniques that are all designed to suggest—although not always explicitly—that basically Mamdani is an antisemite. And I think there are two particular ways that are worth noting about the way in which these claims of antisemitism are created.

The first is that these critics—Jewish critics of Mamdani—posit that they speak for a Jewish consensus, a kind of Jewish pro-Israel consensus. And the fact that Mamdani is against that Jewish pro-Israel consensus is evidence that he has something against Jews, right? So, Rabbi Ammiel Hirsh did this video where he said that most Jews are deeply offended by Zohran Mamdani saying that Israel has committed genocide. Now, that itself is kind of interesting, right? Hirsch is not presenting any evidence that the claim is wrong. He’s simply saying that most Jews are offended. So, it’s a kind of like an identity claim argument, right, that there must be something problematic about this charge of genocide because most Jews are offended, i.e., this probably, you know, suggests some anti-Jewish animus on Mamdani’s part.

But it’s just factually wrong, actually. The Washington Post just recently came out with a poll showed that 39 percent of American Jews think Israel is committing genocide; fifty one percent don’t. So, it’s not a majority of American Jews who think Israel is committing genocide. But it’s a quite large minority of American Jews, right. So, by taking this position, Zohran Mamdani is essentially siding with the more progressive wing of the American Jewish community over the more conservative wing of the American Jewish community, which is hardly surprising given that he’s a political progressive, right, that he is in a way exposing a very deep and increasingly bitter divide among Jews in New York and other places. In fact, it’s probably not a coincidence that Zohran Mamdani is getting about in the polls around 40% of the Jewish vote, running close to Andrew Cuomo, which is roughly the same percentage of Jews nationally think Israel’s committing genocide, right?

But Ammi Hirsch can’t acknowledge that. He has to portray himself as kind of someone who speaks for Jews as a whole, right, even though nobody has elected him, right? Very few Jewish New Yorkers even know who he is. There’s no reason to believe that he would have the right to do that. But he has to do it in order to suggest that, by disagreeing with Ammiel Hirsch, that Mamdani disagrees with the vast majority of Jews and therefore has something against Jews.

Similarly, in his column in the New York Times, Bret Stephens acknowledges, to his credit, that a Fox News poll shows that Mamdani is winning 38% of the Jewish vote. But then he suggests that these voters must be setting aside whatever reservations they might have about the candidates’ views on Israel. So, the only way in which Bret Stephens can imagine that Jews would be supporting Mamdani is to think that they’re doing so in spite of views on Israel. But in fact, the evidence suggests that that’s probably a plus for most of them. Again, after all, the polls show that roughly 40% of American Jews hold the views about Israel that Mamdani does. But Bret Stephens can’t really acknowledge that because that would completely reframe the argument, right, in which he wants to suggest that Mamdani is in opposition to the vast majority of Jews on Israel and, therefore, that that suggests that Mamdani has some problem with Jews.

The second way in which you see this kind of argument of antisemitism being made, is that Mamdani is applying a set of double standards towards Israel, right? Again, it’s not an argument that what Mamdani is saying is wrong on the merits. It’s an argument that there must be some animus here because he’s so focused on Israel. So, Bret Stephens in his column writes, ‘one of the ways anti-Zionists tend to give themselves away as something darker,’ right—something darker is a pretty obvious euphemism for antisemite—’is that the only human rights abuses they seem to notice are Israel’s.’

Here’s a tip. Whenever you notice a writer use the phrase seem, it usually suggests that they don’t actually have evidence for what they’re going to say, but they actually just want to kind of assert it because it seems that way to them. In fact, Zohran Mamdani actually does criticize a lot of other countries for their human rights abuses. He said that Vladimir Putin should also be indicted, that New York should also help indict Vladimir Putin at the International Criminal Court, support the ICC’s warrant against Vladimir Putin. He’s called Narendra Modi, India’s leader, a war criminal, right.

And when he talks about Israel, Mamdani says again and again and again that his criticisms of Israel are based on his broad support for international law, and his belief in human rights, and his opposition to the idea of ethno-nationalist states. That’s the same reason that he doesn’t like Narendra Modi, because Narendra Modi is trying to turn India into a Hindu state. Mamdani doesn’t like the idea of states that are based on religious or ethnic or racial supremacy, which is why he opposes India being a Hindu state and Israel being a Jewish state, right?

It’s actually pretty consistent in his worldview. In fact, I think you’d probably find that Zohar Mamdani, if you looked at something like U.S. arms sales to foreign countries, that Zohran Mamdani would be much, much more critical of many dictatorships than many of his pro-Israel critics. Many of his pro-Israel critics are actually big fans at this point of the dictatorships in, for instance, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Egypt because those governments are fairly supportive of Israel. Mamdani actually is the one who, in accordance with the Semocratic Socialists of America, who’ve endorsed him, basically wants a radical reduction of arms sales to all dictatorships around the world.

But the other thing is that the articles never acknowledge the possibility that one might speak more about Israel, right, and criticize Israel more for reasons that don’t have to do with antisemitism. And here are a couple, right? And you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to think these out.

First of all, the United States gives far more money, far more military support to Israel than any other country, and much more diplomatic support, right. So, of course, it makes more sense if you’re an American politician to care more about the human rights abuses that are being committed with American tax dollars than those that aren’t being committed with American tax dollars, right.

It’s also the case that Zohran Mamdani simply gets asked relentlessly about Israel, right. He doesn’t get asked many questions about his views on the human rights condition in Myanmar. And that’s partly because people like Bret Stephens and Ammiel Hirsch don’t focus their concerns about Myanmar, right. I mean, one of the things that drives me crazy about all these arguments that basically people like Zohran Mamdani are focusing too much on human rights abuses in Israel is that there’s nothing stopping Zohran Mamdani’s critics from focusing their attention on human rights problems in Myanmar or Zimbabwe or Congo or Sudan or anyone else.

But they’re not actually interested in those subjects. What they’re primarily interested in is defending Israel. And then because in their defense of Israel, they attack Zohran Mamdani, and then Zohran Mamdani basically defends his views, and then they attack him for focusing too much attention on Israel when they themselves are also far more interested in Israel, right, than those other countries.

Double standards is always a tell, right? When you argue that the problem is that someone’s subjecting you to double standards, it’s a tell that you don’t actually have a good defense of what you’re doing, which is why virtually every government that’s accused of human rights abuses sooner or later says that they’re being subjected to a double standard, right? Because it turns the conversation away from what they’re actually doing to the biased, and in this case supposedly bigoted, motives of the critics, right?

So, for instance, there was a world leader who said a couple of decades ago that, ‘we will not satisfy the world because it measures with a double standard.’ That was P.W. Berta, the the president of apartheid South Africa in the mid-1980s. This was actually, I remember—again, because my family grew up and my parents are South African—this was a constant claim by the apartheid government. Why aren’t you focusing more on Idi Amin in Uganda? Why aren’t you focusing more on Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire? Why aren’t you focusing on Bokassa or Mugabe or all of these people, right?

And again, it was a tell that the South African government, which had been accused of apartheid by the world’s leading human rights organizations, didn’t have a good answer to that. So, what they wanted to do was essentially say there must be some bias here because we’re being focused on as opposed to other countries.

And now Israel, having been accused of practicing apartheid, and indeed genocide, by its own human rights organizations and the world’s leading human rights organization is doing exactly the same thing. And this is being parroted by some figures in the New York Jewish community in an attempt to suggest that Zohran Mamdani is a bigot. And the fundamental irony of it all, actually, is that Mamdani is being called a bigot because he supports equality between Palestinians and Jews, right?

And equality is not bigotry. Equality is the antithesis of bigotry. And the people who are accusing Zohran Mamdani of bigotry, are doing so in order to preserve a system of Jewish supremacy, a system of institutionalized bigotry that has indeed been called apartheid by the world’s leading human rights organizations. That’s the kind of Orwellian turn behind this whole thing: to use the language of anti-bigotry to oppose equality and defend bigotry itself.

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