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. We’ll talk about the New York mayoral race’s ramifications for the Israel-Palestine debate nationally. Our guests will be Palestinian-American Georgia State Representative, and gubernatorial candidate, Ruwa Romman, who was denied the chance to speak at last year’s Democratic convention, and former Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes, co-host of the podcast, Pod Save the World.

Cited in Today’s Video

The Department of Justice alleged that Andrew Cuomo sexually harassed thirteen women.

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!), Rhys Machold questions the “Start Up Nation” myth.

Senator Rand Paul defends the Constitution against Donald Trump.

The funeral of Rabbi Arthur Waskow, z’’l.

Check out Arno Rosenfeld’s new Substack, Antisemitism Decoded.

The Halachic Left on Parshat Lech Lecha.

I discussed Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza on KALW public radio in the Bay Area.

I’ll be speaking on November 3 at the University of Chicago, November 6 at Columbia Journalism School, and November 10 at Cornell University and Congregation Tikkun v’Or in Ithaca, New York.

See you Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, when I started writing my book, I didn’t think it would be about idolatry. I mean, I knew it would be about Israel and the destruction of Gaza, but it ended up kind of being a book about idolatry because the more I wrote it, the more I began to feel that the organized American Jewish community was willing to sacrifice almost anything to preserve unconditional support for the state of Israel, that every other value, every other principle was subordinated to that.

And I’m seeing that so dramatically and, to me, in what is such a disgraceful way in the final days of this campaign against Zohran Mamdani. What are you willing to sacrifice in order to prevent a New York mayor who says that Israeli Jews and Palestinians should live equally under the same law? What are you willing to try to do to destroy such a candidate? The answer is: lie with almost anyone, do almost anything.

Let’s just look at the examples. We have now all of these rabbis who have either explicitly or implicitly endorsed Andrew Cuomo to be next mayor of New York. This is a man who the Department of Justice found had sexually harassed 13 women, sexually harassed 13 women according to the Department of Justice. And you have rabbis telling their congregants that they need to overlook this and support this man.

Do these rabbis ever think about what message that sends to the women in their own congregations who are being sexually harassed, who might look to a rabbi for pastoral care? Your message it sends to those women when your rabbi gets up and says, I want you to vote for the serial sexual harasser, what does it say about how much you care about women’s right to be free of sexual harassment?

It says it is much less important to you than the principle of ensuring that Israel never faces accountability for its crimes under international law, even when those crimes have been widely acknowledged by the world’s leading genocide scholars, including many Israeli-born genocide scholars, right? That maintaining Israeli impunity to commit genocide and ensuring that Israel doesn’t have to face pressure for equality with Palestinians, that that is more important than the principle that sexual harassment is wrong and that sexual harassers should not be in high public office.

What else are these Jewish leaders willing to sacrifice for the idolatry of unconditional support for the state of Israel? Well, complicity in a mass campaign of anti-Muslim bigotry. We’re daily deluged in the final days of this campaign by just the crudest, most vicious anti-Muslim bigotry against Zohran Mamdani. Now, I’m not saying that everyone who opposes Zohran Mamdani is an anti-Muslim bigot. Of course not.

But I wonder whether it should at least give some of these Jewish leaders a little bit of pause that they have thrown in their lot with a candidate, Andrew Cuomo, who laughed and suggested with a radio talk show host that Zohran Mamdani would have applauded 9/11. This is the people with whom you are throwing in your lot, a viciously anti-Muslim bigoted campaign, and you’re saying, well, you know, opposing anti-Muslim bigotry is less important to me than preserving unconditional support for the state of Israel to be able to perpetuate what the world’s leading human rights organizations have termed as apartheid and genocide.

And then there’s the question of American democracy, right? Because this mayoral election is not happening under ordinary circumstances, right? It’s happening amidst the potential authoritarian takeover and destruction of America’s system of liberal democracy by Donald Trump. And so, one thing you might really want to think about if you believe in liberal democracy is which candidate is more likely to stand up for the principle of liberal democracy: Andrew Cuomo, who has a history of kind of flirting with Donald Trump? Eric Adams, who was an ally of Donald Trump? Or Zohran Mamdani, who’s a very, very vehement, steadfast opponent of Donald Trump? That also turns out to be much less important to these Jewish leaders than opposing a candidate who was willing to try to hold Israel to the standards of international law.

And it is extraordinary to see these rabbis and Jewish leaders describe Zohran Mamdani as a greater threat to Jewish New Yorkers and to the city and the country they love than Donald Trump. I’ve watched these videos put out by rabbis calling on their congregants not to vote for Zohran Mamdani, and I thought to myself, have they done similar videos about Donald Trump?

If you act as I think the Jewish leadership of the institutional Jewish leadership of New York City and beyond has, as if Zohran Mamdani is a greater threat, more offensive, more of an emergency than Donald Trump, what does that say? It seems to me it’s pretty clear what it says. It says that you care more about preserving unconditional American support for Israel than you care about preserving America as a free country, a free country for you and your children.

And this is something that we saw when AIPAC made this very clear when AIPAC endorsed dozens, if not hundreds, of members of Congress who had supported the January 6th insurrection and refused to accept the legitimacy of the 2020 election. We saw this when the Anti-Defamation League in 2024 gave an award to Jared Kushner. That the American Jewish leadership, when faced with the question of what is really important to them, the preservation of America as a liberal democracy, even though it has been liberal democracy, which has been the foundation of American Jewish flourishing, it is the foundation of Jewish safety in the United States, that that is less important to them, less of a criteria for determining which candidates for public office they declare as emergencies and threats to the Jewish community than a candidate who is willing to say that he believes that his city, New York, should abide by the international courts’ indictment of Benjamin Netanyahu, and who abides by international legal scholars who say Israel’s committing genocide.

And God forbid, God forbid, supports the principle that states should be based on equality under the law, irrespective of race, religion, and sex—the principle that American Jewish leadership supposedly believes in the United States, but turns out actually not to believe in it very much because they’re willing to fight much harder to ensure a system that denies equality under the law in Israel and Palestine than they are to try to defend a system of equality under the law in the United States. And so, they end up aligning with white Christian nationalist bigots who are turning America into an authoritarian society, and if they haven’t noticed, will ultimately also be a threat to Jews.

Because fundamentally, what I think the anti-Mamdani campaign doesn’t understand in the Jewish community, just fundamentally doesn’t understand is something simple. If they’re willing to go after him as a Muslim, if they’re willing to go after trans people, if they’re willing to go after Black people, if people who are bigoted and have a view of America as a tribal white Christian nation in which everybody else has been subordinated, those people will get to Jews sooner or later.

And the people who are best likely to be your best allies are the people who have a principled opposition to bigotry and a principled belief in human equality. That candidate actually is Zohran Mamdani. It’s not Andrew Cuomo. It’s certainly not Donald Trump. And yet it’s Zohran Mamdani who is considered to be the greatest threat to Jewish New Yorkers because the way they define threat is not actually what threatens the lives of Jewish New Yorkers. It’s what threatens the idolatry of the worship of a state whose political system is considered by many Jewish leaders to matter more than the lives of the people inside of that state, and indeed to matter more than the lives of many people in New York as well.

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