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Cited in Today’s Video
Establishment Jewish leaders blame Zohran Mamdani for creating the climate that led to last week’s stabbing on the Upper West Side of New York.
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!), Raphael Magarik reviews the Jewish Museum’s Paul Klee exhibition.
Israel’s new strategy for wielding influence in Washington.
On August 23, I’ll be speaking in Sydney, Australia.
See you a week from Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, a terrible incident took place a few days ago in my neighborhood on the Upper West Side of New York. There were two stabbings, one of an Asian man and one of a visibly Jewish man. The visibly Jewish man was actually literally coming out of a synagogue that I’ve been to many times. So, this whole thing, you know, struck close to home for me. And, allegedly, the man who stabbed both of them was yelling, Allahu Akbar.
So, American Jewish kind of organizational leaders came along and said Zohran Mamdani is responsible for creating the atmosphere in which this guy did that. Now, of course, his stabbing of the Asian guy doesn’t quite compute with this logic, right? It suggests that perhaps there wasn’t entirely a clear political motor if this guy is yelling Allahu Akbar and stabbing an Asian person.
But put that aside, and let’s focus on the attack on the Jewish man. The logic of the Jewish leaders, and I’m thinking here of people like, you know, Eric Goldstone, the CEO of the UJA Federation of New York, which is kind of like the Jewish philanthropic organization of New York. And he said that Mamdani contributes ‘to a climate in which Jewish New Yorkers are increasingly targeted and unsafe.’ Or Rabbi Rick Jacobs, who is the leader of the reform movement, who said that ‘Mamdani has created an atmosphere in New York City that makes Jewish people feel less safe and put at risk.’
Now, I think it’s worth trying to understand the logic of the argument they’re making, and to see where I think it really falls apart. Their argument seems to be that because Mamdani has been a very, very fervent and passionate critic of Israel, and also of pro-Israel organizations like AIPAC—most specifically in this video he just did a few days ago, where he said that Benjamin Netanyahu was a war criminal and deserved to be arrested—that because Mamdani has said all of these really, really harshly critical things about Israel, that therefore, people are more likely to be hostile towards Jews, and in this case, actually violently hostile towards Jews.
Now, I think if we just think about this logically, you can see where the logic begins to break down a bit, right? First of all, let’s say that this man, this criminal, right, who did these two terrible things, that he was acting out his anger at Israel by stabbing this Jewish man. Would he really have needed Zohran Mamdani to make him angry at Israel? I mean, we’ve seen a genocide that’s been livestreamed, you know, back since the fall of 2023 now. And this has not been an obscure, small topic. It’s not like no one was paying attention to what Israel was doing in Gaza or to the Palestinians until Zohran Mamdani made it a big issue. It’s been a big issue because it’s a big issue, because modern technology’s allowed people to see what Israel’s doing in Gaza.
So, if it’s the case that this man was motivated by his fury at Israel, it seems to me quite a stretch that Zohran Mamdani would be responsible to that fury, rather than the genocide itself being responsible for that fury. Again, there’s a strange way in the logic of these Jewish leaders, they somehow seem to imagine that somehow people wouldn’t think this was all a big deal, what Israel was doing, or they wouldn’t think it was particularly bad if Zohran Mamdani weren’t making a big deal about it, which I think, in a strange way, like, reflects their own isolation, the fact that they themselves often, I think, live in these kind of cocoons, these bubbles where they don’t pay attention to what’s actually happening to Palestinians.
But a lot of other people are and have been paying attention. That’s part of the reason that public opinion has massively shifted in America, right? And it would have shifted whether or not Zohran Mamdani was elected. So, that’s the first way in which I think the logic just doesn’t really make sense here, the logic in which you say, Zohran Mamdani is attacking Israel, therefore people are attacking Jews.
But the second part of it is, right, that what was fundamentally wrong about what this man appears to have done, right, was that he blamed a random Jewish guy on the Upper West Side for the crimes of Israel. And he didn’t just blame him. He actually violently attacked this man, which is criminal. So, the problem here is that while you may have every right to be very, very angry at Israel, obviously—I should hope it’s obvious—that you don’t have the right to take out that anger against a Jewish person, just as it would be fundamentally wrong to take out your anger against Iran on an American Muslim, or on, you know, your anger against the government in Beijing on a Chinese-American. This conflation is fundamentally wrong and must be opposed.
But who is opposing this conflation between Israel and Jews, and who is making this conflation between Israel and Jews? It’s Zohran Mamdani who keeps opposing this conflation. Zohran Mamdani keeps saying again and again and again, my critique of Israel, even my opposition to Israel as a Jewish state has nothing to do with my feelings towards Jews in New York because I separate Israel as a state from Jewish New Yorkers. The people who are making this conflation, who are conflating Israel with Jews—Jews in New York, Jews in general, Jewishness as a category—are the very establishment Jewish leaders who are now attacking Mamdani.
Now, obviously, I mean, I shouldn’t even need to say this, obviously, that doesn’t mean by any stretch that these establishment Jewish leaders are responsible, God forbid, for this horrific crime that this man committed, but it does mean that if we’re thinking of a strategy for Jewish safety, and you want to compare these two strategies, the Mamdani strategy, which says keep Israel and Jews separate—obviously Jews can choose to support Israel—but don’t suggest that being Jewish inherently connects you, makes you a supporter of the State of Israel, or the strategy of the American Jewish leadership, which is to continually conflate these things, and say that there is something inherent in being Jewish that makes you a supporter of the state of Israel and the way it treats Palestinians.
If you think about these two things—the conflation by the Jewish leaders and the attempt to disaggregate on the part of Mamdani—it seems really obvious to me that it’s the strategy of disaggregation which is more likely to keep American Jews safe. In fact, the kind of conceptual problem in what this man did, besides the fact that he committed this terrible crime, was precisely to conflate Jews and Israel.
And the fundamental contradiction, I think, like the intellectual contradiction in the American Jewish leadership, who are now attacking Mamdani, is they want to say that it’s fundamentally wrong to conflate Israel and Jews when you hate Israel, right? But it’s fine to conflate American Jews in Israel when you really like Israel, as they do. And that just doesn’t make any sense, right? You can’t have it both ways.
The strategy for keeping Jews safe, in addition to doing the same things that would keep everyone safe, like putting more money into fighting against mental health, having decent public safety, trying to maintain our democracy, all of these things. The strategy for keeping Jews safe is to say that Israel and Jews are separate, and therefore to be able to clearly and coherently say that it’s wrong to blame Jews for what Israel does.
Zohran Mamdani can actually say that. He does say that. The very American Jewish leaders who are blaming Mamdani for this attack are the ones who can’t say that, because they keep conflating Israel and Jews, even though it’s that conflation, I think, that leaves American Jews less safe.
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