In a world fractured by disinformation, political opportunism, and the normalization of extremist rhetoric, one fact remains crystal clear: Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor of New York is not about transportation subsidies, housing affordability, or “socialist equality.” It is, as Vanity Fair’s James Pogue has now documented with unsettling precision, about Israel—and about delegitimizing the world’s only Jewish state.
For those who still held out hope that Mamdani’s hostility toward Israel was just one issue among many in his platform, Pogue’s profile makes the truth unmistakable: Mamdani’s entire political identity is built on an obsessive animus toward the Jewish state. This is not merely a passing plank in his campaign rhetoric. It is his “formative issue.” It is the engine of his appeal to segments of the activist left. And it is the litmus test by which he judges his own legitimacy as a political leader.
The evidence is everywhere. As Vanity Fair reports, Mamdani openly claims that Israel represents the “hypocrisies” of Western values. He brands the Jewish state’s war against Hamas—a war that began when Hamas terrorists stormed across the border on Oct. 7, murdering 1,200 innocent people in the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust—as “genocide.” He insists that Israel is somehow the singular evil in the world that must be eradicated.
This is not the language of reasoned debate. It is the vocabulary of hatred.
Mamdani’s campaign is part of a larger, deeply disturbing trend: the appropriation of the Palestinian Arab cause as the central rallying cry for a radical left-wing movement intent on tearing down Western democratic institutions. As Pogue notes, “Palestine” is becoming, for this generation of anti-establishment activists, what Vietnam was for the radical left in the 1960s: a totemic cause, a symbol around which resentment, revolution, and ideological fervor are organized.
But let us be honest: Mamdani’s selective outrage betrays his true motives. If universal human rights were his guiding principle, his speeches would ring with the names of the Uyghurs in China, who languish in concentration camps under Beijing’s genocidal policies. He would weep for the Christians and Jews of the Middle East, who have been driven from their ancestral communities by Islamist persecution. He would rage against Uganda’s draconian laws that criminalize homosexuality with life sentences and even death.
Yet Mamdani says little of these atrocities. He reserves his fury, and his accusations of “genocide,” solely for Israel—the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, the only state in the region that protects the rights of Muslims, Christians, Jews, women, and LGBTQ citizens alike.
Why? Because at its core, Mamdani’s crusade is not about universal rights. It is about targeting Jews.
To call Israel’s defensive war against Hamas “genocide” is not only a moral outrage but also an act of historical perversion. Genocide is what the Nazis perpetrated against the Jewish people during the Holocaust—an industrial-scale attempt to eradicate an entire people, resulting in the murder of six million. Genocide is what happened in Rwanda in 1994, when 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered in 100 days. Genocide is what the Chinese Communist Party is inflicting on the Uyghurs.
By contrast, Israel’s military campaign is aimed at dismantling Hamas—a jihadist terrorist organization that deliberately hides its fighters and weapons in civilian areas, cynically ensuring that Palestinian Arab civilians will suffer in order to produce propaganda.
To label Israel’s actions “genocide” is not only false, it is defamatory. It is an inversion of history that places blame on the victims while absolving the perpetrators. It transforms the Jewish state from a refuge born out of the ashes of the Holocaust into the supposed heir of Nazi barbarism. That is not criticism of policy. That is antisemitism in its rawest form.
The danger is not limited to Mamdani himself. A recent New York Times/Siena poll shows that sympathy for Palestinian Arabs now slightly outstrips sympathy for Israelis among Americans, with 35% siding with Palestinian Arabs compared to 34% with Israelis. This shift, in the wake of the Oct. 7 atrocities, reflects not a sober reevaluation of facts but the triumph of propaganda in social media, academia, and activist politics.
This is precisely the terrain on which Mamdani thrives. His campaign feeds on the anger of those who have been conditioned to see Israel not as a vibrant democracy defending itself against terror, but as an “apartheid state” guilty of phantom genocides. In this way, Mamdani is not merely a local political candidate. He is the embodiment of a growing movement that seeks to mainstream antisemitism under the guise of progressive politics.
To understand the sheer indecency of Mamdani’s rhetoric, one must remember Jewish history. For 2,000 years, Jews were stateless and vulnerable. They were expelled from England, France, and Spain. They were subjected to pogroms in Russia and massacres throughout Europe. They were demonized in Islamic lands as dhimmis—second-class citizens. Finally, in the 20th century, they endured the Holocaust, the systematic extermination of one-third of their people.
The State of Israel is the Jewish answer to that history: a sovereign nation where Jews can defend themselves, where never again would their safety depend on the goodwill of others. To demand that Israel cease to exist “as a Jewish state,” as Mamdani does, is to demand that the Jewish people relinquish their only shield against annihilation.
That is why his stance cannot be dismissed as mere “criticism of Israeli policy.” It is the very definition of antisemitism: denying the Jewish people the right to self-determination.
New York is home to the largest Jewish community outside Israel. It is a city that has been built, in no small part, by Jewish immigrants who arrived with nothing and contributed immeasurably to its cultural, economic, and civic life. To elect a mayor whose defining issue is hostility to Israel—who repeats the blood libel of “genocide” and openly questions the legitimacy of the Jewish state—would be an act of betrayal to those citizens.
It would send a chilling message to Jewish New Yorkers: that their safety, their history, their very identity are fair game for political exploitation. It would normalize antisemitism at the highest level of city government. And it would embolden extremists who already chant “globalize the intifada” on our streets.
The threat posed by Mamdani’s rise extends beyond New York. It is part of a global struggle over the survival of democratic values. If the world’s only Jewish state can be smeared as genocidal for defending itself against terrorism, then truth itself becomes meaningless. If politicians can build careers by demonizing Jews while wrapping themselves in the cloak of “progressivism,” then the lessons of the Holocaust have already been forgotten.
This is why his campaign must be opposed, not only by Jews but by all who care about democracy, truth, and justice. The fight against antisemitism is not a parochial Jewish concern. It is the frontline defense of civilization against the forces of hatred that, once unleashed, never confine themselves to a single target.
Zohran Mamdani’s candidacy is a test of moral clarity for New York. Will the city reward a man whose political career is fueled by hostility toward Jews and their state? Or will it recognize that such hatred, however artfully disguised as “social justice,” is incompatible with the values of tolerance, pluralism, and truth?
New Yorkers must choose wisely. The stakes are nothing less than the moral character of their city.
Mamdani’s campaign of hatred should not succeed. It must be repudiated—loudly, clearly, and unequivocally.
(And what do we do about Curtis Sliwa’s anti-haredi rant?)
Fern Sidman is senior news editor at The Jewish Voice.