{"id":269859,"date":"2026-08-22T00:32:08","date_gmt":"2026-08-22T00:32:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/269859\/"},"modified":"2026-08-22T00:32:08","modified_gmt":"2026-08-22T00:32:08","slug":"new-york-magazines-habibi-city-erases-jews-while-celebrating-jihad-chic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/269859\/","title":{"rendered":"New York Magazine\u2019s \u2018Habibi City\u2019 erases Jews while celebrating \u2018jihad chic\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

It isn\u2019t any cooler outside, but I have proof that hell has frozen over: New York Magazine, a publication with a rich history of spotlighting brilliant, insightful, and often skeptical journalism that captured the essence of the Big Apple, by great writers such as Tom Wolfe, just featured a cover story proclaiming New York<\/a> is \u201cHabibi City,\u201d an anti-Jewish package of puff pieces that lauds \u201cSWANA\u201d culture in New York.<\/p>\n

SWANA, for the uninitiated, is the new politically correct acronym meaning people of Southwest Asian and North African origin, replacing the acronym MENA, which stood for Middle East\/North Africa<\/a> and is now considered Eurocentric.<\/p>\n

In the main piece, Zaina Arafat, an award-winning novelist who grew up in a Washington, DC, suburb, the daughter of Palestinian parents, writes: \u201cSWANA includes countries from Palestine to Iran to Sudan\u2026 To be in SWANA community meant embracing a set of shared beliefs: that Palestinians deserve human rights. That what happened in Gaza in the aftermath of October 7<\/a> constitutes a genocide. That social justice and social welfare override capitalist concerns. That to care is nonnegotiable.\u201d<\/p>\n

SWANA may include various countries, according to the articles, but it does not include the Jews whose parents and grandparents fled these countries and moved to New York. The two articles in the \u201cHabibi City\u201d package virtually erase Mizrahi Jewish communities, which number about 140,000.<\/p>\n

As is to be expected in a piece in New York Magazine, Arafat and Madeline Leung Coleman, who wrote the companion piece about SWANA cuisine, \u201cWhen Eating Out is Political,\u201d pay lip service to the idea that there are good Jews, worthy Jews, decent Jews, and it\u2019s not coincidental that these are all anti-Zionist Jews.<\/p>\n

\"IRANIANSIRANIANS PROTEST outside the UN in New York following the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini. Such dissents, including by this woman who dared to challenge Iran\u2019s regime, is conspicuously absent from the \u2018New York Magazine\u2019 celebration of \u2018SWANA\u2019 culture, the writer purports. (credit: Stephanie Keith\/Getty Images)Zionism, falafel, and the politics of SWANA identity<\/p>\n

Even some Jews who are not anti-Zionist are characterized as if they are. The main piece describes a performance at a New York club by a Palestinian and an Israeli singer, saying, \u201cThey were part of Feel Beit, an anti-Zionist, pro-dialogue artistic partnership.\u201d Feel Beit is a pro-dialogue partnership, but it would certainly be news to one of its funders, the ardently Zionist Jerusalem Foundation, that it is anti-Zionist.<\/p>\n

Coleman even finds a Jewish chef, Loren Abramovich, who has stopped cooking falafel, exquisitely mindful of SWANA sensitivities about cultural appropriation.<\/p>\n

\u201cDeep, deep in my mind, I think I have all the authority in the world to make falafel, but at the same time, I understand that it\u2019s going to be a mess because people want to accuse us that we are appropriating Palestinian cuisine,\u201d Abramovich is quoted as saying.<\/p>\n

I wish this were a joke \u2013 it certainly sounds like a line from the Israeli comedy show Eretz Nehederet \u2013 but irony is apparently not highly valued in the SWANA-verse.<\/p>\n

Arafat, who is described on her profile for Barnard College, where she is an adjunct assistant professor, as \u201ca queer Arab-American fiction and nonfiction writer,\u201d describes in lyrical terms all the loveliness of SWANA culture in New York, which features book-making workshops for kids, a fundraiser for Gaza journalists at a \u201cwomen-run Syrian supper club,\u201d as well as the literary journal Bidoun, a word she says \u201citself means \u2018without\u2019 and is meant to evoke existing without the concreteness of space.\u201d<\/p>\n

All of this cultural vitality makes her feel \u201clike in the blad\u2026 back home, overseas,\u201d although, as Liel Leibovitz pointed out in The Free Press, her actual blad is closer to Bethesda, Maryland, than Beirut.<\/p>\n

October 7 and the struggle over competing narratives<\/p>\n

The tell here, the breadcrumbs left to lead us to what is really going on, is the casual assertion that the war in Gaza \u2013 and only that war, out of all conflicts in the Middle East \u2013 is a genocide, that Zionism equals oppression, and that October 7 is a phrase that signals a climate of abuse against SWANA hipsters, rather than an actual massacre by Hamas that killed 1,200 people \u2013 mostly Jews but also Muslims, Buddhists, and Christians.<\/p>\n

It reeks of what Moroccan-born writer Zineb Riboua, a research fellow with the Hudson Institute, wrote about in a piece headlined \u201cJihad Chic,\u201d which came with the subhead \u201cTrivializing Terror.\u201d Although Riboua\u2019s article was mostly about anti-Israel celebrities, much of what she says could apply equally well to this celebration of SWANA.<\/p>\n

And while it\u2019s become almost a clich\u00e9 to make fun of people from the LGBTQ community who ignore the inconvenient truth of what happens to people like them in the Middle East \u2013 pretty much everywhere outside of Israel \u2013 Arafat\u2019s piece is a particularly glaring example of this disregard. There is scant mention of, or thought for, the freedom of speech that those who actually live in SWANA countries are denied.<\/p>\n

Arafat does write about one man, \u201cEl Atigh Abba\u2026 [who] is unable to return to Mauritania because of a fatwa issued after he\u2019d left in retaliation for his activism and writing during the Arab Spring,\u201d but what kind of activism he engaged in and who issued the fatwa is left unsaid.<\/p>\n

She does write that \u201cKimia Zakerin invited [Mayor Zohran Mamdani\u2019s wife, Rama] Duwaji to join a panel of speakers at a SWANA women\u2019s networking event about how to support one another\u2019s work (it happened to coincide with the US-Israel 12-day war on Iran and ended up doubling as a place to collectively mourn).\u201d<\/p>\n

What exactly were these networking women collectively mourning? You can bet that it wasn\u2019t the arrests, rapes, torture, and executions of women protesting the Islamic regime of Iran, many of whom were specifically demonstrating against forced hijab-wearing.<\/p>\n

There is zero sympathy for Iranian women in the SWANA-verse \u2013 or, at least, none that Arafat finds worth discussing. You would never guess from \u201cHabibi City\u201d that many Iranian dissidents supported the war and only wished that it hadn\u2019t ended so soon.<\/p>\n

Perhaps none of this should be surprising in a city governed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose administration recently released a map of the city\u2019s \u201cthriving international communities and cultures\u201d that did not include a single Jewish neighborhood. Little Italy was also left out of the mix \u2013 you can draw your own conclusion from these omissions.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all of a piece with Mamdani saying he did not support any \u201cstate that privileges one religion over another\u201d and avoiding Israel Day celebrations but having no problem attending a parade celebrating Pakistan\u2019s independence day, although Pakistan\u2019s state religion is Islam.<\/p>\n

\"THETHE LEGENDARY \u2018New York Magazine\u2019 writer Tom Wolfe made his name by puncturing the pretensions of \u2018Radical Chic,\u2019 a tradition that the magazine has now abandoned in favor of \u2018Habibi City,\u2019 the writer proposes. (credit: Janet Fries\/Getty Images)The missing voice of Tom Wolfe in today\u2019s cultural debates<\/p>\n

The hypocrisy of this ode to SWANA in Mamdani\u2019s New York is so overwhelming that it makes you wish for a writer with a gift for irreverence to take down the pomposity, fatuousness, and fashion cloaked in ideology \u2013 in short, it makes you long for Tom Wolfe.<\/p>\n

Wolfe\u2019s single most groundbreaking essay was \u201cRadical Chic: That Party at Lenny\u2019s,\u201d a cover story for New York Magazine in 1970. It told of a fundraiser for the Black Panthers that legendary composer\/conductor Leonard \u201cLenny\u201d Bernstein held in his home and mocked the elites for hosting these revolutionaries who openly sought to destroy everything about upper-class life and values.<\/p>\n

Wolfe described, in delicious detail, the Black Panthers posturing in Bernstein\u2019s opulent living room as they were served hors d\u2019oeuvres by uniformed servants and New York\u2019s elite fawned over them. \u201cThe very idea of them, these real revolutionaries, who actually put their lives on the line, runs through Lenny\u2019s duplex like a rogue hormone,\u201d is one of the most famous lines.<\/p>\n

Wolfe went on to write, \u201cIn fact, this sort of nostalgie de la boue, or romanticizing of primitive souls, was one of the things that brought Radical Chic to the fore in New York Society. Nostalgie de la boue is a 19th-century French term that means, literally, \u2018nostalgia for the mud.\u2019\u2026 Nostalgie de la boue tends to be a favorite motif whenever a great many new faces and a lot of new money enter Society.\u201d<\/p>\n

Or, as Riboua put it in her essay, \u201c\u2018Jihad Chic,\u2019 like the failed bourgeois revolutions before it, celebrates forces that would gladly destroy its very champions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wole would certainly be perplexed, shocked even, if he were able to see how low the publication he helped put on the map has sunk, how it is now trivializing terror and glorifying jihad chic, with the same fawning tone as the elite at Bernstein\u2019s palatial apartment.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure Wolfe would have followed the money, which means he would have looked at New York Magazine\u2019s owner, James Murdoch, one of the sons of media magnate Rupert Murdoch, who also owned New York Magazine for many years.<\/p>\n

James has been locked for years in a court battle over control of his father\u2019s money and power, and it has been widely reported that he is more liberal than his father and wants to distance himself from his father\u2019s holdings that he finds distasteful, such as Fox News. That alone, however, cannot explain this tripe. But let\u2019s follow the money a step further.<\/p>\n

Qatar\u2019s media investments and the changing face of New York Magazine<\/p>\n

As was widely reported in 2022, a company owned by James Murdoch, Lupa Systems, created a new company with partners that received financial backing from the Qatar Investment Authority, which pledged to invest up to $1.5 billion. And in 2026, Lupa Systems bought New York Magazine.<\/p>\n

Qatar has invested hundreds of billions in media and entertainment companies, and this investment in James Murdoch\u2019s company has apparently led this scion of a media dynasty to betray the legacy of this once-great magazine.<\/p>\n

And it was great. Wolfe was one of the most brilliant New Journalism writers that Clay Felker, who founded New York Magazine with Milton Glaser in 1968, brought to the publication. Others who wrote memorable, even iconic pieces for New York included Nora Ephron, Jimmy Breslin, Gloria Steinem, Pete Hamill, Gail Sheehy, and Nicholas Pileggi.<\/p>\n

Regularly, the magazine would introduce new subcultures in New York, a trend that \u201cHabibi City\u201d is a mawkish attempt to follow. Nik Cohn\u2019s 1976 cover story, \u201cTribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,\u201d about the outer-borough disco scene, was soon adapted into a movie called Saturday Night Fever. Sheehy\u2019s \u201cThe Search for Grey Gardens\u201d was an evocative 1972 profile of the eccentric, impoverished aunt and cousin of Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Those articles and many others were talked about and celebrated, because they revealed fascinating stories.<\/p>\n

But the \u201cHabibi City\u201d package brought to mind yet another article by Wolfe, and one of his most important ones: \u201cThe Me Decade: Reports on the New Great Awakening,\u201d which ran 50 years ago this month and lampooned the self-help industry, which Wolfe saw Americans embracing with a religious fervor that led them to concentrate ever more intensely on themselves.<\/p>\n

In those days, New York Magazine poked fun at such solipsism, at America\u2019s retreat from reality. But here it is publishing Zaina Arafat, who concludes her paean to jihad hipsters by saying:<\/p>\n

\u201cFor SWANA\u2019s diasporic communities, cool is also in some ways coded and inseparable from its origins. In Arabic, it\u2019s known as sumud, a grassroots concept that emerged in Palestine after the Six Day War partly as a means of survival. Sumud is steadfastness. It is perseverance and a quiet refusal to disappear. No matter what we\u2019re up against \u2013 occupation, displacement, annihilation \u2013 we can\u2019t afford to lose our cool.\u201d<\/p>\n

By all means, let\u2019s not lose our cool, and let\u2019s never mention that it\u2019s quite a bit easier to be a cool, queer woman in New York City than in Gaza, Syria, or Tehran.<\/p>\n

What SWANA hipsters are up against here seems to be nothing more than having to walk past an occasional Israeli flag in a restaurant that still dares to serve falafel. To admit concern for the real suffering of anyone in the Middle East outside of Gaza would interfere with all the hipster pose, which quickly descends into the 21st-century version of \u201cnostalgie de la boue\u201d: a veneration of terror.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It isn\u2019t any cooler outside, but I have proof that hell has frozen over: New York Magazine, a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":269860,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[55722,113783,81562,6033,113781,2341,113782,237,238,128,130,129],"class_list":["post-269859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-american-jewry","tag-american-jews","tag-anti-israel","tag-culture","tag-diaspora-jews","tag-media","tag-middle-east-and-north-africa-mena","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269859"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269859\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/269860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}