In last week’s New York City mayoral debate, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo and perennial Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa finally teamed up to make the most of their final opportunity to highlight the faults of the frontrunner, avowed socialist Zohran Mamdani, whose extreme anti-Israel rhetoric has deeply disturbed New York City’s Jewish community. They challenged the comforting assumption that Israel will always be able to count on American support when under attack by the enemies of the Jewish people.
The results of Suffolk University’s New York City mayoral election poll, released just a week before November 4 general election, shows a tightening of the three way race with Mamdani’s lead over Cuomo, who easily won the June 24 Democrat primary, reduced to 10 points (44% to 34%), with Sliwa, who has strongly resisted growing pressure to drop out of the race in favor of Cuomo, running a distant third with just 11% support from the city’s electorate. The survey was taken after unpopular incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, who had been polling in single digits, dropped out of the race in favor of Cuomo, but failed to give the disgraced former governor enough of a boost to mount a serious challenge to Mamdani’s status as the clear frontrunner. Also, even if Sliwa were to give in to the pressure to drop out and endorse Cuomo, it seems unlikely that many of his Republican supporters would overcome their longstanding aversion to Cuomo to enable him to overtake Mamdani on Election Day.
It now appears that the only way that Mamdani could be defeated would be for the vast majority of the estimated half a million registered Jewish voters in New York City to vote en masse for Cuomo, which appears highly unlikely given that an October Fox News poll showed Cuomo leading Mamdani among the city’s likely Jewish voters by a shockingly narrow 42%-38% margin. Mamdani has actually been leading among the younger secular Jewish voters in the city, even though they have been the main targets of the unrestrained antisemitic harassment by Mamdani’s supporters on the city’s college campuses.
Illogically, these young liberal Jews accept Mamdani’s insistence that he is not antisemitic, despite his steadfast refusal to condemn Hamas for its October 7 attack, his failure to call for Hamas’ disarmament, his opposition to Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, and his reluctance to condemn the openly antisemitic rhetoric of many of his fellow progressive Democrats. Mamdani also frequently repeats the false accusations that Israel is an apartheid state, attempting to commit genocide against Gaza’s civilian population, which sends a clear message inciting his supporters to statements and actions of antisemitism He also keeps promising that if he is elected mayor, he will order the arrest of Prime Minister Binyomin Netanyahu on international war crime charges should he step foot inside New York City.
A LETTER OF PROTEST AGAINST MAMDANI SIGNED BY 1,000 RABBIS
The growing concern over the prospect of Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York City, which hosts the largest Jewish community in the world outside of Israel, has led to the circulation of a protest letter signed by more than 1,000 Reform, Conservative, and [Modern] Orthodox rabbis from communities across the country.
The letter blasts Mamdani’s refusal to condemn the use of violent antisemitic slogans by his supporters and fellow progressive activists, his refusal to endorse Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, and his blood libel-like accusations of genocide by Israel against the civilian population in Gaza since the October 7 attack. It also blames Mamdani for encouraging and exacerbating the open “hostility toward Judaism and Jews” in general, unrelated to Israel, which threatens “the safety and dignity of Jews in every city.”
Without mentioning Mamdani’s electoral opponents by name, the letter calls upon “all Americans who value peace and equality to participate fully in the democratic process in order to stand up for candidates who reject antisemitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric, and who affirm Israel’s right to exist in peace and security. . .
“Now is the time for everyone to unite across political and moral divides, and to reject the language that seeks to delegitimize our Jewish identity and our community,” the letter concludes.
NY TIMES COLUMNIST STEPHENS EXPLAINS WHY MAMDANI FRIGHTENS HIM
Concern over the dire consequences to the Jewish community from a Mamdani victory has also found unexpected expression on the New York Times editorial page in a piece by its opinion columnist, Bret Stephens, entitled “Why Mamdani Frightens Jews Like Me.” Stephens pleads with those New Yorkers who intend to use “their right as Americans and as Jews” to vote for the Muslim mayoral candidate to consider the many reasons why he considers Mamdani’s views to be “more than disturbing.”
Stephens then summarizes Mamdani’s long history of anti-Israel activism. As an undergraduate student at the elitist Bowdoin College in Maine, more than a decade ago, Mamdani helped found the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, and called for the college to boycott Israeli academic institutions. At that time, Mamdani also found the collegiate arm of the liberal J Street Jewish lobby, which supports the two-state solution and rejects the legitimacy of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, to be unacceptable because it still supports Israel as “a democratic homeland for the Jewish people.”
Furthermore, in a preview of what he is likely to try if elected mayor, Mamdani introduced a bill in Albany in 2023, as a New York State Assemblyman representing a district in Queens, that would have eliminated the state tax-exempt status of every pro-Israel charity.
Stephens, a former editor of the Jerusalem Post, wrote that he was particularly concerned about Mamdani’s “affinity for extremists,” and for his moral double standard in condemning Israel, and only Israel, for the human rights abuses which are far more common and egregious in the Middle East’s Muslim states. Why, Stephens asks, are the Palestinians the only group whose suffering seems to matter for Mamdani? Why hasn’t he “sponsored bills to oppose, say, the persecution of Uyghurs in China or Kurds in Turkey, or [the rampant intolerance] in his native Uganda?”
How, Stephens asks, can we take Mamdani’s “pledge to fight antisemitism” as mayor seriously when he couldn’t “even denounce [Hamas,] the perpetrators of the most murderous antisemitic rampage in the past 80 years?” But Stephens admits that his “deepest worry” is not about Mamdani’s antisemitism itself, but rather its widespread acceptance “as an election talking point [that] should frighten you in that it says more about the sensibilities of our fellow New Yorkers than it does about Mamdani himself.”
Since the start of his mayoral campaign, the formerly little-known 34-year-old assemblyman from Queens has been running away from his previous calls, along with other progressive Democrats, to “defund the police,” for which he has been repeatedly attacked by Cuomo and Sliwa. Shortly before the second televised debate last week, Mamdani sought to defuse that criticism by announcing that he would re-appoint the current NYPD Commissioner, Jessica Tisch, whose policy innovations have been widely credited for a recent reduction in the rate of violent crimes across the city.
But for the most part, throughout that debate, Mamdani continued to artfully dodge answering the most penetrating questions raised by Cuomo and Sliwa about his troubling positions on a variety of issues facing New York City, many of which are due to more than a decade of incompetent liberal Democrat governance by Mayor Bill De Blasio and Mayor Eric Adams. While refusing to back away from his repeated condemnations of Israel as an “apartheid state” and his accusations that it was committing genocide in Gaza, Mamdani simultaneously had the chutzpah to claim that he is the victim of anti-Muslim discrimination.
CUOMO REJECTS MAMDANI’S “ISLAMOPHOBIA” COMPLAINT
After the debate, Mamdani doubled down on the claim in a controversial statement to his fellow Muslims in New York City in which he condemned the “racist, baseless” attacks he’s faced in recent days, and claimed that they exemplify the “Islamophobia” that he claims that Muslims all over New York City face every day.
He sought sympathy from the city’s voters by describing himself, as well as one of his Muslim aunts, as victims of anti-Muslim discrimination in New York City in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attack, which took down the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Mamdani said, “I thought that if I behaved well enough or bit my tongue enough in the face of racist, baseless attacks, all while returning to my central message, it would allow me to be more than just my faith,” Mamdani claimed. But he then admitted that, “I was wrong. No amount of redirection is ever enough.”
“For as long as we have lived, we have known that no matter what anyone says, there are still certain forms of hate that are acceptable in this city. Islamophobia is not seen as inexcusable. In an era of ever-diminishing bipartisanship, it seems that Islamophobia has emerged as one of the few areas of agreement,” Mamdani added.
Mamdani was later criticized for trying to utilize the sacred memory of the 9/11 tragedy for his political benefit and for accusing New Yorkers of discriminating against himself and one of his Muslim relatives post-9/11, while failing to mention the thousands of Americans of all faiths who lost their lives that day due to an act of Islamic terrorism.
Former Governor Cuomo responded by accusing Mamdani of falsely playing the “victim” of discrimination while “in reality, he is the offender.” Cuomo then explained that “Zohran himself is the person who has created the tension with the Jewish community. . . and the Italian community and the Black community, etc. He is not the victim, he is the offender, and it’s a political tactic,” Cuomo said.
The former governor then came to the city’s defense by declaring that “New Yorkers are not Islamophobic. New Yorkers are all from different places; that’s who we are. And New Yorkers accept one another, and New Yorkers have no tolerance whatsoever for discrimination [against] anyone,” Cuomo added.
MAMDANI’S PROMISES LIKELY TO MAKE LIFE IN NEW YORK CITY EVEN WORSE
During last week’s debate, Mamdani had difficulty defending his unrealistic campaign promises to make life in New York City more affordable, when, in fact, they are more likely to make such problems as the chronic shortage of decent, affordable housing, the soaring cost of living, the dangers involved in riding New York City buses and trains, and the steady deterioration of the quality of life for the city’s working-class and middle-class residents, even worse.
In contrast to the first televised mayoral debate, Cuomo and Sliwa directed most of their criticism at Mamdani rather than each other, highlighting his totally impractical promises for all kinds of new city services. These range from free rides on public buses to a freeze on all regulated apartment rents, to no-cost childcare, to city-owned non-profit grocery stores, and to the pairing of mental health workers with cops in responding to 911 calls for help involving mentally disturbed individuals.
Mamdani again claimed that he will be able to pay for all this by somehow persuading the state legislature in Albany and Governor Kathy Hochul to reverse their positions and agree to impose additional taxes on those higher-income New Yorkers and corporations that have not yet fled the city to much lower-taxed venues such as Florida or Texas.
MAMDANI SUPPORTERS HECKLE HOCHUL WITH CALLS TO “TAX THE RICH”
Before Hochul endorsed Mamdani for mayor, the governor flatly stated that she would not agree to his requests to have the Albany legislature approve a further increase in tax rates on New York City’s wealthiest taxpayers or boost corporate tax rates in the city to the higher current level in New Jersey. But while speaking at a rally in support of Mamdani’s mayoral candidacy held at a stadium in Forest Hills, Queens, Hochul was mercilessly heckled by the Mamdani supporters in the audience who kept screaming at her to “tax the rich” in order to provide the extra money New York City will need to fund Mamdani’s campaign promises.
During the second debate last week, Mamdani boldly sought to take the initiative on the antisemitism issue by depicting himself as “a leader who takes [antisemitism] seriously, who roots it out of these five boroughs, not one who weaponizes it as a means by which to score political points on a debate stage.”
After Sliwa responded by accusing Mamdani of failing to condemn the antisemites who call for a global jihad against Jews around the world, Mamdani again ducked the accusation and then added, “Frankly, I think much of it has to do with the fact that I am the first Muslim candidate to be on the precipice of winning this election.”
Sliwa’s tough zero-tolerance law and order agenda and oversimplified economic remedy for New York’s chronic, complicated housing problems came across as earnest but much too conservative for New York City’s liberal Democrat-dominated electorate.
Cuomo, who seemed to be much more focused and energetic than he was in the first mayoral debate, focused on Mamdani’s total lack of administrative experience and skills that he will need to govern the largest city in the country. “You have never had a [private sector] job. You’ve never accomplished anything,” Cuomo said to Mamdani. “You don’t know how to run a government. You don’t know how to handle an emergency.” His mayoral opponents also noted that during his years representing his Queens electoral district in Albany, Mamdani had the worst attendance record of any Democrat in the State Assembly.
On the other hand, Mamdani did not fail to point out that many of the problems which Cuomo, as a New York City mayoral candidate, is now promising to fix had originated from the state policies that Cuomo himself put in place during his ten years as governor. Mamdani also reminded us that Cuomo, as governor, was accused of condemning thousands of senior citizens to death from Covid due to his controversial March 2020 directive issued by the New York State Department of Health. He forced them from hospitals back into nursing homes, unequipped to house them safely, and then ordered the undercounting of their deaths in an effort to cover up the scandal.
FIGHTING TRUMP ILLOGICALLY BECOMES A NEW YORK CITY MAYORAL ISSUE
Cuomo and Mamdani also clashed in their predictions about how the other would handle President Trump if he orders federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] agents to stage more raids in New York City, like the one last week targeting unlicensed street vendors on Canal Street in lower Manhattan, in which several illegal immigrants were picked up for deportation.
Cuomo said that in such a case, he would tell Trump to “Call them back, or I’m going to have the NYPD step in and stop them.” He also said that Trump thinks of Mamdani as a kid and he’s going to knock him down, and that Trump intends to use Mamdani as a prime example of incompetent Democrat mayors in cities “all across the country.”
On the other hand, Mamdani referred to Cuomo during the second debate as “Donald Trump’s puppet,” and that Trump wants Cuomo “to be the mayor, not because it will be good for New Yorkers, but because it will be good [politically] for him.”
As for Sliwa, he has said that as mayor, he would have no problem with accepting help from President Trump and the federal government in restoring law and order to New York City.
MAMDANI RIDICULES CUOMO ON THE EXPERIENCE ISSUE
Early in last week’s debate, Mamdani delivered this zinger: “You will hear from Andrew Cuomo about his experience, as if the issue is that we don’t know about it. The issue is that we have all experienced your experience,” Mamdani said, and went on to cite examples of Cuomo’s policy failures, including the mismanagement of the MTA and his questionable moral and self-serving practices as governor. At another point during the second debate, Mamdani cleverly reversed Cuomo’s criticism of his socialist-inspired proposals by arguing, “If you want a candidate for mayor who tells you everything that he cannot do, then Andrew Cuomo should be your choice. If you want a candidate for mayor who will use every tool at his disposal … then I am the candidate for you.”
Mamdani’s careful second debate performance was designed primarily to preserve his slowly shrinking polling lead ahead of next week’s New York City mayoral election. Even though the race has tightened slightly in the most recent polling, Mamdani’s victory is still widely considered to be almost certain.
That was also indicated by the delayed endorsements he recently received, first from Governor Hochul, and last week from House Democrat Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Jeffries in particular, who represents a Brooklyn congressional district which includes the Jewish communities of Williamsburg and Mill Basin, had been holding back for fear of alienating those Jewish voters in his district and Democrat campaign donors who consider Mamdani’s criticism of Israel to be driven by the same antisemitism which has now infected most of the elected representatives of the progressive wing of the Democrat party.
Jeffries used as his ultimate justification for his endorsement of Mamdani, even though he admits “there will be areas of agreement and areas of principled disagreement,” the mere fact that Donald Trump is in the White House. However, Jeffries has not even tried to explain why that justifies the election of a young, inexperienced antisemitic socialist to be the mayor of New York City and its population, which includes nearly 1 million Jews.
REPUBLICANS HOPE TO USE MAMDANI TO BOOST THEIR OWN CANDIDATES
But even though a Wall Street Journal editorial agrees that Mamdani is now likely to win the mayoral election next week, “nobody is happier [with Mamdani’s endorsement by Hochul and Jeffries] than Republicans who represent the New York suburbs” who expect their local voters to reject the Mamdani-tainted Democrat brand and his “radical agenda” as much too liberal for their tastes in next year’s midterm election. The editorial also predicts that Mamdani himself will become a poster child for every GOP candidate who argues that, by endorsing Mamdani for mayor of New York City, the Democrats as a party have gone off the ideological deep end.
There are still a few notable exceptions to this disturbing Democrat turn to the extreme left, such as refreshingly honest and free-thinking Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, and, to a lesser extent, Democrat Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Most political observers believe that Schumer has been maintaining an uncomfortable silence regarding Mamdani’s antisemitic criticism of Israel because his own seat in the U.S. Senate is widely considered to be vulnerable to a primary challenge from another outspoken Democrat Socialist critic of Israel from Queens, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez [AOC].
By withholding the votes by Senate Democrats needed to approve a “clean” continuing resolution to fund the federal government, Schumer engineered the now month-long partial shutdown with no end in sight, over the contrived issue of Democrat-passed temporary Obamacare tax credits that are not due to expire until the end of this year. The extended shutdown is a desperate effort by Schumer to salvage his credibility as the leader of Senate Democrats with the party’s increasingly frustrated progressive base. They had been urging Schumer to pick any fight with Donald Trump which they might possibly win, in an effort to make up for their humiliating loss to Trump and the Republicans in last November’s election, and their continued inability to identify and unite behind a new party leader who can successfully fill the empty spot at the top of the Democrats’ 2028 presidential campaign ticket.
SCHUMER IS THE LAST REMAINING JEWISH DEMOCRAT LEADER
Schumer’s currently endangered position is more significant because he is the most powerful of the few remaining Jews in the Democrat party’s leadership on the local, state, and national levels. in which Jews had been, until very recently, very prominent. Furthermore, the rapid decline of Jewish influence and representation in leadership posts in contemporary liberal-dominated American society is not limited to government and politics. Over the past decade, it has systematically reduced or eliminated Jewish participation in every significant cultural and economic field.
That is why Schumer today would not dare to repeat the clear statement he made during a 2014 speech to a pro-Israel AIPAC audience, in which he said, “Those who call for boycotts of Israel without calling for boycotts of other neighboring nations whose human rights records are in fact reprehensible are practicing, whether they know it or not, whether they admit it or not, a modern form of what we call antisemitism.”
The other troubling evidence that the Democrats as a party really do have a serious antisemitism problem is the lack of significant pushback from within their own party in recent years to clearly antisemitic and incendiary remarks by progressive House Democrats like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. In addition, intense public pressure is now being applied by progressives AOC and Bernie Sanders upon more moderate Democrats who still support Israel to endorse Mamdani. They are also pressuring those who fear that too close an association with Mamdani will doom prospects for a Democrat recovery in next year’s midterm election, and the first post-Trump presidential election in 2028.
PENNSYLVANIA GOVERNOR SHAPIRO STILL UNAFRAID TO SUPPORT ISRAEL
The only Jewish Democrat who does not appear to be intimidated by the hateful anti-Israel rhetoric from the leaders of the party’s left wing is Pennsylvania’s Governor Josh Shapiro. He has already paid a high price for his continued outspoken support for Israel in the form of the firebombing of his home, the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion, on the first night of Pesach this year, in which nobody was injured. Pennsylvania police have the alleged arsonist in custody, and believe that he was motivated by Shapiro’s support for Israel, even though prosecutors have not brought hate crime charges against the suspect.
Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris also reportedly decided that Shapiro was too Jewish and supportive of Israel to serve as her vice-presidential running mate, even though he was clearly the most qualified and popular Democrat for that post, and likely would have enabled a Harris-Shapiro ticket to carry the battleground state of Pennsylvania, which Donald Trump wound up winning last November.
Despite his rejection by Harris, Shapiro’s name is still being included on every short list of the most electable potential Democrat presidential candidates for 2028. Yet he is clearly not afraid to risk losing support from the Democrat left by speaking openly about the problems resulting from Mamdani’s high-profile candidacy.
In an interview with Gabby Deutch of the Jewish Insider, Governor Shapiro conceded that while Mamdani “seemed to run a campaign that excited New Yorkers, he also seemed to run a campaign where he left open far too much space for extremists to either use his words or for him to not condemn the words of extremists that said some blatantly antisemitic things.”
Shapiro then added, “I’ll say this about Mamdani or any other leader. If you want to lead New York, you want to lead Pennsylvania, you want to lead the United States of America, you’re a leader. I don’t care if you’re a Republican or Democratic leader or a Democratic Socialist leader [referring to AOC and Sanders as well as Mamdani]. You have to speak and act with moral clarity, and when supporters of yours say things that are blatantly antisemitic, you can’t leave room for that to just sit there. You’ve got to condemn that.”
Shapiro then openly addressed, without apology, his continued outspoken support for Israel. “I think one of the things that always strengthened Israel was the fact that the relationship America had with Israel was not even bipartisan, but somewhat nonpartisan,” Shapiro stated. “Figuring out ways to build bridges between the parties, between people of different walks of life, to support Israel, I think, is important. I think just in general, across the board, I want to see more support for Israel, for a Jewish state. That doesn’t mean that one can’t be critical of Israeli policy.”
While Shapiro called for politicians on both sides of the aisle to do more to maintain support for the U.S.-Israel relationship, he conceded that “the majority of that work is going to happen in Washington.”
SHAPIRO SEPARATES CRITICISM OF NETANYAHU FROM SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL
He then added, “I don’t do foreign policy in Pennsylvania in my role as governor, but I do think it is important to repair that relationship. I am concerned that support for Israel in the United States broadly is down compared to what it was a decade ago,” and placed some of the blame for that on Israeli Prime Minister Binyomin Netanyahu.
“I think if you care about the future safety and security of Israel, and you’re the leader of Israel as Netanyahu is at present time, you’ve got to find ways to build bridges to people in both [American political] parties, to leaders in both parties,” Shapiro said, which was consistent with his prior criticism of Netanyahu’s leadership. But Governor Shapiro also made it clear that his opposition to Netanyahu as prime minister should not be equated with opposition to the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.
“There are policies of the Netanyahu government that I don’t support. I’ve been very vocal about that. But there’s a difference between not supporting the policies of whoever’s in charge at a particular time, and the underlying notion of a Jewish state of Israel,” said Shapiro. “I do think it is important to strengthen people’s understanding of Israel and the relationship America should have with Israel and to strengthen that bond.”
Shapiro also said during the Jewish Insider interview that the Pesach arson attack on his home had affected him both personally and religiously. “It made me believe even more, not just in my G-d, but in the power of prayer. It’s given me a deeper, spiritual connection to my faith and a deeper connection to people of other faiths.”
DOCUMENTING THE VANISHING JEWISH IMPACT ON AMERICAN CULTURE
As documented in the February 2023 Tablet article titled “The Vanishing” by Jacob Savage, from reduced Ivy League college Jewish student admission rates to the shrinking percentage of Jewish tenured faculty members, from the ethnic cleansing corporate board rooms and museum directorates to the erasure of Jewish influence from Hollywood’s liberal secular media culture, and now, Savage adds, “even in New York City — anywhere American Jews once made their mark — our [Jewish] influence is in steep decline.”
Published six months before a complacently comfortable American Jewish community received its rude post-October 7 wake-up call, Savage’s article describes how “American liberalism, our civic religion, has turned on us. Where Jewish success was once upheld as a sign of America’s strength and progress over its prejudices, Jewish “overrepresentation” [compared to its roughly 2.4% share of America’s total population] is [once] again something [American liberalism is treating as a problem] to be solved, not celebrated.”
The examples of this pattern of discrimination Savage cites are everywhere. Today, just 4% of the elite American academics under the age of 30 are Jewish, compared to 21% of the academics of the baby-boomer generation who were Jewish. Another telltale sign of the rapid growth of antisemitism at the highest echelons of American academia is the fact that the number of Jewish editors at the Harvard Law Review has declined by roughly 50% in less than 10 years.
The number of Jews winning prestigious Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships also declined by half over the decade from 2010 through 2019 for no apparent reason other than a pervasive, cultural antisemitic bias.
A SLOW DECLINE FOLLOWED BY A SUDDEN PURGE
Savage argues that “the same pattern [held] across America’s elite institutions: a slow-moving downward trend from the 1990s to the mid-2010s,” and which, starting with Trump’s first term as president, triggered a liberal cultural “purge so sweeping and dramatic you almost wonder who sent out the secret memo.”
Even as this sharp reduction of participation was being imposed upon secular liberal American Jews, it was being deliberately ignored by the “liberal coalition of Jewish communal organizations,” which used to pride itself as the “protectors of specifically Jewish interests.” But now those same groups have reversed that role by becoming the defenders of the ultra-liberal standards of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) in a futile effort “to maintain their waning status with the [now hostile] liberal coalition.”
Savage wrote that, “as true believers in the postwar liberal project, American Jews spent decades advocating for tolerance and equality of opportunity, not least because we were the prime beneficiaries.” But today, “Jews are being disproportionately purged from liberal institutions because Jews disproportionately exist within those institutions.”
He also reminds us that when liberal “activists and journalists and executives talk about how [certain American cultural or corporate institutions are] “too white,” what they really mean is “too Jewish.”
THE RISKS OF SEEKING TO STAY ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF HISTORY
In addition, Savage recalls, “From civil rights to Vietnam to the spectacular bounty of their cultural and political achievements, [the members of the] liberal Jewish [baby] boomers [generation] always managed to be on the right side of history. It is a supreme irony that they’ve helped empower a [liberal] movement that now places their children and grandchildren on the wrong side.”
As Savage noted, DEI was widely adopted during the Biden administration as “a cudgel used to exclude certain groups of Americans, including Asians [as well as] Jews” from the opportunity to compete, succeed, and make valuable contributions in all sectors of American public life as they had in the past.
Savage cites as the prime example of this dramatic role reversal the transformation of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which was created as a division of the secular B’nai Brith organization in 1913 to combat antisemitism and all forms of social and economic discrimination against American Jews. During the 1940s, ADL began working to eliminate the unofficial quota limiting Jewish student admissions to Ivy League universities to around 10%. By the 1950s, those quotas had been eliminated, creating a level playing field for Jewish students seeking to compete, based on their ability alone, for admission to the top schools in the country.
Largely as a result of these efforts, during the 1990s and 2000s, the student body at Harvard University was 25% Jewish. But just 15 years later, because of Harvard’s DEI-based discriminatory admission standards, the percentage of Jewish students at Harvard fell below the 10% level of its original antisemitic quotas. Savage also reported similar but somewhat less drastic declines in the Jewish student populations, over the same period, at the prestigious Ivy League schools of Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell and Penn, as well as New York University (NYU), whose student population at its former Bronx campus was predominantly Jewish when this writer was an undergraduate student there in the mid-1960s.
Savage also cited a 2023 survey by the YouGov polling organization, which found that only 7% of all Ivy League students self-identified as Jewish.
HOW THE ADL HAS BETRAYED ITS CORE MISSION
Yet today, the ADL has failed to react to the return of a race and religion-based quota system at America’s best universities. Today, these schools are once again discriminating, not only against Jewish students, but also against Asian students, because they also represent a disproportionately large percentage of the most academically qualified candidates for admission compared to their share of the total population of the country.
In fact, when a group representing academically qualified Asian students sued Harvard University for unfairly denying them admission on the basis of their race, the ADL actually filed an amicus (friend of the court) brief defending Harvard University’s discriminatory use of DEI-based admission quotas.
While the ADL’s website still claims that it “fights all forms of antisemitism and bias,” that commitment is now limited by a new ADL commitment “to protect democracy and ensure a just and inclusive society for all,” (read: support for DEI discriminatory standards for school admission and faculty hiring).
THE SAD DECLINE OF JEWISH INFLUENCE IN NEW YORK CITY AND CONGRESS
Savage also noted that when he wrote his article in early 2023, “In New York City — the seat of American Jewish political power — there [were] almost no Jews left in power. A decade [earlier], the city had five Jewish congressmen, a Jewish mayor [Michael Bloomberg], two Jewish borough presidents, and 14 Jewish City Council members. [But ten years] later, just two congressmen and a single borough president remain[ed]. Only six Jews [were sitting] on the 51-person City Council.”
Longtime New York State Assembly leader, Shelly Silver, an Orthodox Jew representing Manhattan’s Lower East Side, had been removed from office and convicted of corruption. His Democrat replacement as State Assembly leader was an anti-Israel, pro-BDS progressive liberal. Savage also noted sadly that, because of thinly disguised antisemitic pressure, “not even the Lower East Side Tenement Museum is recognizably Jewish anymore.”
Slowly but surely, over the past 15 years, traditional Jewish Democrats and Israel-friendly non-Jews, including the avidly pro-Israel former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Eliot Engel, the longtime Jewish chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee representing a congressional district in the north Bronx and southern Westchester, have been systematically eliminated from the party’s national congressional leadership, often to be replaced with anti-Israel progressives, such as Jamaal Bowman, who successfully challenged Engel for the right to run for his House seat by defeating him, with the support of AOC and the members of her progressive “squad” in the 2020 Democrat party primary.
Schumer has also apparently seen this writing on the wall with regard to his own endangered party leadership position, and has therefore refrained from any public criticism of Mamdani’s outspokenly antisemitic positions.
Democrat President Joe Biden responded well, at least initially, to Israel’s urgent military needs following the October 7 attack by Hamas. But as the Gaza war dragged on, he was harshly criticized for supporting Israel by progressive Democrats, led by ultra-liberal Jewish Senator Bernie Sanders and members of the openly antisemitic AOC-led progressive Democrat House “squad.” They publicly demanded a halt to U.S. arms shipments to Israel, and Biden, in an effort to win the support of Muslim voters in the battleground state of Michigan, at least partially complied by halting a shipment of U.S.-made bunker-busting bombs to Israel and by pressuring Prime Minister Binyomin Netanyahu into delaying a scheduled IDF attack on the southern Gaza City of Rafah.
LOSING ONE OF THE JEWISH SEATS ON THE U.S. SUPREME COURT
President Biden’s presidential appointments also reflected the steady decline of Jewish influence within the American judicial system. Starting at the top, Biden failed to take the opportunity he had to make up for the 2020 loss of liberal Jewish Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with another qualified Jewish nominee. Instead, Biden nominated a controversial black woman judge, Ketanji Brown Jackson, to the opening created on the Supreme Court bench by the retirement of liberal Justice Stephen Breyer.
That left liberal Justice Elana Kagan, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2010, as the sole Jewish justice remaining on the Supreme Court bench. It also now seems unlikely that if Democrats control the White House and Senate when Kagan’s lifetime term on the court comes to an end, they would honor the precedent, going back to the 1916 appointment by Woodrow Wilson of Justice Louis Brandeis, of maintaining at least one Jewish seat on the highest court in the land.
Similarly, during his four years as president, Biden appointed only about 10 Jewish judges to the federal judiciary out of a total of 235. That was less than 5%, compared to the historic average of at least 20% Jewish membership on the federal judiciary.
All of these ironic observations which Savage revealed six months before the October 7th Hamas attack were updated last week in a Ynet column written by Nicolas Krapf in which he states that, “For a Jew to question [Israel’s right to] self-defense in order to recover the hostages. . . from the clutches of [Hamas], an organization that makes the permanent Intifada its genocidal modus operandi, is not an act of conscience, but a moral capitulation.” They turn themselves into what Bolshevik founder Vladimir Lenin used to refer to as “useful idiots,” by “lending their identity to a cause that seeks the annihilation of their own people.”
THE YOUNG BRAINWASHED TRAITORS TO THE JEWISH PEOPLE
Krapf writes that those alienated young Jews who have been brainwashed by pro-Palestinian progressive Democrat rhetoric into joining such rabidly anti-Israel organizations as the “Jewish Voice for Peace” are much worse than misguided. According to Krapf, “they are, in fact, deserters from the collective destiny [of the Jewish People by offering a] ‘license to hate’ to those who seek the dismantling of [Israel as] the world’s only Jewish sanctuary.”
Krapf adds, “What we are witnessing is a drama of betrayal [by these alienated young Jews, an attempt] to whitewash an antisemitism that, unable to look itself in the mirror, disguises itself as anti-Zionism.”
In their pathological search for conditional acceptance [from the liberals who hate them], they are “selling their integrity and risking the survival of their people for the whisper of progressive approval. [They are] repeating the blindness that in the past cost [six million Jewish] lives. . .
“In the moment of truth, antisemitism never discriminates. The [Jew] who today condemns Israel. . . will tomorrow be as despised as the Jew who defends [the Jewish] people’s right to exist in [Israel] …”
JEWISH COLUMNISTS WHO PUT A “KOSHER” STAMP ON HATRED OF ISRAEL
He also condemns the writings of widely published, nominally Jewish columnists such as Ezra Klein and Peter Beinart, who, through their criticism of Israel, “seek to put a ‘kosher’ stamp on the hatred. . . against their own people. . .
“Their disloyalty is, at its core, a renunciation of the collective memory of Judaism, but also of 3,500 years of history of which their family is a part, sold for a pat on the back in the opinion section [of the New York Times, Time Magazine, or The Atlantic.]”
For example, “Beinart’s rhetoric, which calls for the abolition of [Israel as a] Jewish state and its replacement by a binational [Jewish-Arab] entity. . . ignores the fundamental lesson of the history of minorities in the Middle East: those who lose their sovereignty are annihilated or forced into exile.”
According to Krapf, the proof that these liberal views of Jewish history are dangerously mistaken is clear from the 16 wars that Israel has fought since it won its 1948 War of Independence. They forget that Jewish history “is full of Jews who believed they had negotiated their destiny. In 15th-century Spain, many converts believed that their conversion to Christianity would grant them immunity; the Inquisition proved otherwise. In [pre-Hitler era] Weimar Germany, Jewish assimilationists believed their loyalty to German culture was enough: Nazism proved their error at a [terrible] cost.”
Today’s misled young Jews, who have joined leftist organizations dedicated to Israel’s destruction, “believe that European acceptance or progressive or woke approval is a shield. But it is not. . . [Their] anti-Zionism functions as a Trojan horse. . . [Their lack of historical awareness] reinforces the [false] narrative that Israel is the embodiment of colonial evil. . . [and, more fundamentally, that] the Jew is the problem.”
Krapf argues, “History has already shown that for [antisemitic] executioners,” it ultimately makes no difference whether the Jew they wish to condemn or kill is “religious, secular, Zionist, or assimilated; one who made aliyah, or one who goes to synagogue on holidays, or one who connects with Judaism only through Jewish food.”
MOST JEWS ARE NOT “DIVIDED” OVER THEIR SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL
Adam Milstein of the Jerusalem Post agrees with Krapf. He writes that in a recent New York Times op-ed by Ezra Klein in which he “analyzed the ‘divide in Jewish community’s views on Israel’. . . [he] like many prominent Jewish voices on the left, leverages his Jewish identity to gain progressive credibility while fundamentally misrepresenting the Jewish-American community he claims to speak for.”
Milstein argues that people like Klein and Beinart “have an anti-Zionist agenda and representing mainstream Jewish views would cost them social capital within progressive circles,” whose good opinion of them is the only thing they really care about. Milstein claims that Beinart’s journey from liberal Zionist to anti-Zionist advocate wasn’t driven by new facts on the ground, but by the recognition that abandoning Zionism opened doors to progressive stardom.” Milstein also writes that, “left wing media outlets, like The New York Times, cherry-pick voices exclusively from the far-left fringe [of Jewish journalism] because those are the only Jewish voices their audiences want to hear.”
Milstein points to the results of a recent Pew Research Center survey as further proof that Klein’s picture of a “divided Jewish community” is a distortion of reality. The survey found that 73% of American Jews hold favorable views of Israel. While they may disagree [with the Israeli government] on specific policies, they remain steadfast in … the belief that Jews deserve self-determination in [Israel, which] remains integral to Jewish identity and survival.”
LIBERALS REFUSE TO RECOGNIZE THE REAL CAUSE OF ANTISEMITISM
Milstein also agrees with Krapf’s conclusion that far-left Jews are naive if they “believe Jewish safety and security depends on self-criticism and distancing from Zionism. . . History shows otherwise. Regardless of how much Jews tried to blend in or appease critics, they were still seen as… weak and vulnerable Jews, when it mattered. Antisemites made no distinction between assimilated and traditional, between critics and supporters of Zionism…”
Milstein concludes that “Today’s Jewish critics of Israel [such as Klein and Beinart] suffer from the same delusion… Antisemites don’t hate Jews because of Israel; they hate Israel because they hate everything Jewish…
“Progressive outlets provide these self-hating Jews platforms precisely because they say what their audiences want to hear from Jews who serve as our generation’s useful idiots, but… they don’t speak for American Jewry. We speak for ourselves.”
But the rise to power of a determined Islamic enemy of Israel and the Jewish people, like Mandani, in a Jewish center the size of New York City means that we can no longer take the safety of the Jewish community for granted, even in a democratic country like the United States.
Too many Jewish lives, both in Israel and even here in the United States, are now at risk from the progressive liberal and Islamic enemies who celebrated the torture and slaughter of Jews and the taking of 251 hostages during the Hamas October 7 attack.
If Mamdani does win the election to be the next mayor of New York City, it will be a warning that Jews everywhere must take to heart.
