“Treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual… only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue.” – Henry James
I fear there will be no virtue for the Jews of New York City under the mayoralty of Zohran Mamdani. An unusual reality will be setting in, most probably. The turns of the screw that they will experience will be three. They will be far less than virtuous and not at all ordinary.
The first turn coming is the policies that Mamdani himself applies directly toward Jews and Jewish interests, as well as against Israel.
The second turn will be the influence that anti-Zionist progressive Jews, emboldened and encouraged by his victory, will gain due to their support for his campaign. The third turn will come when Mamdani’s economic and social program fails, and those who expected improvement in their lives and circumstances will seek out a scapegoat for their dashed expectations.
Speaking boldly, Reform Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, in his November 7 Shabbat sermon from the pulpit at New York’s Stephen Wise Synagogue, noted the newly-elected mayor’s existential opposition to Israel’s existence. The video clip has been making the rounds.
A muted interpretation
However, when I checked the synagogue’s website, I saw a different presentation of their rabbi’s words, a quite muted interpretation. Or, rather, to use the language of contemporary progressivism, it was more nuanced.
There I read that Hirsch congratulated Mamdani “while reiterating his deep concern over the future mayor’s commitment to anti-Zionism that could ‘severely threaten Jewish safety everywhere in the city.’” Hirsch promised that “For the good of the city and for the well-being of the Jewish community, we will support Mayor Mamdani’s policies where we can — and oppose them when we must.” In other words, one needs to view the entire video.
To me, that blurb sounded like a version of what the Ahronim Satmar faction leader Moshe Indig was thinking when he expressed his faction’s support for Mamdani in a Williamsburg sukkah, joined by Lincoln Restler, the city’s council member from District 33.
According to a JTA report in February 2022 profiling Restler, “as a young child, he participated in acts of service at the Reform Brooklyn Heights Synagogue with his parents.” Reform and Satmar are a very interesting intra-Jewish ecumenism par excellence.
An unsympathetic boot
Will Mamdani bring back support for “globalizing the Intifada”? Will Mehdi Hassan, Columbia University anti-Israel almost-deportee Muhammed Khalil along with Hasan Piker, who were at Mamdani’s election night party set the direction and tone? Will the city’s Jews find themselves laced up under a very Islamo-Socialist unsympathetic boot that is being guided by an unforgiving City Hall? How tight will that screw press?
Another indication of a tight first screw turn is the leaked internal document from NYC-Democratic Socialist of America’s “demands” from the incoming Mamdani administration. They mainly relate to Israel, such as pension divestments, blacklisting firms that do business with Israel, removing Israeli products from city-run groceries, and of course, arresting Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and IDF soldiers. City Hall is to become a sanctions engine against Israel.
The second turning of the screw, as already indicated by the above-mentioned Indig-Restler combo, is the increased visibility and involvement of the Jewish anti-Zionist progressives. For decades, we have been steadily losing two generations of Jews to assimilation, Jewish illiteracy, and a thinning out of what Judaism is. The inside joke exists that, in the main, those of the Jewish establishment leadership have very few Jewish grandchildren. The fall of many Hillel chapters to anti-Zionists was a harbinger.
Jews are only the start
Moreover, those tightening that screw are simply repeating a very basic lesson any educated Jew should have learned, that turning on Jews only brings about the turning of Jew-haters on those very Jews.
It happened with our apostates in Spain, Germany, and France, which led to the burning of the Talmud and then the burning of Jews at the stake, if they survived the tortures. It happened with enlightened Jews in Central Europe who sought to blend in with the dominant culture and found themselves with their brethren Jews in concentration camps and at the crematoria.
And it happened with Jewish Yevsektzia communists who destroyed Jewish culture in Soviet Russia and then disappeared into Stalin’s Gulag, the lucky ones after a show trial where they admitted to their counter-revolutionary crimes.
Mamdani will fail
As for the third turn, many observers have commented over the past few months that Mamdani’s socialist economic policies not only will not assure the improving of the financial condition of the majority of New Yorkers but will be, for the most part, a failure.
As history has once again taught us, in times of economic pressure, those suffering poverty and privation, realizing their power is inadequate to alter society’s actual power structure, will seek an alternative target for their anger and frustration. And Jews have always been the scapegoat.
Already, Nicholas Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens, to name the most prominent, are hyping up the antisemitism to their millions of social platform consumers. Anti-Jewish questioners are lined up at Tipping Point-USA events confronting Ted Cruz, Ben Shapiro, and Glenn Beck.
Israel beckons
While they are of the conservative Right, their anti-Jewish rhetoric is mirrored, if not exactly in language, then in the same disparaging sense on the Left. We will see the “horseshoe effect” taking place. This is a theory that observes that the far Left and the far Right are not truly opposites but rather closely resemble each other. They are not at different ends of a linear pole but are close together as are the ends of a horseshoe.
The combination of a socialist-cum-communist mayor who detests Israel and blurs the line between Jews and Israel with a cheering chorus of progressive anti-Zionist Jews at a future moment of economic and social crisis will prove dangerous in the most physical sense for the New York Metropolitan Area’s Jews.
I am not sure that immigration to Israel is their preferred option, but we here in the Jewish state should be planning for the arrival of many.
The writer is a researcher, analyst, and commentator on political, cultural, and media issues.