Israel is now New York's favorite political litmus test.

What began as a foreign policy debate has become an increasingly powerful marker of identity, status, and belonging in America's most Jewish city.

Zohran Mamdani at the “Resist Fascism Rally” in New York City in 2024 (photo: Bingjiefu He/Wikipedia)

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This is a two-part essay by Joanne Strasser, a postgrad fellow at the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism; and Nadav Eyal, a columnist for Yediot Aharonot (one of Israel’s largest newspapers).

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Part 1 – by Joanne Strasser

On November 5, 2025, New Yorkers woke to the result they had chosen: Zohran Mamdani had won the mayorship.

He had won on affordability: rent, transit, wages, and the cost of life in the most expensive American city.

But the exit polls registered something stranger: Two-thirds of voters said the candidates’ positions on Israel had factored into their decision, and 38 percent called those positions a major factor — for a mayoral race in New York City.

The job is the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the New York Police Department, the schools, the rent, the rats, the parking, and the snow. There is no Israel desk or foreign policy portfolio for that matter. And yet, on the issue with the least to do with the job, two of every three voters had taken a position and acted on it.

Eight months later, on June 23, 2026, three candidates aligned with Mamdani won Democratic congressional primaries in New York. Unlike the mayoral race, these elections matter for Israel. As members of Congress, the elected candidates will cast votes on aid, sanctions, and resolutions.

We do not yet know whether their position on Israel decided any of the races, as they differed by district, opponent, constituency, and local terrain. What we do know is that each winning campaign treated opposing Israel as politically advantageous; each winning candidate had charged their opponent with enabling Israel’s “genocide” against Palestinians.

Israel policy is the subject of ongoing disagreement among Democrats, and more recently Republicans. The debates draw on specifics, such as how much military aid, on what conditions, with what oversight; whether to recognize a Palestinian state and when; how to position the United States toward settlement expansion.

A congressional candidate running against an incumbent on Israel could have addressed any of these positions, but none of the winning candidates did. Instead, they insisted their opponents enabled “genocide.”

The question is: Why?

The charge converted a matter of foreign policy into a matter of local moral standing. Political economists call this “expressive voting”: a choice whose value lies in the act and its audience rather than its result, and which, as political scientists Alan Hamlin and Colin Jennings observe, comes to dominate wherever the action itself is inconsequential and the price of taking the position is low.

A vote on Israel cast in a New York primary changes little in Gaza and much in the eyes of the voter’s own coalition.

The records of the defeated tell the story better than the charge did. Adriano Espaillat, ousted in New York’s 13th congressional district, was a five-term incumbent and chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, a champion of affordable housing, immigrant rights, and labor — the very issues his opponents claimed to run on. Dan Goldman, who served New York’s 10th congressional district, backed reproductive rights, a higher minimum wage, universal childcare, and paid family leave.

What separated them from the candidates who beat them was Israel. As the writer Elissa Wald put it, the incumbents’ fatal mistake was being pro-Israel, “and it would seem that nothing else mattered.”

In a mayoral election, when voters cast ballots on questions the office cannot meaningfully address, the vote’s political function exceeds its practical effect. The voter may experience herself as responding to Gaza, and she may be responding sincerely; an expressive choice can be a heartfelt one.

In New York, this response functions as a declaration of identity. It signals by telling other people — the electorate, her peers, even herself — who she is.

This is why her position must be visible through the post, the sign, the chant, and even the vote. What she wants is to be recognized, be read as one of them, and be on the right side of the line they draw. These are the forms through which the position becomes socially real.

Philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke call this “moral grandstanding,” the use of moral speech to raise one’s standing. They note its built-in escalation, how once someone stakes out the stronger condemnation, the rest must match it or be left looking like naysayers. In a coalition that reads silence as a position, to go unplaced is to be suspect by default.

So the display tells her neighbors where she stands before anyone can decide she stands elsewhere — with the “oppressed” against the “powerful,” with the “insurgent” against the “establishment,” with the “innocent” against the “guilty.”

The subject is Gaza, but the sorting happens in New York.

The ordinary work of government cannot easily be made into a drama of innocence and guilt. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority resists the form, as do parking, sanitation, and snow removal. Israel works because it meets three conditions: It is distant enough that the voter does not bear the consequences, familiar enough that she knows how to read it, and unresolved enough that it can be used again.

This logic operates on the American Left. The conflict’s costs are paid every day by people who cannot vote in New York City, while its symbolic weight is harvested by people who can. The voter speaks of “decolonization,” but the Palestinians she speaks for are not really the point; they are the material she uses to show who she is. The cause is invoked, the people are not consulted, and a coalition that calls itself “anti-colonial” treats its own subject as something to be spoken for rather than heard from.

In 2025, the Israel position that animated 38 percent of New York’s voters cost most of them nothing. They had never been to Israel or “Palestine,” had no Israeli or Palestinian relatives, and stood at a conversational distance from anyone whose life the position would touch.

So the distance holds in one direction. The voter is far from the conflict she invokes, but the power she opposes is imagined as near. When the imagined source of that power is remote, the hostility travels to whoever stands close enough to answer for it. In New York, that proximity is assigned to the local Jew, who bears no relation to Israeli policy and is drafted into the slot of the aggressor regardless.

The mechanism is old.

Neurologist Sigmund Freud described how a group can “bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness,” and the psychoanalytic literature on antisemitism, from psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel onward, treats the Jew as the figure onto whom a displaced hostility is projected because the particulars of Jewish life “make them suitable for such a projection.”

The displacement is social before it is anything else. The voter reaches for a distant conflict at little personal cost, while the local Jew absorbs it at close range.

While the conflict does identity work for the individual, it does organizing work for the coalition.

A movement recognizes itself through what it opposes, so it needs a shared enemy: someone outside its own membership that the whole coalition can stand against and, in standing against, recognize itself. A target drawn from within fractures the coalition; one drawn from outside holds it together.

The Left had tried the internal version. For a while its organizing principle was a reckoning with “whiteness” — an examination in which members were asked to locate the “oppressor” in themselves, to name their own complicity, to sit with their privilege. As moral instruction it was powerful, but as a unifier it worked against itself.

An object placed inside the coalition divides it, because everyone inside falls under the same scrutiny.

The reckoning turned members’ attention toward one another and toward themselves, and a movement cannot easily cohere around a demand that each of its members answer for the thing it opposes.

But an external object resolves this. When the figure to be opposed stands outside the coalition — powerful, distant, and elsewhere — the scrutiny that had turned inward can be redirected outward where it unifies instead of divides.

What Mamdani’s coalition opposes has a local address: the largest Jewish population outside Israel.

For many New York Jews, the conflict abroad is family, history, theology, the question of whether a relative came home from October 7th. Mamdani’s victory was, among other things, the announcement that the cost of that victory would now be theirs to absorb. They will live with the mayor who declined to say that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state, who vowed to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should he visit the city, singling out the Israeli prime minister from every other head of state he might have named.

Other distant conflicts — such as Tigray, Sudan, Xinjiang, and Myanmar — are familiar enough to register, but that is not enough. The American Left has no labels for them because its signature distinction is “colonizer” and “colonized,” and these wars do not divide that way.

Sudan is an Arab-led government against African populations, with no Western power to cast as the villain; Tigray is Ethiopian against Ethiopian; Xinjiang would mean siding against China, which reads as siding with American power, the wrong direction. Ask who the good side is in any of them and you get a pause because this requires reading up.

But the Israeli-Palestinian conflict comes pre-labeled: a Western-backed, “white”-coded state against a “brown,” supposedly indigenous people. The fact that more than half of Israeli Jews are Black and brown does not disturb the label, because the label was never meant to describe — only to convict.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the vilification of “the Zionist” supply a reading far older than the conflict itself.

The figure of the Jew as powerful, foreign, and dominant by hidden means runs back centuries — through the moneylender, the conspirator, and the secret hand behind events. The American Left’s colonial frame runs on opposition, and without an oppressor to name, there is no side to take and no virtue in taking it. So the frame finds one.

Israel did not have to audition for this role; the casting was a story about Jews before it was a story about Israel. And of course, the voter does not register this story as antisemitic; she believes she is opposing power, and opposing power is the one thing she is sure is right.

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Part 2 – by Nadav Eyal

The most revealing moment in New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s recent interview with ABC was not what he said about Israel. It was what he assumed about Judaism.

Asked whether he supported Israel as a Jewish state, Mamdani replied: “I support the state of Israel as a state with equal rights.”

“But as a Jewish state is the question,” the interviewer pressed.

“I think any state that privileges one religion over the other is one that I can’t tell you I support, whether it be Israel or Saudi Arabia or anywhere else,” said Mamdani.

The exchange came only after Mamdani had effectively declined to endorse the traditional Democratic Party position of two states for two peoples.

His answer was based on a premise: that Judaism is merely a religion. If that is true, then describing Israel as a “Jewish state” necessarily means describing it as a state that privileges one religion over others. From there, Mamdani adopts the posture of universal principle: He opposes any state that grants one religion a preferred status.

The premise itself is false.

First, according to a 2017 Pew Research Center study, more than one-fifth of the world’s countries maintain an official or preferred religion. Many of them are prosperous liberal democracies, including Denmark and the United Kingdom.

The issue is not whether established religions are compatible with democracy. The real issue is that Mamdani’s argument assumes that Judaism is only a religion.

That leaves only two possibilities: Either he knows very little about Judaism (an astonishing level of ignorance for the mayor of New York City) or his hostility toward Israel has blinded him to one of the most elementary historical facts about the Jewish People.

Judaism is both a religion and a nation. For thousands of years, Jews have understood themselves as a people with a shared history, a common language, collective institutions, diverse religious traditions, and — crucially — a homeland from which they originated. Long before modern nationalism, the Jewish People built communities, preserved a civilization, and maintained an identity that survived without sovereignty.

This distinction matters because reducing Judaism to a religion strips Jews of collective rights.

If Jews are only adherents of a faith, then they possess no greater claim to national self-determination than Buddhists or Methodists. The legitimacy of Jewish nationhood disappears by definition. This is why redefining Judaism as only a religion has so often accompanied efforts to deny the legitimacy of Jewish national existence.

Individual Jews are, of course, free to define their own identity however they choose. Some see themselves primarily or exclusively through a religious lens. That is their right.

But when politicians occupying positions of extraordinary public authority — in this case, the mayor of New York City — attempt to impose that definition on the Jewish People as a whole, they are not making an academic observation. They are attacking the identity of a minority.

Mamdani’s formulation is not new. It belongs to a long intellectual tradition that sought to dismantle Jewish peoplehood. Perhaps the clearest example came during the French Revolution. In December 1789, Count Clermont-Tonnerre (a prominent French military officer and liberal politician during the early French Revolution) argued passionately for granting Jews equal civil rights, but only on one condition:

“We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals... They must be citizens individually... It is repugnant to have in the state ... a nation within the nation.”

His intentions were likely more benevolent than those of Mamdani. Yet his demand was unmistakable: Jews could enjoy equality only if they abandoned their collective national identity. Clermont-Tonnerre’s words reveal exactly what both Jews and their neighbors understood Judaism to be centuries ago — not only a religion, but a people.

The American tradition took a profoundly different path.

When the United States’ first president, George Washington, wrote his famous letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, he did not require Jews to surrender their collective identity in exchange for equal citizenship. On the contrary, he addressed them precisely as a distinct people:

“May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

George Washington fortified something fundamental about the American experiment: equal citizenship does not require minorities to erase who they are.

That is precisely what Mamdani’s argument attempts to undo. His “anti-Zionism” is so rabid that it forces him to reduce the Jewish identity, to dilute it, to empty it of every collective trait.

His next interviewer should ask a simpler question: Do you acknowledge that the Jews are a people, with ancestry tracing back to Judea?

Then watch what happens.

George Washington promised the children of Abraham that none would make them afraid. That is the American tradition Mamdani is asking New Yorkers and others to forget.

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