New York City cannot make the same mistake that Britain did.
Zohran Mamdani as New York City's next mayor will signal a major advancement in the Islamist playbook of taking over cities, already playing out to the severe detriment of Jews in England.
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This is a guest essay by Ellen Ginsberg Simon, a Jewish mother, recovering lawyer, and compliance and ethics professional.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
A crowd of 500-plus “pro-Palestine” demonstrators marched through an elite university campus, screaming obscenities and throwing trash at six Jewish students standing at a table decorated with Palestinian and Israeli flags, painting doves and playing music to promote peace. Mounted police officers had to form a barrier with their horses to protect the Jewish students from the angry mob.
A Middle East Studies department attempted to reject a master’s thesis examining the impact of an electoral reform law on Israeli political discourse because it contains no express justification of Israel’s “right to exist.”
A Jewish student stopped in a college common room to grab a cup of coffee, and she found the latest volume of The Economist covered in swastikas scribbled on top of the Israeli prime minister’s picture.
A table was set up daily for several months in the middle of the main street in a college town sporting an Israeli flag with a red swastika spray painted in the middle.
A Holocaust denier was invited to speak at a Middle East Studies Department, and then uninvited only when a dean of the biochemistry department submitted a letter of resignation should the event be allowed to transpire.
A local synagogue is afraid to counter “anti-Zionist” and antisemitic demonstrations because they are prone to being firebombed.
The darling of the Middle East Studies Department is an “anti-Zionist” Israeli Jew who renounces his identity, denounces his own people, and builds his entire career off pathological self-loathing.
A poet/TV celebrity teaching at a college gave interviews to the Arab press stating that all Brooklyn-born Jews in Israel should be shot, and he faced zero repercussions from college administrators.
Did these events occur at Harvard University circa 2023? Or at UCLA in the spring of 2024? What about Columbia University last week? None of the above. Try the University of Oxford in 2002.
I have a theory. It stems from my experience as a graduate student at the Middle East Centre at Oxford University from 2000 to 2002, where I was exposed for the first time in my life to rampant institutionalized antisemitism. What happens in the UK is a bellwether for what will transpire in the U.S. in roughly 10 to 15 years.
Islamists used elite European educational institutions as their proving ground for a methodical takeover that has been recreated in U.S. institutions of higher learning. Middle East Centers at Oxford and Harvard trade directors and faculty like playing cards. They raise generations of rejectionists, and they farm them out to elite universities like swarms of locusts desiccating academic integrity far and wide.
When I returned from my time in Oxford, I experienced a type of relief and peace that few people use to describe their first year at Harvard Law School. For the first time in two years, I could breathe. I could be myself without fear of repercussion. I could write and speak my mind unabashedly. Academic rigor, free speech, and healthy debate still defined law schools in the US.
Of course, it was President Larry Summers’ Harvard at the time, and I watched with satisfaction as that very same lecturer from my Oxford college (who had promoted the shooting of Brooklyn-born Jews in Israel in the spring of 2002) was invited by Harvard’s English Department to speak in the spring of 2003, only to be uninvited at Summers’ express command.
I had the opportunity to ask Summers about this episode a few months later. He simply said to me, “It wasn’t happening on my watch.” Moral clarity and leadership expressed in six words.
I returned from my time living in England feeling incredibly grateful to have been born an American Jew. In my wildest imagination, I never dreamed that the antisemitism so rife in England and Oxford in 2002 would make its way across the ocean and permeate our society.
I have watched with increasing dismay as, roughly a decade after my return, U.S. educational institutions forged the same path of allowing foreign money to dictate their attitudes toward America, the Middle East, and Jews. Academia became increasingly suffused with “anti-Zionist” rhetoric that would never have passed muster under Summers’ watch. The Middle East Studies courses that captivated me as an undergraduate were overtaken by rejectionist professors like Beshara Doumani who reared a new generation of Middle East scholars incapable of dialogue, reasoning, or academic integrity.
Becoming captive to questionable funding sources from the region, filling departments with “anti-Zionist,” antisemitic, and propaganda-spouting academics, championing “anti-Zionist” Jewish and Israeli professors who sell out their people for a shot at tenure, and increasing permissiveness of student radicalism and overt hatred for Jews — to my dismay, each aspect of my experience with British elite academia has been recreated in America brick by brick.
But the takeover of academia is not the only Islamist methodology being recreated in the U.S. today. One need only look at the state of British politics and the upcoming New York City mayoral election on Tuesday, November 4th, to see the same phenomenon of recreating the playbook across the pond yet again.
The universities have been fully infiltrated, and we are having to backpedal over a decade of degradation of free speech, quality scholarship, and institutionalized antisemitism and “anti-Zionism.” We are 20 steps behind and fighting a severely uphill battle, having lost a generation to concerted academic malpractice.
It is not too late, however, to stop the takeover of our local governments. It is not too late to stop Zohran Mamdani.
In the UK, the next target after higher education was mayoral seats. Today, the mayors of London, Oldham, Oxford, Luton, and Blackburn are Muslim. This in and of itself is not the problem. The problem is what has occurred under the leadership of these and other UK politicians.
To put it mildly, the UK is a mess for Jews. True, it has been for years. I can attest to that. But the rampant antisemitism present today tracks the concerted effort to place leaders who espouse extremist views in positions of political power. Muslim leaders in the House of Commons and Lords openly espouse “anti-Zionist” rhetoric. Mayors permit rampant antisemitic attacks on the streets of every major city every weekend. Local officials ban fans of Israeli teams from attending football games in Birmingham.
If a Jew dares to wear a Star of David necklace on the streets on London, he ends up arrested as a provocateur because heaven forbid one of the Islamist rioters permitted to fill the streets weekly is forced to see such a horror. Jews were killed at their synagogue in Manchester this past Yom Kippur. Jewish school children are regularly harassed on their way to and from school and on their school busses. British concerts and subways have been bombed by Islamists.
It is not Islamophobic to acknowledge that politicians like Zohran Mamdani, Sadiq Khan, Shabana Mahmood, Zarah Sultana, and numerous others loathe Israel and its inhabitants. They fail to protect their Jewish constituents. They permit incitement against Jews on their streets. They even participate in it.
A phobia is an irrational fear. There is nothing irrational or imaginary about the fear British Jews live daily right now. And, if New Yorkers are too afraid to recognize the problem and call it out when we see, we will be doomed to repeat England’s mistakes in less than one week.
This is the future that awaits New Yorkers under Zohran Mamdani, who has told us exactly who he is and what he believes. He is “anti-Zionist.” He is anti-American. He was raised by an “anti-Zionist,” anti-American Columbia University professor.
This is a man who founded his college’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, which is pro-Hamas. He stands with Muslim American political activist Linda Sarsour, who is rumored to have ties with Hamas. He stands squarely with the Democratic Socialist Party, a rampantly antisemitic and “anti-Zionist” group. He refuses to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. He refuses to denounce calls to “globalize the intifada.” He has referred to Israel as genocidal repeatedly. He has said he would arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should he attempt to attend the United Nations in New York City.
He is worse than a Manchurian Candidate. We know exactly what he stands for, he has told us time and again, and yet we still find ourselves at this dangerous juncture.
More than a thousand Jewish clergy from across the country recently signed a letter last week entitled, “A Rabbinic Call to Action: Defending the Jewish Future.” The letter warned of the dangers Mamdani poses to the Jewish population not just in New York City, but across America. The normalization of “anti-Zionist” rhetoric in mainstream politics is a clear and present danger to every Jew, whether or not they realize it yet.
The letter cogently states, “When public figures like New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani refuse to condemn violent slogans, deny Israel’s legitimacy, and accuse the Jewish state of genocide, they, in the words of New York Board of Rabbis president Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, ‘Delegitimize the Jewish community and encourage and exacerbate hostility toward Judaism and Jews.’”
A Mamdani win in New York City will signal a major advancement in the Islamist playbook of taking over cities already playing out to the severe detriment of Jews in England. If you want to know why Jews are so afraid, it is because we have seen this playbook in action. We have seen it in England. We have seen it in France. We saw it in Germany 80 years ago. And now we are seeing it in our backyard.
For most of our colleges, it may be too late to fix what is broken. It is not yet too late for our city governments. It is not yet too late for New York. Recognize Islamist creep for what it is and stand firmly in its path for all of our sakes.
Thank you for sharing my story. 🙏
We must stand firm and refuse to allow NYC to be turned into Londonistan