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This is a guest essay by Judah Bernstein, a writer.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
What are Jews exactly?
The modern era of Jewish history has been defined by this very question, a question that has elicited many theories — We are members of a creed, a race, an ethnicity, a nation, a people, or maybe some amalgamation of all of these? — but no conclusive answers.
Nevertheless, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani appears to have landed on one as his preference. Through the 2025 mayoral campaign and now in his short time as mayor, whenever he’s referring to the political-national dimension of Jewish life or talking about Jews as something other than ordinary New Yorkers, Mamdani and his spokespeople tend to call us adherents of a religion.
That may appear to be a noncontroversial choice of phrase — after all, Judaism is obviously a religion. But it’s a startling one when you consider what is conspicuously absent from Mamdani’s rhetoric: the possibility that Jews constitute a global people with transnational commitments or a diasporic nation with concrete political aspirations.
Mamdani has adopted this approach in service of an anti-Zionist agenda that seeks to separate Jewish New Yorkers from the State of Israel. The irony is that this reproduces an old political logic: a dominant political order defining Jews and then limiting the legitimate public expression of Jewish identity to that category.
What has changed is only the purpose.
Once, the religion category was used to assimilate Jews into the emerging nation-state; now, in Mamdani’s formulation, it can be used to separate Jews from a Jewish nation-state. This reveals, in turn, that, for all the talk of the end of wokeness, the governing assumptions of wokeness are still very much in play at least as it relates to Jews.
This past June, in a CNN interview, Mamdani was asked about his decision not to attend the city’s annual Israel day parade. He explained: “Solidarity with a government that is committing genocide is a very different thing than a question of solidarity with people of a specific faith. I’m too proud to be a mayor of the city with the largest Jewish population in the country.”
The distinction is revealing: Mamdani believes that he can achieve “solidarity” with Jewish New Yorkers even while shunning the State of Israel because Judaism, rather than any political or national elements that the State of Israel represents (call it Jewish nationalism, Jewish peoplehood, or whichever term of global Jewish solidarity you favor), is the gravamen of New York Jews’ identity.
This idea is consistent with other recent statements he’s made in response to the accusation that his anti-Israel agenda is inciting antisemitism. Amid the outcry over a video he put out commenting on the possibility of arresting Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Mamdani said, “They are critiques of a political leader, not of people of a specific faith or a religion or a background.”
Also in July, in light of a separate outcry over Mamdani’s failure to nominate a single Jewish person to the city’s judicial panel, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office said that it was false to accuse the mayor of being “motivated by religion” in making his choices.
But lest one think those were the words of a representative of the mayor but not the mayor himself, Mamdani reiterated that very same explanation in a tense meeting with rabbis in early August. In trying to allay criticism over the absence of Jewish picks to the panel, Mamdani maintained that he did not ask about the “religion” of those who were tapped.
At least one rabbi at the meeting was attuned to Mamdani’s idiosyncratic understanding of Jewishness on display here, criticizing Mamdani for failing to understand that Jewish identity can extend beyond the limited bounds of Jewish faith.
One can go back further still — in the lead-up to his mayoral election, when asked whether he supports Israel as a Jewish state, the now-mayor answered, “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.” This is a strange formulation for a critic of the state, seeing as the state actually privileges much more than that.
Mamdani’s Jewishness-as-religion approach departs from how previous mayors spoke about Jews stretching back decades. According to Mamdani’s predecessors like Rudy Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg, Bill de Blasio, and Eric Adams, Jews are members of a religious group, but also are part of a sociological entity that is more than just a faith or creed.
All of them talked about Judaism but also about “the Jewish People” as a transnational group not restricted to the five boroughs — consider Adams, for instance, who framed remarks he delivered at a major synagogue in 2023 with the question: “Why was I so clear on my support for Israel and the Jewish people of not only the city but across the globe?”
And all were comfortable speaking about New York Jews’ connections to the State of Israel. For instance, de Blasio, in explaining his opposition to the BDS movement: It “seeks to undermine the economy of the State of Israel and makes it harder for Israel to exist — therefore, renouncing the very notion that the Jewish people need a homeland in a still dangerous and unsettled world.”
There’s an easy explanation for what’s driving Mamdani’s discursive departure, and it’s evident in the battery of quotes reproduced above. The Jewishness-as-religion framing allows for Mamdani to perform a delicate anti-Zionist two-step.
First, it supports contentions as to Israel’s illegitimacy, because Israel, in his view, elevates Judaism over the other religions contained within its borders. Implied in these and other statements is that Israel’s claim to stand for something beyond Jewish religion, say Jewish nationhood, is a fraud that has been perpetrated on the world, because Jews are not, were not, and will not be a nation, only members of a religion.
And two, it enables Mamdani to deflect accusations that his statements as to Israel’s illegitimacy victimize Jewish New Yorkers, because Jewish New Yorkers are fully separable from the state in the Middle East that claims to represent the Jewish nation, which, again, is a fiction that must be exposed.
You wouldn’t expect someone with Mamdani’s background to adopt a framing for Jewish identity that carries imperialist baggage. His father, for example, a respected historian of African colonialism, his mother is a prolific filmmaker specializing in the multiplicities of non-Western diasporic identity, and Mamdani is a longtime activist in the cause against one state’s sins of imperialism.
Whether or not he’s aware of it, there is a distinctly imperial history to defining Jews as members of a religion — and particularly to treating religion as the only legitimate public dimension of Jewish political, cultural, or national identity. The history of Jewish life in modern Britain, France, the Low Countries, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and elsewhere is replete with examples of imperial regimes demanding the Jews’ cultural and political adjustment in return for equal rights.
That adjustment entailed the Jews’ suppression of separatist political and communal tendencies, accomplished by quarantining Jewishness to the synagogue/temple and home (transforming the all-encompassing demands and markers of Jewishness into a “religion,” in other words) and expecting that Jews comport themselves as “citizens” everywhere else.
It’s a familiar story of European imperialism, which occurred inwards before it spilled out to faraway places — a powerful state seeking to discipline a subaltern population by foisting non-native identity categories upon them, offering rights and privileges in return for their conformity to those categories. Calling Jews members of a religion and nothing else is, in other words, a distinctly imperialistic thing to do.
That may be why the approach, for all its convenience in the thought-world of anti-Zionism, is one that even anti-Zionist Jews have been hesitant to embrace. Indeed, anti-Zionism does not seem to require reducing Jewishness to religion, seeing as some of Mamdani’s closest Jewish allies reject such a move. Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), the anti-Zionist outfit that has supported Mamdani since the beginning, is notably agnostic as to the question of Jewish definition.
On its website, under the frequently asked question “What is JVP’s relationship to Jewishness and Judaism,” the organization says: “JVP is a proudly Jewish organization committed to building and growing thriving Jewish communities and diverse Jewish cultures … Our struggle to build Judaism beyond Zionist is not only an act of solidarity with Palestinians, but also a concrete commitment to creating that future for Jewish people.”
The website also professes to “resist Zionism because we love Jews, Jewishness, and Judaism.”
Mamdani has been hailed as the great post-woke leftist politician, one who has achieved electoral success in a deep blue city while emphasizing kitchen-table concerns rather than advancing identitarian crusades. At the same time, paladins of wokeness like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have tried to distance themselves from the identitarian excesses of the late Trump and Biden years, criticizing the tendencies of what is now being referred to as “Woke 1.0.”
Yet there’s something essentially woke in Mamdani’s approach to Jewish definition, revealing that at least as far as Jews are concerned wokeness is alive and will remain so. It’s not that Mamdani’s rhetoric about Jews recycles woke shibboleths circa 2020; it’s that the way he is imposing an unwanted definition on Jews preserves one of the underlying habits of woke culture.
The continuity with Woke 1.0 is not in the particular category Mamdani assigns to Jews, in other words. It is in the very act of assigning one in blithe disregard of how actual Jews understand themselves to begin with.
Of course, it may appear at first glance that there’s something distinctly “un-woke” about the Jewishness-as-religion framing. Here we have a powerful politician defining a group of Americans in defiance of their favored terms of self-definition, and doing so for reasons that have more to do with foreign policy preferences than with what the members of the group actually desire.
If this were a story about Muslim Americans, you’d almost have to assume that the antagonistic politico on the other side was a benighted conservative congressperson seeking to score points with a deep red political base.
But in fact, Mamdani’s approach reflects an essential element of the grammar of vulgar identity politics, which, if nothing else, was bent on subsuming individual complexity to group identity.
People with white skin were white regardless of their backgrounds, experiences, or political preferences, and people with non-white skin were Black or Brown regardless of the same — and how one was expected to act politically, socially, and morally flowed from those groupings. Assigning individuals to specific groups and allowing those individuals to be identified only with those groups on only those terms was a hallmark of the Woke 1.0 era. Likewise here — Mamdani hasn’t displayed even an iota of curiosity about the panoply of ways his Jewish constituents talk about their Jewish identities, and hasn’t attempted in any serious way to adapt his rhetoric about them to those varying terms.
Instead, he has decided that Jews are a religion and has proceeded to engage with them from that premise.
The logic of wokeness, then, may have been abandoned as it relates to America’s problems of race relations, but apparently not as it relates to Jews. They are not being defined here as a race, to be sure.
But the mayor of the biggest city in the country, the one with the country’s largest Jewish population no less, has declared ex cathedra that Jews are a religion, and from that definition follows expectations as to how they ought to behave, at least politically.
Ironically, what once was a tool for Jewish assimilation is now an expression of Jewish exception.
It’s not just Mamdani. It’s the entirety of the so-called Red/Green alliance and an ever-growing segment of the Democratic Party.
In the DSA flavored left (and increasingly the mainstream as well), if you hate American Jews, you are an antisemite who deserves condemnation. However, if you only hate Jews in Israel, you are a member in good standing of the Democratic Party. These people are repulsive…