The Art of Making Antisemitism Look Like Justice

If they can recode Jewishness, if they can make the erasure of Jewish legitimacy appear as moral evolution, they will have created the prototype for the global isolation of Jews.

A Jewish man walking in New York City (photo: Bertrand Colombo/Unsplash)

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This is a guest essay by Guy Goldstein, a third-generation Holocaust survivor; and Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

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

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The fear spreading through New York City’s Jewish community is primal.

A Muslim socialist has been elected to lead the city that once defined Jewish safety in the diaspora.

For weeks, Jewish circles have whispered the same question: What happens now?

People expect confrontation. They imagine boycotts, public purges, and a mayor who will finally say aloud what the activist Left has only hinted at for years. They brace for a sudden collapse, a visible enemy, a breaking of taboos.

But that is not what is coming.

What is coming will not feel like an attack. It will feel like a slow, suffocating embrace.

Zohran Mamdani does not need to persecute Jews to reshape their place in New York City. He needs only to disarm them. He will do it with inclusion, civility, and charm. After the hysteria that follows his election, even the smallest gesture of goodwill will look like salvation. A polite phone call to a rabbi. A visit to a Holocaust memorial. A social media post condemning antisemitism.

The city will sigh with relief. It will believe it has been spared. And in that calm, the real project will begin.

Mamdani comes from the activist world, where moral framing is the real battlefield. He knows that victory is not about destroying your opponents, but about redefining them. His first term will not be about confrontation; it will be about legitimacy. He will present himself as the mayor of inclusion, a man of empathy and bridge-building. He will launch task forces and roundtables on hate and diversity that read like an ideal civic mosaic. The Anti-Defamation League and American Jewish Committee will be invited, praised, and seated beside J Street (a leftist Jewish lobbying organization), the Council on American–Islamic Relations, “progressive” rabbis, student activists, and interfaith coalitions.

It will look like partnership. In practice, it will be a demotion.

As conversations shift from antisemitism to all forms of hate, Jewish vulnerability will be diluted into a universal moral vocabulary that no longer recognizes its uniqueness. When Jewish organizations object, they will be cast as parochial, unable to evolve with the city’s “progressive” conscience. And once the language of exclusivity is replaced with the language of equality, the Jews will have lost their agency to define their own oppression.

This strategy is not new. The national antisemitism task force for U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration already perfected it. The Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish institutions were invited to participate but surrounded by organizations that reject Jewish definitions of antisemitism. It was sold as diversity, but it worked as dilution. The warnings about antisemitism cloaked in “anti-Zionism” were absorbed into broad discussions of systemic hate. Mamdani will replicate that model in New York City and call it justice.

He will also cultivate his own court of good Jews. Young, articulate activists who reject the link between Jewish identity and the Jewish state will be elevated as symbols of modernity and virtue. They will appear beside him at events, in task forces, in photo ops. They will insist that Jewish safety does not depend on Israel, that Zionism is not essential to Jewish identity. They will help Mamdani frame himself as a friend of the Jews while dismantling the moral foundations that have sustained them.

This pattern is not new either. Every generation of anti-Jewish power has found its Jewish enablers. The czars had their courtiers, the Soviets their Yevsektsiya, the West its intersectional activists. They are always convinced they are saving Judaism from itself. Mamdani will not silence Jews; he will deputize them.

Mamdani’s policies will follow the same gentle pattern. Sister-city ties with Israel will not be severed but reviewed for balance. Educational programs will not denounce Zionism but broaden narratives. Municipal grants will flow to NGOs that speak of peace while teaching that Jewish nationhood is oppression. Every decision will sound fair. Each step will seem moral. And together they will replace post-war Jewish security with post-colonial guilt.

The true danger is not that Mamdani will rage. It is that he will remain calm. He is young, emotional, and ambitious, but if he resists the temptation to flaunt his disdain, if he chooses patience over pride, he will achieve something unprecedented: He will show the world how to isolate Jews without ever appearing to harm them.

New York City is not a local stage. It is the capital of the post-war world order, the seat of the United Nations, the epicenter of global media, finance, and NGO diplomacy. What happens here writes the moral code for the modern West. If Mamdani can recode antisemitism in New York City, if he can make the erosion of Jewish legitimacy appear as moral evolution, he will have created the prototype for the global isolation of Jews.

NGOs will copy it. Universities will teach it. European mayors will cite it. Within a decade, it will become the new democratic standard for polite exclusion, a world where Jews are still invited into the room but no longer allowed to define what safety means.

This is the birth of a modern secular dhimmitude, a system in which Jews are tolerated only so long as they abandon the authority to speak for themselves. It is not imposed by religion but by virtue, not by threat of death but by fear of moral disapproval. It promises equality while quietly restoring subordination, turning Jewish presence into a conditional privilege that exists only at the pleasure of others.

It would not be the first time such a model succeeded. London under its current mayor, Sadiq Khan, showed how power could disarm Jewish vigilance without open hostility. Khan began with outreach, with interfaith partnerships and moral gestures that calmed suspicion. Over time, antisemitism in London was normalized not through violence but through fatigue. Jewish fear was reframed as overreaction. Israel became a moral problem rather than a partner. The method worked because it felt like progress. Mamdani’s politics draw from that same playbook of charm and restraint, the politics of empathy as erasure.

For 80 years, Western civilization has treated antisemitism as the moral boundary that defines its decency. If that boundary falls in New York City, the capital of global legitimacy, it will fall everywhere. The diaspora will lose the civilizational protection that grew out of the memory of the Holocaust. Israel will lose the moral shield that memory provided. And the world that once said “Never Again” will find a new way to forget, not through hate, but through virtue.

So, yes, Jews should be concerned about Zohran Mamdani. But not because he will roar with hatred. The peril lies in the opposite. In the smile, the invitation, the handshake in front of the synagogue. The next phase of antisemitism will not come shouting; it will come applauding. It will come in the name of justice.

And by the time it finishes, it will have rewritten who speaks for the Jews, and who is allowed to be one.

— by Guy Goldstein

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The question of “Who is a Jew?” can be answered in different ways by different people, but one would reasonably assume the answer has to be based on some kind of standard.

In political polls, there are no standards at all. Their polls tell us nothing about what Jews believe because they can’t define what a Jew is. And how do you measure something you can’t define?

In the New York City’s mayoral election this past week, the pre-election gold standard Quinnipiac poll showed Andrew Cuomo taking 60 percent of the Jewish vote, Curtis Sliwa taking 12 percent, and Zohran Mamdani having to make do with 16 percent. However, exit polls, which usually rely on a very small Jewish sample, claimed that 63 percent voted for Cuomo, only 3 percent for Sliwa, and 33 percent for Mamdani.

Polls of Jewish voters are not only notoriously unreliable, dependent on small sample sizes to capture a complex community. They may not even measure what they claim to.

The basic problem that pops up is obvious when you compare the poll showing 28 percent of Catholics and the 36 percent of Protestants voting for Mamdani, compared to the 43 percent of Hispanics and 48 percent of Black voters backing the radical candidate. Even though Hispanics are a significant percentage of New York City’s Catholic population, there’s obviously a sizable gap between the religious Hispanic vote and the secular Hispanic vote. Likewise, the city’s sizable number of Black Protestants and black voters.

But the same poll groups Jews together with the Protestants and Catholics. While other groups are separate by religion and race, Jews are polled as a “race,” yet the results are reported as if they were polled as a religion. The Jewish vote is watered down to the point of meaninglessness, yet described as a committed electorate.

From a religious and philosophical standpoint, the question of “Who is a Jew?” is complex, but when applied to a science like polling, it ought to come with standards.

Polling has none.

The Quinnipiac and Siena polls, in typical fashion, allow people to “self-identify” as Jews. Who would claim to be Jewish, who isn’t? Anti-Israel politicians in New York, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to State Senator Julia Salazar vave falsely claimed to be Jewish to “As a Jew” their hostility to the Jewish state. They’re far from alone. Social media is full of fake Jews who find clout and clicks in hating Israel. Polling has even fewer safeguards.

It doesn’t have to be this way. All pollsters have to do is apply a basic test. Pollsters have an alternative way of meaningfully measuring the Jewish vote, which is to ask about synagogue affiliation and attendance. Every time this has been done, the Jewish vote becomes significantly more pro-Israel and more “Jewish.”

During the heyday of then-U.S. President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, for example, Gallup broke down its polling of the Jewish vote by asking about synagogue attendance, and found that 60 percent of Jews who attended synagogue services on a weekly basis disapproved of Obama, while 58 percent of those who went to synagogue seldom or never approved of him.

Polls of Jewish voters would look dramatically different if, instead of allowing anyone and everyone to “self-identify” as Jewish, they asked about synagogue attendance. There are people who feel very Jewish despite not being religious or going to synagogue, and a recent Washington Post poll provides a demonstration of another question that pollsters could ask: It had looked to create a poll of American Jews that would show that they are turning against Israel. And unintentionally revealed the poll’s agenda by disclosing its methodology and definition of Jews:

“The sample includes adults who identify as Jewish by religion as well as those who identify as adults with no religious affiliation but Jewish ethnically, culturally or through their family background — and either were raised Jewish or have a parent who is Jewish.”

The Washington Post cast the loosest possible net, watering down the definition of a Jewish respondent to the point of absurdity, just to get its results. Among those who said that being Jewish is “very important” to them, 63 percent supported Israel’s campaign against Hamas, while in perfect proportion, 63 percent of those who answered that being Jewish is not important to then, opposed Israel.

There is a term for people to whom being Jewish is not at all important: non-Jewish people. That’s not a judgmental definition; it’s a pragmatic one. The Jewishness of someone to whom being Jewish is unimportant, is unimportant. His or her views on Jewish matters ought to be as unimportant as they consider Jewishness.

A poll that includes large numbers of people to whom the entire criteria that the poll is based on doesn’t matter is a contradiction in terms. Pollsters could ask those they insist on polling as if they were Jewish about their meaningful religious affiliation or identification. Instead, like the Washington Post, they poll people who are not in any way affiliated with the Jewish community to tear down that same community.

— by Daniel Greenfield

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