.@NYCMayor Mamdani must apologize. Referring to members of the Jewish community who advocate for causes they care about as “monsters” wielding “dark money” is shockingly offensive and unacceptable for a mayor who claims to represent all New Yorkers. This is not about political disagreement, it is about crossing a dangerous line by invoking dehumanizing and conspiratorial rhetoric with a long and troubling history in antisemitic tropes. We cannot allow fearmongering, conspiracy theories, or the demonization of Jews to become normalized in our public debate.
The remarkable thing about this is how widespread it is. It happens on campus, online, at work, at dinner parties and potluck dinners and school drop-off and school pick-up and on and on. All of these unhappy interactions amount to the same surreality, the same lie: We have no problem with Jews, just Zionists.
If one protests, if one says, This is the same distinction that Jews have been asked to make over the many centuries -- we have no problem with your Jewishness, just this core part of it -- one is inevitably met with the unthinking, "Genocide!" There's no point in getting into that debate, because it is now religion among so-called progressives. One has to embrace the belief that the Jews are guilty of the worst of all possible crimes, and if you do not believe it, if you do not declare your support vociferously and unequivocally, you'll be excommunicated from polite society. Ghettoized.
The contemporary "left" is simply reenacting the hatreds, the myopias, the violence, of all the antisemites who came before. It imagines itself, arrogantly, ignorantly, transcending the past. It is, in fact, a slave to it.