More Than a Socialist

Why So Many Jewish New Yorkers View Zohran Mamdani With Alarm

Everyone refers to Zohran Mamdani as a socialist, or even a communist. But for many within New York’s Jewish population, there is far more at issue than his economics. The concern is not merely about taxes, rent control, or public spending. It is about the ideological world he comes from, the political causes he has embraced, and the moral language he uses when speaking about Israel and the Jewish state.

New York has lived with left-wing politics for generations. Jewish New Yorkers have often flourished within progressive politics, labor activism, civil-rights coalitions, academia, journalism, and liberal Democratic institutions. So the fear surrounding Mamdani is not that he is simply one more man of the left. The fear is that he represents a newer ideological current in which Israel is no longer treated as a flawed democracy facing real security threats, but as an illegitimate colonial project whose very existence is morally suspect.

That distinction changes everything.

Mamdani’s worldview did not emerge in isolation. It was shaped inside a family environment steeped in post-colonial theory, anti-imperialist politics, and activist hostility toward Zionism. His father, Mahmood Mamdani, is one of the best-known post-colonial scholars in academia, a Columbia professor whose work focuses on colonialism, nationalism, violence, and political identity. He was born in Mumbai, raised in Uganda, expelled during Idi Amin’s purge of Asians, and went on to build a distinguished academic career centered on the legacies of empire and the structures of power. That biography gives him intellectual prestige, but it also helps explain the lens through which he has long interpreted Israel.

Mahmood Mamdani has repeatedly framed Israel not as a nation-state with legitimate historical and security claims, but as a settler-colonial enterprise. He wrote that “the issue is not settlers, but settler colonialism,” and in 2021 declared that “Palestinians have a right to resist” because, in his words, this is “a colonial occupation, not a conflict. Supporters call this sophisticated anti-colonial analysis. Critics see something more troubling: a pattern of rhetoric that abstracts Israeli civilians into symbols of colonial power and gives moral cover to movements that use violence against Jews while calling it resistance. ” He actually rationalized the use of suicide bombing.

His mother, Mira Nair, brought a different but complementary influence. An internationally acclaimed filmmaker, she became known for stories about migration, inequality, identity, and the afterlife of colonialism. Alongside Mahmood Mamdani, she has also been described as part of the political milieu that shaped her son’s anti-colonial instincts and pro-Palestinian activism. In other words, Zohran Mamdani was not merely raised in a left-wing household. He was raised in an intellectual culture that sees global politics through the binary of oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized, privilege and resistance.

That matters because Zohran Mamdani’s own politics increasingly reflect that exact moral architecture. He has backed BDS, defended it as a legitimate nonviolent movement, and repeatedly criticized elected officials for participating in pro-Israel trips and events. He has spoken of Israel in apartheid language and has drawn criticism from Jewish leaders who say he refuses to clearly affirm Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state.solidarity. To many Jews, it looks like participation in a political culture that no longer distinguishes clearly between criticism of Israeli governments and rejection of Jewish national self-determination.

This is where concern becomes fear.

For decades, many American Jews believed they had found a durable political home inside liberal and progressive America. Jews helped build many of the institutions associated with labor rights, free inquiry, civil rights, urban reform, and democratic pluralism. The old alliance between Jewish communities and progressive politics once felt almost natural. But in recent years, many Jews have watched large parts of the activist left abandon the distinction between criticizing Israeli policy and denouncing Zionism itself as inherently racist. The word “Zionist” is now often used not merely as a political label, but as a moral stain.

That shift has had consequences. Jewish students and public figures increasingly describe ideological litmus tests tied to Israel, social exclusion, harassment, and an atmosphere in which Jewish attachment to Israel is treated as presumptive evidence of complicity in oppression. Demonstrations said to be about Israeli policy often slide into chants, slogans, and political demands that many Jews hear not as criticism of a government, but as rejection of Jewish collective legitimacy. That is why so many Jewish New Yorkers do not see Mamdani as just another democratic socialist. They see him as part of a broader movement whose anti-Zionism too often spills over into hostility toward Jews who believe Israel has a right to exist.

There is another layer to this discomfort that commentators often ignore. Mamdani identifies as Muslim, and more specifically as a Twelver Shia Muslim. That fact alone proves nothing about his politics and should not be used as a slur against Muslims generally. But it is still politically relevant in a narrower sense. Twelver Shiism is the dominant religious tradition in Iran, and Iran’s ruling regime has built much of its regional ideology around militant hostility to Israel. Being Shia does not make someone pro-Iran, just as being Catholic does not make someone an agent of the Vatican. Still, when a politician with fierce anti-Israel politics identifies with the same broad religious branch that underpins Iran’s clerical establishment, critics are not irrational for asking harder questions about his instincts, his sympathies, and his silences.

The argument is not that Mamdani is “Islamist” simply because he is Muslim, nor that Muslims as such are taught to hate Jews. Those claims are too broad and too crude. The stronger point is that some Islamist and extremist currents do draw on selective religious language to justify hostility toward Jews, and that anti-Zionist activism can become a vehicle through which old hatreds are repackaged as moral idealism. Many Muslims reject those interpretations entirely. But Jews are not paranoid for noticing that, in today’s political climate, anti-Israel agitation often borrows from ideological and religious traditions that have long treated Jews as villains.

This is why establishment observers often misunderstand the emotional reaction to Mamdani among Jews. They think the issue is economics. It is not. The fear is civilizational. The idea is not that the majority of Muslims are terrorists, but that the majority of terrorists are Muslim.

Jews have seen this pattern before. Hostility to Jews rarely arrives first in the form of open hatred. More often it begins with theories about power, privilege, wealth, nationalism, divided loyalty, or systems of oppression. Jews are told not to worry because the movement is only political, only theoretical, only academic. Then the atmosphere shifts. What begins as criticism of institutions becomes condemnation of the people associated with them. Those who refuse ideological conformity are isolated. Moral pressure intensifies. Rationalizations multiply. Educated societies assure themselves that they remain too enlightened for genuine danger to emerge.

History tells a darker story.

Across Europe, Jews repeatedly believed they had finally found security in modern civilization. In Germany, they thought they were Germans first and Jews second, fully woven into the fabric of national life. In France, many trusted the universal ideals of the Enlightenment and the Republic. In Poland, Austria, Hungary, and elsewhere, Jewish communities built successful, rooted lives over generations and assumed civilization had evolved beyond ancient hatred. Many could not imagine that cultured societies would ever turn against them.

They were catastrophically wrong.

The tragedy of Jewish history is not only persecution itself. It is how often persecution arrived while intelligent people insisted the danger was exaggerated. (i.e. Current American jews. Democrat Jews)

Jewish tradition contains a similarly painful warning. Ancient interpretations surrounding the Exodus maintain that the majority of Jews chose not to leave Egypt with Moses. ( Egypt was familiar. Egypt was prosperous. The notion that “80%” or “four-fifths” stayed behind comes from a traditional interpretation tied to the verse about the Israelites leaving “chamushim” from Egypt in Book of Exodus. Some rabbis interpreted “chamushim” to imply that only one-fifth left. This is theological commentary and tradition, not historical or archaeological consensus. Egypt was home. Many preferred the certainty of what they knew over the uncertainty of freedom and separation. According to those traditions, the Jews who stayed behind ultimately perished.

Whether interpreted literally or symbolically, the lesson remained the same: people often fail to recognize danger while it is still forming because they desperately want to believe the surrounding society will ultimately protect them.

That is why many Jews react so strongly to figures like Zohran Mamdani. The fear is not that he alone is some immediate tyrant. The fear is that he reflects a growing ideological culture in which Jews, especially Jews connected to Israel or Zionism, are increasingly recast as embodiments of oppression rather than as a historically vulnerable people with legitimate fears and legitimate national rights. To his supporters, Mamdani represents justice, activism, and moral courage. To many of his critics, he represents something darker: the normalization of an ideology that isolates Jews while insisting it acts in the name of virtue.

The warning famously expressed by Martin Niemöller still resonates today because it captured how civilized societies slowly normalize exclusion while convincing themselves they remain moral:

“First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

By the time many people recognize the danger, the moral atmosphere has already changed.

That is why, to many Jewish New Yorkers, Zohran Mamdani is not alarming simply because he is a socialist. He is alarming because he stands at the intersection of socialism, post-colonial ideology, anti-Zionist politics, and a family inheritance that has spent years treating Israel as a uniquely illegitimate state. His father’s scholarship gave that worldview intellectual prestige. His own activism brought it into electoral politics. And for many Jews, that combination does not feel like ordinary disagreement. It feels like a warning.

History has taught Jews a brutal lesson: danger rarely announces itself honestly at the beginning. It often arrives draped in the language of justice, theory, liberation, or progress. And every generation is tempted to believe that this time, somehow, the old patterns no longer apply.

Michel Benchimol