The idea of supporting someone who openly advocates for the
destruction of the only Jewish state in the world - which also happens to be
home to the largest number of Jews today - can only mean one thing: their
Judaism means next to nothing to them. And the younger they are, the truer that
is.
A retort often made is that Mamdani’s support transcends
Middle East politics, reflecting frustration with a political status quo that
has ignored working-class New Yorkers. His progressive agenda, they argue,
resonates with those who feel left behind by ‘politics as usual’. But that does
not excuse ignoring the existential threat to the State of Israel.
Neither does sympathy for Palestinian suffering, or even
anger at Israel’s prime minister for that suffering, excuse abandoning your own
people. And certainly not when the candidate in question has said he does not
support the existence of a Jewish state, has been deeply involved in the
anti-Israel movement long before October 7th, and refuses to condemn
calls to ‘Globalize the Intifada’ - a slogan that glorifies suicide bombings
and other terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians.
Any Jew who can support a man like that for public office is
not much of a Jew. No matter how loudly they protest that they are. No matter
how often they claim their support for Mamdani is in the finest tradition of
Jewish values. For them, Mamdani’s identity as a Democratic Socialist is seen
as an extension of those values.
Think about that for a moment. The younger a Jew in New York
is, the more likely they are to support someone like that. Is it any wonder
that when people talk about a ‘New York Liberal’, they’re usually talking about
New York Jews?
These statistics sicken me. It is beyond sad that this has
happened to the Jewish people increasingly over generations since the earliest
waves of immigration to the United States.
It is heartbreaking that Torah observance was abandoned by
so many of those immigrants. It’s hard to blame them. They believed they had no
choice. Very few had enough courage of their religious convictions to strive
for the near impossible task of finding a job that did not entail working on
Shabbos. The struggle for parnassah (livelihood) made it seem impossible
for most Jewish immigrants to support their families without that. Even if they
wanted their children to remain observant, very few succeeded. First, there was
the pull of the melting pot culture luring their young into the pursuit of
American-style ‘happiness’. A lifestyle hardly compatible with Jewish
observance.
Added to that was the hypocrisy of fathers who broke Shabbos
for work while demanding that their children keep it. There were few if any religious
schools to reinforce the observance their parents tried to instill in their
children.
The result was predictable. Most young Jews ran as fast and
as far as they could from their Judaism. They raised their own children as
fully assimilated Americans, unfettered by the old-world ways of their European
parents. And with the help of a misguided heterodoxy that ignored observance of
their members entirely, we now have young Jews in New York proudly supporting
the most anti-Israel mayor in the city’s history.
And they do so arrogantly, with the absurd claim that their
support reflects the most Jewish of values.
So while the trajectory away from Judaism is sad, it angers
me is that any Jew could support a man like Mamdani.
It doesn’t matter that he won’t be able to enact anti-Israel policies at the federal level. What matters is the outsized voice he will have as mayor of the largest city in the United States, with the largest Jewish population. Whose ‘savvy’ young Jews supported him by more than two-thirds (67%).
(Orthodox Jews did not support Mamdani. But they are only 19% of the total number of Jews in the city.)
Mamdani is poised to win the general election. And there doesn’t seem to be anything anyone can do about it. That Jews themselves are enabling it makes me sick.
