When it comes to antisemitism in the U.S., and across the so-called enlightened West, I keep asking myself: how much worse could it get? WTF, indeed.
If you want to know how bad things have gotten, look no further than New York City, the beating heart of the Jewish diaspora, where Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani is now likely to win the contest for mayor. Mamdani isn’t some fringe crank; he’s a rising progressive star, the poster child of a movement that wraps radicalism in virtue.
Mamdani has repeatedly taken public positions that Jewish leaders call problematic, especially in a city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel. The list of horribles is long, but here are a few more notorious: He’s declined to commit to visiting Israel if elected, breaking a 75-year tradition for NYC mayors. He has refused to affirm the existence of the Jewish state as a Jewish state, calling instead for equal rights for all in the land. He’s flagged for using rhetoric tied to the slogan “globalize the intifada”, language many Jewish New Yorkers regard as a dog whistle for anti-Jewish violence.
Meanwhile, antisemitic incidents in NYC are already rising: in the first quarter of 2025, hate crimes targeting Jews made up 62% of all reported hate crimes city-wide.
And yet, Mamdani’s own words drip with a familiar poison:
“The push is defund the NYPD and refund all of these different social services and things that actually create safety. And so I think that when we need to connect the struggles against austerity with the struggle against the funding of Israeli apartheid.” (Mamdani 2021)
And this:
“We have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF. Especially in New York City, you have so many opportunities to make clear the ways in which that struggle over there is tied to capital’s interest over here.” (Mamdani 2023)
In a city where Jewish cops have died protecting synagogues, where Holocaust survivors still walk the streets, the suggestion that “the boot on your neck has been laced by the IDF” isn’t criticism — it’s malicious libel. Yet he’s poised to win.
The alarms are blaring. And not just in New York City. All over the world, the “Pro-Palestine” movement is growing, and getting scary. My synagogue, here in Sharon, now has a full time security guard watching the Jewish School at all times when in session.
Outrage Isn’t Enough – We Need a New Educational Imperative
The line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism has disappeared. And if the world’s most Jewish city can flirt with a mayor who paints Jews as militarized oppressors, then outrage isn’t enough.
It’s time for a new kind of education, one that teaches Jews and non-Jews alike not just what is happening, but why. Our current responses — security guards, hashtags, press releases — are defensive. What’s needed now is offensive: a re-education of the worldon the meaning and mission of Jewish civilization.
Enter Dara Horn, author of “People Love Dead Jews” and her new educational imperative.
Dara Horn’s Tell Institute calls for retelling the story from its roots. Judaism didn’t just introduce monotheism; it introduced a political revolution, the idea that no ruler is divine, no empire eternal, and no human authority absolute.
That’s the story that once taught the world that freedom requires law, and that law requires moral responsibility. And it’s the story our modern culture — whether woke, populist, or nihilist — has completely forgotten.
Horn is helping to redefine the roots of antisemitism and how best to deal with it. In her own words:
Anti Semitism is directly related to the challenge that the Jewish people have always posed to the ideas of conformity and tyranny. Anti Semitism is a lie that people use to maintain power. The big lie of antisemitism is that Jews are the obstacle to what you value most, and the only variant through history is what you value most. Recognizing how this pattern works and how it’s consistently worked for millennia is the key to understanding antisemitism today and how to respond to it.
If Horn diagnoses the disease, Joshua Hoffman offers the cure. In his essay ‘Progressive or Zionist — The Jewish Left’s False Binary,’ Hoffman makes the case to stop letting others define the Jewish narrative through imported ideological frameworks. Stop measuring Jewish survival on the spectrum between “oppressor” and “oppressed.” Reclaim complexity, peoplehood, and particularism without apology.
Together, Horn and Hoffman point the way toward what might be called a Critical Zionist Theory — an educational model that doesn’t beg for acceptance but demands understanding. One that tells Jews, “Your story is not an accident of persecution,” and tells the world, “This is what freedom under moral law looks like.”
The Living Rebuttal: Israel
If antisemitism is the cult of resentment, Israel is the culture of responsibility.
Look at the numbers.
A nation the size of New Jersey leads the world in cybersecurity, medical innovation, water recycling, and renewable tech. Israeli artists headline at Venice, Israeli scientists win Nobels, Israeli startups outnumber entire continents. The same people once accused of poisoning wells are now desalinating the Mediterranean.
That success isn’t luck — it’s legacy. It’s the application of 3,000 years of moral engineering to a small patch of desert that now exports ideas instead of excuses.
And that’s precisely why the tyrants and the Twitter mobs hate it: because Israel proves that survival doesn’t have to be static. It can be creative, defiant, productive — the opposite of Palestiniasm, the global cult of eternal grievance that mistakes victimhood for virtue.
Israel’s greatest sin, to its critics, is not occupation but competence. It succeeds where others prefer to suffer. It builds where others burn. It turns exile into energy.
The Jewish story, properly told, isn’t about what was done to us — it’s about what we’ve built since. And until we teach that story — unapologetically, proudly, relentlessly — we’ll keep ceding moral ground to those who mistake destruction for justice.
Tip of the Kippah
Begrudgingly, a nod to Zohran Mamdani — for proving, in real time, that the Pharaohs never left. They just switched boroughs.
Enjoy the weekend everyone. Go Jays! And as always, be careful out there.
Brad out.
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