Jewish Democrats Have a Bad Feeling About This

hotair.com

There's been a battle going on inside the Democratic Party since the Hamas attack on Israel in 2023. All of the street protests and campus protests demanding a "Free Palestine" from the river to the sea. put a lot of Jewish Democrats on notice that the party wasn't necessarily on their side anymore. Yesterday's election of Zohran Mamdani is another sign that the party has changed.

Advertisement

Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the city with the largest Jewish population in the world offered the starkest evidence yet that outspoken opposition to Israel and its government — and even questioning its existence as a Jewish state — is increasingly acceptable to broader swaths of the party, even in areas where pro-Israel Jews have long been a bedrock part of the Democratic coalition.

Some surveys showed Mr. Mamdani winning as many as one in five Jewish Democrats, with supporters including Brad Lander, the city’s comptroller, who also ran for mayor and encouraged his supporters to back Mr. Mamdani through a cross-endorsement. And on Wednesday, Representative Jerrold Nadler, one of the city’s most prominent Jewish leaders, endorsed Mr. Mamdani, saying they would work together “to fight against all bigotry and hate.”

But for other Jews around the country who were already struggling with their place in the progressive movement, Mr. Mamdani’s stunning victory confirmed their worst fears about the direction of the American left, fueling a sense that urgent concerns about the community’s safety are being dismissed in a movement and a city that Jews helped build.

Jewish Insider spoke to some Jewish Democrats who worked for the Biden administration. They now feel like they don't belong in the party anymore.

Advertisement

“Biden was elected running a campaign in 2020 premised on combating antisemitism. That was the animating feature that got him into the race. So the politics of this have really moved,” said the former White House official. “This is all about language and people using their microphones, and the fact that someone could feel empowered to double down on these ideas and win a mayoral race in New York City, that doesn’t happen by accident. It takes years of moving the goalposts on this language, on what it means to be antisemitic in America in 2025.” 

This Biden administration staffer, who requested anonymity for fear of professional backlash, is one of many Jewish Democrats questioning where their party is heading after a dynamic young socialist with radical anti-Israel politics is on track to become mayor of the largest city in America, which has the largest Jewish population outside of Israel. Coupled with Democrats’ reluctance to offer support for President Donald Trump’s targeted strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, which drew support from major Jewish groups, Mamdani’s ascension has some pro-Israel Democrats concerned about the future of their party. 

Put more bluntly by another senior Biden administration official: “I feel like a person without a party,” they told Jewish Insider.

Advertisement

The really alarming part for many people was something that happened near the end of the campaign. Mamdani could not bring himself to denounce the phrase "globalize the intifada."

The tension escalated on Tuesday, after Mr. Mamdani, a critic of Israel, was asked during a podcast interview if the phrase “globalize the intifada” made him uncomfortable, and he declined to condemn it. Palestinians and their supporters have called the phrase a rallying cry for liberation, but many Jews consider it a call to violence invoking resistance movements of the 1980s and 2000s.

In the interview with The Bulwark, Mr. Mamdani said he believed the phrase spoke to “a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights.” He said the U.S. Holocaust Museum used a similar Arabic term for “uprising” to describe the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against the Nazis, and stressed his own commitment to nonviolence and fighting antisemitism.

The blowback was swift. By Wednesday morning, the Anti-Defamation League; Representative Daniel Goldman, a New York Democrat; and other Jewish leaders had condemned the phrase, and some tied it to recent spasms of anti-Jewish violence in Washington and Colorado...

“Regardless of the technical Arabic translation of the term ‘intifada’ or any supposed benign intent of it, the term is well understood to refer to the violent terror attacks against innocent Israeli civilians that occurred during the First and Second Intifadas,” said Mr. Goldman. “Globalizing the intifada is simply exporting that violence against Jews around the world.”

“If Mr. Mamdani is unwilling to heed the request of major Jewish organizations to condemn this unquestionably antisemitic phrase, then he is unfit to lead a city with 1.3 million Jews,” he added.

Advertisement

The US Holocaust museum said about his Mamdani's remarks.

But as of today we can say that none of that mattered to a plurality of Democratic primary voters in New York. 

Mamdani has denied any antisemtic intent but his politics are definitely pretty compatible with that of the Hamas supporters who've been rallying at Columbia University.

He has called Israel’s actions in Gaza a “genocide” and, when pressed, has not said if Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state, though he has said it has “a right to exist and a responsibility, also, to uphold international law.” He supports the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, which calls for governments, consumers and investors to cut financial ties with Israel in protest of its treatment of Palestinians, and has dodged questions of whether he would advocate for that policy as mayor.

The day after the 10/7 attack in which Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis, the majority of them civilians, he posted this statement saying he mourned the loss of people in Israel and Palestine. 

Advertisement

Despite all that, he's now on his way to being mayor. No wonder Jewish residents are circulating "dark jokes" about it being time to leave the city.