Anti-Zionism Was Never Harmless. Now It Governs.

Antisemitism has learned how to pass a background check.

It no longer shouts.

It governs.

For years, Jews who warned that anti-Zionism was simply antisemitism with better manners were told to relax. Anti-Zionism, we were assured, was a critique of a state, not hostility toward a people. If Jews felt targeted, that was unfortunate, but also, beside the point.

That argument collapsed this week.

But to understand why, you have to start with history. Because none of this is new.

When Theodor Herzl argued at the end of the 19th century that Jewish emancipation without sovereignty was an illusion, he wasn’t indulging paranoia. He was describing a recurring condition. Jews could assimilate, contribute, convert, even patriotize, and still be told they did not belong. Zionism was not born of triumph. It was born of pattern recognition.

The pattern hardened in 1975, when the international community made the quiet part loud. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 declared that Jewish self-determination itself was racist, while leaving every other national movement untouched. Arab nationalism was fine. Turkish nationalism was fine. Dozens of post-colonial national projects were celebrated. Only the Jewish one was deemed illegitimate. Welcome to the 20th-century double standard.

The resolution was eventually revoked. The logic behind it was not.

That logic is anti-Zionism’s engine: Jews may exist as individuals, even thrive as a minority—but not as a people with power. Not with borders. Not with sovereignty. Not with the same moral presumption afforded to everyone else.

For decades, this worldview remained largely rhetorical. It lived on campuses, in NGOs, and in activist spaces where it could be dismissed as overheated moral theater. Jews were told not to worry. It was just talk.

Then it stopped being rhetorical and reached City Hall.

On his first day in office, Zohran Mamdani repealed all executive orders issued by his predecessor, Eric Adams. Among them was New York City’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism—the most widely accepted framework for understanding how antisemitism manifests in the modern world, particularly through attacks on Jewish self-determination.

This was described as a “blanket repeal.” Administrative cleanup. Neutral housekeeping.

It was nothing of the sort.

The IHRA definition does not ban criticism of Israel. It explicitly protects it. What it does, and what made it intolerable, is draw a bright line between legitimate critique and discrimination masquerading as morality. It recognizes that when Jews alone are denied the right to national existence, when Israel is judged not by its actions but by its very being, something older and uglier is at work.

Anti-Zionism cannot survive that recognition.

So the recognition had to go.

What makes Zohran Mamdani’s anti-Zionism so pernicious is not just what it says, but how it is packaged and how effectively it is sold.

This is not the anti-Zionism of Soviet propaganda posters or Middle Eastern state television. It comes wrapped in a familiar, comforting progressive vocabulary: justice, equity, liberation, intersectionality. It speaks fluently in the moral language young people already use to understand the world. It flatters their instincts. It reassures them that they are on the right side of history.

And crucially, it offers younger Jews a way to belong.

For a generation raised to view nationalism with suspicion and power with guilt, Zionism is framed not as Jewish self-determination but as a moral failure—a betrayal of universal values. In this framework, skepticism toward Israel isn’t antisemitism; it’s proof of moral seriousness. The more emphatically one rejects Zionism, the more virtuous one becomes.

That dynamic is especially potent among young Jews already ambivalent about Israel – Jews who feel distant from Israeli politics, uncomfortable with occupation, or alienated by Netanyahu-era governance. Mamdani’s brand of anti-Zionism offers them an escape hatch: you can keep your Jewish identity, as long as you renounce the Jewish state. You can remain welcome in progressive spaces, as long as your Judaism is strictly cultural, aesthetic, and politically disarmed.

This is how anti-Zionism mainstreams itself. Not by attacking Jews head-on, but by sorting them. Good Jews and bad Jews. Enlightened Jews and tribal Jews. Jews who have learned the lesson of power—and those who are punished for not forgetting it.

And once that sorting is normalized, policy follows naturally. Definitions of antisemitism become “controversial.” Jewish concerns become “political.” Jewish fear becomes suspect. The fact that this worldview arrives wearing a liberal smile does not make it less dangerous. It makes it harder to confront.

This is antisemitism adapted for a progressive age. It does not ask young Jews to hate themselves. It asks them to edit themselves until what remains poses no challenge to the moral consensus.

This is the moment the argument no longer needs sealing. Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism by accident. It becomes antisemitism by necessity. Because once Jews are allowed to define the hatred directed at them, the moral cover collapses.

The response from Jewish leadership was immediate. Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations CEO William Daroff called the repeal “a troubling indicator of the direction in which [Mamdani] is leading the city, just one day at the helm.” That phrasing is diplomatic. The reality is blunter: this ideology does not merely tolerate antisemitism, it administratively enables it.

This is why anti-Zionism is more dangerous than the crude antisemitism Jews grew up recognizing. The old versions announced themselves. They shouted. They vandalized. They were visible and therefore resistible. This version wears the language of justice, clears institutional review, and wraps itself in moral certainty. It doesn’t scream that Jews don’t belong. It quietly constructs a world in which Jewish safety, Jewish history, and Jewish self-definition are treated as suspect.

October 7 did not radicalize this worldview. It exposed it. When the mass murder of Jews was “contextualized,” when Jewish terror was treated as a political inconvenience, when eliminationist slogans were rebranded as liberation, the through-line became impossible to deny. Anti-Zionism requires Jews to be uniquely illegitimate, and therefore, uniquely expendable.

Seen in that light, Mamdani is not an aberration. He is a proof case. His first act as mayor did not create a new problem; it revealed an old one in its most honest form. Anti-Zionism stops pretending the moment it governs.

Antisemitism has always adapted to the societies that host it. In medieval Europe, it spoke theology. In the 20th century, it spoke race. In the 21st, it speaks anti-Zionism, until the moment it picks up a pen and decides Jews no longer get to define the hatred directed at them.

Anti-Zionism was never a critique that went too far.

It was an ideology waiting for authority.

That moment arrived this week in New York City.