Globalize Columbia? That’s the Issue in NY

The projected has happened. Mamdani is the new mayor of New York.

Much has been written and contested about him, his positions, the threat he does or doesn’t pose to Jewish life in New York and beyond. The mayor of New York has no say in US foreign policy so that rejoinder in his defense is utterly beside the point. Similarly, with other such disclaimers. Analysts here have explained how one anti-Israel action after another that he has vowed to take is either not in his purview as mayor (this includes arresting Netanyahu), or requires long processes and the assent of other decision makers. In line with Mamdani’s fervent advocacy of BDS against Israel, he has vowed to terminate the Technion’s campus on Roosevelt Island, where research is conducted collaboratively with Cornell University, and other joint research ventures between Israeli universities and institutions based in New York City. These, too, however, he cannot simply terminate on his own.

While it is important to clarify all this, it is a diversion from the real point and danger, which is the high profile boost Mamdani’s words give to the anathematization of Israel. That has a direct bearing on Jews, whether they live in New York or elsewhere, in consequences Jews  are experiencing on their bodies and psyches again and again in recent years, in escalating numbers.

Mamdani’s threat lies in his marriage of fundamental(ist) Islamic dogma according to which, Jews are members of a faith community only, with a radical left position asserting that Jewishness is an individual, not a group, identity. As members of a faith community only, and/or as individuals, not a people, Jews should not have a state and any such state is illegitimate, racist, and to be undone as such. Palestinians, on the other hand, are a people. A Palestinian state, unlike a Jewish one, would be legitimate. That includes giving citizenship preference to Palestinians, as Israel does for Jews, only in their case, it would be legitimate. For examples of countries that explicitly bar members of certain ethnicities or religions from residence or citizenship, which Israel does not do, check the citizenship requirements of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Japan, China, India.

Mamdani has been forthright in condemning, “anti-Semitism,” itself a Jew-hating term though hardly one he invented (Jews are not “Semites” and there is no such thing as “Semitism”  one can either enact or oppose. Hating Jews, on the other hand, was and is rife, in seemingly endless guises). The problem is Mamdani deeming which Jews hold beliefs and practices that are legitimate and worthy of approval, toleration, and protection. He condemned the painting of swastikas on a Brooklyn synagogue that occurred on election day. Will he do the same when Israelis gather as such, whether just socially or in solidarity, or when pro-Israel rallies are stormed by others who share Mamdani’s positions and who assault the participants, as just happened in a university in Toronto, sending some to the hospital? What about Starbucks or similar venues, or music festivals, that refuse to serve or admit people who wear identifiably Jewish clothes or Israeli flag pins, speak Hebrew– are clearly Israeli? Or pro-Israel groups on New York city campuses? What happens when the Israel Philharmonic or other Israeli artists perform in New York and Israel-demonizers attack the performance, as just happened, violently, in Paris? The NYPD, one hopes, will do as the Paris police did and arrest the assailants. Will the mayor of New York condemn such assaults and support the open flourishing of Israeli events in the city? Or, it  it to be open season on Israelis; Zionists (whether self-identified, or  designated as such by demonizers), while “anti-Semitism” is a no?

In full imperialist fashion, Mamdani presumes to define good, acceptable Jews — that is, depoliticized Jews — and unacceptable ones — and their sovereign state. This is ancient Jew-hating behavior, from the Greeks and Romans of antiquity to the Jew-haters of modernity, one of whom, indeed, invented the term, “anti-Semitism,” to distinguish it from unscientific, religiously based Jew-hatred, positing instead, racial characteristics inhering in “Semites,” that it was not just acceptable but imperative to oppose. A similar dynamic operated and, in some quarters, still does, in Christian supercessionism — replacement theology — according to which, Jews who continued as such after the coming of Jesus were in error and illegitimate.

So, first, there is the imperialist presumption, which should be challenged on the most solid post-colonial grounds and for some reason, when asserted about Jews, isn’t.

And then, its application to us.

Pronouncing Jews members of a faith only, and the political significance of that pronouncement, is itself religiously-based. It is a formative tenet of Islam about Jews– this is where the phrase “people of the Book” originates (“people” is used not in its modern, nationalist, meaning; there was no such construct until modernity). Under this principle, enunciated at the beginnings of Islamic empire, Jews, and others deemed monotheists — Christians, Zoroastrians — were recognized as adherents of faiths to be tolerated under Islamic rule. There was no such toleration of polytheists, pagans, who were given the choice of converting to Islam or being killed. Jews were classed with other monotheists as dhimmis — subjects with discriminatory status whose practice of their respective religions was, in theory if not always in practice, protected. Subservience as depoliticized subjects adhering to specified religions, below the status of Muslims, were the conditions for toleration under the so-called Pact of Umar (dating to the 7th or 9th centuries, CE).

This principle in Islam as a ruling religion was enacted policy to the Jewish minority throughout millennia of Jewish history in Muslim realms. Anyone raised with a modicum of Islamic religious education knows it.

This dogma has a quite modern iteration, as well. Some Jews adopted for the Jews the reigning principles of subject nationalism in the nineteenth century, not simply, as is often, erroneously asserted, in response to Jew-hatred, but inspired by the model of emerging nationalisms of other, oppressed national minority groups — Italians, Poles — in multi-national empires (Austria-Hungary, tsarist Russia). Other Jews, seeking full civil rights and social acceptance in national states that were liberal polities — England, France, Germany, the US — were threatened by this development and rejected it, not only for themselves but in principle. Jewish acceptance in these states was based either explicitly (France) or implicitly, on Jewish civil status founded on religious, but not group rights. Acculturating Jews in such states declared that their Jewish identity lay in faith only — this, at a time of increasing secularization and abandonment of religious traditions. From this stance came new terminology, abjuring the words, “Jew,” or “Jews” as intolerably ethnic and with irremediably negative associations, for deracinated terms, “Hebrews,” or, “Israelites” of the “Mosaic persuasion” (as I used to joke to students, as in, Jews worship tiles). In Germany, the largest Jewish organization — not coincidentally, a defense organization, founded in 1893, just four years before Herzl’s First Zionist Congress — called itself, “The Central Union of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith.”

It was against all this that Herzl, in 1896, consciously and provocatively entitled his pivotal essay, “The Jews’ State.” That is the translation of his, “Der Judenstaat.”  “Jewish state” mistranslates. Herzl was the founder of political Zionism; there were and are many other forms. The aim was an independent, national state for Jews, just as other suppressed minority groups in Europe and elsewhere sought to achieve.

So, all the current discourse about Jews, about Israel, and who gets to tell us who and what we are or must or must not be, has a very long history.

What has all this to do with the mayor of New York?

Excellent question. That should be put to Mamdani and his supporters. Who is he, or they, to tell Jews what our identity is or must be — or else — what? Why is a politician and soon-to-be-leader of one of the world’s major cities, home to the largest Jewish population outside of Israeli cities, pronouncing on this subject at all, and threatening action against Israel, whether or not he can actually take it?

In his highly combustible mix of fundamentalist Islamic and radical left dogmas, Mamdani gives official voice, prominence, and perceived legitimacy to self-righteous, a-historic, rigid, anathematization of Israel, from which stance, many derive aggressive and violent license against Jews. Giving air and space to this toxic brew of religious prejudice and anti-colonialist rhetoric misapplied to the Jewish national case is not good for the Jews, in New York, or elsewhere.

The fact that some Jews — Satmar Hasidim, hence, his happy courting of them and their enthusiastic endorsement of him, and some other radical Jewish groups — support him and these dogmas changes nothing about this.

Anyone, of course, is free to define her/ himself/themselves as not a member/ members of a Jewish ethnos, a goy — a people (that is what “goy” means, and in Biblical texts, is what “Israel” is called), but presuming to tell others what they are, or must be or not, including the half of the world’s Jews who live in Israel — is a different story.

At Columbia University (my alma mater) and on many other campuses, vigilantes sharing Mamdani’s positions have constructed a deliberately threatening, intimidating environment, aimed at shutting down courses with Jewish or Israeli content, including Hebrew, or taught by Israelis or anyone not renouncing Zionism and Israel, and have targeted campus Jewish groups. They have invaded classrooms and libraries, harassing students and professors.

On this morrow of Mamdani’s election, the question is whether Columbia will be globalized.