Mamdani, Antisemitism, and the Danger of Displaced Conflation

Conflating Judaism or Jewish identity with the official policies or the actions of The Haganah, The Palmach, The Irgun (Etzel), Lehi (The Stern Gang), The State of Israel, the IDF, Likud, Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Amichai Eliyahu, or aggressive Israeli settlers in the West Bank displacing Palestinians is not acceptable and may constitute dangerous antisemitism.

This conflation is too often done by people who oppose Israel for political reasons or by those who are predisposed to antisemitism, or it can happen due to a genuine lack of knowledge or understanding about the diversity within Israel, where Muslims, Christians, Baháʼí, Samaritans, and Druze are granted Israeli citizenship alongside Jews based on civil criteria. However, the public blurring between Judaism/Jewishness and Israel can also happen among those with an incentive to paint those who oppose current Israeli military or political policies broadly with the brush of antisemitism in bad faith.

Israeli society features deep internal political, ideological, and cultural divisions. Jewish Israelis hold a wide spectrum of views regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, governance, and military strategy, ranging from hardline right-wing nationalism to left-wing peace activism, conscientious objection, and anti-occupation movements. Attributing the actions or policies of a specific government coalition or administration to an entire ethnoreligious group erases this rich internal dissent.

Put plainly, confusing the world’s Jews with Israel due to opposing or supporting Israel is antisemitic, and history has shown how and why that is unsafe. And now, in the second half of 2026, New York is demonstrating a very real rise in hate crimes against Jewish communities and individuals. NYPD data underscores that, even after the city enjoyed its absolute safest summer in recorded history, Jewish New Yorkers continue to be disproportionately targeted by bias-related crimes, accounting for over 55% of all citywide hate crimes.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is wildly popular among many New Yorkers for policies seeking to improve the lives of residents regarding workers’ and tenants’ rights, disability access, universal childcare, and improved transportation, has faced criticism regarding his interaction with the city’s Jewish community. While many agree with the mayor’s views and even his rhetoric on Israeli policy, Palestinian rights, and Benjamin Netanyahu, others, including progressives outside the Jewish community, feel he and his administration have failed to respond sufficiently to concerns about the statistical rise in hate crimes targeting Jews.

Those concerns were on very public display recently when a Jewish woman confronted Mamdani during an event at Eichler’s in Brooklyn and accused him of making Jewish New Yorkers unsafe. Her concern about antisemitism in New York is valid. Jewish New Yorkers are being disproportionately targeted, the statistics are appalling, and Mamdani is the mayor. He should be questioned about what his administration is doing about it.

But the encounter became something else as she continued heckling Mamdani and speaking over other Jewish leaders and community members who were attempting to participate in the event. This is also part of the problem. There is no singular Jewish position on Zohran Mamdani, Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, Benjamin Netanyahu, Zionism, or Palestinian statehood, and one Jewish New Yorker does not speak for every other Jewish New Yorker in the room. The internal disagreement happening inside that Brooklyn shop was itself evidence of exactly the diversity of Jewish political opinion that gets erased when Jewish identity and Israeli politics are treated as interchangeable.

And obviously, one politician is not personally responsible for everything negative happening to a community of people. Mamdani can and should be held responsible for the actions and failures of the Mamdani administration. If his administration is failing to respond adequately to an extraordinary statistical rise in antisemitic hate crimes, say so, document it, and demand that it do better. But blaming Zohran Mamdani for antisemitism itself is disingenuous. Antisemitism is considerably older than Zohran Mamdani.

It is also not victim-blaming to acknowledge what happened after October 7, 2023.

Hamas is a terrorist organization. The murder of approximately 1,200 people in Israel, the deliberate targeting of civilians, sexual violence, and the taking of more than 250 hostages on October 7 were acts of terrorism and were indefensible. Nothing Israel subsequently did makes Hamas’s actions on October 7 acceptable.

But October 7 was October 7, 2023. It is now September 2026.

Since then, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. Vast numbers have been displaced. Homes, hospitals, schools, universities, religious buildings, roads, water systems, and other civilian infrastructure have been damaged or destroyed. The conduct of the war has produced allegations of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. These are not events that can be removed from public discussion of why anger toward the Israeli government has increased around the world simply because antisemitism has also increased. Palestinians are not responsible for antisemitism, and Jewish people are not responsible for what the Israeli government does to Palestinians.

And Gaza is not the only issue.

Palestinians in the West Bank are currently facing aggressive settler violence, displacement, destruction of property, and attacks by people who sometimes explicitly invoke Judaism or Jewish entitlement to the land while doing it. In September 2026, an Israeli settler standing on top of a Palestinian home in Turmus Ayya was filmed telling the people below him, “You need to understand, this country and this land — Jewish. This is my land. This is my country because Allah promised me.” He was reportedly wearing a Kach shirt.

Even Mike Huckabee has had enough.

Huckabee is not exactly a hostile witness for the Israeli settlement movement. He is a Baptist pastor, one of the most aggressively pro-Israel figures in American politics, has repeatedly rejected the ordinary terminology of the “West Bank” in favor of the biblical “Judea and Samaria,” and has been openly sympathetic toward Israeli settlements for years. Now the United States Ambassador to Israel, Huckabee condemned the settler attacks in unmistakable language: “Crime is crime. Terror is terror.”

When Mike Huckabee is calling attacks by Israeli settlers terrorism, acknowledging that the attacks are happening is not some radical anti-Israel invention.

And when a settler climbs onto a Palestinian home and announces that “this country and this land — Jewish,” Jewish people elsewhere in the world do not suddenly become responsible for him. He does not get to do that. He does not get to appropriate an entire religion and ethnoreligious identity for his conduct, and everyone watching him does not then get to accept his premise.

There is another recent example particularly pertinent to New York City.

On September 11, 2001, the people who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and crashed United Airlines Flight 93 were not innocent Muslims unfairly characterized as extremists. They were terrorists. Al-Qaeda was and is a terrorist organization. Nearly 3,000 people were murdered, and the perpetrators invoked their interpretation of Islam in explaining what they were doing.

That did not make Islam responsible for September 11.

Yet Muslims around the world paid for it anyway. In the United States, Muslims were harassed, threatened, assaulted, and subjected to hate crimes. Mosques and Muslim-owned businesses were vandalized. Sikhs were attacked by people who did not even know enough about the people they hated to distinguish Sikhism from Islam. Muslims from Dearborn to Brooklyn found themselves treated as though nineteen terrorists and al-Qaeda had somehow appointed them representatives of an atrocity they had nothing to do with.

And the response abroad became vastly larger than September 11 itself. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq continued for years and killed far more people than died in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania on September 11. Iraq, of course, was not responsible for September 11 at all. Anger at a real atrocity did not remain neatly attached to the people who committed it.

It would have been absurd to blame Mayor Rudy Giuliani personally for every Islamophobic hate crime that occurred in New York after September 11. Giuliani could be judged on what his administration said and did. He could be criticized for his policies, rhetoric, policing, failures, or response. But he did not invent Islamophobia, and screaming at Rudy Giuliani in a Brooklyn shop would not have solved it.

Conflating Islam with immoral violence that good people condemned was wrong then. Conflating Jewishness with immoral violence that good people condemn is wrong now.

Of course, antisemitism is always wrong. Always. There is no qualification after that sentence. A person attacking a Jewish New Yorker because of something Benjamin Netanyahu did is committing an antisemitic act. A person vandalizing a synagogue because of Gaza is committing an antisemitic act. A person blaming Jews collectively for the conduct of Israeli settlers is engaging in antisemitism. Palestinian suffering is not an excuse for any of it.

But refusing antisemitism cannot require pretending that Gaza did not happen or that Palestinians in the West Bank are not currently being attacked and displaced. It cannot require pretending that Benjamin Netanyahu speaks for the world’s Jews, that an Israeli settler wearing a Kach shirt speaks for Judaism, or that criticism of what either one does is inherently an attack on Jewish people.

Blaming Mayor Zohran Mamdani in a shop in Brooklyn won’t solve the ongoing crimes against humanity in Palestine or the rise in displaced antisemitism around the world. Let’s address the root causes of both.