On ‘monsters’ and ‘dark money’ – Mamdani’s use of antisemitic tropes

At a rally held on June 18 in Brooklyn as part of the Democratic primary campaign in New York State for this year’s midterm congressional elections, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, citing a widely circulated mistranslation of a Gramsci quote, spoke of the “monsters” of “the old world” who would try to prevent the birth of “a new world.” According to him, “these monsters” include the pro-Israel lobbying organization American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which would be even more frightened by “an end to genocide and Netanyahu’s wars” than by a “democracy being allowed to run its course.” They would “move millions in dark money” in order “to preserve their power,” turn people “against one another,” and thus make the necessary “moral change” impossible.

Josh Gottheimer, a Jewish Democrat and member of the US House of Representatives from New Jersey, denounced Mamdani’s remarks as dangerous antisemitism in a post on “X” on June 21, arguing that if one were to replace “AIPAC” with “Jews,” the result would be “the oldest antisemitic conspiracy theory in the books.”

When Mamdani was asked about the criticism of his remarks at a press conference on June 22, he defended them by claiming that AIPAC had supported a status quo of “death and destruction” in the Middle East, where children were “being killed on a daily basis.”

With his remarks, Mamdani reproduces tropes and conspiracy theories from the centuries-old and ever-evolving canon of antisemitism: from the alleged world domination or conspiracy of ‘financial Jewry’ to the ‘ritual murder myth,’ according to which Jews deliberately kill children. One would expect the mayor of a city where more than a million Jewish people live to have at least a basic sensitivity to antisemitism, but in the times we live in, this already seems to be asking too much…