“I feel like last night’s NYC election result is like a spiritual Kristallnacht. It proved Jew hatred is now OK,” wrote Jewish writer and actress Jill Kargman. “Jewish New Yorkers rightfully believe themselves to be at risk, and it’s unthinkable that the city with the largest Jewish population outside of the state of Israel should have so many of its Jewish citizens finding themselves in a vulnerable state of affairs,” said Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove. These are two examples of the kinds of Jews I have been arguing with my entire life, and I am beyond sick of this kind of nonsense.
I know this may come as a surprise to some folks, but us Jews like to argue. Especially with each other. It’s the subtext of like, at least half the Torah. I rarely wrote about Israel prior to October 7th because I have argued more than enough for one lifetime about this subject, and prior to Hamas’ terrorist attack and Israel’s genocide, I felt like I had used up all the words I have on it. But Israel’s casual mass murder of Palestinian children has taken traditional splits in Judaism and opened a gulf among Jews so wide that Moses would even do a double take.
These quotes from the New York Times article today detailing this split among Jews are abhorrent. Comparing a mayoral race to a pogrom that killed over 91 Jews and helped spark the Holocaust is unhinged. It is a slap in the face to ancestors like mine who actually lived and died under tyranny, and it certainly doesn’t do much to counter the actual antisemitism coursing through the right-wing that falsely portrays Jews as a bunch of hysteric meddlers trying to control the world to everyone else’s detriment. Israeli society at least has the excuse of being warped by a near-infinite amount of imperial fuckery for its unhinged views, but the self-involved hysteria emanating from certain corners of American Jews is truly gobsmacking, and it has made this eternal split among Jews over Palestine seem completely unbridgeable. Reading that Kristallnacht quote makes me think there’s probably a better chance of Jews bringing the 1488 Pepe posters into the light than these kinds of people who think we are at the beginning stages of a Holocaust due to the global revulsion to what even Israeli Holocaust historians say is a genocide.
If you as a Jew are more afraid of antisemitism coming from the left than antisemitism from the right that has already killed people in America, you have lost all touch with reality. You have fallen down a cable news rabbit hole and come out the other side believing that words are more important than actions. The hysteria around phrases like “from the river to the sea” (which appears in the Israeli right-wing Likud Party’s 1977 platform) and Zohran Mamdani pointing out that the US Holocaust Museum used the word “intifada” in its Arabic translation of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is silly. They’re examples of people searching for something to be upset about before assessing what they’re specifically upset about. Yes, there is some real antisemitism in pockets of the lefty movement, I have seen it myself. But they are not leading their organizations (the ones actually doing things other than putting out press releases, at least), nor are they calling for, or even capable of, perpetuating the genocide so many US Jews are saying they’re bracing themselves for.
But you know who is capable of and willing to carry out campaigns of ethnic cleansing?
The Trump administration is an openly white nationalist administration, and anyone more concerned by Zohran Mamdani than Stephen Miller is just proving that Stephen Miller’s brand of racism is unfortunately very effective. “Brown people bad” is the American elite’s go-to cudgel in the 21st century to try to unmoor the smoothest brains from civil society’s coalition, piggybacking off the classic “Black people bad” that has been used for most of our history, and the genocide in Gaza has demonstrated how marble-textured craniums are and have been a bipartisan trait among some Americans for a long time.
Zohran Mamdani was endorsed by Brad Lander, a Jew. Why isn’t he fearing a Kristallnacht? If you are fearing a Kristallnacht, why are you still living in New York City? Get out while you still can! If not, it almost seems like you just want to post things on the internet for attention!
The only way for people like Kargman to rationalize this absurd contradiction in their mind is to traffic in classic right-wing antisemitic tropes of good Jews and bad Jews. I am a bad Jew, because I don’t think this is Kristallnacht and am excited about the Mamdani-Lander alliance and I care about our brothers and sisters in Palestine, whereas the good Jews are the ones supporting the US-backed mass slaughter of infants that has lost Israel the public’s support across the globe. This genocide has undoubtedly made Jews less safe everywhere outside of Israel, all while making Israel more isolated than ever.
Supposed “good Jews,” ask yourselves, whose interests does this dynamic serve? Yours? Or the Evangelical Republicans, who as Tucker Carlson so helpfully and subtly pointed out in his skewering of Ted Cruz last week, openly believe that all Jews must return to the state of Israel so we can all be raptured as we watch them ascend to heaven. The shambolic hypocrisy of all this would be hilarious if it weren’t all so utterly horrifying.
The assertions put forth by Kargman and Rabbi Cosgrove highlight divisions I’ve experienced my entire Jewish life. There is a longstanding old/young split on this issue, where older Jews have lived experiences with a more vulnerable Israel fighting wars with more bellicose neighbors, while the younger cohort has lived under a world where the US has subdued or placated those neighbors and turned Israel into the lone true hegemon in the region, all while the very clear apartheid regime in Palestine exposed the state of Israel as the globe’s biggest hypocrite. It has always felt like an intractable divide, especially as it has expanded from a young/old split to a liberal/conservative split in the US, another demonstration in my view of how Israel is not ours. We are not obliged to protect this iteration of our ancient state, because it was not created in our image, but in our imperial masters’. It is our modern golden calf some are worshipping in the desert as we wander the land, still searching for salvation.
‘Zohran Mamdani winning is Kristallnacht’ is utter batshit insanity that stems from perhaps the most salient and difficult debate among Jews in modern times. The Torah promised us, a people of refugees, a home in the land of Israel one day, and the state has animated our values ever since. ‘Jews can only be safe in Israel’ is an argument I heard ten million times before my brain fully developed, and that is at the root of the fears communicated by Kargman and Rabbi Cosgrove. But as I came to realize as my brain matured, there was a blind spot in our holy document that never saw New York City coming.
“Israel” is both a physical state and the Jewish people itself. A Jew in Colorado writing about a Jew helping a Muslim win a mayoral election in New York City as Jews in France, Poland and Singapore all read it is the realization of a dream by our ancient forefathers chased out of their homes by Haman, the Romans and the Almohads, to name just a few. Jews who fixate on the Holocaust as the lone big crime committed against us make me question whether they truly have learned from our history, as it roots the ancient state of Israel in modern imperial contexts. Yes, the dream of a Jewish state has always been intrinsic to the Jewish faith, but the faith has long preached that we are the Jewish state too. We don’t need Israel to exist, as demonstrated by our survival across the world throughout the centuries.
New York City is, and has been, a more welcoming place for Jews like me than Israel. Watching a progressive Jew endorse and defend a man slated to become New York City’s first Muslim and Indian American mayor fills me with immense pride in my people. Brad Lander is walking the walk of the lessons we learned as one of history’s refugees. We are not the only ones who have been murdered and expelled by imperial forces, and thinking that Jews are unique in being persecuted against is extremely unhelpful to the project of solidarity to try to combat the actual antisemitism creating terrorist attacks at our synagogues. It’s very telling that the ‘what can you do, they have been fighting for centuries’ argument never gets applied to lily white Europe, who fought much more with each other than Israelis and their neighbors have throughout history, and who finally achieved a truly unprecedented dream of peace on the continent in the past century.
Jews are being used as a transparently cynical political football in America right now, which will only lead to more hatred of Jews from more reasonable members of society having this political football weaponized against them. The Jews like the ones I quoted above likening any support of Gaza to rank antisemitism are aiding the modern McCarthyites pursuing this project to prosecute and expel vulnerable people for thought crimes, supposedly to benefit us. All for the reward of our people eventually getting massacred in Israel by their god for being heretics. History has long proven that the moment the “good Jew” and “bad Jew” label stops being convenient for those in power, the “good Jews” become no more and by process of elimination, we all wind up in the same boat.
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