More than our fear

A letter from a New York City Jew after election day

For Jews, throughout history and in my immediate family, fear is a conditioned response to even the most mundane realities everyday life.

My mother notoriously answers every phone call from me or my brother with a cheerfully panicked, “Hi! Everythingokay?” I kept my son home from his preschool at our synagogue on a day when there was an increased security risk. I took down our mezuzah after 10/7 and only nervously put it back up when we moved to a new house. My digestive tract (and my mother’s, and my grandmother’s before her) carries centuries of shtetl anxiety.

A life as a Jew is a life spent bracing for the next blow, the guarantee of the once-a-century extermination. Living with this inherited panic, this ancestral adrenaline, is a survival strategy.

It can also be a weapon we turn on ourselves, and our humanity.

I do not look down on any Jew whose heart was broken by people immediately criticizing Israel after 10/7 because my heart was broken when people jumped to criticize Israel after 10/7.

On October 8th, I unfollowed Instagram accounts that broadcasted “long live the resistance” and “globalize the intifada” in the hours after nearly 1200 Israeli civilians were slaughtered by terrorists. Children and babies in their beds, teenage hippies at a music festival, families cowering in their homes on kibbutz, some peace activists like Vivian Silver. When the hostages were dragged away, I felt their fear in my body because it is a fear I was born to hold. At any moment we can be dragged off, brutalized, dehumanized, and thrown underground to rot.

In the days and weeks after, I retrenched into my corner with my Jewish friends and family. I shuddered at anyone so much as suggesting the culpability of Israel in the way I shudder at a rape victim questioned about what she was wearing.

Mamdani standing up for the people of Palestine in that moment felt like a slap in the face of a shocked, grieving population. But was it? Or was it a wearily prophetic contextualization that bore out beyond anyone’s imagination?

In order to understand how so many Jewish New Yorkers, myself included, cheered when Zohran Mamdani won the democratic primary yesterday, I think two truths have to be self-evident. First: Netanyahu and the IDF have gone far beyond the red line of proportionate response. And second: What the IDF has done in Gaza has not made Jews safer, in the tunnels or in the diaspora. If you are reading this and disagree with either, you will surely disagree with the rest of what I will say and I will see you in my DMs.

This is not October 8th. In the two years since the attacks, I have watched horrors unfold in Gaza and a defiant, embattled chorus of prominent Jewish Americans who have reacted as if following the same script. They insist, beyond all evidence and (antisemitic!) reporting and pleas from (universally antisemitic!) international aid organizations and (antisemitic!) video footage and logic and consensus from (traitor!) hostage families: “The devastation in Gaza is not due to Netanyahu’s unapologetic war crimes, it is simply because Hamas won’t release the hostages.” Any parent recognized this playground logic: I am biting him because he will not give me the toy back. If he gives me the toy I will stop biting him. It is maddening.

The same right-wing Jewish voices for annihilation at any cost in the name of Israel say that the death counts from Gaza are fake, because the reporting authorities including Gaza’s Health Ministry are Hamas propaganda. (In reality, an independent estimate is significantly higher than the Hamas-affiliated number) I have seen diehard pro-Israel influencers with their AI-generated filters roll their eyes at reports of children dying. “Who will stand with us?” They ask while isolating themselves further from a possibility of shared humanity. “Anyone?”

I believe Israel has lost moral standing on the international stage through Netanyahu’s barbaric response to the seventh. Mamdani holds this position as well. I do not think Mamdani equates the Jews of New York City with the actions of the Israeli government, even if there are Jews insisting on his antisemitism who hold that criticism of Israel is the same as criticism of the Jews of New York.

In our Jewish victimhood, in our insistence that we are being bullied by any criticism of Israel, have we become the bullies? Has this belief in ultimate divine moral purity given us carte blanche to do whatever it takes to retain control in a region that is only tenuously under Jewish control despite the most powerful army in the world funneling billions to fortify it?

I am the great-granddaughter of New York City socialists. My Zeder stood on wooden soap boxes in Union Square and organized for workers’ rights. “He was always on the picket line,” was the refrain in my family. I am also the great-granddaughter and granddaughter of proud Zionists, Jews in the 1940s who were alive during the holocaust and saw Israel as a safe bastion for our displaced people. A place to farm and thrive in communities in our ancestral, Talmudic homeland away from the bloodshed.

How would they reconcile Netanyahu’s bloodshed with their utopian vision for a Jewish oasis? And What would they say about a socialist giving an entrenched bastard like Cuomo a run for his dirty money?

I don’t know what they would say. But I know the values they passed down to me, and they are bigger than fear and anxiety. They are bigger than cherry-picked soundbites and inflammatory gotchas all absolutely intent on proving one man’s antisemitism. If I am alarmed by anything right now it is the level of panic that has caused adults to post “ALL JEWS EVACUATE NYC” on Instagram, because it is emblematic of something far scarier than a Muslim candidate who called Netanyahu’s bluff a mile away and wants to make housing affordable and has some followers who are certainly antisemitic.

So here is where I, a Jew for Brad Lander who did not rank Cuomo, am coming from:

Since Zohran Mamdani announced his candidacy, Super PACs funneled a record-shattering $25 million into Andrew Cuomo’s smear campaign against him. Mamdani was up against a king-making establishment political machine that was hell bent on combing through his every photoshop-lengthened beard hair for a TRACE of something to tank the Jewish vote.

If my Instagram feed was to be believed in the days leading up to the primary, Zohran Mamdani said he does not think Israel should exist, and wants to “globalize the intifada.” Neither is remotely true.

Mamdani’s exact words were: “I believe Israel has a right to exist, as a state with equal rights.”

As for what my Upper West Side Jewish dad is calling “The whole Intifada Intishmada thing.”

Zohran Mamdani, in fact, did not say he wants to globalize the intifada. On the podcast The Bulwork, he made a very “speech and debate club” point about linguistics that was incredibly offensive to anyone looking to be incredibly offended. I found it bad. I also found it logical. The Holocaust Museum did, in fact, use the word “intifada,” which is the Arabic word meaning “uprising,” in their own translated exhibit about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against the Nazis.

I do not think a candidate running for mayor of the Most Jewish City in America should have used a term widely accepted to signify Jewish murder to illustrate a point about Jews resisting murder by Nazis, even if I and anyone who reads the transcript would intellectually understand it. And I do not think Zohran Mamdani is a traditional candidate. He says exactly what he means, not what very powerful interest groups and establishment advisors demand he says. What we parse from it says more about us than him.

When asked by Brian Lehrer if he used the term “globalize the intifada,” which of course, of course of course of course, sends a chill down my and any Jew’s spine, Mamdani said: “That is not language that I use. The language that I use is that of clarity. And I do not believe it is the mayor’s position to be policing language.”

I do not think Mamdani should performatively apologize for his answers to questions about “globalize the intifada,” because it is wildly insane that the first Muslim candidate for mayor would be obsessionally hounded about whether or not he is a jihadist terrorist. In televised debates, on talk shows, on podcasts — every time there has been a microphone on Mamdani in this race he has been asked to prove he can pay lip service to what Jewish voters want to hear.

At the debate, the patronizing display of mayoral candidates kissing the AIPAC ring and reciting dutifully, in monotone, that as mayor of New York they would all travel to our great ally Israel reminded me of something I couldn’t quite place until my husband pointed it out while we watched it wincing: “It’s how we tell the kids to hug the grandparents when we get to Thanksgiving.”

Mamdani’s answer was clear, free of pandering, and from the heart: “I would stay in New York City. My plans are to address New Yorkers across the five boroughs and focus on that. As the mayor, I'll be standing up for Jewish New Yorkers and I'll be meeting them wherever they are across the five boroughs, whether that's in their synagogues and temples or at their homes or at the subway platform. Because ultimately we need to focus on delivering on their concerns.”

Here is the exchange that followed, with various candidates jumping on him throughout. Mamdai’s words are in bold.

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Melissa Russo (01:58:15):

And just yes or no. Do you believe in a Jewish state of Israel?

Zohran Mamdani (01:58:16):

I believe Israel has the right to exist.

Melissa Russo (01:58:19):

As a Jewish state?

David Ushery (01:58:20):

Not as a Jewish state.

Zohran Mamdani (01:58:20):

As a state with equal rights.

David Ushery (01:58:22):

He won't say it has a right to exist as a Jewish state.

Andrew Cuomo (01:58:25):

And his answer was no. He won't visit Israel.

Zohran Mamdani (01:58:27):

I said that-

David Ushery (01:58:28):

That's what he was trying to say.

Zohran Mamdani (01:58:29):

No, no, no. Unlike you, I answer questions very directly. I believe every state should be a state of equal rights.

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I am choosing to take him at his word, in the same way I hope to be taken for mine.

I do not hold him responsible for the fringe, radical beliefs of his campus group or people waving signs next to him, nor do I think his association with those beliefs in his lifelong history of anti-apartheid activism speaks to his innate, secret hatred of Jews.

I am not writing this on October 8th. It is June 25th, 2025. And if we do not change our perspective with time and events and evidence, we are living with our heads in the sand.

A man who mobilized the vote in a way that no establishment Democrat has done since Obama, who also withstood nonstop Islamaphobic and xenophobic attacks, emerged as the clear bastion of hope for a dying party. Whether or not “he can handle the job” is a separate debate, but he has held his moral ground in the face of the most moneyed and frenzied opposition imaginable, and that gives me enormous hope. On June 25th, no wild mobs are waving banners signifying Jewish death.

But there is a palpable sense of joy in the air. An astounding majority of voters elected him not because they hate Jews, but because they believed in the clear-eyed, egalitarian future that this candidate symbolizes. And despite the fear and the doubt and the anxiety coursing through so many, the city feels unified very much against the hate and violence handed down by the Trump administration. Because across the boroughs, almost everywhere except the Upper East Side, the city rallied for the vulnerable people who stand to benefit from this new way forward.

In letting go of that fear, and in listening to this candidate’s words and not the propaganda surrounding them, maybe there is a way forward for those who only see him as the enemy, too.

I hope we are in this together. For the New York City that Zohran Mamdani sees, not the one that his detractors project on him. For the city where I was born, and my mother was born, and her mother was born. For the city where I am so proud to raise my children. For the city I love, and the lantern of progress it has always held up for the world to follow. For Zohran. For all of us.