Zohran Mamdani won New York City Hall because he spoke to something real: that people cannot afford their lives — the rent, the groceries, the childcare. He said it plainly, to people who had stopped being spoken to at all, and he won just over half the vote in the highest-turnout mayoral election New York had seen since 1969.
That message is real, and it has real appeal. I do not dismiss it.
This week, his movement went national. Three congressional candidates he endorsed swept their New York primaries, ousting two sitting Democrats. In safe-blue districts like these, the primary is the real election. Even in a high-turnout year, a June primary is decided by the party’s smallest and most committed slice, its activist base. That base chooses the representative for a far broader public than itself.
I write — one citizen a state away, and one Jew — because of what his slate shared and what set it apart. The Mamdani-backed candidates and the rivals they beat shared the same progressive economic message: rent, groceries, housing, taxing the wealthy. Most of his slate defeated other progressives who hold those very same economic views. What distinguished his picks, the apparent reason he chose them over fellow Democrats, was their posture toward Israel.
Darializa Avila Chevalier, who helped found Columbia’s campus divestment group and joined an anti-Israel protest the day after the October 7 attack, unseated the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus; she has shared a post asserting that “Israel doesn’t exist.”
Claire Valdez won an open seat after campaigning on calling Israel’s war a “genocide” and an “apartheid.”
Brad Lander — himself a Jew, a self-described Zionist who still affirms Israel’s right to exist — unseated a Jewish incumbent, Dan Goldman, by running to his left on Gaza. Lander called the war a genocide and told a Queens mosque that denouncing “Israel’s genocide in Gaza” was “a Jewish requirement.” Goldman, who would not use that word, warned as he conceded about antisemitic tropes he said he had encountered on the trail.
The litmus test has moved, and Mamdani is the one moving it.
I do not speak for all Jews; some support him, and read all of this very differently. I am one voice, not a verdict. And it is not Mamdani’s heart that concerns me. It is the structure of his ideas.
That structure sorts the world into two boxes, oppressor and oppressed, and files every people permanently into one. It files Jews and Israel into the oppressor box using the old slander about Jewish power, lightly updated into “the lobby.” The framework flattens that people — a long, mostly powerless, often hunted history — and paints over it with a single cartoon: the villain with his boot on the Palestinian neck.
But reality does not come in two boxes. What is happening between Israelis and Palestinians is a tragedy of two peoples, both real, both with real claims, both having inflicted harm and suffered it. I hold the grief of Palestinian civilians and the grief of murdered and kidnapped Israelis in the same two hands, and I will not set one down to make the other lighter. The binary cannot hold both.
Once a people is defined as the oppressor, the rest follows without malice. It is how Mamdani could decline to simply condemn “globalize the intifada.” It is how “genocide” and “apartheid” come to be aimed so readily at the one Jewish state, and how its very right to exist becomes a question asked of no other nation. None of it requires hatred. It only requires the box. And cloaked in the language of justice, the animus travels farther and faster than open hatred ever could.
This is, in part, an inherited way of seeing — the postcolonial scholarship Mamdani’s father, an eminent scholar of colonialism, helped shape. An inheritance can be brilliant, and loving, and still be wrong in places. The one duty of a thinking adult is to hold it up to the light rather than swallow it whole.
There is a second danger, and it does not stop at the Jews. In the world this movement is building, disagreement is not met as disagreement. It is treated as proof of bad character. Question the framework and you are not mistaken, you are complicit. That is how a room seals shut, and how a country splits into two sealed chambers, each certain the other is not merely wrong but wicked. That is the engine of our polarization, and the far left now feeds it as eagerly as the far right. The horseshoe is real, and this movement sits nearer its other end than it can see from the inside.
The political point is familiar. If the Democratic Party lets this define it, it will lose, and badly — handing the country to people who will be worse for everyone the movement says it fights for: immigrants, the poor, Palestinians, and Jews alike. A faction that cannot persuade the middle does not win a country. It purifies itself while the other side governs.
I have no illusion of changing Mamdani’s mind; by the framework’s lights, I fall into the wrong category. So I write for the far larger number of readers who have no political home — who believe Palestinian children are precious and Palestinian grief is real, and also that a Jewish family’s fear is real, and who cannot find a single room that will hold both truths at once.
To you, the politically homeless: anyone who tells you that you must choose one grief and discard the other is not handing you a conscience; he is handing you a cage. Seek a home open to all voices, not one blinded by judgment. Your discomfort is the most honest thing you carry, and it is the sign that you are already on your way to a new home that is open to many voices.
Joyce Kamanitz, M.D., of West Hartford is a board-certified psychiatrist with nearly 40 years of clinical experience, based in the Hartford area. She is a collaborator with the Antisemitism Prevention and AI Initiative at the University of Connecticut.
