At his Brooklyn rally last week, Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood before a roaring crowd and reached for a word with a very long history. The pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, he declared, was among “the monsters that we are up against,” an organization moving “millions in dark money” to “turn us against one another.” AIPAC is not a shadow cabal. It is a mainstream, bipartisan organization with a large and openly Jewish membership. To brand it a “monster” trafficking in secret money is to revive one of the oldest libels in the Western canon.

That word should chill anyone who knows the history. For a thousand years, Jews have been drawn as demons, beasts, and monsters, in medieval woodcuts, in blood-libel sermons, and most infamously in Nazi propaganda that rendered them as vermin and devils to make their slaughter thinkable.

Dehumanization is not a rhetorical flourish; it is the first step on a known road. So the question is not academic: how does the leader of one of the most diverse cities in the world, with an esteemed........

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