Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City on promises that anyone familiar with government recognized as crude populism in attractive packaging, designed to seduce residents of a city where living costs had spiraled, and corruption under previous administrations had become intolerable.

That also persuaded many Jewish New Yorkers to vote for him.

Today, they may be the unhappiest of all.

They swallowed promises Mamdani knew he could not keep while making a far more consequential concession—one that will remain a dark chapter in the history of a Jewish community woven into New York’s cultural identity.

Mamdani is using the mayoralty of the city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel as a means to promote a systematic “anti-Israel” campaign. The quotation marks matter: this is not legitimate criticism of a particular Israeli government, but a challenge to the legitimacy of Jewish statehood itself.

Alongside it comes a more insidious cultivation of antisemitism. Jews are relabeled “Zionists,” while self-described progressives march with Islamists and apologists for Palestinian terrorism. Synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses are blockaded; visibly Jewish people are assaulted.

Mamdani’s agenda is hardly hidden. He has described the debate on Palestine as “central to my identity.” At Bowdoin College, he co-founded a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, whose national........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)