JTA — In 2002, Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, described a series of mostly anti-Israel actions on and beyond campus as “antisemitic in their effect if not their intent.”

Summers’ reputation has suffered since then for reasons unrelated to Israel, but his framing remains potent. Jewish leaders frequently use the phrase to suggest that even criticism of Israel made in good faith can inspire acts of hate.

That paradigm resurfaced this month in the reaction of prominent rabbis and other Jewish leaders after New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani posted a two-and-a-half-minute video explaining that he had no authority to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu under an International Criminal Court warrant accusing the Israeli prime minister of crimes against humanity. In the same video he called Netanyahu “a war criminal” and “the architect of a horrific genocide.”

“Rhetoric that may not be antisemitic in intent can still be antisemitic in effect, as yours has been,” wrote Rabbi Joshua Davidson of Temple Emanu-El in an open letter to the mayor.

Mamdani’s video and the Jewish reaction seemed to represent a new lowpoint in the increasingly tense relationship between the mayor and the pro-Israel Jewish community.

Mamdani has been frequently and often harshly critical of Netanyahu since his campaign for mayor in 2025 — leading many Jewish leaders, for example, to boycott an event marking Jewish American Heritage Month in May. Last month, even some of his Jewish supporters were critical when he used the word “monsters” to describe the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC.

What’s different in the latest eruption was the timing — just days after the video dropped, a Jewish man was stabbed near a synagogue on the Upper West Side — and the platform: The video was on its way to garnering more than 200 million views before anyone in the Jewish establishment could get a statement out the door.

It’s not at all clear that anything Mamdani said inspired the attacker, who eyewitnesses say yelled the Arabic phrase “Allahu akbar” while attacking the Jewish man and an Asian man. (He is being charged with hate crimes relating to both victims.) Some Jewish leaders were more careful than others in pointing this out.

Defenders of the mayor insist that legitimate criticism of Israel, however harsh, is not a priori antisemitic or inciting.

Critics of Mamdani are themselves divided, between those, such as the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt, who said the mayor’s rhetoric stems from an “antisemitic worldview,” and those who say his “worldview” isn’t the point: It’s his anti-Israel rhetoric that makes Jews feel unsafe or potentially raises the threat level.

The critics and defenders are really arguing about the same question, just from opposite directions: One side asks how much criticism of Israel a public figure can voice before it becomes antisemitic, in intent or effect; the other side charges that “antisemitism” becomes a word used to police criticism of Israel, and to stoke the public’s fears about a perceived political opponent.

Davidson and another prominent local rabbi invoked safety in their responses to the video. Rabbi Angela Buchdahl of Central Synagogue, in her own open letter, accused Mamdani of using “dehumanizing language reserved for no other nation” and said his rhetoric “helps create the climate in which threats and violence flourish.”

Davidson was careful to say he wouldn’t call the stabbing “a direct result” of the video — and then spent the rest of the letter implying exactly that, writing that Mamdani’s “constant stoking of the fires of resentment toward Israel” had “jeopardized” Jewish security.

Defenders of Mamdani say such........

© The Times of Israel