email #47 — thoughts on the nyc mayoral election; also, i'm in new york for the month
Leon Kraiem
Hi friends,
I arrived in New York last night; it's my usual November trip — I didn't come just for the election – but part of why I have a usual November trip is the timing of elections. Last year, too, I arrived on the Sunday before Election Day; on Monday, I went down to Pennsylvania and knocked on doors for Kamala.
(One could say: 'A fat lot of good that did.' This would be a mistake. It's the same mistake people make who, like me, voted for Meretz in the last Israeli election, lamenting that the country's farthest-left Zionist party failed to pass the electoral threshold; the more significant fact is that it got close. Which means that actually, this was precisely the sort of vote you ought to turn out for. If someone falls way behind, and it was always strategically foolish to vote for them, that's something you can kick yourself for. If your candidate's victory is such a done-deal that you'd have been better off cooking a special birthday dinner for your kid that night, then you can also kick yourself. But narrow losses, like narrow victories, are precisely the results that should give you added confidence in your decision to try to tip the scales.)
I will be voting in person tomorrow — I like the ritual of it, and it's harder to cheat, and I think we should, with appropriate skepticism and objectivity, be concerned these days about the powers-that-be trying to cheat.
I will also, for a few hours here or there, be volunteering for the Andrew Cuomo campaign. Like last time, I'm volunteering because: 1) I have a clear opinion that electing one of the candidates is irresponsible; 2) for that candidate to lose, another, specific candidate must win; 3) the outcome will be determined by how many votes each candidate gets; 4) the main method to influence that is through in-person conversations with other voters.
I didn't write an email last year, in advance of the presidential election, because 1) I was more strict about watching my public partisanship, for professional reasons, than I am now; 2) there was hardly anyone on this list who was going to vote for Trump, and those who were, I'd already made my case to one-on-one; and 3) I didn't have any unique insight into why Trump was bad for the US; his demagoguery and corruption and cruelty and callousness were all open-source; there was no reason for me to add my specific voice into the fray.
But on all those fronts, this election is different. There is no support in Israel for Zohran Mamdani, which would pose a professional issue; there is, on the other hand, a large constituency for him in my own social circle, including on this list; and while I had little unique insight into the Trump/Kamala election, I do have something special to contribute when it comes to Israel/Palestine rhetoric and antisemitism in New York City.
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I think a Mamdani mayoralty is dangerous for Jews, and I think pretending otherwise is willful wishy-washiness. Here is, in brief, my evidence:
Zohran said nothing about the October 7 attack for around 36 hours, at which point he issued a statement condemning Israel. He pointedly refused, when prompted, to denounce the slogan ‘Globalize the intifada,’ or to call for Hamas’s disarmament, though he later backtracked on both those points. At Bowdoin, Zohran founded his campus’s chapter of SJP, an organization whose national organ called Oct. 7 “a historic win for Palestinian resistance," and called for "not just slogans and rallies, but armed confrontation with the oppressors.” A couple weeks ago, Zohran’s wife took to social media to mourn the death (at the hands of other Palestinians) of a Gazan influencer known across Israel for his videos celebrating Oct. 7 while it was happening.
Some Jews of different backgrounds and political persuasions who all live in Zohran’s district wrote the following in an article I recommend you read: “our objections to a Mayor Mamdani are rooted not in abstract fear or deep-seated bias, but the product of daily life in a community shaped by Zohran’s public political choices…we’ve seen graffiti reading “Long Live Hamas,” “Sinwar Lives,” “Kill Yourself Zionist,” and Hamas red triangles spray-painted on residential buildings and businesses. Flyers attacking “Zionist capital” were distributed during a local rezoning debate, and people waving Hamas flags have rallied in our streets…At a holiday block party, a mother was called a “genocidal killer” in front of her preschool-aged children; another was called a “bitch” by a man miming throat-slitting while she scraped graffiti from a lamp post. At a neighborhood bar’s karaoke night, a man sang “Deutschland über alles” while giving a Nazi salute. Posters and stickers with keffiyehs and machine guns have regularly appeared near playgrounds and public spaces…What we haven’t seen is any meaningful response to just how normal this has become. When a local business hung a massive, blinking “Fuck Israel” sign alongside a portrait of Hitler, we spoke up at our community board meeting in front of a silent Mamdani representative, to no response.”
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Jill Jacobs the other day shared an interview with Mamdani, saying Zohran’s “comments on what he has learned from listening to rabbis and Israelis… is evidence that real engagement, rather than blanket condemnation, can change hearts and minds.” In the interview, Zohran says that for some New Yorkers, “globalize the intifada” “refers to civil disobedience and protests,” but that “the same phrase is heard differently” by others, recalling terror attacks in Israel, and “that distance between what some intend and what others hear is a bridge that is too far,” hence he discourages the slogan’s use.
That answer is perfectly calibrated to assuage a Rabbis for Human Rights donor’s cognitive dissonance, but unfortunately it’s also a lie. No one who chants “globalize the intifada” on New York City streets is talking about nonviolence. (I’m speaking here about activists, organizers, people with megaphones; there are know-nothings in every movement, but they don’t call the shots.) Within Our Lifetime shouted “globalize the intifada” outside the exhibit showcasing personal effects of victims of the Nova massacre. Factions of the DSA endorsed an “intifada, intifada” rally in Times Square while the October 7 attack was still going on. The student coalition at Columbia that broke into Hamilton Hall and unfurled an “Intifada” banner (and chanted, in Arabic, ‘from the water to the water, Palestine is Arab’), issued a statement on Oct. 7, 2024, clarifying that “violence is the only path forward” and retracting their previous apology for a member who declared: “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” These groups, it should be noted, opposed the current ceasefire, specifically because it called for Hamas’s ultimate disarmament.
Matti Freidman wrote a great piece last year about reading Orwell, as a journalist covering Israel. “It is obvious that the story in the Middle East and North Africa in our times is the rise of violent and conflicting strains of Islam and the move of these ideologies and their adherents into the West. A great deal of effort goes into obscuring this,” Friedman wrote. “During my time in the press, we were expected to tiptoe politely around Islam’s two billion adherents and pretend the region’s key story was a group of six million Jews oppressing a minority, the Palestinians, who only wanted a peaceful state beside Israel. Because this was mostly fictional, my colleagues and I were forced into increasingly ludicrous contortions.”
The story of antisemitism in New York is a reflection of this picture in miniature. The “mostly fictional” version: Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza, and New Yorkers, urgently mobilizing to put a stop to it, occasionally get sloppy in their rhetoric, which worries some American Jews. Zohran has moral clarity about the war, but he has no problem with Jews; his cynical, Islamophobic opponents, however, exploit people’s anxiety to quash his political movement using false claims of Jew-hated. The true version: Israelis and those who care about them are besieged on all fronts, and Zohran is one of the besiegers.
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It’s around this point I should note that Andrew Cuomo is a corrupt scumbag, who spent his governorate “slapping fannies and killing grannies,” to use Curtis Sliwa’s immortal phrase. But he doesn’t make common cause with the people who kidnapped the Bibas babies, and that’s enough for me. Elections are zero-sum. (Of course, I’m also more aligned with Cuomo than with Mamdani on city policy questions, which makes this easier for me; but I think I’d treat this as a red line even if that weren’t the case.)
In my taxi to the airport yesterday, the driver was listening to Army Radio, which was focusing on the New York City mayoral election, from 6,000 miles away. As we drove past Ofer Prison — which is basically empty, having been drained of 250 terror convicts as part of the deal to get our 20 living hostages home — I told the cabbie I’d be knocking on doors for “the other guy.” I won’t detail the rest of our conversation (I swore years ago, before letting myself accept a job in English-language Mideast journalism, never to indulge in the all-knowing-cabbie cliché), but I raise the anecdote to illustrate: 1) that Israelis are very invested in this election, partly for national reasons but mostly out of their own ‘dual loyalty,’ to Jews in the Diaspora, about whom they worry; and 2) the ubiquity of my two homes in each’s other these days, how distant the era when I could fly across the world and feel I’d left either one of them behind.
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Assumed, but rarely articulated, in every moral argument that takes place against a backdrop of conflict, is that even a person on the receiving end of violence can make responsible decisions about how to behave going forward, that radicalization is not ‘baked in’ to the cycle.
My friend Noah wrote a Substack post yesterday marking eleven years since he survived a car-ramming attack by a Hamas-affiliated terrorist in Jerusalem. I highly recommend you all read it, not only because he gave me a little shout-out, and I am so egoistic I will even make my friend’s reflections on almost getting murdered about me.
Noah wrote: “I refused to let it make me angry, and refused to let it make me more extreme. Friends sometimes wonder how. How did I not let this event turn me into someone else, into someone with a worse temper, more sharp views regarding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, instead riding that wave to a different shore?” His answer: “I think a lot of it comes from the interactions I had with people after. People’s first question wasn’t about the attack. It was about whether I was ok.”
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On which note: Cuomo was wrong to laugh along with Sid Rosenberg’s joke on the radio that Zohran would cheer another 9/11. I think the interaction was more complicated than simple Islamophobia — Zohran’s been loudly criticized for palling around with Hasan Piker, who literally said “America deserved 9/11,” which is significantly more basis for a joke like that than mere Muslim identity — but the response, by people like JD Vance, to Zohran’s recollection of Muslims’ fear in the wake of the attacks, was disgraceful. I don’t believe there is a Cuomo-and-Muslims parallel to Zohran-and-the-Jews, but if others think there is, they should let me know why; that is a potential blind-spot of mine, given the media I consume, the things I pay attention to, etc.
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Please vote, in every election you can, wherever you are, in the way that is most likely to produce the most just and peaceful outcome, and to ensure further free and fair elections in the future. They’re by no means guaranteed unless you do so, especially now.
To all New York-and nearby-ers: My return flight to Israel is on December 2. Let’s please make plans before then. Most days I’m working until the mid-afternoon, but am often free in the evening.
As always, I am alive, and I am well, thanks to others, not all of whom are.
Leon