email #50 - post-election thoughts, and one of my heroes
Leon Kraiem
Hi friends,
I should make this one quick. It's quarter past 9pm, and in less than 12 hours I'm on a liveblog shift, and those are exhausting, and I'm just barely getting over a cold. But I really like when I'm on a streak with these, and a lot of you are reading them and writing to me about them, which is an exciting thing when you're stuck at home sick, and more to the point I'm glad to be of some little bit of service for people trying to sort out their thoughts on things, or else have them unsorted a little, so that a thought they've overlooked will catch their eye.
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Mamdani is, of course, mayor-elect now. The important things to be said about the election were to be said before it, because the primary reason to say them was to help people decide whom to vote for. Elections are a good example of the functionality of emotions — feeling stressed on November 3 is useful, if it gets you to go out and do something. Being stressed on November 5 — when there are no more votes to cast, and the guy’s not even in office yet — is a misfire.
It’s only been 48 hours since Mamdani was elected. Obviously, nothing dramatic has changed in terms of the state of Jewish safety in New York City. But here are two things that happened in other major cities since he was elected, which illustrate the trend I expect him to exacerbate in New York:
On Wednesday, in Toronto, a pro-Israel student group invited some IDF veterans to speak at an off-campus event. Masked rioters stormed the event, breaking into the building, damaging property, and assaulting a police officer. Five people were arrested. The school’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter then posted on Instagram: “Our universities refuse to hold war criminals accountable. We will hold them accountable.”
And Thursday, in Birmingham (England, not Alabama), an Israeli soccer team played an away game; 700 police were deployed to the arena, even though Israeli fans were barred form the game for their own safety. Some 200 protesters demonstrated outside the stadium, and a few dozen pro-Israel people counterprotested. Six people were arrested. Before the match, a local preacher — if you look him up, you see his plaudits as an anti-extremism campaigner — urged people to turn up, declaring: “This Zionist entity and all its supporters are the spawn of the devil, and they are Satan worshippers, and they are following the plan of Satan."
If IDF vets can’t speak to students at a Toronto university without glass getting shattered and a cop getting assaulted, and if Israeli athletes can’t play a British team without a major police operation to prevent a riot, then surely it’s reasonable to worry that New York, which has already gotten significantly scarier in the last two years for people with any connection to Israel, is not about to turn a corner and become more tolerant to this particular group.
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I referred to that group as ‘people with any connection to Israel,’ rather than ‘Jews,’ intentionally, and I want to unpack that.
The morning after election night, some swastikas got spraypainted on the Magen David Yeshiva in Flatbush. Zohran condemned it, pitch-perfectly, as expected. I don’t worry about him at all with this sort of thing, because I’m sure he finds this sort of antisemitism — explicit, Nazi-coded, and without any clear connection to Israel — abhorrent.
For a lot of people, there’s a sort of bait-and-switch when people like me accuse Zohran of antisemitism; when I use the word, it sounds like I’m talking about skinheads beating up hasids, which he's clearly against; but I actually mean students protesting alleged war crimes by soldiers of a nuclear-armed nation-state, which is pretty different.
Now, there are enough treatises challenging that binary, and I won’t add another one now. I’ll only make a few points, that are relevant to the mayoral race and the identity issues caught up in it: First, that hating Israelis is also hate — no other country’s citizens are casually referred to as “the spawn of the devil”; in no other context do student organizations brag about their role in vigilante violence against their classmates. This is not criticism of a government's actions.
And second: Insofar as these pathologically-hated Israelis are overwhelmingly Jewish — which is how they ended up being Israeli — and insofar as those Israelis make up half of the world’s total Jews, if Israelis are hated for who they are, other Jews should consider that a personal affront.
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I say “should” here, and I mean “should.” I do happen to think that what starts with Israelis will eventually, inevitably, come around to even the most strident antizionists; but that’s not the point I’m making, and I’d be making this point even if I didn’t believe that.
In my conversation the other day with my friend Rebecca, which I referred to in my last email, we went back and forth about Mamdani’s weird, Israel-condemning and Hamas-ignoring statement some 36 hours into the October 7 attack.
I asked my friend: “Is there anything Zohran could have said that would be a dealbreaker for you?” And I posited: “Imagine instead of that statement, he’d tweeted — on October 7 — ‘Glory to our martyrs!,’ with a little watermelon emoji.” Rebecca thought about this hypothetical for a moment, and then she said: “It would bother me, but I don’t think I’d tell other people not to vote for him on that basis.”
Rebecca is, surely, reading this email. Hello Rebecca, I love you, I am excited to see you over Thanksgiving. I respect you very much.
Turning back to the broader audience, though: That exchange really stuck with me, if only as a stand-in for something bigger. There is a lot of longwinded talk about Israel-Diaspora relations, a lot of hard conversations about complicated security questions, about stateside complicity in real Israeli wrongs, about identity and doykeit and all that; but if the hypothetical is: “A candidate for mayor, in the name of a political cause, publicly celebrated the raping, kidnapping, and house-by-house butchering of Jews on the other side of the world; does that compel you to knock on a door?”, any form of Judaism that doesn’t begin and end with a resounding, unequivocal “yes” isn’t one that makes any sense to me.
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But, of course — and now, at quarter to 1am, I will really try to sew up this email and get some rest (if the ToI liveblog is subpar tomorrow, you’ll know why) — any so-called Judaism that’s defined merely by its opposition to violent antisemitism — rather than the expansive, sacred work those antisemites obstruct the Jewish people from doing — would also be unworthy of the name.
I cancelled plans today, and turned down others, because I didn’t think I’d feel up to being social and I didn’t want to get anyone around me sick. But it’s time to confess that a few hours later I was walking in the neighborhood and I came across a line outside the 92nd Street Y; when I asked the people who they were waiting for, they told me it was Salman Rushdie, and that there were still tickets. I’m still not fully better, but under-the-weather, schmunder-the-schmeather, let the people wear masks if they don’t like a cough or two.
I really don’t have time to expound on this, but in very, very brief: You can tell as soon as you see Rushdie that he’s basically lost an eye; obviously the attack is on everybody’s mind; but he hardly talked about that, that’s old news; he’s returned to writing fiction, and that’s what he was there to discuss.
We live in a time where people are just begging to be cancelled; this is a temptation that I, clearly, hear the siren call of, writing political emails to my friends and then responding to pseudonymized, probably strawmanned versions of them the next day. But it’s a pyrrhic sort of dignity to say “you, censor, won’t stop me from saying this one thing; instead, I’ll say only that one thing, and thus refrain from saying everything else!”
Contrast this with Rushdie, who was stabbed almost to death for his speech, and then cleared his throat and said: “Screw you. Anyway.”
I have a lot more to say about the Rushdie thing, and how it relates to the Mamdani thing, and the Jewish thing, and all that; I actually thought that’s what the email would be about; but I really need to crash.
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Thank you for reading, thank you for the feedback, and to the people I’ve mentioned — if you want me to never mine these conversations again, feel free to tell me that; I admire you all very much and appreciate having you as friends first and foremost, but as thought partners and influences too.
As always, I am alive and I am well, thanks to others, not all of whom are.
NYC people, keep making plans with me please, I'm here all month,
Leon