Mamdani and the collapse of ‘liberal Zionism’

When former New York City Mayor Eric Adams created an Office to Combat Antisemitism last May, it was widely interpreted as a political gesture intended to boost his failing independent run for re-election in November. Adams had always been broadly supportive of Israel and the wider Jewish community. But his move was too little and too late—both to do much about the surge of antisemitism that followed the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab terror attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and to save his mayoral campaign.

Adams dropped out of the race in September, six weeks before Zohran Mamdani was elected to succeed him. Mamdani, an avowed opponent of the existence of the State of Israel and a supporter of the pro-Hamas mobs who were the shock troops of the wave of Jew-hatred that swept across the country, hasn’t abolished Adams’s pet project. Similar to his predecessor, the motive for this is political. While Adams used it to signal his somewhat ineffectual support for the Jewish people, Mamdani seeks to employ it to provide cover for the fact that he is still doubling down on his anti-Zionism and efforts to link that noxious cause to other items on his agenda, such as opposing the Trump administration’s effort to crack down on illegal immigration.

To do this, he has appointed Phylisa Wisdom, a veteran left-wing activist, to lead it.

Serving an antisemite

Wisdom’s main qualifications seem to consist of a worldview that is sympathetic to Mamdani’s political program—with one exception. According to The New York Times, she is a “liberal Zionist,” which the paper seems to define as someone who has “criticized Israel’s conduct in Gaza” while still believing in “Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.”

New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch is the one holdover from the former administration who seems to be motivated by a real desire to hold the line against Jew-hatred in law enforcement, as well as to possibly further her personal future political ambitions. But Wisdom’s post isn’t nearly as important as the one that controls the police. Like the situation last year, it’s far from clear what, if anything, it can do about the epidemic of antisemitism in New York, highlighted by the fact that hate crimes against Jews rose a staggering 182% in Mamdani’s first month in office.

This is hardly surprising. Avowals notwithstanding, Mamdani’s ardent anti-Zionism is indistinguishable from antisemitism since he denies Jews rights that neither he nor anyone else would think of denying to any other people.

What Phylisa Wisdom stands for

Wisdom’s significance, therefore, comes not from how much she can contribute to the effort to reverse that trend, but how it symbolizes what has happened to the idea of “liberal Zionism” in the 21st century. If acting and speaking as she has done is what it means to be a liberal Zionist today, then a real disconnect exists. It’s not merely time to realize that the phrase has lost its original meaning; instead, we must understand that those who have appropriated that label are neither Zionist nor authentically liberal.

In theory, those who identify as political liberals have an important role to play in rallying support for Israel and Zionism within the Jewish community and the non-Jewish world. Adherence to liberalism—whether in the form of the classical school of political thought that prized individual liberty above all, or even just as a label that most members of the Democratic Party applied to themselves—can be entirely compatible with Zionism. Indeed, for most of the history of the modern Zionist movement, the natural affinity between liberal economic and political ideas and the effort to facilitate the self-determination of the Jewish people in their ancient homeland was patently obvious.

But as Wisdom has demonstrated in the course of her career, in practice being an avowed “liberal Zionist” means acting as an ally of those working to undermine and even destroy the Jewish state, whose existence she says she supports. At the same time, she is also aiding a cause that is fundamentally illiberal.

"Though Mamdani may disingenuously pledge his desire to protect Jews, even his half-hearted statements about protecting synagogues from pro-Hamas mobs send the message that he is on the side of the attackers"

Let’s start by noting that claiming to be a supporter of Israel and an opponent of antisemitism while serving in a Mamdani administration represents a contradiction in terms. There may be some who say that it is important for the Jewish community to have a voice among the mayor’s advisers. But this is no ordinary mayor of New York. The 34-year-old chief executive of Gotham is someone whose entire brief political career has revolved around his obsessive opposition to Israel’s existence and Jewish rights.

Even if we assume that someone like Tisch is sincere in her desire to steer the city’s government in a way that will help protect Jews, it’s already apparent that she’s deceiving herself. Whatever checks she or someone in Wisdom’s office can try to put on the mayor’s ideological fixation about Israel and Jewish life will be outweighed by the way the mayor’s rhetoric and actions are legitimizing and mainstreaming Jew-hatred.

Though Mamdani may disingenuously pledge his desire to protect Jews, even his half-hearted statements about protecting synagogues from pro-Hamas mobs send the message that he is on the side of the attackers. Those who think they can influence him or somehow lessen the harm he will cause by serving him are deceiving themselves. To collaborate with Mamdani in any way is to commit to compromising one’s own morality far more than it could ever influence him.

Supporting blood libels

Still, it is just as important to look at Wisdom’s stands and ponder whether they are in any way compatible with a traditional definition of liberal Zionism.

A glance through Wisdom’s social-media posts, a litany of her political stands or those of the New York Jewish Agenda (NYJA) group that she has led since July 2023, reveals someone who is most interested in bashing Israel, in addition to providing aid and comfort to those who seek to take it down. Indeed, the main point of that group is to provide a platform for the “as a Jew” version of modern Jewish life. That is an all-too-common trend. It is a means to comment about Israel by using one’s Jewish identity to legitimize arguments seeking to treat virtually any effort to defend it as illegitimate or a crime.

The position of NYJA is indistinguishable from that of J Street, which started out claiming to be both “pro-Israel and pro-peace.” In practice, the group became a mouthpiece for those who were determined to impose suicidal concessions to the Palestinians that had been repeatedly rejected by the Israeli people. In the wake of Oct. 7, J Street and NYJA ultimately found themselves mainly acting to support the efforts of those who sought to prevent Israel from attacking Hamas and Iran, and thus to ensure the victory of the terrorists.

Worse than that, they were guilty of lending credibility to the blood libels about Israeli conduct that have been fueling antisemitism. In particular, Wisdom and NYJA repeatedly weighed in to support the false claims that Israel was deliberately causing starvation in Gaza, and in doing so, claimed that the Jewish state was morally equivalent to Hamas. That she did so while claiming to uphold Jewish values is no defense for this immoral and destructive stance.

"Like Mamdani, Khalil isn’t merely 'pro-Palestinian.' He is an active supporter of the campaign to destroy Israel..."

In this context, her assertion that she supports Israel’s “right to exist” (something that only among all the nations in the world is considered controversial when applied to the Jewish state) is merely a way to justify opposing anything done to defend it from those who are waging a genocidal war to destroy it.

Equally helpful to understanding just how little her positions have to do with liberalism or Zionism is her consistent opposition to the Trump administration’s efforts to combat bigotry against students on college campuses. Wisdom opposed the federal government’s attempts to hold institutions like Columbia University on Manhattan’s Upper West Side accountable for their toleration and encouragement of Jew-hatred, which clearly violates the 1964 U.S. Civil Rights Act. Beyond that, she took up the cause to defend Mahmoud Khalil, a foreign student who was one of the chief organizers of the pro-Hamas demonstrations that targeted Jews at the Ivy League school for intimidation and violence, when the administration sought to deport him for violating the terms of his visa.

Like Mamdani, Khalil isn’t merely “pro-Palestinian.” He is an active supporter of the campaign to destroy Israel and has a long record of working for anti-Israel groups like the U.N. Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA. But to Wisdom, his antisemitic record and actions were not as important as the imperative to oppose Trump and back his anti-Israeli opponents.

While Wisdom and others on the left claim that this position is a defense of individuals against a repressive state authority, it puts them in the position of bolstering illiberal figures like Khalil, who support the most reactionary and repressive Islamist groups. In this manner, too many contemporary liberals have allowed themselves to be convinced to support racialist theories that undermine the defense of Western civilization and help bolster the war against Jews that Islamists seek to spread.

Illiberal Islamist imagery

Mamdani’s use of Islamist imagery in his efforts to oppose Trump’s willingness to enforce existing immigration laws ought to trouble genuine liberals. The mayor claimed that the Islamic principles and history he invoked were also a reason to support open borders policies in the contemporary United States. But they actually helped form the prelude for Muslim campaigns to persecute Jews during that religion’s conquest of the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East.

A true liberal Zionist might disagree with President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on many issues. Yet they would support Israel’s war on Hamas and oppose the importation of Islamist radicalism into the United States.

There are still many such liberal Zionists. Still, they have allowed leftists like Wisdom to hijack that term and marginalize supporters of Israel on the political left. This is a liberalism that not only won’t support Israel, but is determined to disarm those who seek to defend America against toxic Marxist ideas that single out Jews as “white” oppressors. The rise of Mamdani to political power is a function of the way these leftist ideologues have turned the Democratic Party into a haven for anti-Zionists and those who are enabling the surge of antisemitism.

"More than that, it should be a wake-up call to those liberal supporters of Israel to begin to fight in earnest against the forces that have swept to control of the Democratic Party"

That such a person has been put into a position where their job is to defend Jews against hatred isn’t merely ironic. It’s a logical conclusion to a process by which liberalism has been subverted by those who oppose its basic precepts that are the foundation of Jewish security. We should treat Wisdom’s elevation to this role as not so much inappropriate but as a parody of efforts to combat antisemitism.

More than that, it should be a wake-up call to those liberal supporters of Israel to begin to fight in earnest against the forces that have swept to control of the Democratic Party.

Conservatives are also fighting to fend off antisemites on the right, but there is no question that such figures remain a minority, and that, at present, it is only the Trump administration and its supporters who are actively fighting antisemitism in the United States. If Jewish liberals aren’t prepared to resist Mamdani and his Jewish collaborators, like Wisdom, then they should stop calling themselves liberal Zionists and concede that the idea has become obsolete.

© JNS