Not content with classifying the socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani as an “antisemite” because of his advocacy for Palestinians, his “tax the rich” mantra really meant “tax the Jews,” because one of his main foils was Jewish billionaire Bill Ackman. “Connect the dots,” she said.
It’s become a tiring charge of both the right and neoliberal centre that leftists must be antisemites because they advocate for Palestinians.
Leftist British lawmaker Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party was hounded because of an Antisemitism scandal and now Green Party leader Zack Polanski, who is Jewish, “has been challenged over his party’s record on antisemitism and was forced to defend his deputy over comments he made in the wake of the 7 October terror attacks in Israel”, according to The Jewish Chronicle.
Danzilo’s comment might have been made in desperation, as polls showed Mamdani in a comfortable lead, and with the support of many Jewish voters. And it’s easy to write off the charge of Antisemitism as a cheap tool to wave at any notion of human rights for Palestinians.
But there’s something deeper going on with Danzilo’s charge, whether she knows or not.
Clearly, most Jews in New York City wouldn’t be affected by Mamdani’s tax increase proposals, and a large part of the ruling class is goyish. Naturally, the European and American right blame nearly all of society’s supposed problems on Jewish billionaire George Soros.
Writing in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot, David Christopher Kaufman asserts that Mamdani poses a threat to Jews while also invoking the Antisemitic trope that Mamdani represents the “cosmopolitan, Millennial elite” and that “What makes Mamdani so dangerous is his masterful ability to use Jews to convince other Jews he’s not antisemitic.”
In other words, he’s offering a political defence not of Jews as a whole, but Jews who agree with a certain pro-market program.
In The Wall Street Journal, Algerian-born French Jewish intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy states that Europe’s foundations will be at risk. If a Muslim who criticises Israel becomes mayor of New York City, it would be the “beginning of rupture of the age-old pact between the world’s most cosmopolitan city and the people of the Book.”
The idea that all Jews are God’s monks and the only recognisable spiritual anchor in America’s biggest city is a bold claim on its own. But this also overlooks the fact that many religious Jews in the city oppose Zionism. Mamdani has support from the ultra-Orthodox Satmar community in north Brooklyn.
Antisemitism is often called “the socialism of fools” because it blames Jewish bankers and media moguls for economic hardship instead of the capitalist class as a whole, redirecting worker anger from profiteering towards ethnic hatred, transforming what could be humanistic socialism into barbaric fascism.
I’ve noted before that it’s not simply an instinctive defence of Israel that motivates the Jewish right, but an allegiance to the bourgeoisie and ruling class.
Look, for example, at the UK and the story of two Zac/Zacks. Polanski, who re-Judaized himself by de-Anglicising his surname, attended a fee-paying grammar school on a scholarship and “hated it”, according to The Guardian, and is now viewed not only as a threat to the pro-Israel consensus but also to the pro-capitalist grip on the major British parties.
Then take a look at Zack Goldsmith, a Jewish Tory aristocrat once married to a literal Rothschild, the very image of a privileged Jew who was inducted into the exclusive club.
Goldsmith ran unsuccessfully for the mayor of London not only as an opponent of economic progress but also with racist animosity towards his Muslim opponent, Sadiq Khan. At the time, Labour MP Yvette Cooper said, “What started as a subtle dog-whistle is becoming a full-blown racist scream.”
Tying right-wing Jewish concerns about the left’s criticism of Israel to economic populism is more than just strategic. Jewish conservatism and centrism are based on the idea that the ruling sectors of society are societies Jews should aim to join, not treat as an enemy class, and that leftist Jews who align politically with other minorities are acting in self-defeat.
American conservatives used to complain that “Jews earn like Episcopalians but vote like Puerto Ricans,” a line many Jewish leftists embraced as a sign of their commitment to universal politics.
By contrast, there’s a self-hating current in the Jewish right that this slogan is a source of shame. There are too many Jewish labour organisers, climate activists and global relief workers and not enough Bill Ackmans commanding headlines and dominating crucial conversations on the golf course.
In that sense, the struggle of a politician like Polanski in the UK or the many Jewish supporters of Mamdani is part of a fight over Diaspora politics, not merely about Israel and Palestine but also whether Jewish politics should be a commitment to the oppressed and the workers who generate the value of this world, or to the small circle of champagne-sipping, tuxedo-wearing rulers.
That’s an existential struggle, and one that is sure to evoke strong feelings on both sides.
Photograph courtesy of Bristol Green Party. Published under a Creative Commons license.
