It isn’t any cooler outside, but I have proof that hell has frozen over: New York Magazine, a publication with a rich history of spotlighting brilliant, insightful, and often skeptical journalism that captured the essence of the Big Apple, by great writers such as Tom Wolfe, just featured a cover story proclaiming New York is “Habibi City,” an anti-Jewish package of puff pieces that lauds “SWANA” culture in New York.
SWANA, for the uninitiated, is the new politically correct acronym meaning people of Southwest Asian and North African origin, replacing the acronym MENA, which stood for Middle East/North Africa and is now considered Eurocentric.
In the main piece, Zaina Arafat, an award-winning novelist who grew up in a Washington, DC, suburb, the daughter of Palestinian parents, writes: “SWANA includes countries from Palestine to Iran to Sudan… To be in SWANA community meant embracing a set of shared beliefs: that Palestinians deserve human rights. That what happened in Gaza in the aftermath of October 7 constitutes a genocide. That social justice and social welfare override capitalist concerns. That to care is nonnegotiable.”
SWANA may include various countries, according to the articles, but it does not include the Jews whose parents and grandparents fled these countries and moved to New York. The two articles in the “Habibi City” package virtually erase Mizrahi Jewish communities, which number about 140,000.
As is to be expected in a piece in New York Magazine, Arafat and Madeline Leung Coleman, who wrote the companion piece about SWANA cuisine, “When Eating Out is Political,” pay lip service to the idea that there are good Jews, worthy Jews, decent Jews, and it’s not coincidental that these are all anti-Zionist Jews.
Zionism, falafel, and the politics of SWANA identity
Even some Jews who are not anti-Zionist are characterized as if they are. The main piece describes a performance at a New York club by a Palestinian and an Israeli singer, saying, “They were part of Feel Beit, an anti-Zionist, pro-dialogue artistic partnership.” Feel Beit is a pro-dialogue partnership, but it would certainly be news to one of its funders, the ardently Zionist Jerusalem Foundation, that it is anti-Zionist.
Coleman even finds a Jewish chef, Loren Abramovich, who has stopped cooking falafel, exquisitely mindful of SWANA sensitivities about cultural appropriation.
“Deep, deep in my mind, I think I have all the authority in the world to make falafel, but at the same time, I understand that it’s going to be a mess because people want to accuse us that we are appropriating Palestinian cuisine,” Abramovich is quoted as saying.
I wish this were a joke – it certainly sounds like a line from the Israeli comedy show Eretz Nehederet – but irony is apparently not highly valued in the SWANA-verse.
Arafat, who is described on her profile for Barnard College, where she is an adjunct assistant professor, as “a queer Arab-American fiction and nonfiction writer,” describes in lyrical terms all the loveliness of SWANA culture in New York, which features book-making workshops for kids, a fundraiser for Gaza journalists at a “women-run Syrian supper club,” as well as the literary journal Bidoun, a word she says “itself means ‘without’ and is meant to evoke existing without the concreteness of space.”
All of this cultural vitality makes her feel “like in the blad… back home, overseas,” although, as Liel Leibovitz pointed out in The Free Press, her actual blad is closer to Bethesda, Maryland, than Beirut.
October 7 and the struggle over competing narratives
The tell here, the breadcrumbs left to lead us to what is really going on, is the casual assertion that the war in Gaza – and only that war, out of all conflicts in the Middle East – is a genocide, that Zionism equals oppression, and that October 7 is a phrase that signals a climate of abuse against SWANA hipsters, rather than an actual massacre by Hamas that killed 1,200 people – mostly Jews but also Muslims, Buddhists, and Christians.
It reeks of what Moroccan-born writer Zineb Riboua, a research fellow with the Hudson Institute, wrote about in a piece headlined “Jihad Chic,” which came with the subhead “Trivializing Terror.” Although Riboua’s article was mostly about anti-Israel celebrities, much of what she says could apply equally well to this celebration of SWANA.
And while it’s become almost a cliché to make fun of people from the LGBTQ community who ignore the inconvenient truth of what happens to people like them in the Middle East – pretty much everywhere outside of Israel – Arafat’s piece is a particularly glaring example of this disregard. There is scant mention of, or thought for, the freedom of speech that those who actually live in SWANA countries are denied.
Arafat does write about one man, “El Atigh Abba… [who] is unable to return to Mauritania because of a fatwa issued after he’d left in retaliation for his activism and writing during the Arab Spring,” but what kind of activism he engaged in and who issued the fatwa is left unsaid.
She does write that “Kimia Zakerin invited [Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s wife, Rama] Duwaji to join a panel of speakers at a SWANA women’s networking event about how to support one another’s work (it happened to coincide with the US-Israel 12-day war on Iran and ended up doubling as a place to collectively mourn).”
What exactly were these networking women collectively mourning? You can bet that it wasn’t the arrests, rapes, torture, and executions of women protesting the Islamic regime of Iran, many of whom were specifically demonstrating against forced hijab-wearing.
There is zero sympathy for Iranian women in the SWANA-verse – or, at least, none that Arafat finds worth discussing. You would never guess from “Habibi City” that many Iranian dissidents supported the war and only wished that it hadn’t ended so soon.
Perhaps none of this should be surprising in a city governed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose administration recently released a map of the city’s “thriving international communities and cultures” that did not include a single Jewish neighborhood. Little Italy was also left out of the mix – you can draw your own conclusion from these omissions.
It’s all of a piece with Mamdani saying he did not support any “state that privileges one religion over another” and avoiding Israel Day celebrations but having no problem attending a parade celebrating Pakistan’s independence day, although Pakistan’s state religion is Islam.
The missing voice of Tom Wolfe in today’s cultural debates
The hypocrisy of this ode to SWANA in Mamdani’s New York is so overwhelming that it makes you wish for a writer with a gift for irreverence to take down the pomposity, fatuousness, and fashion cloaked in ideology – in short, it makes you long for Tom Wolfe.
Wolfe’s single most groundbreaking essay was “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” a cover story for New York Magazine in 1970. It told of a fundraiser for the Black Panthers that legendary composer/conductor Leonard “Lenny” Bernstein held in his home and mocked the elites for hosting these revolutionaries who openly sought to destroy everything about upper-class life and values.
Wolfe described, in delicious detail, the Black Panthers posturing in Bernstein’s opulent living room as they were served hors d’oeuvres by uniformed servants and New York’s elite fawned over them. “The very idea of them, these real revolutionaries, who actually put their lives on the line, runs through Lenny’s duplex like a rogue hormone,” is one of the most famous lines.
Wolfe went on to write, “In fact, this sort of nostalgie de la boue, or romanticizing of primitive souls, was one of the things that brought Radical Chic to the fore in New York Society. Nostalgie de la boue is a 19th-century French term that means, literally, ‘nostalgia for the mud.’… Nostalgie de la boue tends to be a favorite motif whenever a great many new faces and a lot of new money enter Society.”
Or, as Riboua put it in her essay, “‘Jihad Chic,’ like the failed bourgeois revolutions before it, celebrates forces that would gladly destroy its very champions.”
Wole would certainly be perplexed, shocked even, if he were able to see how low the publication he helped put on the map has sunk, how it is now trivializing terror and glorifying jihad chic, with the same fawning tone as the elite at Bernstein’s palatial apartment.
I’m sure Wolfe would have followed the money, which means he would have looked at New York Magazine’s owner, James Murdoch, one of the sons of media magnate Rupert Murdoch, who also owned New York Magazine for many years.
James has been locked for years in a court battle over control of his father’s money and power, and it has been widely reported that he is more liberal than his father and wants to distance himself from his father’s holdings that he finds distasteful, such as Fox News. That alone, however, cannot explain this tripe. But let’s follow the money a step further.
Qatar’s media investments and the changing face of New York Magazine
As was widely reported in 2022, a company owned by James Murdoch, Lupa Systems, created a new company with partners that received financial backing from the Qatar Investment Authority, which pledged to invest up to $1.5 billion. And in 2026, Lupa Systems bought New York Magazine.
Qatar has invested hundreds of billions in media and entertainment companies, and this investment in James Murdoch’s company has apparently led this scion of a media dynasty to betray the legacy of this once-great magazine.
And it was great. Wolfe was one of the most brilliant New Journalism writers that Clay Felker, who founded New York Magazine with Milton Glaser in 1968, brought to the publication. Others who wrote memorable, even iconic pieces for New York included Nora Ephron, Jimmy Breslin, Gloria Steinem, Pete Hamill, Gail Sheehy, and Nicholas Pileggi.
Regularly, the magazine would introduce new subcultures in New York, a trend that “Habibi City” is a mawkish attempt to follow. Nik Cohn’s 1976 cover story, “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” about the outer-borough disco scene, was soon adapted into a movie called Saturday Night Fever. Sheehy’s “The Search for Grey Gardens” was an evocative 1972 profile of the eccentric, impoverished aunt and cousin of Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Those articles and many others were talked about and celebrated, because they revealed fascinating stories.
But the “Habibi City” package brought to mind yet another article by Wolfe, and one of his most important ones: “The Me Decade: Reports on the New Great Awakening,” which ran 50 years ago this month and lampooned the self-help industry, which Wolfe saw Americans embracing with a religious fervor that led them to concentrate ever more intensely on themselves.
In those days, New York Magazine poked fun at such solipsism, at America’s retreat from reality. But here it is publishing Zaina Arafat, who concludes her paean to jihad hipsters by saying:
“For SWANA’s diasporic communities, cool is also in some ways coded and inseparable from its origins. In Arabic, it’s known as sumud, a grassroots concept that emerged in Palestine after the Six Day War partly as a means of survival. Sumud is steadfastness. It is perseverance and a quiet refusal to disappear. No matter what we’re up against – occupation, displacement, annihilation – we can’t afford to lose our cool.”
By all means, let’s not lose our cool, and let’s never mention that it’s quite a bit easier to be a cool, queer woman in New York City than in Gaza, Syria, or Tehran.
What SWANA hipsters are up against here seems to be nothing more than having to walk past an occasional Israeli flag in a restaurant that still dares to serve falafel. To admit concern for the real suffering of anyone in the Middle East outside of Gaza would interfere with all the hipster pose, which quickly descends into the 21st-century version of “nostalgie de la boue”: a veneration of terror.