In 2002, Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, described a series of mostly anti-Israel actions on and beyond campus as “antisemitic in their effect if not their intent.”
Summers’ reputation has suffered since then for reasons unrelated to Israel, but his framing remains potent. Jewish leaders frequently use the phrase to suggest that even criticism of Israel made in good faith can inspire acts of hate.
That paradigm resurfaced this month in the reaction of prominent rabbis and other Jewish leaders after Zohran Mamdani posted a two-and-a-half-minute video explaining that he had no authority to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu under an International Criminal Court warrant accusing the Israeli prime minister of crimes against humanity. In the same video he called Netanyahu “a war criminal” and “the architect of a horrific genocide.”
“Rhetoric that may not be antisemitic in intent can still be antisemitic in effect, as yours has been,” wrote Rabbi Joshua Davidson of Temple Emanu-El in an open letter to the mayor.
Mamdani’s video and the Jewish reaction seemed to represent a new lowpoint in the increasingly tense relationship between the mayor and the pro-Israel Jewish community. Mamdani has been frequently and often harshly critical of Netanyahu since his campaign for mayor in 2025 — leading many Jewish leaders, for example, to boycott an event marking Jewish American Heritage Month in May. Last month, even some of his Jewish supporters were critical when he used the word “monsters” to describe the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC.
What’s different in the latest eruption was the timing — just days after the video dropped, a Jewish man was stabbed near a synagogue on the Upper West Side — and the platform: The video was on its way to garnering more than 200 million views before anyone in the Jewish establishment could get a statement out the door.
It’s not at all clear that anything Mamdani said inspired the attacker, who eyewitnesses say yelled the Arabic phrase “Allahu akbar” while attacking the Jewish man and an Asian man. (He is being charged with hate crimes relating to both victims.) Some Jewish leaders were more careful than others in pointing this out.
Defenders of the mayor insist that legitimate criticism of Israel, however harsh, is not a priori antisemitic or inciting. Critics of Mamdani are themselves divided, between those, such as the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt, who said the mayor’s rhetoric stems from an “antisemitic worldview,” and those who say his “worldview” isn’t the point: It’s his anti-Israel rhetoric that makes Jews feel unsafe or potentially raises the threat level.
Critics and defenders arguing about same question
The critics and defenders are really arguing about the same question, just from opposite directions: One side asks how much criticism of Israel a public figure can voice before it becomes antisemitic, in intent or effect; the other side charges that “antisemitism” becomes a word used to police criticism of Israel, and to stoke the public’s fears about a perceived political opponent.
Davidson and another prominent local rabbi invoked safety in their responses to the video. Rabbi Angela Buchdahl of Central Synagogue, in her own open letter, accused Mamdani of using “dehumanizing language reserved for no other nation” and said his rhetoric “helps create the climate in which threats and violence flourish.” Davidson was careful to say he wouldn’t call the stabbing “a direct result” of the video — and then spent the rest of the letter implying exactly that, writing that Mamdani’s “constant stoking of the fires of resentment toward Israel” had “jeopardized” Jewish security.
Defenders of Mamdani say such accusations of cause and effect are baseless, often suggesting that opposition to Mamdani is less about Jewish safety than shielding Israel from criticism.
“The community says over and over again, ‘It’s fine to criticize Israel, it’s fine to criticize Bibi,’” said Mik Moore, a board member of the progressive Jewish advocacy group New Jewish Narrative, in an interview. “And then there’s a very long list of exceptions: not too much, or not in this way, or not if they’re not also going to say it about other people, or not if your job is New York City mayor.”
He added, referring to a traditional rabbinic concept that creates extra rules to prevent people from breaking a biblical commandment, “I think the community is just creating fences around fences around fences, so that the idea that you can criticize Israel has become meaningless.”
The mainstream critics of Mamdani counter that they aren’t saying that a politician can’t criticize Netanyahu. Rather, the mayor’s intense focus on this issue, his harsh language and his avowed anti-Zionism make no distinctions between a supporter of Israel and a supporter of the Israeli government. It’s that very support, like Zionism itself, that becomes suspect, and puts a target on every Jew’s back.
That was Buchdahl’s point in her open letter to the mayor: “You continue to divide Jews into those whose politics you deem acceptable and Zionists whom you cast beyond the pale — knowing, as you do, how many Jews in this city are deeply attached to Israel, you cannot claim to protect Jews while using the power of your office to make Jewish identity morally tainted and imperilled.”
Others found different ways to suggest that Mamdani is, to update an old joke, more anti-Israel than he needs to be. In his statement, Mark Treyger, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, said Mamdani’s focus on Israel “distracts from urgent local responsibilities … including responding to a deadly Legionnaires’ outbreak.” (The bacteria recently killed five people and sickened more than 80 across Manhattan’s Upper East Side.)
“Leadership means solving the crises you have the power to fix, not inventing ones you cannot,” Treyger wrote. In other words, stay in your lane.
In fact, mayors of New York, with its huge ethnic voting blocs, have often dabbled in international affairs in the name of constituent services. Ed Koch traveled to Ireland on a goodwill tour, but ended up infuriating Irish voters by suggesting the British troops in Northern Ireland were not “occupying forces” — remarks he later retracted.
In 1995, Mayor Rudy Giuliani ejected Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat from a United Nations celebration concert at Lincoln Center, saying it would be “enormously offensive” to host a leader like Arafat “because of the murder they’ve engaged in over a period of time.”
Before Mamdani, all 11 New York City mayors elected since the founding of Israel in 1948 visited the country. Eric Adams, Mamdani’s immediate predecessor, visited the country twice as mayor and once referred to New York as the “Tel Aviv of America.”
“The Jewish community, for my entire lifetime, has been very happy for mayors to speak out about Israel when it was in support of Israel,” said Moore.
For Jewish New Yorkers accustomed to such gestures, especially those old enough to remember when Israel was a less polarizing subject, Mamdani’s rejection of Zionism is a political and personal affront.
The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, for one, urged the mayor to lean into his concern for the Palestinians — only not in the way he has so far. Calling the recent video a “political stunt,” he urged Mamdani to shelve his unrealistic calls for a one-state solution to the conflict and instead convene a meeting of all sides of the issue around a path to two states for two peoples.
“Rather than being a constructive bridge builder between [the city’s Muslims and Jews], Mamdani, the city’s first Muslim mayor, has chosen to be a bridge destroyer — using the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as his ax,” wrote Friedman.
The conflation of Zionism and Jewishness
Beyond the argument over criticizing Israel, Mamdani’s video also rekindled a debate over the conflation of Zionism and Jewishness, which both Mamdani critics and supporters say is being weaponized in the debate over his activism.
In a July 23 Jerusalem Post open letter timed to Tisha B’Av, Dov Bleich — identified as an Orthodox Jewish businessman from Brooklyn — writes that the mayor’s video hurt him not because it criticized Netanyahu, but because it omitted any mention of the ways Jews connect to Israel, the land and its people. Bleich suggested Jews are being offered a false choice: “Either defend every action of an Israeli government or renounce our attachment to Israel to prove our innocence. I will do neither.”
He stops short of blaming Mamdani for antisemitism in the city, calling that “collective guilt,” but argues the mayor bears responsibility for the rhetorical climate he creates, and closes by asking Mamdani to extend to Israelis and Jews the same humanity he has asked New Yorkers to extend to Palestinians.
Journalist Peter Beinart, perhaps the most visible of Israel’s Jewish critics, took the opposite side in the debate over identity, accusing the Jewish establishment of being inconsistent in how it talks about Israel and Jewishness. On the one hand, he said in his own video, Jewish leaders insist that American Jews should not be held responsible for the actions of an Israeli government. On the other, American Jewish leaders regularly insist, he said, “that there is something inherent in being Jewish that makes you a supporter of the state of Israel and the way it treats Palestinians.”
And yet it is not just Jewish leaders who insist on the connection between Israel and Jewishness, and Jews are hardly of one mind about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Like many other surveys, Pew has found that the overwhelming majority of Jews say “caring about Israel is an essential or important part of what being Jewish means to them.” As for being supporters of the way Israel “treats Palestinians,” a recent AP-NORC poll found that American Jews are increasingly divided over Israeli policies. Among “religiously affiliated” Jews — basically, synagogue members — only about half say Israel’s ongoing military operations in Gaza are justified, and one-quarter believe Israel has committed genocide.
Whether they support the Israeli government or not, the conflation of Jews and Israel is “one of the most serious challenges that we face,” said Jonathan Jacoby, the national director of the Nexus Project, an antisemitism watchdog group positioned to the left of the ADL.
“I don’t believe that protests against Israel should take place in front of Jewish institutions, all things being equal,” he said in an interview. “But I understand why, in the context of people declaring that Zionism is an integral part of Jewish identity, those protests are inevitably going to take place. And I do think that we have a responsibility to pay attention to the ways in which we conflate [Jewishness and Zionism], and not just point the finger at the other conflators.”
In its statement on the Mamdani video, the Nexus Project rejected the accusations that Mamdani’s criticism of Israel was antisemitic, calling them “unfounded, inflammatory, and divisive.”
At the same time, Jacoby acknowledges that Mamdani “needs to talk with greater care about Israel and Palestine,” citing his “monsters” remark and his hesitation to condemn the phrase “Globalize the intifada,” which many Jews see as a call to violence.
“He needs to respect the complexity of the issues. He needs to understand how things land,” said Jacoby. Conversely, “We need to understand that as long as Israel’s actions are generating outrage, there’s going to be more and more criticism of Israel, and that as long as Jewish institutions support those actions, they’re inviting hostility.”
If nothing else, the discourse demonstrated what an optimist would call the diversity of the Jewish community, and a pessimist might call its fractures. In another poll of “connected” US Jews, released this week by the Israel-based Jewish People Policy Institute, 50% rate Netanyahu’s leadership as poor.
As for Mamdani, who won over 33% of all Jewish voters in the 2025 election, the “connected” Jews were largely in agreement: 69% of respondents said he is both anti-Israel and antisemitic.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.