F*ck Your Bagels, Zohran

Civics 101, real quick: Jewish Americans have the same constitutional right as every other group of Americans to organize, advocate, donate, lobby, and support whatever political causes they believe in, using whatever legal resources they have available. That’s not a right-wing position or a left-wing position. It’s the basic architecture of how democracy works in this country. And supporting Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland does not make you a Bibi apologist or a charter member of the Itamar Ben Gvir fan club, any more than supporting Irish self-determination makes you personally responsible for every decision the Irish government has ever made. Not complicated. Which makes it genuinely wild that the mayor of New York City just called a Jewish political organization “monsters.”

On Tuesday, June 18th, at Kings Theatre in Brooklyn, with Bernie Sanders standing right there nodding along, Zohran Mamdani called AIPAC “monsters” who move “dark money” to “turn us against one another.” Not shortsighted. Not too influential. Not even wrong. Monsters. The word you use for things that aren’t fully human. The word that treats Jewish political participation not as a constitutional right exercised by citizens but as a sinister, uniquely corrupting force that democracy needs to be protected from. In a city where Jews are already the target of more than half of all confirmed hate crimes despite being ten percent of the population, that is not just rhetoric. It is fuel. Simon Wiesenthal Center CEO Jim Berk made the historical context plain: Soviet anti-Zionist campaigns and earlier antisemitic movements portrayed Jewish organizations as pursuing power not to achieve political goals but because Jews themselves craved influence and control. The suggestion that Jewish political participation is inherently suspect, illegitimate, or secretly manipulative is, as Berk put it, “the same old story, retold in a new language.” No cap, I need a minute.

The timing is not incidental. Three days before Mamdani gave that speech, five men were charged for allegedly plotting to kill government officials at UFC Freedom 250, a cage-fighting event on the White House lawn held in honor of Trump’s 80th birthday. One suspect’s phone revealed he had specifically built a target list of lawmakers using TrackAIPAC.com, selecting politicians because of their ties to AIPAC. On the same day Mamdani called AIPAC monsters, a Florida man was federally indicted for allegedly planning a mass shooting targeting AIPAC employees in Plantation, Florida. The Times of Israel noted the grim convergence directly: antagonism toward Israel and Jews has become a point of contact between the far left and the far right, with the website the White House plot suspect used to identify targets having been founded by far-left anti-Israel activists. People are being indicted for planning to murder AIPAC employees, and the mayor of New York chose that week to call AIPAC monsters at a rally. Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz of Manhattan’s Kehilath Jeshurun put it directly: “I shudder to think what happens next. But you will be responsible for it.”

And then, after the monsters speech, Mamdani closed with a bit about shul and bagels and Jewish community and how much he loves all of us. Bestie. You do not get to call the major pro-Israel lobbying organization monsters and then reach for the bagel platter as a peace offering. That’s not outreach. That’s a garnish on something deeply ugly.

But the monsters speech didn’t come from nowhere. This has been building since January 1st, 2026, the day Zohran Mamdani became mayor of New York City and immediately got to work.

On day one, he rolled back every executive order Adams had signed after his indictment, sweeping out the city’s adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism and, critically, the order directing the NYPD to evaluate buffer zone proposals outside houses of worship. That last one matters because synagogues had already been targeted. On November 19th, 2025, protesters organized by Palestinian Assembly for Liberation descended on Park East Synagogue on the Upper East Side, where the nonprofit Nefesh B’Nefesh was holding an event for Jews interested in moving to Israel. Chants of “Death to the IDF,” “globalize the intifada,” and “we need to make them scared” rang outside the building. Mamdani, then mayor-elect, declined to condemn the slogans, suggesting instead that the synagogue had misused its “sacred space” by hosting an event connected to Israel. A few months later, the same synagogue was targeted again, this time over a real estate event advertising properties in Israel, with protesters chanting “intifada revolution” and “from the river to the sea.” Mamdani’s first act related to Jewish security was to eliminate the protection order Adams had put in place after that first incident.

The numbers that followed were not subtle. Antisemitic hate crimes in January 2026 were up 182 percent compared to January 2025. One incident per day on average. By the first quarter of the year, 55 percent of all confirmed hate crimes in the city were antisemitic, against a community that is ten percent of the population. In May, anti-Jewish hate crimes were up 70.8 percent year over year. When those January numbers dropped and the optics got bad, the administration changed the methodology for reporting hate crimes, twice, before reverting under pressure.

The City Council, led by Speaker Julie Menin, the first Jewish speaker in council history, pushed two buffer zone bills. Mamdani let the synagogue bill become law only because the veto override was guaranteed anyway. He vetoed the schools bill. His allied groups JFREJ, Jewish Voice for Peace, and IfNotNow welcomed the veto as “a victory for free speech.” These are the organizations Mamdani holds up as his Jewish community. Let’s talk about that.

JFREJ describes itself as “the home of New York’s Jewish left” with 6,000 members. In a city of 1.1 million Jews. JVP has 32,000 active dues-paying members nationally and declared itself anti-Zionist in 2019, with its own political director stating that identification as both a Zionist and a progressive is impossible. IfNotNow exists specifically to radicalize young Jews away from Zionism. The Jewish Majority describes these groups plainly as “fringe groups that weaponize the Jewish identity of some of their members to call for policy recommendations rejected by the overwhelming majority of the Jewish community” and that “intend to make the community appear divided, and to make consensus issues appear controversial.”

So what does the overwhelming majority of American Jews actually believe? According to the American Jewish Committee’s 2024 survey, 85 percent of American Jews believe it is important for the US to support Israel after October 7, and 57 percent say they feel more connected to Israel or their Jewish identity than before. The Jewish Federations of North America found that nearly nine in ten American Jews support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state. JFREJ’s 6,000 members are not “the Jewish community.” They are one flavor of a very specific political project. Mamdani knows the difference. He has chosen to pretend otherwise.

Then there is the Israel Day Parade. On May 31st, Mamdani became the first New York City mayor to skip the event since it began in 1964. Koch, Dinkins, Giuliani, Bloomberg, de Blasio, Adams: men who agreed on approximately nothing else all walked Fifth Avenue in solidarity with Jewish New York. Two weeks before the parade, Mamdani’s office released a Nakba commemoration video, the first of its kind from a sitting New York City mayor, featuring a Palestinian woman displaced in 1948, with no acknowledgment of the Jewish refugees expelled from Arab countries in the same period. Israel’s Consul General in New York, Ofir Akunis, responded with a statement that became the parade’s rallying cry: “This year, when antisemitism and hatred of Israel is at an all-time high, fueled by leaders in NYC and worldwide, we must show them that the blue and white flag will never be taken down.”

All of this was happening while Mamdani’s endorsed congressional slate was sitting down for campaign interviews with Bartley Blakeley, an influencer with several hundred thousand followers who in October 2024 compared slain Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar to Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela, who explicitly refuses to condemn Hamas for October 7, and who demanded Hamas’s social media page be reinstated after X took it down. Mamdani showed up. He used the interview to promote the Block the Bombs Act. Americans Against Antisemitism founder and former Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind called it what it is: “The world is turned upside down. To be part of the ‘in’ crowd, you have to support Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.”

And then there is Rama Duwaji. On October 7th, 2023, the day Hamas murdered 1,200 people, Mamdani’s now-wife liked an Instagram post describing the massacre as “breaking the walls of apartheid.” She liked posts supporting Times Square protests organized by the People’s Forum, a Maoist-linked nonprofit, held the day after the attack. She liked a post calling the New York Times investigation into sexual violence during the Hamas attack a “mass rape hoax fabricated by the newspaper.” Older posts showed her celebrating PFLP hijacker Leila Khaled and illustrating a book for Susan Abulhawa, who has publicly called Jews “supremacist vampires.” When asked about all of this, Mamdani said his wife is “a private person.” He did not condemn a single post.

Which brings us to Brad Lander, the Jewish face of Mamdani’s political project. Lander is a self-described liberal Zionist who has been Mamdani’s most prominent Jewish ally since helping deliver the mayoral primary to him via a cross-endorsement. Now Mamdani is backing Lander in a challenge to incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman in New York’s 10th Congressional District. In their joint campaign video, Mamdani asks: “A lifelong progressive? You mean you haven’t sold out to special interests?” Lander responds: “Or AIPAC either.” That’s the pitch. That’s the “Jewish” wing of Mamdani’s movement: a liberal Zionist who has drifted steadily leftward since allying with an anti-Zionist, now using AIPAC as a slur in campaign ads the week a man gets indicted for plotting to shoot AIPAC employees. Goldman, for the record, sat out the mayoral endorsement because he was, as he put it, “very concerned about some of the rhetoric coming from Zohran Mamdani.” He seems to have been right to be concerned.

Call it what it is, because “criticism of the Israeli government” stopped covering it a long time ago. What we are watching is a mayor who uses the word “Jewish” instrumentally. He finds the small subset of Jews willing to validate his political project, elevates them as the authentic voice of the community, and uses them to delegitimize the rest. It is the oldest move in antisemitic politics, just wearing new clothes. You do not need to say “the Jews control everything” when you can say “AIPAC moves dark money to turn us against one another” and point to JFREJ’s 6,000 members as proof that real Jews agree with you.

This should alarm everyone, regardless of where they stand on Israeli policy, because the convergence isn’t just coming from the left. The America First crowd, certain right-wing commentators, flat-out Jew haters across the political spectrum: they are all arriving at the same talking points from different directions. AIPAC as sinister manipulators. Jewish political participation as uniquely suspect. “Zionist” as a container for what an earlier era would have just called “Jew.” When the far left and the far right are reading from the same script about Jewish power and dark money, that is not a coincidence. It is a sign that what they share is older and uglier than any policy disagreement about Gaza. The White House plot suspect used a far-left anti-Israel website to build his hit list. That detail belongs in the conversation every time someone insists this is only about Netanyahu.

Jewish New Yorkers aren’t living in the abstract. They’re living with one antisemitic incident per day. Swastikas on synagogues in Forest Hills. A car ramming into Chabad headquarters in Crown Heights. Harassment outside synagogues on the Upper East Side. And a mayor who on day one eliminated the IHRA antisemitism definition, killed the synagogue buffer zone order, let the crime statistics methodology change when the numbers looked bad, released a Nakba video from the mayoral office, skipped the Israel Day Parade for the first time in sixty-two years, sat down with a Hamas sympathizer for a campaign interview, backed Lander against Goldman in an ad that uses AIPAC as a punchline, and called the major pro-Israel lobby “monsters” the same week someone was indicted for planning to shoot their employees. Then wrapped up with shul and bagels.

What do we do about it? Mamdani won with a coalition that included a lot of Jewish voters who told themselves his anti-Israel positions were negotiable or performative. The evidence of six months in office suggests they were neither. The most direct lever available is the June 23rd primary: Dan Goldman is running against Lander in the 10th District tomorrow, and Goldman has been the clearest Democratic voice on Mamdani’s failure to adequately address antisemitism. If you are in that district, that is an easy call. More broadly, the organizations that have been doing the actual work of Jewish security in New York, UJA-Federation, ADL, the Jewish Majority, need bodies and money. The Americans Against Antisemitism pressure campaigns have had real effects. When the Israel Day Parade comes around next year, be one of the 50,000 who showed up this year despite everything, and bring someone who didn’t. Document incidents. Report them to the NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force and push your council members to demand accountability for the statistics. And stop giving cover to politicians who use JFREJ’s 6,000 members and JVP’s 32,000 as a human shield while the other 1,094,000 Jewish New Yorkers, and the 7.5 million Jews nationally, live with the consequences.

One more time, because it keeps getting buried under arguments about settlements and ceasefire resolutions and who said what at which rally: Jewish Americans have every right to support Israel’s existence. They have every right to believe that Jewish people deserve a homeland in the place where Jewish civilization was born. They have every right to organize, donate, lobby, and advocate for that using every legal tool available. None of that makes them monsters. None of that makes them personally responsible for every decision made by whoever happens to be running Israel’s government right now. You can think Netanyahu has been a disaster and still believe Israel has a right to exist. You can be furious about civilian casualties in Gaza and still believe AIPAC members deserve to go to work without someone plotting to shoot them. Those are not contradictory positions. That is just being a person who can hold more than one thought at a time.

I should be able to walk anywhere I want in this city wearing my Magen David without fear of being attacked or accosted. The Haredi guy on the subway should be able to go wherever he wants without someone getting in his face. Visibly Jewish people, in all the ways Jews are visibly Jewish, should be able to exist in New York City without bracing for it. That’s not a political ask. That’s the floor. And right now, in Zohran Mamdani’s New York, we are not meeting the floor. The mayor of this city, governing 1.1 million Jews, called a Jewish organization monsters, surrounded by people who won’t condemn Hamas, while his wife liked posts celebrating the murder of 1,200 people, while antisemitic hate crimes in his city rose 182 percent in his first month. You want to know who the monsters are, Zohran? Look in the mirror. And f*ck your bagels.

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Uh. Based.

I love being Jewish and I love writing. When I grow up I want to be Olivia Reingold. I'd be all "Hey Bari, wanna get lunch babe?" and every day I'd show up in another impossibly chic outfit. Does anybody even read this? Called a "Scum of the earth parasitic Nazi Jew puke' eagerly fellating Bibi. Yay me!

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