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How the Holocaust is remembered in the land of Anne Frank
(JTA) — You’d think that in a country so closely identified with Anne Frank — perhaps the Holocaust’s best-known victim — cultivating memory of the genocide wouldn’t be a steep challenge.
That’s why a recent survey, suggesting what the authors called a “disturbing” lack of knowledge in the Netherlands about the Holocaust, set off alarm bells. “Survey shows lack of Holocaust awareness in the Netherlands,” wrote the Associated Press. “In the Netherlands, a majority do not know the Holocaust affected their country,” was the JTA headline. “The Holocaust is a myth, a quarter of Dutch younger generation agree,” per the Jerusalem Post.
“Survey after survey, we continue to witness a decline in Holocaust knowledge and awareness. Equally disturbing is the trend towards Holocaust denial and distortion,” Gideon Taylor, the president of the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which conducted the study, said in a statement.
Like other recent studies by Claims Conference, the latest survey has been challenged by some scholars, who say the sample size is small, or the survey is too blunt a tool for examining what a country’s residents do or don’t know about their history. Even one of the experts who conducted the survey chose to focus on the positive findings: “I am encouraged by the number of respondents to this survey that believe Holocaust education is important,” Emile Schrijver, the general director of Amsterdam’s Jewish Cultural Quarter, told JTA.
One of the scholars who says the survey doesn’t capture the subtleties of Holocaust education and commemoration in the Netherlands is Jazmine Contreras, an assistant professor of history at Goucher College in Maryland. Contreras studies the historical memory of the Holocaust and Second World War in Holland. In a Twitter thread earlier this week, she agreed with those who say that “the headline that’s being plastered everywhere exaggerates the idea that young people in NL know nothing about the Holocaust.”
At the same time, she notes that while the Netherlands takes Holocaust education and commemoration seriously, it has a long way to go in reckoning with a past that includes collaboration with the Nazis, postwar antisemitism, a small but vocal far right and a sense of national victimhood that often downplays the experience of Jews during the Shoah.
“It’s such a complex issue,” Contreras told me. “There’s no one answer to how the Holocaust is remembered in the Netherlands.”
Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I took the opportunity to speak with Contreras not only about Dutch memory, but how the Netherlands may serve as an example of how countries deal with Holocaust memory and the national stories they tell.
Our interview was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Tell me a little bit about when you saw the survey, and perhaps how it didn’t mesh with what you know about the Netherlands?
Jazmine Contreras: My major problem is that every single outlet is picking up this story and running a headline like, “Youth in the Netherlands don’t even know the Holocaust happened there. They cannot tell you how many people were killed, how many were deported.” And I think that’s really problematic because it paints a really simplistic picture of Holocaust memory and Holocaust education in that country.
There are multiple programs, in Amsterdam, in other cities, in Westerbork, the former transit camp. They have an ongoing program that brings survivors and the second generation to colleges, to middle schools and primary schools all across the country. And they also have in Amsterdam a program called Oorlog in Mijn Buurt, “War in My Neighborhood,” and basically young people become the “memory bearers” — that’s the kind of language they use — and interview people who grew up and experience the war in their neighborhood, and then speak as if they were the person who experienced it, in the first person.
You also have events around the May 4 commemoration remembering the Dutch who died in war and in peacekeeping operations, and a program called Open Jewish Houses [when owners of formerly Jewish property open their homes to strangers to talk about the Jews who used to live there]. It’s really amazing: I’ve actually been able to visit these formerly Jewish homes and hear the stories. And, of course, the Anne Frank House has its own slew of programming, and teachers talk a lot about the Holocaust and take students to synagogues in places like Groningen, where they have a brand new exhibit at the synagogue. They are taking thousands at this point. The new National Holocaust Names Memorial is in the center of Amsterdam.
I think, again, this idea that children are growing up without having exposure to Holocaust memory, or knowledge of what happened in the Netherlands, is a bit skewed. I think we get into a dangerous area if we’re painting the country with a broad brush and saying nobody knows anything about the Holocaust.
Have you anecdotal evidence or seen studies of Dutch kids about whether they’re getting the education they need?
Anecdotally, yes. I was invited to attend a children’s commemoration that they do at the Hollandsche Schouwburg theater in Amsterdam, which is the former Dutch theater that was used as a major deportation site. And it’s children who put on a commemoration themselves. Again, not every child is participating in this, but if they’re not participating in the children’s commemoration, then they’re doing the “War in My Neighborhood” program, or they’re doing Open Jewish Houses, or they’re taking field trips. That’s pretty impressive to me, and it’s pretty meaningful. They want to help participate in it in the future. They want to come back because it leaves a lasting impression for them.
Let’s back up a bit. Anne Frank dominates everyone’s thinking about Holland and the Holocaust. And I guess the story that’s told is that she was protected by her neighbors until, of course, the Nazis proved too powerful, found her and sent her away. What’s right and what’s wrong about that narrative?
Don’t forget that Anne Frank was a German Jewish refugee who came to the Netherlands. And I think that part of the story is also really interesting and left out. She’s this Dutch icon, but she was a German Jewish refugee who came to the Netherlands, and the Dutch Jewish community was single-handedly responsible for funding, at Westerbork, what was first a refugee center. I think that’s really complicated because now we also have a discourse about present-day refugees and the Holocaust.
Jazmine Contreras, an assistant professor of history at Goucher College, specializes in Dutch Holocaust memory. (Courtesy)
I’ve also never quite understood the insistence on making her an icon when the end of the story is that she’s informed on and dies in a concentration camp. The idea that the Franks were hidden here fits really well into this idea of Dutch resistance and tolerance, and her diary often gets misquoted to kind of represent her as someone who had hope despite the fact that she was being persecuted. In the 1950s, her narrative gets adopted into the U.S., and we treat it as this globalizing human rights discourse.
We don’t talk about the fact that she’s found because she’s informed upon, and we don’t talk about the fact that you had non-Jewish civilians who were informers for a multitude of reasons, including ideological collaboration and their own financial gain.
And when it was talked about most recently, it was about a discredited book that named her betrayer as a Jew.
That was a huge controversy.
I get the sense from your writing that the story the Dutch tell about World War II is very incomplete, and that they haven’t fully reckoned with their collaboration under Nazi occupation even as they emphasize their own victimhood.
On the national state level, they have officially acknowledged not only the extensive collaboration, but the failure of both the government and the Crown to speak out on behalf of Dutch Jews. [In 2020, Prime Minister Mark Rutte formally apologized for how his kingdom’s wartime government failed its Jews, a first by a sitting prime minister.] Now, the question is, what’s happening in broader Dutch society?
Unfortunately, there was an increase in voting for the Dutch far right, although they’ve never managed to get a majority or even come close to it.
Something else that’s happening is that many ask, “Why should Dutch Jews get separate consideration after the Second World War, a separate victimhood, when we were all victimized?” The Netherlands is unique because it’s occupied for the entirety of the Second World War — 1940 to 1945. There is the civil service collaborating, right, but there’s no occupation government. So it’s not like Belgium. It’s not like France, not like Denmark. And there was the Hunger Winter of 1944-45 when 20,000 civilians perished due to famine. You have real victimhood, so people ask, “Why are the Jews so special? We all suffered.”
And at the same time, scholarship keeps emerging about the particular ways non-Jewish Dutch companies and individuals cooperated with the Nazis.
The NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, which has done so much of this research, found that Jews who were deported had to pay utility bills for when they weren’t living there. You have a huge controversy around the the Dutch railway [which said it would compensate hundreds of Holocaust victims for its role in shipping Jews to death camps]. The Dutch Red Cross apologized [in 2017 for failing to act to protect Jews during World War II], following the publication of a research paper on its inaction. A couple of decades ago, the government basically auctioned off paintings, jewelry and other Jewish possessions, and in 2020 they started the effort to give back pieces of art that were in Dutch museums. Dienke Hondius wrote a book on the cold reception given to survivors upon their return. Remco Ensel and Evelien Gans also wrote a book on postwar Jewish antisemitism.
So a lot has been happening, a lot of controversies, and, thanks to all of this research, a lot happening in order to rectify the situation.
It sounds like a mixed story, of resistance and collaboration, and of rewriting the past but also coming to terms with it.
There’s a really complex history here of both wanting to present it as “everybody’s a victim” and that the resistance was huge. In fact, the data shows 5% of the people were involved in resistance and 5% were collaborators. So it’s not like this wholesale collaboration or resistance was happening. It was only in 1943, when non-Jewish men were called up for labor service in Germany, that they got really good at hiding people and by then it was too late.
Right. My colleagues at JTA often note that the Nazis killed or deported more Dutch Jews per capita than anywhere in occupied Western Europe — of about 110,000 Jews deported, only a few thousand survived.
Yes, the highest percentage of deportation in Western Europe.
A room at the Anne Frank House museum where she and her family hid for two years during the Holocaust in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. (Photo Collection Anne Frank House)
Since this week is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, let me ask what Holland gets right and wrong compared to maybe some other European countries with either similar experiences or comparable experiences.
The framing of that question is difficult because there’s so many unique points about the Holocaust and the occupation in the Netherlands. Again, it was occupied for the entirety of 1940-45. You have a civil service that was willing to sign Aryan declarations. The queen, as head of a government in exile in London, is basically saying, “Do what you need to just to survive.”
One of the big problems is there are people like Geert Wilders [a contemporary right-wing Dutch lawmaker] who practice this kind of philo-Semitism and support of Israel, but it’s really about blaming the Muslim population for antisemitism and saying none of it is homegrown. They don’t have to talk about the fact that there was widespread antisemitism in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
In the Netherlands they’re not instituting laws around what you can and can’t say about the Holocaust like in Poland [where criticizing Polish collaboration has been criminalized]. There are so many amazing educational initiatives and nonprofit organizations that are doing the work. And even these public controversies ended up being outlets for the production of Holocaust memory when survivors, but mostly now the second and third generations, use that space to talk about their own family Holocaust history.
Tell me about your personal stake in this: How did the Holocaust become a subject of study for you?
I specialize in Dutch Holocaust memory. I’m not Jewish, but my grandparents on my mother’s side are Dutch. For my first project I looked at relationships between German soldiers and Dutch women during the war during the occupation, and I eventually kind of made my way into the post war, when these children of former collaborators were still very marginalized in Dutch society. It ties into this. I do interviews with members of the Jewish community, children of resistance members and children of collaborators and how these memory politics play out.
What is the utility of events like International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the major Holocaust memorials in educating the public about the Holocaust and World War II?
International Holocaust Remembrance Day and May 4 result in the production of new memories about the Holocaust and the Second World War. I was at the 2020 International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration when the prime minister formally apologized. It was a really big moment, and it allowed the Jewish community, and the Roma and Sinti community, a space to remember and to share in that and to speak to it as survivors and the second and third generation.
Unlike the United States, the Netherlands is a small, insular country, so the relationship between the public and the media and academics is so close. So in the weeks before and the weeks after these memorials, academics, politicians and experts are publishing pieces about memory. That’s useful to the production of new memories and information about the Holocaust.
But what about the other days of the year? Will putting a monument in the center of Amsterdam actually change how people understand the Holocaust? That is a question that I think is harder to answer. The new monument features individual names of 102,000 Jews and Roma and Sinti and visually gives you the scope of what the Holocaust looked like in the Netherlands. But does that matter if somebody lives outside of Amsterdam and they’re never going to see this monument?
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The post How the Holocaust is remembered in the land of Anne Frank appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Can Israeli Liberals win back the Democratic center — and save the U.S.-Israel alliance?
About a dozen Israelis gathered in my living room this week for a conversation that would have seemed unnecessary a decade ago. Some identified with the political left, others with the right. But everyone agreed that the bipartisan foundation of the U.S.-Israel alliance is being destroyed, that this is a disaster for Israel, and that restoring confidence among Democrats has become a critical priority, as important as preventing a nuclear Iran.
Leading the discussion was Rotem Oreg-Kalisky, the 32-year-old founder of LIBRAEL, an Israeli nonprofit built around that very challenge. The organization argues that support for Israel and liberal values are fundamentally compatible, and that rebuilding the relationship requires something more ambitious than better public relations. It sees its mission as educating members of Congress on the liberal Zionist perspective, training pro-Israel advocates to communicate more effectively in progressive spaces, and helping Israeli institutions — from the Foreign Ministry and the IDF to technology companies and NGOs — engage international audiences in language that resonates with liberal Americans.
The animating idea is that two things are true yet underappreciated: one, that most Israelis actually do believe in liberal values; and two, that most Americans actually are Zionists by the classic definition that means simply that the Jewish people have the right to a democratic nation-state in their ancestral homeland.
“There’s a growing big lie in America that says that if you are a liberal — if you believe in peace, justice, and human rights — you can’t be a Zionist, in the basic sense of believing Israel has the right to exist as the democratic nation-state of the Jewish people,” he told me. That belief, he argues, has become increasingly accepted among younger progressives, even though he believes liberal Zionism remains entirely compatible with progressive values.
This — while in my view completely true — obviously runs counter to the prevailing winds in the United States
In particular, there is a major challenge with the “genocide” claim — which, like me, he rejects — that has become widely accepted even outside the far-left. He argues that it can be engaged, at least with liberals, and even with some progressives, provided Israel is willing to acknowledge its own failures and present a different political vision.
“At least some of them are persuadable,” he says of progressive Democrats. His strategy is to sidestep the legal label of genocide and argue that Israel regains credibility by acknowledging wrongdoing where it exists, refusing to defend indefensible actions, and changing policy. “I don’t think the IDF is a force for evil. But it makes mistakes and it sometimes makes stupid decisions.”
Either way, LIBRAEL has already begun turning that strategy into measurable activity.
Oreg-Kalisky, a former research advisor to U.S. Ambassador Dan Shapiro, says his group has developed relationships with 39 congressional offices from 19 states, sends a biweekly newsletter to 75 lawmakers and congressional staff with a 37% average open rate, has presented its liberal Zionist narrative to hundreds of liberal Americans, and has trained more than 1,800 pro-Israel advocates.
With a staff of 15, all volunteers, its ambitions are considerably larger still, including regular congressional engagement, expanded advocacy missions to Washington, and a dramatic increase in outreach — especially on social media — over the coming four years.
Oreg-Kalisky spends much of the money he succeeds in raising simply getting himself to Washington and New York, knocking on doors that are often closed even to official Israeli channels. Over the past three years he has repeatedly flown to the United States, meeting with Democratic lawmakers, congressional staff, policy advisers, and political operatives, but also with grassroots: college students, Jewish communities, non-Jewish liberal organizations and even a queer synagogue.
The value of those trips, he argues, often lies not in headline meetings but in quieter conversations. He described reaching Democratic offices that Israeli diplomats sometimes struggle to access. In one example, he said he was able to meet with the military adviser to Sen. Raphael Warnock — a conversation that officials from the Israeli embassy had found difficult to secure. His pitch was not that Israel deserved automatic support, but that liberal Israelis still existed, still shared many of the same values as American liberals, and still wanted to preserve the bipartisan alliance that had anchored Israeli security for decades.
The timing could hardly be worse. Recent polling found that roughly 60% of Americans now hold an unfavorable view of Israel, with much of the deterioration concentrated among Democrats and younger voters. Even Republicans have become increasingly less supportive of Israel, while many Democrats have grown steadily more critical of Israeli governments and their policies. The result has been the erosion of one of Israel’s greatest strategic assets: broad bipartisan support in the United States.
Oreg-Kalisky does not believe this can be solved simply by improving messaging. He also claims Americans and Israelis increasingly process the same events through different moral vocabularies. Israelis naturally describe Oct. 7 as terrorism, while many younger Americans, he argues, do not have an emotional response to the word “terror” because they were not alive on 9/11 — but they will respond if the Nova massacre is described as the largest mass shooting in history. Israelis instinctively speak about terrorism when Jews are targeted; Americans, especially liberals, often first think in terms of hate crimes. The underlying facts remain identical, but the political language has diverged.
Nor does he believe the answer is asking Americans to lower their standards for Israel. Asked about today’s Israeli government, Oreg offered blunt criticism, especially of the tolerance of Jewish terrorism in the West Bank “at least by some segments of the government. Nationalistic violence is something I’m not proud of, to put it mildly, and something that needs to change. You won’t hear me defending an indefensible policy.”
That willingness to criticize Israel from within is central to LIBRAEL’s approach. Oreg-Kalisky, an IDF veteran with over 200 days of reserve duty since Oct. 7, argues that rebuilding Democratic confidence requires not simply changing how Israel explains itself but, in some cases, changing Israeli policy itself. Replacing Benjamin Netanyahu alone, he believes, would not be enough. Future governments would also need to phase out the military aid, demonstrate changes in the West Bank, preserve democratic institutions, confront extremist violence, and persuade allies that Israel still seeks a political horizon beyond permanent conflict.
At the same time, he rejects what he sees as another dangerous illusion taking hold in parts of Israel: that the United States can somehow be replaced. “If someone tells you Israel can replace the U.S. with India, the UAE, Azerbaijan, or anyone else — that’s bullshit. There are no alternatives to America. Israel needs to retain the support of the United States. I’m doing this because I want to save the alliance.”
That is the central wager behind Oreg-Kalisky’s work. Rather than writing off Democrats as lost, or asking them to “Support Israel and shut up” — as he says many government backers expect, — he believes Israeli liberals must re-enter the conversation themselves, speaking honestly about Israel’s flaws while defending its legitimacy as a democratic and Jewish state with serious security needs.
Whether that proves possible remains uncertain. Oreg is betting that enough common ground still exists to recover. But there are no illusions about the political side. What if Netanyahu wins the upcoming October election?
“Then we will certainly need to reassess.”
The post Can Israeli Liberals win back the Democratic center — and save the U.S.-Israel alliance? appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel’s government doesn’t want to protect American Jews. It wants to use us.
Consider two acts of antisemitic violence.
In October 2018, a gunman entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and murdered 11 Jews at Shabbat services, to date the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history. Before he opened fire, the shooter had spent months online railing against HIAS, the Jewish refugee resettlement agency, for supposedly bringing in “invaders” who want to “kill us.” That language echoed, almost word for word, the “invasion” and “caravan” rhetoric that President Donald Trump had been using for weeks about Central American migrants heading toward the U.S. border. Days before the shooting, Trump had also mused publicly that he “wouldn’t be surprised” if philanthropist George Soros — a Holocaust survivor whose name has functioned as an antisemitic dog whistle for decades — was secretly funding that caravan.
This past week, two men were stabbed on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, one of them Jewish, allegedly by a man shouting “Allahu Akbar.” It was a frightening, ugly attack, and the Jewish man who was hurt deserves our concern, not our politics. But within hours, Israel’s government had turned the Jewish victim’s blood into a talking point — while conveniently erasing the Asian second victim, who does not fit so cleanly into the Israeli government’s preferred narrative.
Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar declared that months of “incitement” from New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani had “helped create a climate in which Jews are targeted,” and Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, told Mamdani directly that his rhetoric is “putting Jewish lives in danger” and that he needs to “take responsibility for the consequences.” Even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself got involved, declaring, “I don’t think it’s accidental that after he made this hate speech against Israel and against me, the next day a Jew is stabbed coming out of a synagogue,” and accusing Mayor Mamdani of “basically supporting Hamas” — despite Mamdani’s description of the October 7, 2023 attacks as “a horrific war crime” that should be opposed “with every single fiber of our being.”
Mamdani’s sin, in their telling, is calling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal and Israel’s conduct in Gaza a genocide.
Set aside for a moment whether or not one agrees with Mamdani’s language, and look instead at how differently Israel’s government behaved in these two moments, because it has been here before, and it responded in exactly the opposite way.
When American Jews connected Trump’s rhetoric to the Pittsburgh massacre, Naftali Bennett, who was then Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Minister, was dispatched to Pittsburgh and New York specifically to represent the Israeli government in the wake of the shooting. Bennett went out of his way to shield the president. Tying Trump to the massacre was, in Bennett’s own words, “unfair” and “wrong.” He praised Trump as a “great friend of Israel and of the Jews,” and pointed to the president’s decision to move the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem as supposed proof.
This is the same Naftali Bennett who Israeli politics has since rehabilitated as the anti-Netanyahu alternative, the reasonable face of the Israeli right. And it’s worth sitting with what he chose to do the last time American Jews were murdered in their synagogue: not investigate whether rhetoric had consequences, but rather fly across the ocean to make sure nobody blamed the man whose rhetoric the killer had directly echoed.
Here’s the part that should really sting. Bennett was not criticizing some fringe, unpopular position. A poll conducted right after the Pittsburgh shooting found that a whopping 72% of American Jewish voters believed Trump’s comments and policies bore at least some responsibility for the attack, and majorities of Jewish Americans said they were alarmed by the rise of antisemitism and right-wing extremism on his watch. Naftali Bennett was not speaking for us. He was speaking over us, on behalf of a foreign leader most American Jews didn’t trust, at the exact moment American Jews were burying our dead.
Now compare that to how Israel’s government treats American Jewish opinion today. A Washington Post poll from October 2025 found that 61% of American Jews believe Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza, and 68% rate Netanyahu’s leadership negatively. In other words, a clear majority of American Jews already hold something close to the view Mamdani was attacked for expressing. On immigration, the issue at the center of the Pittsburgh shooter’s radicalization, polling from the nonpartisan Jewish Electorate Institute has repeatedly found large majorities of American Jews disapproving of Trump’s approach and his broader agenda, by margins as lopsided as 72–24%.
If Israel’s Foreign Ministry genuinely believed that a politician’s rhetoric about Israel and Jews should be judged by how it lands with actual American Jews, it would have to conclude that Mamdani is, on the substance, much closer to representing the American Jewish community’s views than Trump is.
None of this means Mamdani’s language is beyond criticism, or that rhetoric never has consequences. It obviously can, and this is a conversation which American Jews are entitled to have. But there is a real difference between the statements made by Mayor Mamdani and those made by President Trump. Mamdani made an argument, however harsh, about the actions of one specific head of state, in a conflict where accusations of war crimes have been leveled by the International Criminal Court, United Nations bodies, and human rights organizations, and are shared by a majority of American Jews themselves. Trump invented a conspiracy theory, unsupported by any evidence, that reached for one of the oldest and most dangerous slurs in the antisemitic playbook, the idea of a shadowy Jewish financier secretly engineering demographic change, and aimed it at a private citizen.
If either statement deserves to be investigated for the violence it might have inspired, it is not the one about a specific government’s wartime conduct. It is the one that reanimated a genocidal myth and pointed it at an elderly Jewish Holocaust survivor.
The Israeli government does not seem interested in that comparison, because the comparison was never really the point. When American Jews are attacked, Israeli officials do not ask what will actually keep us safer or what we, as a community, actually need. They ask which conclusion helps Israel’s ruling coalition politically. In 2018, that meant protecting the president who had just moved the embassy to Jerusalem, and who was at the time wildly popular among Israeli Jews (though not among American Jews). In 2026, it means punishing a mayor who has called Israel’s conduct genocidal, even though a higher percentage of American Jews agree that Israel has committed genocide than support Trump’s immigration policies.
The Israeli government does not listen to American Jews. It speaks over us, in real time, in the wake of real violence against us.
As an American Jew, I do not need a foreign government — one that answers to its own voters, not to me — to tell me which grief is politically convenient and which is not. American Jews are capable of grappling honestly with antisemitism, with Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, and with the real dangers of eliminationist rhetoric wherever it comes from, without being used as a prop in someone else’s electoral strategy.
If the Israeli government truly cared about the safety of the Jewish diaspora, it would have been just as quick to call out Trump’s Soros conspiracy-mongering as it was to call out Mamdani’s. It was not. That silence is the whole answer. As an American Jew, I deserve better than to be spoken for by people who only remember I exist when it becomes useful to them.
The post Israel’s government doesn’t want to protect American Jews. It wants to use us. appeared first on The Forward.
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Mayor Mamdani, please step back from the brink
For much of the last year, I’ve defended Mayor Zohran Mamdani against critics who have accused him of antisemitism. And I continue to do so now: Mamdani is not antisemitic, and he has done great things for New York City, inspiring younger voters, improving the quality of life in the city with progressive polities, and being the most accessible mayor in at least a generation.
But when it comes to Israel/Palestine, Mamdani has acted recklessly, wrongheadedly and irresponsibly. It is one thing to make strident, inaccurate and extreme statements as a progressive activist; indeed, nothing about Mamdani’s recent comments about Israel and its prime minister are new to me. I have heard the same things over and over in progressive spaces. But it is another to do so as the mayor of a city with 960,000 Jews living in it, at least a quarter of whom support its current government.
As someone who has been sharply, publicly critical both of the Netanyahu government and of the “anti-antisemitism” industry, I urge the mayor to step back from the brink, reflect on the office he now holds, and consider the responsibilities that come with it.
It is too soon to say whether Mamdani’s recent comments inspired the apparent hate crime that took place on the Upper West Side last week, in which a Jewish person and an Asian person were stabbed by someone who allegedly shouted “Allahu Akbar.” Personally, I doubt that they did — hate crimes are rarely quid pro quo — but time will tell. But can you blame Jewish New Yorkers for connecting the dots?
Whatever their relationship to the attack, Mayor Mamdani’s recent comments were wrongheaded in at least four ways.
First, they were reckless. Yes, Mamdani has condemned antisemitism and all other forms of bigotry. Yes, his comments were about a “nation-state,” in his words, not a people. But do we really expect would-be criminals and terrorists to parse the difference between extremely harsh criticisms of the Jewish state and the Jewish people who support it? When the mayor says the Jewish state has committed genocide, and that everyone with eyes can see this is true, it is entirely foreseeable that a bigot will take it out on Jewish people.
Zohran Mamdani is no longer a young DSA activist preaching to the left-wing choir in the basement of a community center in Brooklyn. He is the mayor of New York City, a kingmaker, and a rising star in the Democratic Party. And with that power comes increased responsibility. Even if his criticisms are justified, it is reckless for a mayor to present them the way he did. Indeed, if this happened on the Right, we would call it “stochastic terrorism.”
Second, Mamdani’s comments were careless with the facts. His statement was a cri de coeur, full of far-left platitudes but rife with factual errors.
“Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal, the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people,” said the mayor of New York City on July 21. Is that accurate? It is not. Yes, Netanyahu has been charged with war crimes, and there is indeed an ICC warrant for his arrest — but he has not been convicted. He is not (yet) a war criminal. Is he the architect of a genocide? Maybe, or maybe not; that, too, has not yet been established by any legal authority.
But Mamdani isn’t resting on legal authority; his case is based solely on outrage. In his words: “Anyone, with their eyes, with their heart, with their conscience, should recognize the devastation he has wrought, and understand that he belongs before a court of law.” So that is the standard of review? What my eyes, heart and conscience say?
Tell me, Mr. Mayor, how do my eyes discern the intent to destroy an entire people, which is a necessary part of the legal crime of genocide? Does my heart know the heart of a leader halfway around the world? In the absence of the documentary evidence that underlies every genocide conviction of the last 70 years, is my conscience proof enough?
This isn’t lawfulness — it is demagoguery, and I find it frightening.
Now, while it is fashionable in this decade to take an extreme position and double down on it, I am taking no position on these questions. It does seem to me that the State of Israel committed war crimes in Gaza, and the nature of the destruction of Gaza was absolutely horrible, clearly out of proportion to military necessity. And if there is evidence that Israel’s decisionmakers shared the intentions of Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who have called for Palestinians to be ejected from Gaza, then, tragically, the state did in fact commit genocide.
But we can’t know this by our eyes, heart, and conscience; for that, we need investigations, a trial and a legal process. It is lawless to assume the conclusion of such a process before it has even begun.
Third, Mamdani’s comments betray his responsibility as mayor.
Of the 960,000 Jews in New York City, at least a third (but probably more) identify as Zionist, and a quarter basically support Israel’s actions in Gaza, or at least understand them in the context of the mass murders and rapes of Oct. 7 and the intransigence of Hamas in the months thereafter. After all, when the hostages were finally released, the bombs (mostly) stopped dropping. Had Hamas surrendered sooner, this position says, fewer Gazans would have been killed.
This is not my view, as I have said. But it is the view of at least 250,000 New Yorkers. How, Mr. Mayor, are they now supposed to regard themselves as citizens of New York? Their own mayor has said that they support genocide and war crimes, as anyone with eyes, a heart and a conscience can see. There is no reasonable disagreement here, no dickering over the Genocide Convention or the ratio of civilian deaths in urban warfare. There is only one truth, and those 250,000 New Yorkers are — well, what other word is there — evil.
Has any mayor ever said such a thing about his own constituents?
Sure, mayors take political stances, including about Israel/Palestine. Eric Adams took several controversial, and to my mind misguided, ones. But I cannot find an example in recent history of a mayor saying that a quarter million of his own constituents are either evil or blind or both.
And then to be shocked that a bigot might be inspired by them?
To repeat, I am not saying many things here. I am not saying the mayor is antisemitic; he is not. I am not saying the destruction of Gaza didn’t happen, or was justified, or was entirely Hamas’ fault; it was not. I am not saying that Israel didn’t commit genocide or war crimes; perhaps it did. I am only saying that a mayor should not make conclusory, incendiary statements that directly impugn the morality — even the humanity — of a quarter of a million of his constituents.
Perhaps worst of all, though, is how Mamdani’s rash comments have set back the cause of peace and emboldened the opponents of coexistence.
First, he has strengthened the ADL, AIPAC, and Netanyahu himself, all of whom have gleefully chanted versions of “we told you so.” He has validated both the fears of Jewish New Yorkers and the calumnies of the anti-antisemitism crowd, while making his liberal-but-not-radical supporters look like idiots. He has played directly into the hands of Israel’s staunchest defenders.
And in so doing, he hasn’t advanced the cause of justice, safety, and dignity for five million Palestinians who live in Palestine itself. On the contrary, by so greatly strengthening the hand of their enemies, I would argue he has done the opposite.
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