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‘There was no time to sleep’: 4 Jews reflect on a year of helping Ukrainians at war
(JTA) — In the months after Russian tanks rolled into her country last February, the music largely stopped for Elizaveta Sherstuk.
The founder of a Jewish choral ensemble called Aviv in her hometown of Sumy, in the northeastern flank of Ukraine, Sherstuk had to put singing aside in favor of her day job and personal mission: delivering aid to Jews in Sumy.
“There was no time to sleep,” Sherstuk recalled to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency recently. “All my team members worked the same, 24/7.”
A year later, Sherstuk is still hustling as the Sumy director of Hesed, a network of welfare centers serving needy Jews in the former Soviet bloc. But she has also begun teaching music classes again, too — with performances sometimes held in bomb shelters.
Catch up on all of JTA’s Ukraine war coverage from the last year here.
Sherstuk’s story reflects the ways that Russia’s war on Ukraine has affected Jews in Ukraine and beyond. The conflict has killed hundreds of thousands, left even more in peril and fundamentally altered the landscape and population of Ukraine, forcing millions to flee as refugees.
But the war has also mobilized the networks of Jewish aid and welfare groups across Europe, leading to a Jewish organizational response on a massive scale not seen in decades. And Ukrainian Jews who have remained in the country have recalibrated their lives and communities for wartime.
Here are four stories about Jews who stepped in and stepped up to help, and a taste of the on-the-ground situations they found themselves in.
‘I was needed there’
Enrique Ginzburg, second from right, is shown with Ukrainian doctors in Lviv. (Courtesy of Ginzburg)
Since nearly drowning at 23, Dr. Enrique Ginzburg has felt he “had to pay back” for the extra years of life he was granted.
Now 65, the professor of surgery at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine and its trauma division has lent his critical care expertise in Haiti, Argentina, Kurdistan and Iraq, in various emergency situations. But until last year, he had never been to a war zone.
The Cuba native felt drawn to Ukraine because his grandfather is from Kyiv, while his grandmother is from nearby eastern Poland. So early on in the conflict, he called Dr. Aaron Epstein, an old friend and the founder of the nonprofit Global Surgical and Medical Supply Group.
“Get yourself a flak jacket, a helmet, a gas mask and come on over,” Ginzburg said Epstein told him.
He has been to Ukraine twice under the nonprofit’s auspices, last April and July. Ginzburg’s explanation for why he flew across the world to put himself in danger: “I was needed,” he said.
His base was an emergency hospital in Lviv, a city located west enough that it became a major refugee hub. He consulted with front-line Ukrainian physicians, many of them young and inexperienced, and hospital administrators, watching the doctors in action. He also visited patients in hospital wards and helped to treat gunshot wounds and assorted combat injuries.
Ginzburg’s bags were packed with meaningful supplies. Some had been requested by his Ukrainian colleagues for medical use, mostly specialized catheters. But he also brought tefillin, the phylacteries used by Jews in their morning prayers. Ginzburg, who studied in a yeshiva while young but no longer considers himself Orthodox, wrapped them every day while in Ukraine.
Even though Lviv was far from the fighting, he could hear air raid sirens and the explosion of the Russian missiles, sometimes feeling the earth shake. When intelligence reports warned Ginzburg’s medical team of impending missile attacks, they sought refuge in safe houses.
“Today,” he told the Miami Herald last June, “I was calling my life insurance [company] because I have young sons and my wife, so I’m trying to make sure I have good coverage.”
By the end of his trips, Ginzburg lost count of the number of doctors he helped train and the number of patients he saw. “I’m sure it’s hundreds.” He plans to make a third trip sometime this year.
‘This is our new reality’
Karina Sokolowska is the director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s activities in Poland. (Courtesy of the JDC)
As the director of the JDC, or the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, in Poland, Karina Sokolowska has heard countless harrowing stories over the past year. But one sticks out in her memory.
It involved an elderly Ukrainian couple she met at the Poland-Ukraine border in late spring. The husband was in a wheelchair, and Sokolowska helped push him — back towards Ukraine. They had spent three months in a shelter in Poland but eventually “realized we cannot go looking for jobs, we cannot restart our lives. We are too old,” the woman said.
“If they are to die, they’d rather die back home,” Sokolowska said. “It’s a story of hopelessness. They are so vulnerable.”
Last year, about 8 million Ukrainian refugees made their way to Poland, the bordering country that accepted the most refugees. Early on in the conflict, Sokolowska contacted and visited Jewish communities throughout Poland, investigating the availability of places where the soon-to-be-homeless refugees could be housed. She also traveled to some of the border crossings where the Ukrainians entered, to arrange transportation to venues in Poland and to oversee the conditions in which the refugees would begin their new lives.
Later she would help with, among other things: arranging legal advice for the people who arrived with few identification documents; lining up medical care and drugs; finding them short- and long-term housing; connecting them to psychological counseling; providing kosher meals; and even caring for the refugees’ pets (“dogs and cats with no documents”).
According to JDC statistics, the organization “provided essential supplies and care” to 43,000 Jews in Ukraine and “aided 22,000+ people” there with “winter survival needs … more than double the amount served in previous years.” The welfare organization also claimed to provide “life-saving services” to more than 40,000 refugees in Poland, Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and other European locations. It also helped evacuate about 13,000 Jews from Ukraine. (Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen recently said 15,000 Ukrainian Jews in total have immigrated to Israel since the start of the war.)
Karina Sokolowska, JDC director for Poland and Scandinavia sits in her office down the hall from a hotline room, in early March 2022. (Toby Axelrod)
At the height of the refugee flood, Sokolowska said her monthly JDC budget ballooned to more than what she previously spent in an entire year. Her office went from having a few employees to over 20. The amount of sleep she got decreased in tandem; she started taking sleeping pills to get rest when she could.
“This is our new reality” in Poland, she says of the JDC work with Ukrainian refugees. “This is our life now.”
Sokolowska, the granddaughter of Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors, became active in Jewish life during college, when a classmate heard her pronouncing some German words with a Yiddish accent and persuaded her to lead the Polish Union of Jewish Students. As JDC director for Scandinavian countries in addition to Poland, she typically organizes educational conferences and helps Jewish families learn about traditions they had not learned while growing up in the communist era.
Today, her sense of optimism has been ground down.
“Everything changed when war came to Ukraine — there is less hope,” Sokolowska said. “It’s a totally new everything. Every aspect of our life changed. Our hope for this to be over soon is going down, down, down. Nothing will change.”
‘It could [have been] me’
Tom and Darlynn Fellman volunteered in Krakow in October 2022. (Courtesy of Tom Fellman)
Sometime in the late 1890s, Harry Fellman, about 20 years old, left his home in Ukraine. According to family legend, he was a sharpshooter in the Ukrainian army and was about to be sent into active combat. Instead, he emigrated to the United States and settled in Omaha, Nebraska, where he became a peddler.
His grandson Tom Fellman — whose middle name is Harry — doesn’t know all the 120-year-old details, but he knows that he is grateful that Harry Fellman decided to leave Ukraine when he did.
“It could [have been] me, if my grandparents had not left when they did,” said Fellman, a successful real estate developer and philanthropist in Omaha.
In October, at 78 years old, Fellman made the reverse trip across the Atlantic to pitch in to the relief effort. He also wanted to pay what he sees as a debt to the memory of his late grandfather and to help the current generation of Ukrainian Jews.
He and his wife Darlynn served as volunteers for a week at the Krakow Jewish community center, joining hundreds (possibly thousands) of volunteers from overseas who have gone to Poland and the other nations in the region over the last year to participate in humanitarian programs on behalf of the millions of Ukrainian refugees. Fellman worked nine hours a day with a half-dozen fellow foreign volunteers in the basement of the community center, transferring the contents of “big, big” sacks of items like potatoes and sugar into small containers to be distributed to refugees in the building’s first-floor food pantry. His wife spent her time in an art therapy program that was set up for the refugee mothers and children to raise their spirits.
Fellman is “not particularly religious” but supports “anything Jewish.” In 1986, he accompanied a rescue mission plane of Soviet Jews headed to Israel. “It was the most rewarding experience of my life,” he recalled.
Fellman says he plans to return to Poland, in June, for the JCC’s annual fundraising bike ride from Auschwitz to Krakow.
What did his friends think of his septuagenarian volunteer stint? “They thought it was cool,” he said. “But none of them are going too.”
‘Everything was a risk’
Elizaveta Sherstuk runs a branch of Hesed, a network of welfare centers, in Sumy, Ukraine. (Courtesy of Sherstuk)
Sherstuk’s parents would have sent their daughter to a Jewish school in her early years if they had had the option. But Jewish education was not permitted In Sumy during the final years of communist rule in the Soviet republic. Sherstuk was exposed to Jewish life only at home.
Her parents infused her with a Jewish identity, she said, and her grandparents used to talk and sing songs in Yiddish. That inspired Sherstuk’s first career as a singer and a music teacher, during which she founded Aviv and took it on tour throughout the region singing traditional Jewish songs. Later, she became the director of Sumy’s branch of the JDC-funded Hesed network.
Sumy, an industrial city with a population of 300,000 before the war situated only 30 miles from the Russian border, was one of Russia’s first targets. In the days before the pending invasion, Sherstuk stockpiled food, which was certain to become scarce in case of war, and arranged bus transportation to safer parts of the country for hundreds of vulnerable civilians, mostly the elderly and disabled. The bus plan fell through for safety issues.
As the bombing started, it became dangerous for members of the local 1,000-member Jewish community, many of them elderly, to venture outside of their apartments. Sherstuk, working out of a bomb shelter, assisted by a Hesed network of volunteers, coordinated food and medicine deliveries.
The situation grew more dire, and she coordinated the Jewish community’s participation in a brief humanitarian corridor evacuation of vulnerable civilians that the Russians permitted. She communicated with Sumy residents mostly by smartphones provided by the JDC — the Russian attacks had cut the landlines — and accompanied the busloads of Sumy Jews to western Ukraine. Some of them eventually moved on to Israel, Germany, or other nearby countries, she said.
Sherstuk stayed in western Ukraine for a while (“The humanitarian corridors are only for one-way trips,” she noted), moving from place to place, keeping in touch with the Jews of Sumy and waiting for Ukraine’s army to make the trip back safe. But Sumy, like many Ukrainian cities, has come under frequent Russian rocket attack.
“Everything was a risk,” she said. “We were following whatever our hearts told us to do. We had to save people. I was the one who had to do it.”
Last May, Sherstuk was among 12 men and women (and the sole one from the Diaspora) who lit a torch at the start of Israel’s Independence Day in a government ceremony on Mount Herzl. During two weeks in Israel, she spent some time with members of her family, and held a series of meetings with JDC officials, government ministers and donors. “It was not a vacation,” she said.
After going back to Sumy, at the suggestions of her choral group members and fellow Sumy residents, she organized concerts in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ukrainian and Russian — some in person, some in a bomb shelter in the city’s central square, some online. She has now resumed her music classes, too, and it has all boosted morale. “I [teach] all the time,” she said.
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The post ‘There was no time to sleep’: 4 Jews reflect on a year of helping Ukrainians at war 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.
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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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