Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has announced plans to fight antisemitism in New York City using a curriculum that seems to contradict his own views on Israel.

The “Hidden Voices” program, reviewed by the Forward, teaches students in kindergarten through 12th grade about Jewish Americans in U.S. history and defines Zionism as, “The right to Jewish national self-determination in their ancestral homeland.” That is not language Mamdani, an anti-Zionist, has used himself. Mamdani has repeatedly said Israel does not have a right to exist as a Jewish state, but rather “as a state with equal rights.”

Yet at the mayoral debate last Thursday, Mamdani said he would be a mayor who “actually delivers on the implementation of the ‘Hidden Voices’ curriculum in our school system.”

Mamdani reiterated that position Sunday on ABC’s Up Close with Bill Ritter, saying the curriculum “would celebrate the breadth and the beauty of Jewish life in our city’s history.”

What does the curriculum say about Israel?

The curriculum says “an important aspect of Jewish American identity is a connection to Israel,” citing a 2023 statistic from the Pew Research Center that, “82% of Jewish adults in the United States said caring about Israel is an essential or important part of what being Jewish means to them.”

It notes that, “For millennia, Jews have directed their prayers toward Jerusalem and continue to do so.” The curriculum also points to traditions like concluding the Passover seder with “Next year in Jerusalem” as evidence of Jews’ enduring connection to Israel.

“Many Jewish Americans have family and friends in Israel, again reinforcing the familial concept of Jews around the world as an ‘am,’ a people,” the curriculum reads.

At the same time, the curriculum acknowledges that Jews “are not a monolith” and hold a range of opinions about Israel. The Jewish figures profiled “exhibit a range of attitudes about Zionism and the state of Israel, from passionate support to disengagement to harsh criticism,” the curriculum says.

For example, the curriculum notes that businessman and progressive philanthropist Julius Rosenwald “did not support Zionism.” It also says that “Jewish students bring a range of feelings and opinions about Israel to the classroom; they should be allowed to develop those ideas and speak for themselves.”

Why was the curriculum created?

“Hidden Voices” began in 2018 as an initiative of the New York City Department of Education to integrate the stories of underrepresented groups into history curriculum. Curricula include lessons on LGBTQ history, Asian Americans, Muslim Americans, the Black and African diaspora, and Americans with disabilities.

Following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel in 2023, Mark Treyger, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, set out to help create a Jewish version, with historian Natalia Mehlman Petrzela as one of the lead authors. Mayor Eric Adams also backed the curriculum, led by his Office to Combat Antisemitism.

The result is a nearly 300-page curriculum that focuses on teaching Jewish history as U.S. history, rather than concentrating on European history or the Holocaust.

On ABC, Mamdani described “Hidden Voices” as “an existing curriculum. It just hasn’t actually been implemented.”

But as of this school year, the curriculum is already available to all New York City public school teachers for optional use, after being piloted in five districts last year. Mamdani’s campaign did not respond to questions from the Forward about how his proposal would differ from current policy or whether he was calling for the curriculum to be mandated.

What else does the curriculum teach about Jewish history?

The curriculum includes profiles of Jewish figures from colonial America through the Industrial Age, a glossary of key terms, and a map of New York City marking sites significant to Jewish American history — including the Forward’s former office at 173 East Broadway.

Among the featured figures: Asser Levy, one of the first Jewish settlers of what was then New Amsterdam; Harry Lender, who pioneered the idea of freezing bagels; Ayn Rand, the political philosopher who championed unfettered capitalism; and Rose Schneiderman, a feminist labor union leader.

By spotlighting Jews from a range of backgrounds and beliefs — yes, Ayn Rand and a labor organizer are in the same lineup — the curriculum aims to challenge stereotypes about what it means to be a “New York Jew.”

The course of study also intends to offer a more positive portrait of Jewish identity, rather than learning about Judaism through the lens of victimization. While the curriculum does not ignore antisemitism, it seeks to include examples of “perseverance, empowerment, and joy,” the curriculum says.

A second “Hidden Voices” curriculum on Jewish Americans is expected to be released this spring.

The post Mamdani opposes Zionism, but wants New York public schools to teach about it appeared first on The Forward.

Executive Director of the Ohio chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-OH) Khalid Turaani, speaks at a press conference, July 9, 2025. Photo: USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect

The director of the Ohio chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) took part in an online event last week alongside a senior member of Hamas who has been sanctioned by the US government and other individuals tied to the Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terrorist organizations.

Khalid Turaani moderated the event hosted by the Beirut-based Al-Zaytouna Center last Wednesday titled “Palestinians Abroad and Regional and International Strategic Transformations in the Light of Al-Aqsa Flood.” The term “Al-Aqsa Flood” is the name Hamas gave to its Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel, in which Palestinian terrorists murdered 1,200 people and dragged 251 hostages back to Gaza.

Among the speakers was Majed al-Zeer, who was sanctioned by the US Treasury Department in October 2024 for his role as a senior Hamas operative in Europe.

Al-Zeer “is the senior Hamas representative in Germany, who is also one of the senior Hamas members in Europe and has played a central role in the terrorist group’s European fundraising,” the Treasury Department stated in its formal designation. “He has appeared publicly with other senior Hamas members in order to generate funding and other support for Hamas. Al-Zeer has also served in Hamas delegations in the Middle East along with Adel Doughman and Hannoun.”

The US Treasury noted that al-Zeer “was designated for having acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, Hamas.”

Despite working as a terrorist operative, al-Zeer spoke at last week’s event during a session following Turaani’s panel, which remains publicly available on YouTube.

Al-Zeer praised Hamas’s conduct, branding the terrorist group as a “resistance” and arguing that the Islamist movement has propelled a “strategic shift” in how Europe and the US view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Screenshots from Al-Zaytouna’s website show Turaani listed alongside al-Zeer and Dr. Sami al-Arian, a convicted Palestinian Islamic Jihad financier deported from the United States after pleading guilty to terrorist-related charges. Al-Arian praised Hamas’s terrorism, claiming “the overall Palestinian situation is much better strategically than it was before the Flood.”

Also featured was Ziad el-Aloul, a Hamas-linked activist involved with the European Palestinians Conference and the Popular Conference for Palestinians Abroad, both groups accused by Israeli authorities of operating as Hamas fronts in Europe.

CAIR’s participation in an event featuring multiple extremists will likely amplify long-standing concerns about the organization’s alleged links with Hamas. US Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK.) has called on the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to investigate CAIR’s status as a nonprofit organization, arguing the group has ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, two internationally designated terrorist groups.

“The IRS has broad authority to examine whether an entity’s operations align with its exempt purpose. Tax-exempt status is a privilege, not a right, and it should not subsidize organizations with links to terrorism,” Cotton wrote in the letter.

CAIR has denied any ties to Hamas or other terrorist organizations, portraying itself as a civil rights group defending Muslim Americans.

At last week’s event, speakers also expressed hope that Turkey, a vocal backer of Hamas, would deploy troops to Gaza with the aim of launching a war against Israel. According to reports, the Trump administration has commenced discussions with Turkey about potentially sending troops as part of an “international force” to help rebuild the Gaza strip. Israel has rejected the idea.

The Al-Zaytouna Center, which regularly hosts pro-Hamas scholars and activists, has not commented publicly on its invitation to the US nonprofit leader.

In the 2000s, CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case. Politico noted in 2010 that “US District Court Judge Jorge Solis found that the government presented ‘ample evidence to establish the association’” of CAIR with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.

According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “some of CAIR’s current leadership had early connections with organizations that are or were affiliated with Hamas.” CAIR has disputed the accuracy of the ADL’s claim and asserted that it “unequivocally condemn[s] all acts of terrorism, whether carried out by al-Qa’ida, the Real IRA, FARC, Hamas, ETA, or any other group designated by the US Department of State as a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organization.’”

CAIR leaders have also found themselves embroiled in further controversy since Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities in southern Israel.

The head of CAIR, for example, said he was “happy” to witness Hamas’s rampage of rape, murder, and kidnapping of Israelis in what was the largest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.

“The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege — the walls of the concentration camp — on Oct. 7,” CAIR co-founder and executive director Nihad Awad said in a speech during the American Muslims for Palestine convention in Chicago in November 2023. “And yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land, and walk free into their land, which they were not allowed to walk in.”

Tucker Carlson wanted to know: What does Nick Fuentes actually believe?

“Everybody’s going to be like, ‘You’re a Nazi, you just like Fuentes,’” the former Fox News personality mused on his show Tuesday. “But then I’m like, ‘I don’t think Fuentes is going away. Ben Shapiro tried to strangle him in the crib in college, and now he’s bigger than ever.’”

So Carlson invited the avowed antisemite and white nationalist livestreamer onto his online talk show. There, the two had a friendly conversation about the Jews, and whether it was right to blame them for everything.

And Fuentes, whose own platform has only grown in the wake of the assassination of conservative archrival Charlie Kirk, made clear what he believes. Asked who in the conservative movement needed to be taken down, he responded, “These Zionist Jews.”

The sit-down, which had been rumored for weeks, carries implications for the growing popularity of antisemitism and anti-Israel voices on the right. Both men have followings in the millions, and Carlson has maintained close ties in President Donald Trump’s orbit even as he has become a vociferous critic of Israel and helped platform Holocaust revisionists.

Fuentes, meanwhile, has launched a far-right attack on mainstream conservatives using antisemitism as his chief plank — an ideology that an increasing number of young conservative operatives are also embracing. On YouTube, the top comments under the two-hour episode were rife with antisemitic memes.

Even as he signalled broad alignment with Fuentes’s views on Israel, Carlson gently sought to distinguish himself from his guest’s more overt antisemitism.

“I’m not that interested in ‘the Jews,’ but I am very interested in the foreign policy question,” Carlson said at one point, bringing up his fingers for air quotes. Later, he told Fuentes, “The second you’re like, ‘Well, actually, it’s the Jews,’ first of all, it’s against my Christian faith. Like, I just don’t believe that and I never will. Period. And second, then it becomes a way to discredit. That’s when I was like, ‘This guy’s a fed.’”

In response, the young man who opens his “America First” online shows with animated depictions of Jewish conspiracies outlined his own core belief: that “neoconservatism,” an ideology he opposes, is Jewish in nature because it prioritizes allegiance to Israel over traditional conservative principles.

“As far as the Jews are concerned, you cannot actually divorce Israel and the neocons and all those things that you talk about from Jewishness: ethnicity, religion, identity,” Fuentes told Carlson. While some Jews do oppose Israel, he acknowledged, among his enemies in conservatism, “I see Jewishness as the common denominator.”

Fuentes continued, “They’re a stateless people. They’re unassimilable. They resist assimilation for thousands of years. And I think that’s a good thing. And now they have this territory in Israel. There’s a deep religious affection for the state. It’s bound up in their identity.” Modern neoconservatism, he said, stemmed from “Jewish leftists who were mugged by reality when they saw the surprise attack in the Yom Kippur War.”

Fuentes insisted he doesn’t hate all Jews: “Not to be that guy and say that thing, but my best friend is a Jewish person,” he said, also claiming his “assistant” is Jewish (it was unclear if he was referring to the same person). He then went on to blend his understanding of Jewish American anxieties, some of which have been articulated by leading Jewish communal figures, with the dual-loyalty trope.

“If you are a Jewish person in America, it’s sort of rational self-interest, politically, to say, ‘I am a minority. I am a religious, ethnic minority. This is not really my home. My ancestral home is in Israel,’” Fuentes said. “They have this international community across borders, extremely organized, that is putting the interests of themselves before the interests of their home country.”

Even beyond Israel, Fuentes also sought to paint Judaism as incompatible with the European tradition to which America’s modern right aspires. “They hate the Romans because the Romans destroyed the Temple,” he said. “We don’t think that, as Americans and white people.”

To hear Fuentes tell it, his radicalization was a story of first being taken in by, before later rebelling against, influential Jewish conservatives. Israel was his breaking point, he insisted.

Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin and Dennis Prager were his right-wing heroes in high school, Fuentes said; he would parrot Shapiro talking points in debates and was a member of a Facebook group for young fans of PragerU. As a college freshman in 2017 he fell into the orbit of The Daily Wire, Shapiro’s media company, after a debate against his school’s progressive student body president went viral. Fuentes would soon drop out of college to pursue conservative media full-time.

Quickly, Fuentes claimed, he became suspicious of Shapiro’s pro-Israel views. When a staffer asked him if he had any interest in traveling to Israel, he responded, “No, I think I have everything I need right here in America…. And that was a little bit of foreshadowing.”

Later, he said, he would challenge Daily Wire staff: “I would say, ‘So, why do we give Israel all this money?’” he recalled. “They would say, ‘You’re asking it in an antisemitic way.’”

But Fuentes, in his recollection, “was genuinely inquisitive. I wanted to know. Is there an actual reason?… There’s a lot of these neocon Jewish types behind the Iraq War.” The Daily Wire’s rejection of his questions on Israel, he said, spurred his shunning across the broader mainstream conservative movement and led to him going independent with his preaching of more insidious forms of Jewish control.

Comparing himself to Shapiro, Fuentes reflected, “I didn’t come from some strange background. I come from a normal home. My parents are Catholic.” (In recent weeks, Shapiro and some other voices on the right have warned of a rise in antisemitic conspiracies among their ranks.)

Even as Fuentes became a Trump loyalist in the run-up to the 2016 election, he said, he broke with conservatives by supporting President Barack Obama’s decision to abstain from, rather than back, a National Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

“Fox News and all the pro-Israel conservatives are calling him an antisemite. They’re saying, ‘He hates Jews! He’s an antisemite! He hates Israel!’” Fuentes recalled. “It seemed hypocritical. It seemed like how, when conservatives would critique anything about race, we got called racist. Or anything about feminism, we got called sexist. All Obama did was uphold US policy on the West Bank that we’ve had since ’67, which is, we don’t support the settlements. I said, how is it antisemitic to just be consistent on our U.S. foreign policy?”

On Israel, Carlson said, they agreed.

“I always thought it’s great to criticize and question our relationship with Israel because it’s insane and it hurts us,” Carlson told him. “We get nothing out of it. I completely agree with you there.” He also blasted Christian Zionists on the right he used to support, including U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, whom he said have been “seized by this brain virus.”

Later discussing the war in Gaza, Carlson added, “One of the reasons I’m mad about Gaza is because the Israeli position is, everyone who lives in Gaza is a terrorist because of how they were born, including the women and the children. That’s not a Western view. That’s an Eastern view. That’s non-Christian. That’s totally incompatible with Christianity and Western civilization. They say, ‘Oh, we’re the defenders of Western civilization.’ Not with that attitude, you’re not.”

The two did agree on some Jews they both respect, including Glenn Greenwald, an iconoclastic Israel critic formerly on the left who himself hosted Fuentes recently on his own podcast, and Paul the Apostle.

Elsewhere, the men discussed whom Fuentes wants to see be president next (he picked Ye, the superstar rapper who has embraced Nazism) and his 2022 dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Ye and Trump, where Fuentes said the once and future president said, “This guy’s hardcore. I like this guy.” (Trump has since claimed he didn’t know who Fuentes was when they dined together.)

When asked to share his unfettered core beliefs with Carlson, Fuentes obliged, painting a vision of a future America that Jews did not have the right to inherit.

“We do need to be right-wing. We do need to be Christian. We do, on some level, need to be pro-white,” he said. “Not to the exclusion of everybody else, but recognizing that white people have a special heritage here, as Americans.”

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