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A Black writer explores how Germany remembers its ‘unthinkable’ past
(JTA) — For his 2021 book “How the Word Is Passed,” winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, poet and journalist Clint Smith explored the landscape of American memory — specifically how the history of slavery is explained, commemorated, distorted and desecrated in sites across the United States.
While on tour promoting the book, he explained in an interview Tuesday, he’d often be asked if any country had gotten it right when it came to memorializing its own dark past. “I kept invoking the memorials in Germany, but I had never been to the memorials in Germany,” Smith said. “As a scholar, as a journalist, I felt like I had to do my due diligence and excavate the complexity and the nuance, and the emotional and human texture, that undergirds so many of these places and spaces.”
The result is December’s cover story in the Atlantic, “Monuments to the Unthinkable.” Smith traveled to Germany twice over the past two years, visiting Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, its Topography of Terror Museum, the museum in Wannsee where the Nazis plotted the Final Solution, and the concentration camp at Dachau, talking to historians and curators along the way. As a Black man wrestling with how America accounts for the crimes of its past, he went to learn from the experience of the Germans, who “are still trying to figure out how to tell the story of what their country did, and simultaneously trying to figure out who should tell it.”
In an interview, Smith talked about the inevitable differences between the Holocaust and the Atlantic slave trade, the similarities in how two countries — and communities — experience their histories, and how his article could serve as a bridge between African-Americans and Jews in a time of increasing tension between them.
Smith spoke to JTA from his parents’ home in his native New Orleans.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Your book is about the ways America succeeds and fails to come to terms with slavery, and your article is about the ways Germany is, in your phrase, “constructing public memory.” I was struck by someone who warned you, “Don’t go to Auschwitz.” What were they saying?
Clint Smith: It was Frederick Brenner, a Jewish man and a remarkable photographer who has photographed the Jewish Diaspora across the world for the past several decades, who said that, because people are standing [at Dachau] and they’re taking selfies, and it’s like “me in front of the crematorium” and “me in front of the barracks.” That was deeply unsettling to him, especially as someone whose family was largely killed in the Holocaust.
I don’t want to be reductive about it and say that you don’t want people to go to these spaces and take pictures. I think it’s all about the sort of disposition and sensibilities one brings to a space. If someone went to the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, I don’t necessarily want them doing puckered-lip selfies in front of a slave cabin. I can understand why people wouldn’t want those places engaged with in that way, but you do want tourists to come, right? I mean, before the pandemic, 900,000 people visited Dachau every year, and part of what brings people to Dachau is seeing and taking a picture of the crematorium, taking a picture of themselves on this land in that space where history happened, and posting it online. And maybe that serves as a catalyst for somebody else to make that journey for themselves.
You did go to Dachau, which you call a “memorial to the evil that once transpired there.”
I am a huge believer in putting your body in the place where history happened. I stood in many places that carry the history of violence: plantations, execution chambers, death row. But I’ve never experienced the feeling in my body that I felt when I stood in the gas chamber at Dachau. And you just see the way that this space was constructed, with the sort of intentional, mechanized slaughter that it was meant to enact on people. The industrialized nature of it was something unlike anything I’d ever experienced before and it made me feel so much more proximate to that history in ways that I don’t think I would have ever experienced otherwise.
Physically standing in a concentration camp and physically standing and putting my body in the gas chamber fundamentally changed my understanding of the emotional texture and the human and psychological implications of it. Because when you’re in those spaces you’re able to more fully imagine what it might have been like to be in that space. And then you can imagine these people, these families, these women, these children who were marched into camps throughout Europe. You can never fully imagine the fear, that sense of desperation that one would have felt, but in some ways, it’s the closest we can get to it if you are someone who did not have family who lived through or survived the Holocaust. It provided me with a radical sense of empathy. And that’s why I took the trip in the first place.
A tourist takes a selfie inside the Memorial to the Murdered Jews Of Europe in Berlin, Sept. 25, 2019. (Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
By contrast, there are the memorials that are not historical sites, but either sculptural or architectural, like Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, nearly five acres of concrete slabs. What do you think makes an effective memorial that isn’t necessarily the historical place itself, but a specifically memorial project?
Well, for example, the big one in Berlin. It’s just so enormous. The scale and scope of it was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. I tried to imagine what an American analog would be like. What if in the middle of downtown Manhattan there was a 200,000-square-foot memorial, with thousands of stone columns, dedicated to commemorating the lives of indigenous people who were killed in the early Americas? Or a 200,000-square-foot memorial in the middle of downtown D.C., not far from the White House, to the lives of enslaved people?
With that said, what I found really valuable were the people I spoke to, who had very different relationships to that space. Some thought of that memorial as something that was so meaningful because of its size and because of its scope, and because it was a massive state-sanctioned project. And then there were others who thought that it was too abstract, that it was too passive, even in its name, right, the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,” which sounds as if something happened to people without naming the people who enacted the harm and who committed the crime. Those are the sort of nuances and complexities that I wanted to spend more time with, and found really valuable because, in the same way, descendants of enslaved people here in the United States have many different conceptions of what the iconography of slavery should look like or what repair and reparations to slavery should be made.
You write about the “stumbling stones” or “Stolpersteine”: Those are the small brass plaques placed in the streets, inscribed with the names of Holocaust victims and placed in front of their last known residence. The stones are exactly the opposite scale of the Berlin memorial.
Right. I think that is the memorial that I was most struck by: the largest decentralized memorial in the world, with 90,000 stones across 30 different European countries. I remember the moment I was walking down the street looking for landmarks and saw my first Stolpersteine, and I only saw it because at that moment the clouds moved and the sun shone off the brass stone. You see the name, the birth date, the deportation date, the death date, the place where the person was killed. You walk past another home, you see seven; you walk past another home, you see 12. You begin to imagine entire lives based on the names and information that exist on these stones. It creates this profound sense of intimacy, this profound sense of closeness to the history and it’s so human, because it’s individual people and individual names.
One of the most valuable things about the stumbling stone project, I think, is all the work that precedes it. It’s the school students who are doing research to find out about the lives of the people who were taken from the home across the street from their school. It’s the people in the apartment complex, who come together and decide that they’re going to figure out who were the Jewish families who lived in that apartment complex before them. And sometimes it’s really remarkable, granular details about people’s lives: what their favorite food was, what their favorite flavor of ice cream was, what the child liked.
Artist Gunter Demnig lays “stumbling stones” that memorialize persecuted or murdered Jews on the streets of Frankfurt. (Boris Roessler/picture alliance via Getty Images)
As Gunter Demnig, the originator of the project, says, 6 million people is a huge abstraction, and now it becomes about one man, one woman, one child, and [people] realize that it truly was not that long ago. There are so many survivors of the Holocaust who are still with us. Gunter Demnig, his father fought for the German army. He represents this generation of people who are engaging in a sort of contrition for the acts of their parents and their grandparents.
You ask in the piece what it would look like for a similar project to be created in the United States as a memorial to enslaved people.
I’m from New Orleans, and the descendant of enslaved people in New Orleans, which was at one point the busiest slave market in the country. And as Barbara Steiner, a Jewish historian, said to me in Germany, entire streets [of New Orleans] would be covered in brass stones! That was such a striking moment for me. That helped me more fully realize the profound lack of markers and iconography and documentation that we have to enslaved people in our landscape here in the United States relative to that of Germany.
Why are physical monuments important? I have sometimes wondered why we spend so much money on the infrastructure of memory — statues, museums, memorials — and if that money could be better used for living memorials, like scholarships for the descendants of victims, say, or programs that study or archive evidence of genocide. Why is it important to see a statue or a museum or even a plaque?
First off, museums and statues and memorials and monuments are by no means a panacea. It is not the case that you put up some memorials or you lay down some Stolpersteine and suddenly antisemitism is gone. Obviously, Germany is a case study and is experiencing its own rise in antisemitism. And that’s something that’s deeply unsettling, and is not going to singularly be solved by memorials and monuments.
With that said, I think there is something to be said to regularly encounter physical markers and manifestations of the violence that has been enacted and crimes that have been done in your name, or to the people that you are the descendant of. I try to imagine Germany without any of these memorials and I think it would just be so much easier for antisemitism to become far more pervasive. Because when your landscape is ornamented by things that are outlining the history that happened there, it is much more difficult to deny its significance, it is much more difficult to deny that it happened, it is much more difficult not to have it shape the way you think about public policy. I do believe that if we had these sorts of markers in the United States, it wouldn’t solve the racial wealth gap, it wouldn’t solve racism, it wouldn’t solve discrimination. It wouldn’t eradicate white nationalism or white supremacy. But I do think it would play some role in recalibrating and reshaping our collective public consciousness, our collective sense of history in ways that would not be insignificant.
And to your point, my hope is that those things are never mutually exclusive. It’s a conversation that’s happening here in the United States with regard to how different institutions are accounting for their relationship to slavery. Universities are coming up with reports, presentations, panels and conferences that outline their relationship to the history of slavery, especially since the murder of George Floyd [in 2020]. Activists and descendants have pushed them to not just put out a report, or put up a plaque or make a monument. It’s also about, well, what are you going to do for the descendants of those people? Harvard, where I went to grad school, put $100 million aside specifically for those sorts of interventions. Places like Georgetown have made it so that people who were the descendants of those who are enslaved have specific opportunities to come to the school without paying. And people of good faith can disagree over whether those initiatives are commensurate with or enough to atone for that past, and I think the answer is almost inevitably no.
Certainly people on what we like to think of as the wrong side of history understood the importance of physical monuments in creating memory.
The origin story of my own book was that I watched the monuments come down in 2017, in my hometown in New Orleans, of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee. I was thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority Black city, and there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslaved people. What does it mean that to get to school I had to go down Robert E. Lee Boulevard? That to get to the grocery store, I had to go down Jefferson Davis Parkway? That my middle school was named after a leader of the Confederacy? And that my parents still live on a street today named after someone who owned 115 enslaved people? The names and iconography are reflective of the stories that people tell and those stories shaped the narratives that communities carry. And those narratives shape public policy and public policy is what shapes the material conditions of people’s lives.
One thing about Germany is that its national project of memory and repentance has been accompanied by a vast reparations program — for Israel, Jewish survivors, their families and programs to propagate Jewish culture. I wonder if you think Germany could have moved ahead without reparations? And can America ever fully grapple with the legacy of slavery without its own reparations?
The short answer is no. America cannot fully move forward from its past without reparations. The important thing is not to be limited and reductive in the way that we conceive of what reparations are or should look like. In some ways, I’m as interested if not more interested in what specific cities and states are doing in order to account for those histories and those crimes. For example, in Evanston, Illinois, they created a specific program to give reparations to Black families who experienced housing segregation, in a certain period of time, given how prevalent redlining was in and around Chicago in the mid-20th century. I know in Asheville, North Carolina, there’s a similar program that’s thinking about how to meaningfully engage in repair to the descendants of communities that were harmed from some of the policies that existed there. This is not to say that those programs themselves are perfect. But I think we sometimes talk about it so much on a federal level, that we forget the local opportunities that exist.
West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer signs the reparations agreement between his country and Israel, Sept. 10, 1952. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Benjamin Ferencz, from “Reckonings”)
Many people who were redlined or experienced housing covenants — all the sort of insidious manifestations of wealth extraction that were part of Jim Crow — are still alive today. So sometimes it’s not even a question of what you have to give the descendants. Sometimes it’s like, what do you give the actual people who are still here?
That’s an important distinction you make in your article, about the difference between grappling with the past in Germany and the United States. In Germany, there are so few Jews, while in the U.S. we see the living evidence of slavery, not the evidence of absence.
That’s perhaps the greatest difference that allows for both a landscape of memory to be created in Germany, and also allows for Germany to pay reparations in ways that the United States is reluctant to do: Jewish people in Germany represent less than one quarter of one percent of the population of Germany. One of the folks I spoke to told me that Jewish people in Germany are a historical abstraction. Because there’s so few Jewish people left, because of the slaughter of the Holocaust. I think about the reparations that were given to Japanese Americans who were held in incarceration camps during World War II. They got $20,000 checks, which is not commensurate with what it means to be held in a prison camp for multiple years, and cannot totally atone for that. But part of the reason that can be enacted is that there’s a limited amount of people. There are 40 million black people in this country. So the economic implications of reparations are something fundamentally different here in the United States.
So let me ask you if there’s anything else you wanted to mention that we haven’t talked about.
I want to name specifically for your readers that I’m not and would never intend to conflate slavery and the Holocaust. They are qualitatively different historical phenomena that have their own specific complexities and should be understood on their own terms. With that said, I do think it can be helpful to put the two in conversation with one another, specifically in the profound ways that these two monumental periods of world history have shaped the modern world and how they are remembered in fundamentally different ways.
And there are similarities as well, which you write about.
I did find so many parallels. The Jewish people I spent time with in Germany explained that some of the manifestations of racism and anti-Blackness in the United States are not so different from the sort of manifestations of antisemitism that exist in Germany, especially as it relates to public memory. When I was at the museum devoted to the Wannsee conference, the executive director, Deborah Hartmann, told me that she and Deidre Berger [the chair of the executive board of the Jewish Digital Cultural Recovery Project Foundation] were talking about how Jewish people did not always have a seat at the table when these monuments and memorials were being built. Jewish people were not allowed to participate beyond a certain extent, because many Germans felt that Jewish people were not objective. Jewish historians couldn’t be taken seriously because they were too close to the history.
That just echoes so much of what Black scholars and historians have been told about their ability, or the lack thereof, to study the history of Black life. The godfather of African-American scholarship, W.E.B. Du Bois, was told by white scholars that he couldn’t be taken seriously because he was too close to the history of slavery.
Meanwhile, Deborah Hartmann talked about how so many of the historians and scholars who played a role in shaping the landscape of memory in Germany were themselves “close to the history,” including former members of the Hitler Youth.
Somebody sent me a message that really meant a lot to me this past week, basically saying that my essay is an exercise in “solidarity via remembrance” — in a moment where, unfortunately, there have been a lot of public manifestations of ideas and antisemitic remarks that might threaten to rupture a relationship between Black and Jewish people. Obviously, we didn’t time it this way: I worked on this piece for a year. But it’s my hope that as someone who is a Black American, who is the descendant of enslaved people, who is not himself Jewish — that my respectful, empathic, curious, journey reflects the long history of solidarity that has existed across Black and Jewish communities and that that I hope we never lose sight of.
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How Mira Nair and Mahmood Mamdani’s politics shaped New York City’s new mayor
(New York Jewish Week) — When he sat down for an interview in November with the Chronicle of Higher Education, Mahmood Mamdani offered one parameter: “Let’s not talk about the mayor thing.”
It was just two days after the Columbia University professor had taken the stage alongside his wife and daughter-in-law after his son Zohran had been elected mayor of New York City, winning more than 50% of the vote in a three-way race.
Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist with a long track record of pro-Palestinian activism, has said he counts his father as one of his political inspirations.
But Mahmood Mamdani preferred to talk about his own record, as a professor of anthropology and international affairs and a longstanding pro-Palestinian activist who was the first faculty member to address the Gaza war encampment on his campus.
His wife, filmmaker Mira Nair, and Zohran’s wife, the artist Rama Duwaji, likewise are respected in their fields and well known for their pro-Palestinian advocacy and adherence to the movement to boycott Israel.
Zohran Mamdani has described the BDS movement as “consistent with the core of my politics,” and in 2023 introduced a bill while serving as an assemblymember that sought to block nonprofits from funding Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
While it is unclear the extent to which Mamdani will pursue BDS policies during his upcoming mayoral term, his politics and those of his parents reflect a shared alignment with pro-Palestinian causes.
“When you’re the kid of two parents who are very involved in social justice, a lot of times what you remember as a playdate was you being at some rally or some march,” Mamdani recalled in an interview with City & State in April 2023.
Now, as Zohran takes the city’s reins, here’s what you need to know about his immediate family.
Mahmood Mamdani, viewing Israel through an anti-colonial lens
Long before his son’s mayoral campaign, Mahmood Mamdani, 79, was known widely as one of the foremost scholars on colonialism and postcolonial politics in Africa. Born in India in 1946, Mamdani was raised in Kampala, Uganda at a time when the country was racially segregated. After receiving his bachelors, masters and doctorate from universities in the United States, Mamdani was expelled from Uganda in 1972 after Ugandan President Idi Amin ordered all Asians to leave the country.
Since 1999, he has been a professor of government at Columbia University, and has published several books and essays on colonialism and political violence including “Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism” in 1996 and “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror” in 2004.
As a scholar, Mahmood Mamdani is best known for his analysis of colonial rule and how it shapes the identities of both the occupied and occupiers. In his 2020 book, “Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities,” he uses case studies that include Nazi Germany, Israelis and Palestinians and post-apartheid South Africa.
Mamdani has spoken directly and repeatedly about how his broader scholarship shapes his thinking on Israel and Palestinians. “The issue is not settlers, but settler colonialism,” he wrote in “Neither Settler nor Native.” In 2021, during an 11-day outbreak of violence between Hamas and Israel that was sparked by tensions in Jerusalem, Mamdani wrote on X, “Palestinians have a right to resist. This is a colonial occupation, not a conflict!”
Three days later, as Hamas and Israel exchanged missiles and airstrikes, Mamdani wrote that the conflict was not between Israel and Hamas, but rather the resurgence of a third intifada.
“The resistance this time began in Jerusalem and spread to Gaza, now the West Bank and Palestinian communities beyond. This is not a conflict between Israel and Hamas,” wrote Mamdani in a post on X. “We are witnessing something far more meaningful, the birth of the Third Intifadah against settler colonialism!”
In 2002, as the second intifada was in full force, Mamdani signed onto a petition calling for Columbia University to divest from companies supplying arms to Israel, saying at the time his support for the petition was to make a “moral statement registering concern over the exercise of power by Israel.”
In the Chronicle of Higher Education interview, Mahmood Mamdani spoke about being the first faculty member to address the pro-Palestinian protesters who set up an encampment at Columbia in 2024. He said his talk focused on “lessons of the divestment movement in South Africa.”
In a 2022 Zoom lecture at the Carter G. Woodson Institute of the University of Virginia, Mahmood Mamdani argued that while there was reason to give “full and enthusiastic support” to the BDS movement, he cautioned against the movement extending its boycotts against the breadth of “Israeli society and not just to its Zionist sectors.”
During his lecture, Mamdani also argued that Israel must learn from the dissolution of the South African apartheid, saying that the only way forward in the region was if there was an “epistemic revolution” in Israel where they realized the “flourishing of Jews and Jewish life does not require a Zionist state.”
“Whites did not need to monopolize political power to have a home in South Africa. It is this lesson that needs to be driven home to Israelis, as many as possible, that Jews do not need to have a Jewish state to have a secure home in Israel-Palestine,” said Mamdani. “Indeed, Jews are more secure in New York City than they are in Israel.”
Asked whether he supports a one-state solution, Mamdani recently told The Chronicle, “I’m sympathetic to only one type of one state, a state which is based on rule of law and guarantees equal rights,” a position his son echoed on the campaign trail. “I’m opposed to any kind of discrimination. I’m opposed to any form of apartheid which I understand to be a legally enforced distinction between two groups in society, where one benefits and the other is penalized.”
In an interview with The Nation in January 2024, Mamdani criticized the public response to the pro-Palestinian protests erupting across the U.S., saying that conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism was a danger to democracy.
“To conflate the critique of a state with the critique of a people poses a challenge to a democratic culture,” he said. In his recent Chronicle interview, Mamdani pointed favorably to the Jerusalem Declaration definition of antisemitism, signed by over 200 mostly Jewish scholars, which insists that the movement to boycott Israel is not in and of itself antisemitic. The declaration, he said, “makes a very clear distinction between the State of Israel and the people of Israel,” as opposed to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition.
In a January 2024 letter published in the Columbia Spectator, Mahmood Mamdani criticized the school for dissuading the use of the words “intifada” and “from the river to the sea,” arguing that excluding them would “rule out any meaningful dialogue on Israel and Palestine on this campus.” (He told the Chronicle that the “river to the seas” concept appears in the Likud party manifesto, which declares that “between the [Mediterranean] Sea and the Jordan [River] there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” He also claimed that he had not actually heard “from the river to the sea” chanted in Columbia’s quad, and had only read about it.)
Zohran Mamdani similarly downplayed rhetoric that many Israel supporters consider incendiary. In June he declined to condemn the phrase “globalize the Intifada,” arguing that the phrase symbolized a “desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights.” (Mamdani later said he would “discourage” the use of the phrase, which many supporters of Israel, recalling two violent uprisings of Palestinians in 1987 and 2000 that killed hundreds of Israelis, see as a call to violence.)
At an appearance on the encampments, Mamdani described charges of antisemitism as “part of the currency the administration uses to demonize protests like this,” according to the Columbia Spectator.
Critics of the elder Mamdani say he underplays Jewish historical vulnerability and antisemitism, minimizes Palestinian political agency and their internal divisions, and ignores the way Zionism differs from European colonialism. But like his son, he believes even younger Jews are increasingly adopting his critique of Israel and Zionism.
In a December interview with Peter Beinart for Jewish Currents, a leftist magazine, he said he believed the Jewish diasporic community would play an “important role” in discussions over the “Palestinian question” in the future.
“Jewish children in New York City have become increasingly skeptical of the direction in which Israel has been moving, and increasingly disillusioned with both the moral and the political efficacy of that route and increasingly open to explore an alternative,” said Mamdani.
Mira Nair, a supporter of cultural boycotts
Nair is an award-winning Indian-American filmmaker whose debut 1988 film, “Salaam Bombay!,” earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. She also directed several acclaimed films including “Mississippi Masala” in 1991, “Monsoon Wedding” in 2001 and “The Namesake” in 2006.
Born in India, she met Mahmood Mamdani in Uganda in 1989, and they married two years later. Nair was also married to the Jewish photographer Mitch Epstein from 1981 to sometime before 1989; he has declined JTA’s requests for an interview.
Nair has also been an outspoken critic of Israel and a supporter of petitions backing the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement.
In 2013, Nair declined an invitation to the Haifa International Film Festival. “I will not be going to Israel at this time. I will go to Israel when the walls come down. I will go to Israel when occupation is gone,” she tweeted at the time. In a subsequent post, she added that she stood with the BDS movement.
In March of this year, Nair signed onto a petition calling for the Academy Awards to remove Israeli actress Gal Gadot from its ceremony, accusing her of showing “support for Israel’s military actions against Palestinians,” according to an Instagram post by the group.
Following the election of her son, Nair has also declined to discuss Mamdani’s attitudes towards Jews and Israel in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
“What I love so much about Zohran is that he embraces the multiplicity of our lives in the most natural way — this mosaic that is our city but that no one has seen until this young man came along,” Nair told The Hollywood Reporter of her son.
Rama Duwaji, an artist with a political vision
Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji, whom he married this year, has also made pro-Palestinian advocacy a focal point of her work in ceramics, animation and illustrations.
While Duwaji has largely refused interviews with the press and did not appear at campaign events or fundraisers, last month she sat for her first interview post election with The Cut.
“Speaking out about Palestine, Syria, Sudan — all these things are really important to me,” Duwaji told The Cut. “I’m always keeping up to date with what’s going on, not just here but elsewhere. It feels fake to talk about anything else when that’s all that’s on my mind, all I want to put down on paper.”
“Everything is political; it’s the thing that I talk about with [Zohran] and my friends, the thing that I’m up to date with every morning, which is probably not great for my mental health. It’s what I talk about when I check on my family back home,” continued Duwaji.
During the interview Duwaji also discussed the meaning behind part of her election night outfit —- a black top designed by Zeid Hijazi, a London-based Palestinian-Jordanian label.
“It’s nice to have a little bit of analysis on the clothes because, for instance, during the general-election night, it was nice to send a message about Palestinians by wearing a Palestinian designer,” said Duwaji.
Duwaji, 28, who is ethnically Syrian and grew up in Texas and Dubai, also frequently posts illustrations that advocate for pro-Palestinian causes on her Instagram account. Her art has been featured in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, the BBC, and VICE, according to her website.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DNQ85ehpSo6/?hl=en
In August, she posted an animation of the Palestinian flag along with the words “end the genocide,” and posted another last month depicting the Global Sumud Flotilla.
In March, she posted an illustration of Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian student activist at Columbia University, calling for his release after he was detained by the Trump administration amid its campaign to purportedly combat campus antisemitism.
“This is an attack on freedom of speech, and sets a scary f—king precedent for anyone who speaks up for what’s right. Resist,” wrote Duwaji.
“He’s his own person”
In an interview with the New York Times in June, Mahmood Mamdani spurned suggestions that his politics had an outsized impact on his son’s political views.
“He’s his own person,” Mamdani said. “Now, of course what we do as his parents is part of the environment in which he grew up, and he couldn’t help but engage with it. That doesn’t mean anything is reflected back on us.”
But Nair was quick to disagree, telling the Times that her son had “very much absorbed” his parents’ politics, which largely center on anti-colonialism.
“I don’t agree!” Ms. Nair said. “Of course the world we live in, and what we write and film and think about, is the world that Zohran has very much absorbed.”
The post How Mira Nair and Mahmood Mamdani’s politics shaped New York City’s new mayor appeared first on The Forward.
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How Jewish politics are shaping the 2026 election map, from coast to coast
(JTA) — After a year in which Israel, antisemitism and political polarization scrambled long-standing alliances, the American Jewish political map is heading into 2026 unusually unsettled.
From New York City Hall to swing-state governors’ mansions to some of the most crowded Democratic primaries in memory, the coming election cycle will test how much Jewish voters still cohere as a political bloc — and whether the issues that have dominated Jewish life since Oct. 7 will continue to shape the ballot box. The rise of outspoken pro-Palestinian candidates, fractures inside both parties over Israel, and the growing visibility of antisemitism on the left and the right have turned races that might once have seemed parochial into national bellwethers.
As Democrats and Republicans jockey for control of Congress and key statehouses, Jewish candidates and Jewish issues are no longer confined to the margins. Instead, they are central — sometimes uncomfortably so — to debates about ideology, identity and power. These are the big political questions facing the American Jewish community as 2026 approaches.
The Mamdani era begins
After the most closely watched — and, in some Jewish corners, feared — mayoral race in generations, Zohran Mamdani will be sworn in as New York City’s next chief executive on the first day of the year. For many Jews, both in and beyond New York, 2026 will be measured by how the democratic socialist mayor will wield his power and influence once in office — and by how many candidates in the midterms are able to follow in his footsteps when it comes to explicit pro-Palestinian activism.
Ahead of his inauguration, Mamdani seemed to heed some of the Jewish alarms over his harsh criticism of Israel. During his transition he dismissed a staffer over her past antisemitic posts; met with the New York Board of Rabbis, which include some vocal critics of his; and, after the deadly attack on a Hanukkah celebration in Australia, visited the grave of the Lubavitcher Rebbe.
Tensions remain. The Anti-Defamation League has launched a controversial monitoring project focused on his administration. He also still pledges to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu should the Israeli prime minister visit New York, a threat that Netanyahu has shrugged off.
Once he takes power, Mamdani’s outreach efforts to Jews will continue to be closely scrutinized, as will Jewish leaders’ willingness to be in the same room with him — or to discourage, or encourage, further attacks on him.
Seismic shifts on the right
Republicans could have seized upon the rise of Mamdani as an effort to appeal to worried Jews ahead of the midterms as the pro-Isael, anti-antisemitism party. Instead, the GOP now seems unsure what it thinks about Jews at all.
While President Donald Trump says he remains resolutely pro-Israel, and many establishment Jewish groups continue their eagerness to work with him, his second-in-command JD Vance has opened the door to a rising tide of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment on the party’s hyper-nationalist wing. At Turning Point USA’s annual convention, Vance declined to join the critics of conservative antisemitism, and instead encouraged the party to widen its tent.
Meanwhile, conservative thought leaders such as the Heritage Foundation and Turning Point USA, which have wielded power to vet and promote GOP candidates, have opened doors to outright conspiratorial talking points about Jewish and Israeli power, via figures such as open antisemite Nick Fuentes and podcaster Tucker Carlson, who has offered him a friendly platform.
Already some Republican candidates, driven by “America First” ideology and their disdain for U.S. aid to Israel, are taking explicitly anti-Israel platforms. Florida gubernatorial hopeful James Fishback, for example, has pledged to refuse donations from AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, and praised Heritage for its defense of the Carlson-Fuentes interview. “Why is it that when we’re critical of Israel, it feels like a fourth branch comes out to almost criminalize our speech?” the Gen Z hedge-fund manager has said.
And in the Ohio gubernatorial race, the biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy — who as a 2024 presidential candidate was one of the first major figures of his party to suggest cutting aid to Israel — appears to be the likely GOP nominee. He will likely face a Jewish Democratic candidate, former state health official Dr. Amy Acton.
A test for Josh Shapiro
A Jewish governor with a national profile, Josh Shapiro is seeking reelection in November. Stacy Garrity, his GOP opponent, is the only person to earn more votes in Pennsylvania history than Shapiro when she was elected state treasurer in 2024. A popular moderate with a reputation as a humanitarian war hero, Garrity hopes to unite the state as Shapiro did, despite her record of boosting election denials. She’ll remind Jewish voters that she boosted the state’s Israel bond investments.
An upset — seen by insiders as unlikely but not impossible — could put a screeching halt to talk of Shapiro becoming the first Jewish president.
The Upper West Side story
Few Democratic primaries this year promise to be more circus-like than the race for the Manhattan district being vacated by longtime Jewish Rep. Jerry Nadler, a progressive on domestic issues who could read the haftarah at synagogue one day and offer what he considered loving criticism of Israel the next. Nine candidates have so far thrown their hats in, including three big Jewish names with very different takes on Jewish issues.
The favorite is New York State Assembly member Micah Lasher — a close confidant of Nadler. But Lasher’s path to the nomination is far from guaranteed, especially if progressives want to send a message to a Democratic establishment that they are unhappy for a range of reasons — including Israel.
Enter Cameron Kasky, a survivor of the Parkland High School shooting and Jewish Gen Z political activist. The 25-year-old, courting pro-Palestinian voters, has already made fighting “support for genocide” a central plank of his campaign (he recently returned from a pro-Palestinian solidarity mission to the West Bank). And Kasky isn’t alone among Jewish candidates popular with the online left: Jack Schlossberg, 32, a Kennedy scion with millions of social media followers, is running on what he describes as the “cost-of-living crisis” and erosion of democratic norms under Republican leadership.
Threading the needle on Israel
As support for Israel erodes in the Democratic party and in portions of the right, a number of Jewish candidates insist that there is room for progressive Jewish voices who can be critical of Israeli policy. A number of declared Jewish candidates this year are looking to represent this vanguard. In many cases they’re vying to replace long-serving Jews and/or stalwart Democratic leaders.
Kasky exemplifies the trend. But progressive Brad Lander, the Jewish New York City comptroller and Mamdani ally, may have a clearer path to Congress: He is challenging Jewish Rep. Dan Goldman, a more typically pro-Israel lawmaker, for his House seat, and early polling has given him an advantage.
Scott Wiener, a state senator in California, is running for the seat being vacated by retiring Democratic figurehead Nancy Pelosi. Wiener holds conventionally left-of-center views on housing reform, civil rights, LGBTQ+ issues, climate and tech regulation and has pushed for antisemitism prevention in schools. He has also publicly condemned actions by the Netanyahu government.
And Daniel Biss, the progressive Jewish Israeli mayor of Evanston, Illinois, is running in the Chicago-area congressional district previously held by retiring Jewish Rep. Jan Schakowski. Like many pro-Israel centrists, he’s an advocate of the two-state solution, but has veered to their left by calling for an early ceasefire in Gaza and for pausing offensive U.S. weapons sales to the Israeli government amid the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. He is facing, amid a slew of challengers, the leftist Palestinian-American influencer Kat Abugazelah.
Israel and the midterms
Months after the tentative ceasefire, will voter sentiment about the Gaza war have an impact on midterm races? AIPAC, whose endorsements were once courted by politicians, is now seen as toxic by candidates who have been reading the tea leaves. Case in point: Rep. Seth Moulton, the Massachusetts Democrat, has publicly said he will return the campaign donations he previously received from AIPAC and will not accept future support from the organization.
In New York’s 15th Congressional District race, where Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres is seeking reelection, former state assemblyman and ex‑Democratic National Committee vice chair Michael Blake has made Torres’s pro‑Israel stance a central issue of his campaign. Blake has accused Torres of prioritizing U.S. support for Israel over his constituents’ needs, including alleging that Torres’s positions effectively support what Blake calls a “genocide” — language that has drawn criticism from local Jewish leaders.
In the Michigan Senate race, Rep. Haley Stevens, a non-Jewish pro-Israel stalwart who previously won AIPAC’s support over progressive Jewish incumbent Andy Levin, is the favorite in the race right now. But she faces two progressive challengers, including one, former county health executive Abdul el-Sayed, who has also labeled Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as “genocide” and opposes U.S. military aid to Israel.
A Jewish hopeful for New York governor
Bruce Blakeman is the first Jewish county executive of Long Island’s Nassau County. He shouldered aside former frontrunner Elise Stefanik, upstate’s fiery Trump ally and scourge of college presidents, for both Trump’s endorsement and the likely Republican nomination to challenge Gov. Kathy Hochul. Blakeman’s hawkish pro‑Israel advocacy aligns him with the segment of the Republican base that emphasizes strong U.S.-Israel ties and opposition to movements like BDS. In the 2026 governor’s race, he’s likely to draw a contrast with Democrats, even if Hochul herself has strong pro-Israel bona fides.
Much ado about a tattoo
Graham Platner, the progressive Maine Senate candidate running in what Democrats see as a must-win race, has refused to quit following revelations that the military veteran had a Nazi-era tattoo on his chest for years. Even after shedding staff and facing fiery condemnations over both the tattoo and derogatory comments he made on Reddit, a defiant Platner is still polling within range of establishment candidate Gov. Janet Mills ahead of the June 9 Democratic primary.
Could the oyster farmer (who has claimed he didn’t know what the tattoo was, and covered it up following the revelations) actually pull off the upset primary win? Like Mamdani and several other progressive candidates this year, Platner also holds ardently pro-Palestinian views and has accused Israel of genocide. The elder statesman of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, has shrugged off questions about his tattoo, giving it a Jewish stamp of non-concern.
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Mayor Zohran Mamdani reassures Jewish New Yorkers at inauguration: ‘I will protect you’
Zohran Mamdani’s swearing-in at City Hall on Thursday afternoon highlighted the full diversity of New York City and included a striking display of Jewish presence and pride during a historic change in leadership.
In a scene rich with symbolism, Sen. Bernie Sanders, who once ran to become the nation’s first Jewish president, administered the oath of office to the city’s first Muslim mayor as Mamdani placed his hand on a Quran.
Looking on from the dais was Sen. Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking elected Jewish official in the United States. Jewish actor Mandy Patinkin, who hosted Mamdani for Hanukkah, led a musical performance with elementary school students from Staten Island. A bagel and lox schmear even got a mention during Mamdani’s inaugural remarks.
Mamdani’s vision of New York City
Mamdani, a democratic socialist and Israel critic whose surprise rise divided the city’s Jewish community, used his address to cast New York as a shared civic project shaped by its many languages and faiths. “The authors of this story will speak Pashto and Mandarin, Yiddish and Creole,” he said. “They will pray in mosques, at shul, at church, at Gurdwaras and Mandirs and temples — and many will not pray at all.”
The new mayor also mentioned Russian Jewish immigrants in Brighton Beach, who, along with other immigrant communities, came to America with a dream of a better life and nodded to his own upbringing deeply rooted in Jewish culture. “Where else could a Muslim kid like me grow up eating bagels and lox every Sunday,” Mamdani said, a line that drew cheers from the crowd.
Mamdani, a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, drew louder applause when he acknowledged Palestinian New Yorkers in Bay Ridge, saying that under his tenure, they “will no longer have to contend with a politics that speaks of universalism and then makes them the exception.” Mamdani faced fierce backlash during the Democratic primary for defending the slogan “globalize the intifada,” used by some at the pro-Palestinian protests and perceived by many as a call for violence against Jews. In the inauguration crowd was Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate who was held for deportation for his role in pro-Palestinian protests.
Mamdani also pledged to divest from city investments in Israel. This commitment could create a clash with Mark Levine, the incoming city comptroller, who has pledged to repurchase the bonds as part of the city’s portfolio. “This has been a rock-solid investment for decades,” he said. “Israel has never missed a bond payment, and a good, balanced portfolio should have global diversity.”
Levine, who is Jewish, took the oath of office on the Five Books of Moses, called the Chumash. “How remarkable is it that on these steps today, we have three swearings-in,” Levine said, “One by a leader using a Quran, one by a leader using a Christian Bible, and one by a leader using a Chumash or Hebrew Bible. I am proud to live in a city where this is possible.”
Mamdani orders new antisemitism office to stay open
In a signing ceremony for his first three executive orders, Mamdani announced that he will keep open the recently-created mayor’s office to combat antisemitism. “That is an issue that we take very seriously,” he told reporters. Former Mayor Eric Adams used the office to counter antisemitism, including pursuing a measure adopting the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which considers most forms of anti-Zionism as antisemitic.
According to the executive order about the structure of the city government, the second measure Mamdani signed after the ceremony, the office will lead efforts to reduce antisemitism and anti-Jewish hate crimes using existing resources and act as a liaison between the city and the Jewish community on safety and security issues. It would regularly advise Mamdani on public education, tracking enforcement cases and reviewing city materials for bias.
Mamdani also issued an executive order revoking all previous executive orders issued by Adams after September 26, 2024, the day of his indictment on federal bribery and fraud charges. That includes the June 2025 measure adopting the IHRA antisemitism definition.
At the inauguration, Mamdani addressed skeptics directly, in a move to lower the temperature after a polarizing campaign. “I know there are some who view this administration with distrust or disdain, or who see politics as permanently broken,” he said. “And while only action can change minds, I promise you this: if you are a New Yorker, I am your mayor. Regardless of whether we agree, I will protect you, celebrate with you, mourn alongside you, and never, not for a second, hide from you.”
The Anti-Defamation League, which clashed with Mamdani during the election and launched a “Mamdani Monitor” to track and scrutinize the new administration’s appointments, said in a statement on Thursday that while holding him actions, the advocacy group will “stand ready to engage constructively” with the new mayor.
On City Hall steps and in the plaza
The ceremony featured a benediction delivered by Imam Khalid Latif, executive director of the Islamic Center at NYU, who co-founded the NYU ‘Of Many’ Institute for Multifaith Leadership with Rabbi Yehuda Sarna. Appearing alongside the Imam was Rabbi Ellen Lippmann, founder and rabbi emerita of Kolot Chayeinu/Voices of Our Lives in Brooklyn and a board member of the progressive Jews For Racial & Economic Justice.
Levine, who speaks fluent Hebrew and Spanish, used the Hebrew terms for welcome and thank you in his remarks as the city’s new comptroller. “Welcome, everyone. What a joy that you came,” he said in Hebrew, after using similar terms in Spanish and Greek. “To those of you who don’t understand Spanish, Hebrew or Greek, welcome, thank you, and please download Duolingo,” he quipped.
Patinkin, an early supporter of Mamdani who appeared in a get-out-the-vote video with the candidate during the campaign, performed “Somewhere over the Rainbow” with the PS22 Chorus of Staten Island.
Rep. Jerry Nadler, co-chair of the Congressional Jewish Caucus, sat on the dais next to Schumer, who refused to endorse Mamdani during the election.
Among the 4,000 guests was Rabbi Moshe Indig, the leader of the Hasidic Satmar Ahronim faction who endorsed Mamdani in the general election. Also present were some Orthodox leaders who didn’t endorse and were close allies of Adams — Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zwiebel, executive vice president of Agudath Israel of America, and Josh Mehlman, head of the Flatbush Jewish Community Coalition.
Outside, a group of rabbis protested Mamdani’s swearing-in by displaying Israeli flags. It was led by Rabbi Avi Weiss, founding rabbi of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, and Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun on the Upper East Side. Both rabbis publicly opposed Mamdani during the election. In an interview with Talkline Network, a Jewish online radio, Steinmetz said it was a “demonstration of Jewish pride.” However, he said, New York Jews shouldn’t be fixated on Mamdani, they should assess his actions day by day.
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