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A scholar sees a common root for antisemitism and racism: ‘Christian supremacy’
(JTA) — Magda Teter’s new book, “Christian Supremacy,” begins in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 11, 2017. Hundreds of white nationalist neo-Nazis who ostensibly gathered to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee from a local park broke into a chant: “Jews will not replace us.”
Other writers and scholars would note how antisemitism shaped white nationalism. But Teter, professor of history and the Shvidler Chair of Judaic Studies at Fordham University, saw something else: how centuries of Christian thought and practice fed the twin evils of antisemitism and racism.
“The ideology espoused by white supremacists in the US and in Europe is rooted in Christian ideas of social and religious hierarchy,” she writes. “These ideas developed, gradually, first in the Mediterranean and Europe in respect to Jews and then in respect to people of color in European colonies and in the US, before returning transformed back to Europe.”
In the book, subtitled “Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism,” she traces this idea from the writings of the early church fathers like Paul the Apostle, though centuries of Catholic and Protestant debates over the status of Jews in Europe, to the hardening of racist attitudes with the rise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Antisemitic laws and theology, she argues, developed within Christianity a “mental habit” of exclusion and dominance that would eventually be applied to people of color up to and including modern times.
Teter is careful to acknowledge the different forms antisemitism and racism have taken, distinguishing between the Jews’ experience of social and legal exclusion and near annihilation, and the enslavement, displacement and ongoing persecution of Black people. And yet, she writes, “that story began with Christianity’s theological relation with Jews and Judaism.”
Teter is previously the author of “Blood Libel: On The Trail of an Antisemitic Myth,” winner of the 2020 National Jewish Book Award. At Fordham, the Catholic university in the Bronx, she is helping assemble what may be the largest repository of artifacts and literature dedicated to the Jewish history of the borough.
We spoke Thursday about how groups like the Proud Boys embrace centuries-old notions of Christian superiority, how “whiteness” became a thing and how she, as a non-Jew raised in Poland, became a Jewish studies scholar.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Your book was conceived and written during the COVID lockdown. Where did the idea for the book come from?
It’s an accidental project. I’ve been teaching the history of antisemitism for years, and I live in Harlem so questions of race and racism are very stark in my daily life. And since I grew up in Poland, and American history was not something we were taught or studied, I’ve never been satisfied with the various explanations for the strength of antisemitism and history of racism. And as I mentioned in my prologue, I watched the Raoul Peck documentary, “I Am Not Your Negro,” which has a clip with James Baldwin saying that white people have to figure out why they invented the idea of the N-word and must “embrace this stranger that they have maligned so long.” You could also say that the European Christians created the idea of “the Jew” and that sort of caricature had absolutely nothing to do with flesh and blood Jews. I kept noticing these parallels, as an outsider, reading American and African-American history.
I was also thinking about this idea of servitude that was attached to Jews in Christian theology, and then in law.
You write in your book that “Over time, white European Christians branded both Jews and people of color with ‘badges of servitude’ and inferiority.” What do you mean by servitude in this context?
In Christian theology, from the earliest Christian texts, the idea of servitude and slavery is attached to the concept of Jews and Judaism. Paul does it in his Epistles. He uses this quote from the book of Genesis that “the elder shall serve the younger,” which becomes really embedded in Christian theology. It is the Jews, the elder people, who should serve the Christians, the younger people. Later on in medieval theology and canon law, Jews are in a servile position, consigned for their sin of rejecting Jesus to perpetual servitude. So even though Jews were free people and could live mostly where they wanted to live, marry whoever they wanted to marry — nobody was sold and some even had slaves — that idea of Jews as confined to perpetual servitude to Christians created a habit of thinking of Jews as having an inferior social status.
That language became secularized in modern times, and we see the development of the [antisemitic] trope of Jewish power: that they are in places where they shouldn’t be. I worked on fleshing out the parallels between the idea and then legal status of Jewish servitude and the conceptual perception of Black people in servile and inferior positions.
Magda Teter’s new book explores how “white European Christians branded both Jews and people of color with ‘badges of servitude’ and inferiority.” (Chuck Fishman)
What other kinds of parallels did you find between racism and antisemitism?
In the Christian theology, Black people, like Jews, will be seen as cursed by God. Jews were [portrayed as] lazy because they didn’t work physically — they made money and exploited Christians. Black people were [portrayed as] lazy because they were trying to avoid physical labor at the expense of white men. Both people were seen as carnal, both as sexually dangerous, and so on.
I was struck by the fact that the racist turn of Christian supremacy — justifying the enslavement of Black people on theological grounds — is a fairly late development, taking hold in the early modern period when Europeans established slaveholding empires.
That’s right. In the summer of 2020, the summer of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, we were all thinking about these issues of race and racism and America. And as I was in the middle of writing the article that became the book, I felt that there was a deeper history that needed to be told, and that slavery is not bound by color until the enslavement of Black Africans by Europeans during the colonial expansion of Europe.
After the French Revolution, when Jews were offered “emancipation” in much of Europe, there were deep debates about whether they could be citizens and be entitled to the same rights and protections as Christian citizens of France and England and other countries. How was that debate informed by Christianity?
In pre-modern Europe, there was obviously both a religious and legal framework under which Jews existed. They had their place in a social hierarchy. After the French Revolution, people are creating a new political reality. The idea of equality obviously challenged the social hierarchies that existed, including the idea that Christians were the superior religion. And that begins to play a role on two levels. One is the level of, well, “how can you be equal and be our judges and make decisions about us?” It’s fear of power — political power and political equality. That challenges the habit of thinking that sees Jews as inferior, in servitude and otherwise insolent and arrogant.
The other level comes from Enlightenment scholars who begin to place Jews in the Middle East and in the Holy Land, in Palestine. Jews are no longer seen as European. They are seen as “Oriental,” and they are compared to the non-European religions and practices that these Enlightenment scholars have been studying. Their differences are now also racialized. “They are not like us, they can’t assimilate. They can never be Frenchmen, they can never be Germans.”
And I guess it’s a short step from that to regarding people with dark skin as inferior and subordinate.
That’s right. Enlightenment scholars are also trying to to understand why it is justified to enslave Black Africans and they do it through “scientific” and other means. They classify Africans as inferior intellectually and they create this idea of race.
I began to think about these European politicians and intellectuals in terms of creating their identities, and what I ended up arguing is what we saw in Charlottesville, what we’re seeing in Europe. It’s not necessarily just about hate, but it’s about exclusion and rejection of Jews and people of color from equality, from citizenship.
And the common thread here is that whiteness and Christianity become inseparable. You write that “freedom and liberty now came to be linked not only to Christianity, but to whiteness, and servitude and enslavement to blackness.”
That’s right. White Christian “liberty” becomes embedded and embodied in law.
Did you see any pitfalls in drawing parallels between the Black and Jewish experiences? I am thinking of those in either community who might say, “How dare you compare our suffering to theirs!”
Yes, I was tempered. I think what some call “comparative victimhood” has paralyzed conversations about this subject, and I kept it in my mind all the time. What I hope comes through is that there’s incredible value in a comparative approach. Coming from Jewish studies as my primary field, the comparison with the Black experience gave me clarity on the nature of antisemitism as well as on the nature of the Jewish experience, and vice versa: The Jewish experience can also give clarity to some of the aspects of anti-Black racism.
What’s an example?
So, for instance, questions like, “Are Jews white? Are they not white? When did they become white?” That’s a whole genre of scholarship. And when you look at it through the lens of law and ideology, you begin to see that from a legal perspective, Jews were considered white in the United States because they could immigrate and they could be naturalized according to law. They did not have to go to court to become American. Their rights to vote were not challenged. There was discrimination, they couldn’t stay in hotels and in some places they couldn’t find employment, but by law, they were considered citizens. The debate about the whiteness of Jews is creating a fog of misunderstanding.
Black Americans were targeted by specific legal statutes from the very beginning in the Constitution and then in naturalization law and so on. And then there was the backlash even after the Civil War to the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments [aimed at establishing political equality for Americans of all races].
Statues at the Strasbourg Cathedral depict Ecclesia and Synagoga, representing the triumph of the church, at left, and the servitude of Judaism, which is represented by a blindfolded figure, drooping and carrying a broken lance. (Edelseider/Wikimedia Commons)
How much do modern-day white supremacists, like the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys, see themselves as Christian? Or is this a kind of white supremacy that doesn’t name itself Christian but doesn’t even realize how many of its ideas are based in theology?
I think they might not be conscious of this legacy, but neo-Nazis take from the legacy of the Nazis who themselves were not thinking of themselves as Christian necessarily. But what I argue in the book is that white Christian supremacy becomes white supremacy. It never discards the Christian sense of domination and superiority that emerges from its early relationship with Jews and Judaism.
In the United States, Black people serve as contrast figures to whiteness, in the law and in the culture. You cannot have whiteness without Blackness. For Christians, Jews serve as that contrast figure. Consciously or unconsciously, the Proud Boys are embracing that. They talk of “God-given” freedoms for white people. That is the Christian legacy.
You said that the Nazis didn’t necessarily see themselves as a Christian movement. But I must ask, even though it is not the scope of your book, was the Holocaust a culmination of white Christian supremacy? Because I think many Christian theologians would want to say that Nazism was godless, and a perversion of the true faith.
I’ll say that when exclusionary ideology is coupled with the power of the state, that’s where it can lead.
In the years since the Holocaust especially, there have been many efforts by Christian leaders to address the ideological failings of the past. You write about Nostra Aetate, the 1965 declaration by the Catholic Church absolving Jews of collective guilt in the death of Jesus and some Protestant documents of contrition. But I got the feeling you were disappointed that many denominations haven’t gone far enough in reckoning with the past.
There was a sort of a moral sense that something needs to be addressed after the Holocaust. But then it is not fully addressed. I don’t think anybody has addressed the issue of power — the roots of hate, yes, but not the dynamics of power. We’ll see where the book goes, but maybe theologians will begin to grapple with this legacy of superiority and domination, and the way hierarchical habits of thinking have been developed through theology and through religious culture.
What other impact do you hope the book may have?
White supremacy is very much in the air. We need to speak up against it, and make connections and allyships. I hope that maybe because the book deals with law and power, it may create bridges among people who care about “We the People” as a vision of people who are diverse, respectful and equal, and not the exclusionary vision offered by white and Christian supremacy.
A cross burns at a Ku Klux Klan rally on Aug. 8, 1925. (National Photo Company Collection)
I’d love to talk about your background. You’re not Jewish but you are chair of Jewish Studies at Fordham, a Catholic university. What drew you to the study of Judaism and the Jews?
I grew up in Poland with a father who from the time I was a little girl would point out to me that there had been Jews in Poland. We would drive through the countryside, and he’d say, “This used to be a Jewish town and there used to be a synagogue and there was the Jewish cemetery.” I grew up being very conscious of the past’s presence and this kind of stark absence of Jews in Poland, where in the 1970s when I grew up Jewish history was taboo.
As soon as Jewish books on Jewish subjects began to be published, including those that dealt with antisemitism, we would read it together. We would talk about it. He wouldn’t just shift the destruction and murder of Jews in Poland on to the Nazis.
There was no Jewish studies program in Poland when I was applying to universities, so I studied Hebrew in Israel, and then studied Yiddish in New York at YIVO. I came to Columbia University to get my PhD in Jewish history and my career went in the direction it did. I was a professor of history and director of the Jewish and Israel studies program at Wesleyan University. I came to Fordham eight years ago and created a program in Jewish studies.
Your previous book was about the blood libel, the historic canard that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood. This one’s about antisemitism. I don’t want to presume, but is your interest in these subjects in any way an act of contrition?
I grew up in a very secular household. I did not grow up Catholic. But I think growing up in Poland made me very, very aware of antisemitism and the history of antisemitism. I got my PhD from Columbia University in Jewish history, which did not emphasize Jewish suffering, but Jewish life, and I have studied Jewish life and teach about Jewish life — not just about Jewish suffering.
However, in the last few years, antisemitism has certainly been on the minds of many of us. I also am committed to the idea of shared history, and therefore all my scholarship, as much as it is about Jews, it is also about the church and Poland and the law. Jews are an integral part of that history and culture. And, as such, I’m committed to that, to teaching about the vibrancy of Jewish life as much as the dynamics of what made that life difficult over the centuries.
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Holocaust survivor event features a Rob Reiner video address — recorded just weeks before his death
(JTA) — At a virtual Holocaust survivor event on Thursday, beloved Jewish film director Rob Reiner gave a pre-recorded address where he urged those watching to be “resilient.”
For the survivors, families and advocates who tuned into the virtual event hosted by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, or Claims Conference, Reiner’s words carried added weight, having been recorded just weeks before he and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, were killed in their home on Sunday.
Ahead of Reiner’s pre-recorded remarks, Greg Schneider, the executive vice president of the Claims Conference, said that Reiner had begun working on the organization’s annual International Holocaust Survivors Night a few years ago, including appearances in the virtual screening in 2023 and 2024. The organization has disbursed restitution money to survivors since 1951.
Schneider then read a quote from a 2017 Jewish Telegraphic Agency interview with Reiner.
“Yes, all this is reflected in my work. It’s my sensibility. I’m a Jew. I was raised a Jew. I value honesty and integrity and knowledge and education and all those values I was raised with,” said Schneider, quoting Reiner.
Concluding his introduction to Reiner’s address, Schneider said, “Rob and Michelle, we will carry on your values of acting with honesty, integrity, knowledge and education.”
As Reiner came on the screen, surrounded by posters from some of his most acclaimed films, including “The Princess Bride” and “A Few Good Men,” he began by describing his family’s “personal connection” to the Holocaust.
“Thank you again for asking me to join your evening, I can tell you that what you’re all about means a lot to me,” Reiner said in the video. “Personally, my wife, her mother, was in Auschwitz, and her whole family died there. Her mother was the only survivor, and my aunt was also in Auschwitz.”
On Wednesday, the USC Shoah Foundation shared a 1994 video of Singer Reiner embracing her mother, Holocaust survivor Nicole Silberkleit, who described her children as “very understanding, loving, and affectionate.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/DSYmPLmEshI/
In his address, Reiner then shifted his focus to urging “resilience,” which was the theme of the virtual event to honor Holocaust survivors.
“I know the theme of the evening is resilience, and if ever we needed to be resilient, it’s now,” he said. “We’re living in a time where what’s happening in our country is scary and reminiscent of what we’ve seen happen in the past, and we just hope that we can all survive this and that we can hold on to our democracy, but I want to just thank everybody for being there, and let’s be resilient.”
The Claims Conference’s event was part of an annual menorah lighting ceremony on the fifth night of Hanukkah to honor survivors. It concluded with around 100 survivors lighting candles at the Western Wall in Jerusalem.
This year, Claims Conference officials also used the event to draw attention to antisemitism, with the survivor event taking place just days after 15 were killed during an antisemitic attack on a Hanukkah event in Sydney, Australia.
“Even in these difficult days, when antisemitism is rising and Jewish communities around the world are under attack — this very week on the first night of Hanukkah in Sydney, Australia — we draw strength and inspiration from you, the survivors, from your personal and collective resilience,” Schneider told the group of survivors in Jerusalem.
One of the victims of the attack, Alex Kleytman, was a Holocaust survivor who had passed World War II living with his family in Siberia.
“Lessons from the past should have protected Holocaust survivor Alex Kleytman – a husband, a father and a grandfather,” the Claims Conference wrote in a post on Facebook Sunday. “Educating about how words of hate can turn into violence must not be a hollow promise.”
The couple’s 32-year-old son, Nick, briefly appeared in a Los Angeles court Wednesday after he was charged in connection to his parents’ killing. He has been charged with two counts of first-degree murder with a special circumstance of multiple murders.
The other Reiner children, Jake and Romy, shared a statement with People on Wednesday expressing their grief over the loss of their parents.
“Words cannot even begin to describe the unimaginable pain we are experiencing every moment of the day,” the statement said. “The horrific and devastating loss of our parents, Rob and Michele Reiner, is something that no one should ever experience. They weren’t just our parents; they were our best friends.”
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In Reykjavik, Hanukkah offers a chance for Iceland’s tiny, isolated Jewish community to come together
(JTA) — REYKJAVIK — December light is brief in Iceland. It was not yet 4 p.m., and by the time the giant menorah was lit in downtown Reykjavík, the day had already slipped into darkness. A steady drizzling rain blurred the streetlights and soaked the pavement where fewer than 100 people gathered, roughly half of the country’s Jewish population, which has always been small and largely unseen.
The celebrants were calm, almost subdued; security was not. Armed plainclothes police ringed the area. They moved through the crowd while surveillance drones hovered overhead. Air support was on standby, measures almost unheard of in a country that tops the world’s most peaceful list.
The gathering took place just hours after news broke of the most recent terrorist attack on Jews, this one a celebration of Hanukkah at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia.
Rabbi Avraham Feldman and his wife, Mushky, welcomed the crowd, their voices steady but restrained. Iceland’s minister of foreign affairs, Þorgerður Katrín Gunnarsdóttir, followed, and she lit the menorah herself. Curious passersby slowed, some watching silently before moving on. The event passed without incident.
“The attack in Sydney reminds us that darkness is not only something we read about in history books. It still exists in the world and appears suddenly and violently,” said Avraham Feldman, who is associated with the Chabad movement, which makes public menorah-lightings a centerpiece of its outreach around the world.
“Hanukkah does not ask us to deny this darkness,” he added. “Instead, Hanukkah teaches us that each and every one of us can create light and positivity. Even a small light pushes away great darkness. And when many lights stand together, we overpower the darkness.”
In a statement issued the same day, Gunnarsdóttir condemned the attack in Sydney, which took place at a Chabad event. “I strongly condemn the horrific attack on those celebrating Chanukah at Bondi Beach in Australia,” she said. “There is no place, anywhere, for antisemitism or terror. I extend my heartfelt condolences to the victims, their loved ones, and others affected.”
Her presence at the Hanukkah event carried significance well beyond the ceremony itself. Iceland’s government has been among Europe’s most vocal critics of Israel, and public discourse around the war in Gaza has been intense. Jewish teens have reported increasingly tense relationships with their peers, and the national broadcaster recently announced that it would boycott the Eurovision song contest over Israel’s participation.
For some Jews in Iceland, the political situation has shaken their sense of acceptance.
“It has become very different for me since Oct. 7,” said an American Jew living in Iceland who asked to remain anonymous. “Before, I was fairly widely open about being Jewish, but the landscape has changed.”
When he and his spouse moved into a new home last year, he ordered a mezuzah for the front door, but he hesitated to put it up. “For the first time, I found myself concerned about placing my Hanukkah menorah in the window,” he said, even as he added that most Icelanders would likely not recognize the symbol anyway, given the prevalence of seven-armed electric advent lights in windows each December.
For some present, having Gunnarsdóttir at the Hanukkah event offered a rare and meaningful signal that support for a vulnerable minority need not be conflated with geopolitics.
“It’s so special to have the foreign minister join us today, to stand with us, support the community, and offer her continued friendship,” said Mushky Feldman said. “We’re honored to have her speak tonight and light the first candle.”
Jewish life in Iceland has no long historical footprint. There are no historic synagogues, no Jewish neighborhoods, and no centuries-old institutions. Holidays are celebrated in rented spaces or private homes. Until 2018, there was not even a resident rabbi. The community is made up largely of immigrants — including an Israeli jewelry designer who was the country’s first lady for 13 years until 2016 — their children, and Icelanders who have claimed a Jewish identity later in life.
“How do you teach your children what it means to be Jewish without a ready-made community?” asked Reykjavík resident Adam Gordon, an American Jew. “The answer is that we must create that community ourselves.”
Practical challenges abound. “Supplies can be difficult to come by,” said the American Jew, who decided that he would light a menorah. “I finally placed a bulk order from abroad with enough Hanukkah candles to get me through the end of this decade.”
An obstacle is the traditional Icelandic approach to religion. Most Icelanders are nominally Christian but the country is known as one of the most secular in Europe. (Judaism became an official state religion in 2021, following Avraham Feldman’s advocacy.)
“Icelanders see Jewishness as a function of religion, which they largely see as a quaint if outdated view of the world incompatible with their collective level of political and moral evolution,” said Mike Klein, an American Jew living in Iceland.
“Discussions about my being Jewish often become uncomfortable, partly because of the current political predicament, but also because Icelanders find it strange that I would choose to make my life difficult by maintaining my Jewish identity when I’m otherwise relatively well accepted,” Klein added.
Others echo the same tension. A Jewish American living in Iceland, who declined to be named out of concerns about identifying publicly as Jewish, said antisemitism in Iceland is often rooted in misunderstanding rather than explicit hatred. “There is a lot of ignorance,” she said.
“Many Icelanders have no idea that there are only about 15 million Jews in the world, and that while we are few, we are not a monolith. We have different ways of connecting to our Jewish identity, that it is not only rooted in religion, but culture, a shared heritage.”
At the same time, some Icelanders have embraced the community in meaningful ways. Finnur Thorlacius Eiríksson first encountered Jewish life in 2017, when he met an Israeli couple visiting Iceland. When they later moved to the country and invited him to a Passover seder in 2018, he joined.
“The experience was a positive one, which prompted me to attend more events where I got to know the Jewish community in Iceland quite well,” he said.
Eiríksson now holds the distinction of the only non-Jew known to be registered as a member of the official Jewish community. He attends major holidays and events and is even considering converting to Judaism.
“Thankfully, nearly all my Jewish friends are open about being Jewish,” he said. “They know it never helped the Jewish people to hide their identity, so they wear their Jewish identity with pride.”
Andrea Cheatham Kasper, who is Jewish and lives in Iceland with her family, said her Shabbat table has become a cornerstone of connection.
“Our Shabbat table has been central in our home and also as our way to make friends and build community,” she said. “Relationships have grown there, some immediately and some after many meals together.”
Kasper said she does not hide being Jewish or Israeli but avoids online political battles. “My goal is to focus on face-to-face relationships and interactions that are human, not political,” she said. “What I have found is that the noise comes from the loud voices, and they aren’t always representative.”
At the lighting, the menorah flickered against the rain and the early darkness. Children stood close to their parents. Photos were taken to share with family far away, and fresh-baked sufganiyot (jelly-filled donuts) were passed out to the crowd.
“Events like the menorah lighting become these precious moments when we can gather and celebrate together,” said Gordon. “None of us came to Iceland to deepen our Jewish practice, but we don’t want to abandon it. Instead, we want to weave it together with our Icelandic identities.”
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Mamdani Transition Team Appointee Resigns After ‘Money Hungry Jews’ Social Media Posts Resurface
Candidate Zohran Mamdani speaks during a Democratic New York City mayoral primary debate, June 4, 2025, in New York, US. Photo: Yuki Iwamura/Pool via REUTERS
An appointee of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani resigned just one day after her selection this week, following the exposure of decade-old social media posts that contained antisemitic language and stereotypes.
Catherine Almonte Da Costa, who had been named Mamdani’s director of appointments, stepped down Thursday after social media posts from around 2011–2012 resurfaced in which she used phrases echoing classic antisemitic tropes, including references to “money hungry Jews.”
The Anti-Defamation League condemned the comments, saying they “echo classic antisemitic tropes and otherwise demean Jewish people,” and questioned how such remarks were not uncovered during the vetting process for a senior role in the incoming administration. Shortly after the controversy broke, Da Costa’s X account was taken offline.
In a statement announcing her resignation, Da Costa expressed remorse for the posts, calling them and inconsistent with who she is today. In a statement, Da Costa said she “spoke with the Mayor-elect this afternoon, apologized, and expressed my deep regret for my past statements. These statements are not indicative of who I am.” Mamdani accepted her resignation, stating that he believed her apology to be sincere.
The episode has intensified scrutiny of Mamdani’s transition team and personnel choices as he prepares to take office. Mamdani, a progressive lawmaker, has previously faced criticism from Jewish and pro-Israel groups over his rhetoric and positions related to Israel, prompting heightened sensitivity to issues of antisemitism surrounding his administration.
Jewish communal leaders said the incident underscores broader concerns about tolerance for antisemitic language within progressive political circles and the need for more rigorous screening of public officials and senior staff. Several noted that public servants must be held to a high standard, particularly at a time of rising antisemitism in the United States.
Halle Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, expressed approval of Da Costa’s resignation.
“Glad to see that Catherine Almonte Da Costa has resigned. The views she expressed are unacceptable and intolerable,” she said.
Sara Forman, executive director of the New York Solidarity Network, also praised Mamdani’s “cutting ties” with Da Costa, but cautioned that ““had she said ‘Zionist’ instead of ‘Jew’ the response from the incoming Mamdani administration and the outcome we just witnessed would likely have been quite different.”
David Friedman, the former US Ambassador to Israel, expressed a more skeptical view of Da Costa’s decision to step down.
“Seems like every Mamdani appointee has something in common — an intense dislike for Jews,” he said.
The resignation marks an early setback for Mamdani’s mayoral transition and is likely to keep questions about antisemitism and accountability at the forefront as his administration begins to take shape. Mamdani has repeatedly stressed his commitment to protecting New York City’s Jewish community amid ongoing concern over rising antisemitism in the city and his own anti-Israel viewpoints.
Mamdani, a far-left democratic socialist and anti-Zionist, is an avid supporter of boycotting all Israeli-tied entities who has been widely accused of promoting antisemitic rhetoric. He has repeatedly accused Israel of “apartheid” and “genocide”; refused to recognize the country’s right to exist as a Jewish state; and refused to explicitly condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which has been associated with calls for violence against Jews and Israelis worldwide. During his tenure in the NYC City Council, Mamdani spearheaded the “Not on our dime!: Ending New York Funding of Israeli Settler Violence Act,” legislation which would ban charities from using tax-deductible donations to aid organizations that work in the West Bank. In 2021, Mamdani issued public support for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement—an initiative which seeks to economically and diplomatically isolate Israel in the first step to its eventual destruction.
Notably, on Oct. 8, 2023, 24 hours following the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, Mamdani published a statement condemning “Netanyahu’s declaration of war” and suggesting that Israel would use the terror attacks to justify committing a second “Nakba.” Mamdani then said that Israel can only secure its long term safety by “ending the occupation and dismantling apartheid.”