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Angela Buchdahl, prominent NYC rabbi, ratchets up criticism of Zohran Mamdani — and cautions against Jewish infighting
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, one of New York City’s most prominent rabbis, addressed the growing turmoil within New York’s Jewish community over the upcoming mayoral election — delivering a sermon at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue Friday night that included her most pointed comments yet about frontrunner Zohran Mamdani, while reaffirming her refusal to endorse or oppose any political candidate.
“I fear living in a city, and a nation, where anti-Zionist rhetoric is normalized and contagious,” Buchdahl said during services at her synagogue, one of the country’s largest Reform congregations. “Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has contributed to a mainstreaming of some of the most abhorrent antisemitism.”
She cited Mamdani’s 2023 remark, surfaced this week, saying the New York Police Department had learned aggressive policing tactics from the Israeli army and his past reluctance to label Hamas a terrorist group.
Yet even as she condemned the rhetoric, Buchdahl rejected calls from some in the Jewish community to endorse in the mayoral race — a demand that has placed her, and other prominent New York rabbis, under intense pressure in recent weeks.
The city’s Jewish institutions, already reeling from a war in Gaza that led to intense anti-Israel protests, have been alarmed by the rise of Mamdani, a progressive state assemblyman from Queens and anti-Zionist critic of Israel. Jewish leaders across the denominational spectrum have debated whether rabbis should publicly oppose his candidacy, citing fears about normalization of anti-Zionism in politics and worries that if elected Mamdani will not protect Jewish interests.
Last month, over 1,100 Jewish clergy signed a letter denouncing Mamdani and the “normalization of anti-Zionism,” quoting another prominent Manhattan rabbi, Elliot Cosgrove of Park Avenue Synagogue, who in a recent sermon endorsed Mamdani’s independent opponent, former N.Y. Gov. Andrew Cuomo. In a sign that Jews are not of one mind on Mamdani’s candidacy, more that 200 rabbis, at least 40 located in or near New York City, signed a second letter charging the first letter was divisive.
Buchdahl, who has a national profile as the country’s first Asian-American woman rabbi and as a sought-out spokesperson on Jewish affairs, had previously written to her members to explain why she would not endorse any candidate or sign public political letters, despite her “steadfast support of Israel and Zionism.”
After Buchdahl declined to sign the rabbinic letter, she drew withering attacks on social media from those who said she was failing to advance Jewish interests — some from her own congregants.
In her latest remarks, Buchdahl said she felt so compelled to address the tension directly that she returned during a sabbatical taken to promote her new book.
“I knew I needed to be here with my Jewish family,” she said. “Some of you agreed with my position. Some of you, very emphatically, did not.”
She continued, “I was flooded with emails of support, and I want to thank all of you who shared those words with me. But I want to offer even more thanks to those of you who privately and respectfully shared your disagreement with me. I have been listening, and I want to respond in person tonight because that is what you do when you care about your family.”
Buchdahl framed her sermon around Lech Lecha, the Torah portion in which Abraham and Sarah leave the familiarity of home for “a place they do not know.” The story, she suggested, mirrors the community’s uncertainty about its place in a shifting political and moral landscape.
She spoke both to those who see the election as “an existential moment for our Jewish community” and to younger Jews who fear that “our community has become too focused on fear and what can be done to us.”
She acknowledged that Mamdani has met recently with Jewish civic and business leaders and softened some of his language. “I would not quickly trust a campaigning politician changing his lifelong positions,” she said. “But I hear those who believe we must engage even with those we deeply disagree with, or risk isolating ourselves from the broader good of this city.”
Drawing on an idea from Israeli writer Yossi Klein Halevi, Buchdahl described the community’s divide as one between “Purim Jews” — who prioritize vigilance and self-protection — and “Passover Jews,” who emphasize empathy and justice for the vulnerable. “Both memories are sacred, and both are necessary,” she said. “Compassion without caution is reckless naïveté; vigilance without empathy is paranoia or despair.”
While acknowledging that she is “terrified by how anti-Zionist rhetoric and antisemitic tropes have led to some deadly violence against Jews,” Buchdahl also turned her concern inward to talk about the internal Jewish tensions. “It endangers all of us: the way we are trying to impose a litmus test on other Jews, essentially saying you’re either with us or you’re against us,” she said. “Pitting Jew against Jew. Rabbi against rabbi.”
She warned that such divisions could do more damage than any outside threat. “Both Temples were destroyed because of sinat chinam — senseless hate,” she said. “We can argue robustly and should. But disputation does not require defamation.”
Buchdahl also defended her decision not to make political endorsements, invoking both the federal Johnson Amendment — the decades-old ban on political campaigning by religious institutions that the IRS recently announced it would stop enforcing — and Central Synagogue’s own policy of non-endorsement. “Once a rabbi can tell you how to vote, imagine donations being given, or withheld, in exchange for a rabbi’s thumb on the scale,” she said.
Instead, she pledged to continue speaking on “moral issues that unfold in the political realm,” regardless of partisanship. “I thanked President Biden for standing with Israel after Oct. 7, and I thanked President Trump for helping bring home the hostages after others failed,” she said.
Buchdahl concluded with a message of hope, describing meetings with Jewish students at Yale, Brandeis and Harvard who, she said, “don’t want to be defined by fear.”
“They want a Jewish community where disagreement doesn’t mean disconnection,” she said. “We will find our way forward if we walk it together.”
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The post Angela Buchdahl, prominent NYC rabbi, ratchets up criticism of Zohran Mamdani — and cautions against Jewish infighting appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The Psychology Behind the Rise in Right-Wing Antisemitism
Tucker Carlson speaks on July 18, 2024, during the final day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Photo: Jasper Colt-USA TODAY via Reuters Connect
Over the past year or so, there has been a strange and unsettling shift on parts of the political and cultural right. Figures who built their influence by pushing back against progressive excess, moral confusion, intellectual laziness, and the erosion of democratic values have begun drifting into territory that should have been left behind long ago — antisemitic tropes, conspiratorial thinking, and flirtations with ideas they themselves once would have dismissed as corrosive and dangerous.
It has been very upsetting to watch, not least because many of these voices rose to prominence by presenting themselves as more serious, more grounded, and more responsible than the alternatives they criticized.
Some have pointed to foreign money and malign external influences – with Qatar chief among them as a reliable patron of some of the most destructive forces in the modern world – as an explanation. It would be naïve to deny that such actors play a role. But that explanation, on its own, is not enough to explain this phenomenon.
Even if Qatari money helps shape narratives at the top of the pyramid – and their possible involvement absolutely deserves scrutiny – it does not explain the sheer number of willing followers who nod along to contentious statements and ridiculous conspiracies without being paid a cent by anyone.
Elite influencers may be driven by incentives tied to financial or political power, but the grassroots level is clearly motivated by something else. Money may help light the match, but it does not explain why so many people are eager to watch the fire burn – and then cheer it on.
The instinctive response is to frame all of this as ideological betrayal – and then to draw battle lines, or to declare that the political culture of Western democracies is fundamentally broken. But that reaction is the wrong approach. It shuts down thought precisely when careful thinking is needed most. Because at its core, something more human – and far more familiar – seems to be going on.
What makes this moment so counterintuitive is that this regression on the right has not emerged from defeat or marginalization. It has emerged from success.
The stunning political victory by the Republicans in November 2024 should, in theory, have been followed by a period of consolidation – a sharpening of ideas and a renewed sense of responsibility. Instead, we are witnessing a growing rift between principled conservatism and a darker, more reckless version of right-wing beliefs. That paradox suggests we are dealing less with ideology than with a psychological response to the sudden expansion of freedom and power.
We tend to assume that success produces stability and confidence. History suggests otherwise. When people or movements feel genuinely embattled, they often develop discipline, clarity, and a strong sense of shared purpose – an understanding of what matters and what must be set aside for the greater good.
But when the wind is at their backs, and a threat – real or imagined – appears on the horizon, the result is often anxiety: “We might lose what we have!” And anxiety is dangerous. It clouds judgment and tempts people to reach for ideas they already know are corrosive, simply because they feel familiar.
History offers some sobering examples. After years of devastating war under Napoleon, France in 1814 finally rid itself of him and he was exiled to Elba. The country had a rare opportunity to step back, recover, and build something more stable and restrained. But when Napoleon escaped from Elba a year later and returned to France, large parts of the country welcomed him back.
Soldiers sent to arrest him joined him instead. Within weeks, France had re-embraced the very man who had brought it to ruin, and 100 days later, they paid for it at Waterloo. The regression was not imposed from above. It was embraced from below – and it was an utter disaster.
Ancient Rome offers a similar lesson. The Roman Republic was built on restraint, combined with a sophisticated system of checks and balances and a healthy suspicion of the concentration of power into the hands of one man. And yet Julius Caesar’s rise was welcomed by many as a solution to a period of dysfunction.
He was appointed dictator, and what followed was not renewal but the oppressive age of emperors. Rome gained order but lost its liberty. Once again, faced with uncertainty, a civilization chose a familiar system that was bad over the harder work of repair and healing — and they called it progress.
The Torah identifies this same flaw in human nature at the very beginning of Jewish history, in Parshat Beshalach. Just days after experiencing one of the most dramatic liberations ever achieved by a slave nation – the Exodus from Egypt – the newly freed Jewish people find themselves trapped between the sea and Pharaoh’s approaching army.
Despite everything they know – that God has redeemed them, that awesome miracles have carried them this far – panic sets in. They turn on Moses and cry out: “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you took us out to die in the wilderness?”
And then comes a line so jarring that it almost feels like parody (Ex. 14:12): טוֹב לָנוּ עֲבֹד אֶת־מִצְרַיִם מִמֻּתֵנוּ בַּמִּדְבָּר – “It would have been better for us to serve Egypt than to die in the wilderness.”
How is this even possible? These are people who have just witnessed the collapse of the most powerful empire on earth for their benefit – who are, in that moment, at the very top of their game. And yet, even as they bask in the glow of victory, the instant their freedom begins to feel fragile, their instinct is not to move forward into the rational unknown but to retreat into what they already know is irrational evil.
That is the crucial point. It is not a calculation that makes sense, nor is it a carefully thought-out strategy; it is a psychological reflex, and a dangerous one. Faced with what feels like an existential threat, people often reach for the familiar – even when that is the worst possible thing they could do.
Which is what makes the current flirtation with antisemitism and conspiracy thinking on certain parts of the right so disturbing. These are old instincts, long known to be destructive, that have now resurfaced because they feel familiar, as some on the right feel tinges of anxiety.
But familiarity is not necessarily wisdom; far more often, it is a dangerous trap. A recent study suggests that engagement with antisemitic conspiracy theories on the right has risen dramatically since the November 2024 election. Unless this trend is halted, it won’t end well.
The Torah’s message at the sea is uncompromising. The way forward is not to turn backward. Redemption does not come from retreating into the habits and ideas that once enslaved and degraded us. The sea will open up and offer salvation only when someone is willing to step into it – to take the risk, and to trust that moral clarity and courage still matter.
Regression may feel comforting, but it leads nowhere. The only way forward is through.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
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Karen Jones and the Institutionalization of Medical Dhimmitude
Illustrative: Health workers move a woman on a stretcher to an ambulance after a deadly terrorist shooting at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, on Dec. 14, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
The reports emerging from Sydney’s Liverpool Hospital are not merely a localized administrative failure; they represent a chilling indicator of a new, institutionalized “dhimmitude” taking root in the heart of Western society.
Rosalia Shikhverg, a survivor of the horrific Bondi Beach Hanukkah massacre on Dec. 14, was admitted for treatment of shrapnel and gunshot wounds to the head. While she lay in her hospital bed, terrified and recovering from a terror attack that claimed 15 lives, staff — without her knowledge or consent — snipped her medical wristband and replaced it with a new one. Her name was gone. In its place was the alias “Karen Jones,” with her religious status completely scrubbed from official records.
The hospital’s defense, offered through state health officials, is perhaps more terrifying than the act itself. Officials claimed the name change was a “protective measure” to shield a high-profile victim from media intrusion following the heightened risks in Sydney. But Shikhverg’s own account points to a more sinister and systemic motivation: the hospital administration apparently did not trust its own staff to provide equal, safe care to a patient identified as Jewish. Shikhverg recounted how the switch left her more focused on a fear of her caregivers than her physical injuries, crying incessantly and pleading for an early discharge because she felt profoundly unsafe.
This incident represents the logical culmination of a process by which the values of the Middle East’s most regressive ideologies are imported into Western civil society. When a premier medical institution in a Western democracy feels compelled to erase a Jewish patient’s identity to ensure her safety from the very people hired to heal her, we are no longer talking about a mere “spillover” of the Gaza conflict. We are witnessing the surrender of Western professional ethics to the mob.
This is the rebirth of dhimmitude. In the classical tradition, the dhimmi was a protected non-Muslim subject granted life and property only on the condition of submission and the public erasure of their distinct identity.
In 2026, a modern hospital has effectively recreated this status. By stripping Shikhverg of her name and her religion, the hospital sent a clear message: Jewish identity is a provocation and a “safety risk” that the state can no longer manage. It suggests that the only way to protect a Jew in a modern metropolis is to ensure that they are no longer recognizable as a Jew.
This betrayal is not an isolated event. It follows the recent suspension of nurses at other nearby facilities who were caught on video bragging about their refusal to treat Israelis and expressing a desire to kill Jewish patients. The “Karen Jones” incident shows that instead of purging these radical elements from the health-care system, administrators have chosen a path of appeasement. They have decided that it is easier to erase the patient than to confront the radicalization of the workforce.
The “long march through the institutions” by radical ideologues has finally reached the bedside. We have seen this pattern on campuses, where “Jew-free zones” are established under the guise of “safe spaces,” and in the courts, where legal harassment is used to silence critics of extremism. Now, the hospital ward has become the next frontier of exclusion. If a nurse or a doctor cannot look at a patient with a Jewish name without the administration fearing for the patient’s life, then the social contract of the Western democracy has been fundamentally breached.
If the West is to survive this ideological assault, the response must be uncompromising. There must be a full, independent audit of radicalization within the public health systems of major Western cities. The administrators who authorized the erasure of Rosalia Shikhverg’s identity must be held legally and professionally accountable for civil rights violations. Furthermore, governments must recognize that non-violent subversion of Western values is just as dangerous as the violent jihad that targeted Boni Beach on Hanukkah.
Rosalia Shikhverg survived the bullets of a terrorist only to be erased by the bureaucracy of a hospital. We must ensure that “Karen Jones” is the last alias a Jew is forced to wear in a Western democracy. Peace and security cannot be built on a foundation of coerced invisibility. The survival of pluralistic society depends on the ability of every citizen to exist openly, without fear that their identity will become a death warrant in the hands of those sworn to protect them.
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Palestinian Terrorists Admit Their Own Rockets Kill Gazans, and the Media Look the Other Way
People inspect the area of Al-Ahli hospital where Palestinians were killed in a blast from an errant Islamic Palestinian Jihad rocket meant for Israel, in Gaza City, Oct. 18, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Ahmed Zakot
A document seized in Gaza and reported by Israel’s Kan public broadcaster exposes a reality that sharply contradicts much of the global coverage of the Israel-Hamas war: Palestinian civilians have long been killed by Palestinian rockets and terrorist leaders knew it, discussed it, and accepted it.
The document records a meeting between Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad officials held before Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel and the war that followed. In it, Hamas representatives confront Islamic Jihad leaders over a deadly and recurring problem: rockets misfiring and landing inside Gaza, killing civilians.
“Your rockets are falling on people’s homes, and this is a recurring issue,” a Hamas official is quoted as saying.
The response from Islamic Jihad is even more damning. “We are at war,” a senior representative of the terrorist group replies. “Even if a thousand people are killed by friendly fire, that is the price of war.”
This is not a battlefield mishap acknowledged after the fact. It is an explicit, pre-war admission that Palestinian terrorist groups were aware their weapons routinely killed civilians and that they viewed those deaths as acceptable.
The document also records Islamic Jihad officials admitting that they knew their rockets were defective. According to the report, the weapons were manufactured using blueprints supplied by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. In other words, unreliable rockets were knowingly produced, launched from densely populated areas, and expected to fall short.
Image of the seized document, as presented by Kan Public Broadcaster
This matters because it directly undermines a central assumption that has dominated coverage of Gaza for years and intensified after Oct. 7: that civilian casualties are almost entirely the result of Israeli fire.
Kan’s report does not quantify how many Gazans have been killed by Palestinian rockets. But it does establish something journalists have consistently avoided confronting: terrorist groups themselves acknowledge that their own fire kills civilians and that this has been happening for years.
That reality burst briefly into view 10 days after the war began, when a PIJ rocket exploded in the courtyard of a Gaza hospital, killing hundreds of Palestinians. Israel was immediately blamed across much of the international media. Only later did evidence emerge that the blast was caused by a misfired Palestinian rocket.
This newly revealed document shows that the incident was not an anomaly. It was a known risk discussed internally long before Oct. 7.
So, why has this revelation barely registered outside Israel?
Journalists often justify their reliance on casualty figures and on the fog of war. But here, there is no ambiguity. This is a primary source document describing internal discussions between terrorist groups, criticizing each other for weapons failures and explicitly accepting civilian deaths as collateral.
If such a document emerged showing Israeli officials dismissing civilian deaths as “the price of war,” it would dominate headlines worldwide. When terrorist groups say it among themselves, it is met with silence.
This selective attention has consequences. Media outlets routinely report Gaza casualties without asking how many were caused by Palestinian fire. They rarely revisit earlier claims when new evidence emerges. And they almost never scrutinize the conduct of terrorist groups with the same intensity they apply to Israel.
The Kan report exposes not just the recklessness of Palestinian terrorist organizations but the media’s unwillingness to reckon with it. By ignoring evidence that complicates a simplified narrative, journalists deprive audiences of essential context and accountability.
This document does not absolve Israel of scrutiny. But it does demand that journalists stop treating Palestinian armed groups as passive actors whose actions are irrelevant to civilian harm.
Terrorists killing their own civilians is not a footnote. It is a central fact of this conflict. The question is no longer whether the evidence exists.
It is why so many in the media choose not to report it.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.