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Columbia professor Mahmood Mamdani, father of NYC Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, criticizes university over antisemitism and protests
Mahmood Mamdani, a longtime Columbia University professor and father of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, sharply criticized the school’s leadership and its creation of a task force to address allegations of antisemitism in a recent interview with progressive writer Peter Beinart.
Students who hold pro-Palestinian views are “terrified” and “terrorized,” Mamdani said in a Zoom call for Beinart’s Substack on Friday. “The smallest move they make, they are targeted, they are expelled, they are suspended and they are warned. Which means we have less and less of an idea of what they think and how they might respond to their situation.” Beinart is editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, which co-hosted the webinar.
Mamdani, who has been on medical leave since September, refused to discuss his son’s views or how his son was raised, a condition for participating in the conversation, he said. Though he briefly acknowledged the election’s broader significance as an immigrant was elected to the city’s highest office.
Mamdani, who has been critical of Israel and teaches about the Middle East, South Asia and Africa, said the school’s leadership is in a “vindictive mood” since it entered a settlement with the Trump administration and created a task force to address complaints of harassment and allegations of antisemitism by Jews on campus.
Pro-Palestinian protests intensified in April 2024 after a House hearing highlighted antisemitism at Columbia and the school’s police crackdown on students.
Mamdani, a faculty senator at Columbia, said he was planning to suggest at a Senate meeting convened on Friday a “healing process” through an alternative, broad-based commission on discrimination, rather than separate initiatives for specific groups to address concerns about Islamophobia or other forms of discrimination.
“Can’t you resist turning anti-discrimination into a device to set up one group of students against another group of students, like a divide and rule policy under British colonialism that I grew up under,” he said about the university’s approach.
“I think these people have lost a sense of what it means to govern,” Mamdani said, pointing to the Board of Trustees’ struggle to find a new president.
Mamdani said that Minouche Shafik, a former World Bank official who resigned in the summer of 2024 after being accused of exacerbating the turmoil on campus, was ill-equipped to handle the student encampments that erupted shortly after she took on the top post. “To her credit, when she realized that, she resigned,” Mamdani said.
Columbia has struggled to install permanent leadership since Shafik’s departure. Katrina Armstrong, a medical school executive, stepped down from her interim post in March after the university agreed to a list of demands from the White House. Claire Shipman is the current acting president. The Columbia Spectator, the student newspaper, reported that this is the longest the university has gone without a permanent president since 1948.
Mamdani on the U.S.-Israel relationship
In Friday’s interview, Mamdani also spoke about comparative scholarship on settler colonialism, including his work on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and South Africa. He said that U.S. policy toward Israel differs fundamentally from its past approach to apartheid South Africa because Israel is an “internal issue” in American politics. “To face up to Israel will require some significant changes inside the U.S.,” Mamdani said.
The Mayor-elect is a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, and faced fierce backlash for refusing to outright condemn the use of the slogan “‘globalize the intifada”’ at some of the protests for Palestinian rights and against the war in Gaza. His victory in the Democratic primary was attributed to a surge among young and new voters who agreed with his views. In the general election, Mamdani swept progressive Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Manhattan on his way to a citywide win. He recently met with Jewish leaders to discuss his positions.
Mamdani did talk about his son’s election and stance on Israel in an interview with Democracy Now. “His refusal to budge, to soften his critique of the state of Israel, even in the face of millions of dollars being pumped against him, even in the face of big personalities, including the president of the United States, coming out against him, his refusal to change his stand, convinced the electorate that this was a man of principle,” Mamdani said.
In the webinar with Beinart, the senior Mamdani said that meaningful political change will come from younger Jews and Palestinians in the diaspora rather than from within Israel itself. “Jewish children in New York City have become increasingly skeptical of the direction in which Israel has been moving,” he said, “and increasingly disillusioned with both the moral and the political efficacy of that route and are increasingly open to exploring an alternative.”
This week, Mamdani released his 12th book, Slow Poison, a political history of Uganda under the dictators Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni. His next book is about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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Pentagon Preparing for Weeks of Ground Operations in Iran
US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth holds a briefing with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine, amid the US-Israeli war on Iran, at the Pentagon in Washington, DC, US, March 19, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Evan Vucci
The Pentagon is preparing for weeks of ground operations in Iran, the Washington Post reported Saturday, citing US officials.
The plans could involve raids by Special Operations and conventional infantry troops, the Post reported. Whether President Donald Trump would approve any of those plans remains uncertain, according to the Post.
The Trump administration has deployed US Marines to the Middle East as the war in Iran stretches into its fifth week, and also has been planning to send thousands of soldiers from the US Army’s 82nd Airborne to the region.
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America’s oldest synagogue closed. Then an unlikely group tended its cemetery.
In 1833, Herald of the Times, a Newport, Rhode Island, newspaper, reported that the remains of Mrs. Rebecca Lopez had been brought from New York by steamboat and placed inside Touro Synagogue.
Dedicated in 1763, the building is now recognized as the nation’s oldest surviving synagogue. Newport had once been home to a thriving colonial Jewish community, but after the Revolutionary War and the city’s economic decline, that community had largely faded. The cemetery remained, and so did the synagogue. It was during that long interval of near-absence that Lopez’s funeral briefly reopened Jewish ritual life in Newport.
After prayers were read by Rabbi Isaac Seixas of New York, the body was carried to the cemetery on Touro Street, with “the clergy, town council, and a numerous concourse of spectators” joining the funeral procession. The paper noted that a Jewish ceremony had not been performed there “for the space of forty years.”
Newport’s Jewish burial ground dated to 1677. In 1822, Abraham Touro left money for the upkeep of the cemetery, the synagogue, and the street on which they stood. The fund was placed under trustees appointed by the Rhode Island legislature, and Newport’s Town Council was later authorized to use the interest for repairs.
While Newport’s Jewish population declined, the endowment ensured that the synagogue building and cemetery grounds continued to be maintained. In 1826, the Town Council reported that it had tried to repair the synagogue using the Touro fund, but could not proceed because it had not been able to obtain the keys from Shearith Israel in New York. Many of Newport’s former Jewish residents had relocated there, and the congregations had longstanding ties.
In 1842, the council contracted to enclose the synagogue lot with a substantial stone wall and an ornamental cast-iron fence, modeled on the fence around the Jewish cemetery. The work included a Quincy granite base and a gateway on Touro Street designed to correspond with the synagogue’s portico. The project cost $6,835.
The synagogue’s doors rarely opened, and often only for moments of mourning. In June 1854, Newport received the body of Judah Touro, one of the most prominent American Jews of his era, a native of the town and brother of Abraham Touro. The Herald of the Times reported that “the streets was [sic] crowded with people, the stores all closed, and the bells tolled.”
The City Council assembled at City Hall and marched in procession to the synagogue, where “thousands remained outside” during the service. At the funeral, Newport’s mayor, William C. Cozzens, spoke of the trust that had long existed between the city and local Jewish families, recalling that the synagogue and cemetery had been left in Newport’s care and maintained there “with ample means for their preservation.”
When Henry Wadsworth Longfellow visited Newport’s Jewish cemetery that same year, he wrote of the graves as “silent beside the never-silent waves.” He noticed, too, what endured there: “Gone are the living, but the dead remain,” he observed, “and not neglected.”
Newport’s preservation of Jewish sacred space was shared. Jews endowed these places and returned to bury their dead there. Christian officials repaired, protected, and publicly honored them. In this way, a Jewish inheritance was carried forward until communal life returned.
In 1883, Touro Synagogue was rededicated and a new Jewish community established in Newport. But even in the window of years when the congregation was gone, the dead were not abandoned.
The graves were kept.
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Milwaukee rabbi and son ordered to pay $1,000 to muralist who reportedly praised Hamas in court
(JTA) — A retired rabbi and his son were sentenced Wednesday in Milwaukee for having destroyed a local mural in 2024 that depicted the Star of David transforming into a swastika.
Rabbi Peter and Zechariah “Zee” Mehler were ordered to pay $1,000 total in restitution to Ihsan Atta, the property owner who had put up the mural. Peter, who pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge for criminal damage, was also fined $50, while Zee, who had pleaded guilty in December, was given a withheld sentence of 25 hours of community service.
The sentencing hearing took another turn when Atta, who is Palestinian, praised Hamas and walked out of the courtroom before being brought back in by deputies to finish the proceedings, according to local news reporters who were present. A transcript of the exchange could not immediately be obtained.
Zee Mehler told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that, despite pleading guilty, he felt “vindicated.”
“What we did was illegal and needed to be answered for. But at the same time, what we saw was a very strong response from the city and the court that showed that they have no patience or time for this anti-Israel narrative,” he said. “They recognize the way that it has spread antisemitism, and they recognize the way that it’s caused so much global harm to the Jewish community.”
The case dates back to September 2024, when the Mehlers used a hammer and other tools to tear down Atta’s recently installed mural in full view of security cameras. They have long maintained that, while they understood it was illegal to destroy the mural, they did so out of concern for the safety of the local Jewish community.
Atta’s mural included the words “The irony of becoming what you once hated” surrounding a Star of David transforming into a swastika; the background of the mural appeared to depict scenes of destruction in Gaza. The Mehlers viewed the mural as incitement. At the time of their actions, it had already been condemned by local Jewish groups and the Milwaukee City Council.
In the courtroom, Zee, wearing long dreadlocks, escorted his father, who is 74 years old and has Guillain-Barre syndrome, in a wheelchair. Peter recently lost the ability to walk, his son said: “This has been a really rough few years for him.”
According to reports, circuit court judge Jack Dávila interrupted Atta when he began praising Hamas and instructed him not to make comments unrelated to the crime.
“We’re not going to solve the world’s problems with this hearing,” the judge reportedly told Atta, who apologized for his actions. In a video posted after the verdict, Atta called the proceedings a “kangaroo court” and stated, “We must have judges that are on the Epstein files, because we’ve got clowns running the courthouse.”
Atta’s actions in court, Zee Mehler said, meant “I didn’t really need to do much.”
“He was called to testify, and he absolutely buried himself,” Mehler said. “I can’t believe he said that he supports Hamas in a court, on the record. That’s a crazy thing to do.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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