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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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‘No speaking Swedish here!’ — Yiddish Day in Lund University
דעם 26סטן פֿעברואַר 2026 איז אין לונד, שװעדן, פֿאָרגעקומען אַ „ייִדיש־טאָג“.
דער לונדער אוניװערסיטעט בשותּפֿות מיטן שוועדישן אינסטיטוט פֿאַר שפּראַכן און פֿאָלקלאָר („איסאָף“) האָבן אָרגאַניזירט אַ צונױפֿטרעף פֿון אַמאָליקע און איצטיקע לונדער ייִדיש־סטודענטן. ס׳רובֿ הײַנטיקע ייִדיש־לימודים בײַם לונדער אוניװערסיטעט װערן געלערנט אָנלײַן, אין דיסטאַנצקורסן. דערפֿאַר איז דער ייִדיש־טאָג פֿאַר עטלעכע אָנטייל־נעמערס געװען דאָס ערשטע מאָל װאָס זײ טרעפֿן זיך מיט זײערע שותּפֿים און לערערס מחוץ די ראַמען פֿון קאָמפּיוטער־עקראַן.
אַחוץ סטודענטן און רעדנערס, האָט מען אויך פֿאַרבעטן מאַמע־לשון־רעדערס פֿון מאַלמע, אַ שטאָט נאָענט צו לונד מיט אַ גרעסערער ייִדישער קהילה. די טאַטעס און מאַמעס פֿון די הײַנטיקע מאַלמער ייִדיש־רעדערס זײַנען געװען פֿון דער שארית־הפּליטה און האָבן זיך בשעת אָדער קורץ נאָכן חורבן באַזעצט אין שװעדן. דאָס איז דער דור וואָס האָט אויפֿגעשטעלט דעם „ייִדישן קולטור־פֿאַראײן 1945“ אין מאַלמע.
די איבעריקע אָנטײל־נעמערס זײַנען געקומען צו פֿאָרן פֿון גאַנץ שװעדן, און אױך פֿון נאָרװעגיע, פֿינלאַנד, דענמאַרק, דײַטשלאַנד און האָלאַנד. אַלץ אין איינעם האָט די אונטערנעמונג צוגעצויגן אַ 30 מענטשן, פֿון יונגע סטודענטן ביז יונגע פּענסיאָנערן.
„פֿיקאַ“
אַ שוועדיש וואָרט אינעם אָרטיקן ייִדיש: אַ שמועס אַרום אַ טעפּל קאַווע מיט קוכן און אױבס.
מיט אַזאַ „פֿיקאַ“ האָט זיך נײַן אַ זײגער אָנגעהױבן די פּראָגראַם. די אָנגעקומענע האָבן זיך באַגריסט צװישן זיך, זיך פֿאַרשריבן, און יעדער אײנער האָט זיך אָנגעקלעפּט אַ ייִדיש־שפּראַכיק נאָמען־צעטל.
מאַריאַ פּערסאָן (ראָש פֿונעם צענטער פֿאַר שפּראַכן און ליטעראַטור בײַם לונדער אוניװערסיטעט) און ראָקעל נילען (קאָאָרדינאַטאָרשע פֿון די ייִדיש־לימודים) האָבן מקבל־פּנים געװען דעם עולם מיט אַ קורצער באַגריסונג אויף ענגליש. גלײַך נאָך דעם איז מען אַריבער אױף ייִדיש: אליעזר ניבאָרסקי און אורן כּהן ראָמאַן האָבן פֿאָרגעשטעלט די מיט-אָרגאַניזאַטאָרן פֿון „איסאָף“. מע האָט אָנגעװוּנטשן, אַז יעדער אײנער זאָל „הנאה האָבן פֿון ייִדישן װאָרט.“
און דאָס האָט זיך תּיכּף אײַנגעגעבן: מע האָט זיך אַרײַנגעטאָן אין אַ ליטעראַטור־װאַרשטאַט, וווּ עטלעכע אָנטײל־נעמערס האָבן פֿאָרגעלײענט לידער פֿון אַבֿרהם רײזען, ישׂראל שטערן, קאַדיע מאָלאָדאָװסקי, איציק מאַנגער און ציליע דראַפּקין. אַז איין סטודענטקע האָט פֿאָרגעלייענט דאָס פֿאָלקסליד „אַ מאָל איז געװען אַ מעשׂה“, האָט דער גאַנצער עולם גענומען זינגען אין איינעם. מע האָט געלײענט ניקאָלײַ אָלניאַנסקיס אַ פֿיקטיווע באַשרײַבונג פֿונעם אַמאָליקן ייִדישן קװאַרטאַל אין לונד און בפֿרט פֿון איין באַזונדער הײַזל.
אײנער פֿון די אָנטײל־נעמער האָט אויך דעקלאַמירט אײגענע פּאָעטישע און דראַמאַטישע טעקסטן.
בעת אַ צװײטער „פֿיקאַ“ האָט מען געהאַט די געלעגנהײט אַ קוק צו טאָן אױף די נײַסטע ייִדישע אױסגאַבעס אין די זאַמלונגען פֿון דער אוניווערסיטעט־ביבליאָטעק, מערסטנס פֿונעם שװעדישן „אָלניאַנסקי־פֿאַרלאַג“. ס׳רובֿ אָנטײל־נעמערס האָבן לײַכט געשמועסט און זיך אױסגעשפּאַנט מיט אַ טעפּעלע קאַװע, נאָר עטלעכע סטודענטן פֿון צװײטן יאָר האָבן שױן אָנגעהויבן דורכפֿירן אינטערװיוען צוצוגרייטן אַ רעפּאָרטאַזש וועגן דער קאָנפֿערענץ.
שידוכים
הײַנט איז נישט דאָס ערשטע מאָל װי מע לײענט װעגן לונד אין דער ייִדישער פּרעסע. אליעזר ניבאָרסקי האָט געברענגט „אַלטע נײַעס“ און פֿאָרגעשטעלט עטלעכע אַנאָנסן און באַריכטן בנוגע לונד אין אַמאָליקע צײַטונגען. נאָך אין 1895, עטלעכע יאָר נאָך דעם ווי אַ צאָל ייִדישע אימיגראַנטן ליטוואַקעס האָבן זיך אײַנגעאָרדנט אין אַ נײַעם פּעריפֿערישן קוואַרטאַל פֿון דער שטאָט, האָט מען געזוכט דורך אַנאָנסן אַזש אין װאַרשע אַ בעלן אויף אַ פּאָסטן פֿון שוחט, שליח־ציבור און מלמד אין לונד. און עס װײַזט זיך אַרױס אַז אין 1940, שוין לאַנג נאָך דער בליצײַט פֿונעם „לונדער שטעטל“, האָבן די „לונדער כּלות“ נאָך געהאַט אַ שם צווישן שוועדישע ייִדן.
נאָך דעם האָט סימאָ מויִר, אַ פֿאָרשער פֿון דער ייִדישער שפּראַך און חורבן־לימודים אינעם אוניװערסיטעט פֿון אופּסאַלע, שװעדן, װאָס האָט פֿריִער געלערנט ייִדיש בײַם לונדער אוניווערסיטעט, געהאַלטן אַ רעפֿעראַט װעגן דעם פּראָיעקט „ייִדיש אין די שװעדישע אַרכיװן“. מע האַלט אין צוגרײטן אַ דיגיטאַלישן קאַטאַלאָג פֿון די ייִדישע מאַטעריאַלן װאָס געפֿינען זיך, אָפֿט מאָל אָן געהעריקע באַשרײַבונגען, אין די שװעדישע אַרכיװן.
מויִר האָט געװיזן בילדער און כּתבֿ־ידן פֿון די אַרכיװן אין שטעט װי שטאָקהאָלם, קריסטיאַנשטאַט און מאַלמע, און דערמאָנט אַז עס װאָלט געװען כּדאַי אויסצופֿאָרשן און צושטעלן די נעמען פֿון די מענטשן אױף די בילדער. האָט זיך אָפּגערופֿן דער פֿאָרזיצער פֿון מאַלמער קולטור־פֿאַראײן, יערי אײלנבערג: „דאַרפֿט איר פֿרעגן מיך, איך האָב זײ דאָך אַלע געקענט!“
דער פֿאָרשער האָט אויך גערעדט װעגן דער פּראָבלעם, אַז מע װײסט שױן נישט װוּ עס געפֿינען זיך טייל אַרכיװ־מאַטעריאַלן. זײער אַ סך פֿון צווישן די 1940ער און 1960ער יאָרן איז אַ פּנים נעלם געװאָרן, למשל פֿונעם אַרכיװ פֿון דער מאַלמער ייִדישער ביבליאָטעק. האָט זיך אָבער יערי אײלנבערג גלײַך אָפּגערופֿן: „דאָס האָבן מיר פֿאַר אַ יאָרן אַלץ אַרױסגעשלעפּט, די קעסטלעך שטײען בײַ מיר אױפֿן בױדעם.“ אַזוי אַרום האָט דער ייִדיש־טאָג טאַקע בײַגעטראָגן צו אַ פֿרוכפּערדיקן אױסבײַט צװישן פֿאָרשערס און דעם ברייטן עולם.
מיטאָג האָט מען געגעסן בײַ איינער פֿון די אוניװערסיטעטישע קאַפֿעטעריעס: עס איז געשטאַנען אַ בופֿעט מיט כּל־המינים גוטע מיטל־מיזרחדיקע מאכלים און דער עולם האָט זיך צונױפֿגעקליבן בײַ די טישלעך און געשמועסט גאַנץ לײַטיש, זיך דערצײלט װיצן – אױף ייִדיש, פֿאַרשטײט זיך.
– יערי, קײן שװעדיש רעדט מען נישט!
– זײַ מוחל! איך האָב שױן נישט געטראַכט אַז איך וועל דערלעבן דעם טאָג װאָס די אײנציקע שפּראַך װאָס מע מעג רעדן איז ייִדיש!
אױפֿן פּריפּעטשיק
נאָכן עסן איז מען אַרױס אױף אַ שפּאַציר. מע איז געגאַנגען דורך דעם היסטאָרישן לונדער צענטער שטאָט און די „מדריכים“ אינעם עולם האָבן דערצײלט װעגן אַזאַ צי אַן אַנדער פּרט פֿון דער געשיכטע פֿון ייִדישן לעבן אין לונד. טומאַס װוּדסקי, אַ מיטאַרבעטער פֿון „איסאָף“, האָט אַלעמען דערלאַנגט אַ טיפּיש שװעדישן כּיבוד, היימיש באַקאַנט ווי „שטױבזױגערלעך“: אַ מין זיסװאַרג מיט מאַרציפּאַן און שאָקאָלאַד װאָס איז שטאַרק באַליבט בײַם ייִדיש־אָפּטײל פֿון לונדער אוניווערסיטעט. מע האָט באַזוכט דעם אַמאָליקן ייִדישן קװאַרטאַל און געפֿונען דאָס הײַזל פֿון אָלניאַנסקיס דערצײלונג. פֿאַרן הויז פֿונעם ערשטן ייִדיש־לערער בײַם לונדער אוניווערסיטעט, שלמה שולמאַן ז״ל, האָט זיך די גאַנצע גרופּע אָפּגעשטעלט און געזונגען „אױפֿן פּריפּעטשיק“ לזכר אָט דער באַליבטער פֿיגור.
אַ באַקאַלאַװער
צוריק אין אוניװערסיטעט האָט יאַן שװאַרץ, עמעריטירטער ייִדיש־לעקטאָר אין לונד, געהאַלטן אַ „קלײנע זאַך, נישט קײן רעפֿעראַט“ װעגן זײַנע „לונדער יאָרן“, און דערצײלט װעגן דעם בראשית פֿון די ייִדיש־לימודים אין דער שטאָט, װעגן די חבֿרישע מחלוקתן מיט זײַן קאָלעגע שלמה שולמאַנען, און װעגן זײַן טאַטן, װאָס איז מיט זײַן זאַפֿטיקן פּױלישן ייִדיש געװען אַ יוצא־מן־הכּלל צװישן די ליטװישע קלאַנגען פֿון די ייִדיש־רעדערס אינעם נאָך־מלחמהדיקן דענמאַרק.
די געשיכטע איז אַזאַ: זײַט דעם יאָר 2000 האָט ייִדיש אין שװעדן דעם באַזונדערן סטאַטוס פֿון אַן אָפּגעהיטער מינאָריטעט־שפּראַך. אין 2007 האָט די רעגירונג אָנפֿאַרטרויט דעם לונדער אוניװערסיטעט דאָס אַחריות פֿאַר די ייִדיש־לימודים אין שװעדן, און זײַט 2012 קענען סטודענטן זיך לערנען אױף אַ באַקאַלאַװער אין ייִדישע לימודים.
דער תּחום האָט זיך אַנטװיקלט און הײַנט באַטייליקן זיך אין דעם פֿאָרשערס פֿון פֿאַרשײדענע אוניװערסיטעטן. און בזכות די איבערגעגעבענע טוערס און רעדערס האָט אױפֿגעבליט דאָס קולטורעלע ייִדישע לעבן אין שװעדן פֿון דאָס נײַ.
ווײַטער האָט מען זיך צעטײלט אין דרײַ גרופּעס אױסצופּרוּװן די נײַע ייִדישע „שמועס־קאַרטלעך“ װאָס דער „איסאָף“ האָט אָקערשט אַרױסגעגעבן. עס האָבן זיך אײַנגעשטעלט לעבעדיקע שמועסן אַרום פֿראַגעס װי „מיט װעמען רעדסטו ייִדיש?“ און (בפֿרט אַ שװעדישע פֿראַגע) „װאָסערע מאכלים עסטו לכּבֿוד מיטזומער?“ די טוערס פֿון „איסאָף“ האָבן ברייטהאַרציק געשאָנקען יעדן איינעם אַזאַ פּעשל שמועס־קאַרטלעך.
אין סופּערמאַרק
דער פֿאָרשער אורן כּהן ראָמאַן האָט געהאַלטן אַ רעפֿעראַט „ייִדיש אין סופּערמאַרק“. ער האָט פֿאַרגליכן מאכלים מיט אַ בפֿירושן ייִדישן נאָמען אין העברעיִש־שפּראַכיקע סופּערמערק אין ישׂראל און ענגליש־שפּראַכיקע אין די פֿאַראייניקטע שטאַטן, און דערצײלט װעגן די װאַריאַציעס און בײַטן אין אױסלײג, אַרױסרעד און באַניץ במשך דער צײַט אין די צוויי לענדער. מע האָט זיך צערעדט וועגן דער פֿראַגע, „צי איז „ראָגעלעך“ אויף עבֿרית צי אויף ענגליש אײנצאָל אָדער מערצאָל?“ און „פֿאַר װאָס שרײַבט מען אין ישׂראל אַזוי זעלטן אַ קמץ־אַלף?“
טראַדיציע
פֿאַרן געזעגענען זיך האָבן אַלע אָנטײל־נעמערס געזאָגט אַ װאָרט װעגן זײערע אײַנדרוקן פֿונעם טאָג, און די אָרגאַניזאַטאָרן האָבן אונטערגעצויגן אַ סך־הכּל. האָפֿנטלעך װעט זיך לאָזן אײַנשטעלן אַ טראַדיציע און מע וועט זיך װידער קענען זיך טרעפֿן אין לונד אין 2027.
דער עולם איז זיך פֿונאַנדערגעגאַנגען. אַ ווײַל האָט מען נאָך געהערט ייִדיש אױף די לונדער גאַסן און אין די רעסטאָראַנען. נאָך דעם איז דאָס ייִדיש מיט זײַנע רעדערס אַוועק אױף דער באַנסטאַנציע און אין דער װעלט אַרײַן.
דער ייִדיש־טאָג האָט דערלאַנגט אַלע אָנטײל־נעמערס אַ געלעגנהײט אָנצוקניפּן נײַע באַציִונגען און צו באַנײַען אַלטע חבֿרשאַפֿטן, זיך צו באַקענען מיט דער הײַנטיקער ייִדיש־פֿאָרשונג אין שװעדן און צו פֿילן דעם טעם פֿון דער שװעדיש־ייִדישער קולטור. בײַ ס׳רובֿ אָנטײל־נעמערס איז אָבער געשטאַנען ברומו־של־עולם דער פֿאַקט אַז מע האָט אַ גאַנצן טאָג געקענט הערן און רעדן נאָר ייִדיש.
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We’re forgetting the lessons of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire
When the young women of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory sat down before their Singer sewing machines on Saturday, Mar. 25, 1911, they could not know that their lives would soon be extinguished because of a lit cigarette.
At around 4:40 p.m., a worker flicked a still-smoldering cigarette butt into a bin filled with paper patterns and fabric scraps. The contents ignited instantly. Someone threw a bucket of water to douse the flames — to no avail. Eighteen minutes later, 148 people were dead: 123 women and 25 men, many of them teenagers, most of them immigrants.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which remains the deadliest workplace disaster in New York City and one of the worst in the country, not only shocked the nation, it transformed American labor law. Locked doors, unsafe conditions, and the exploitation of young workers came to symbolize an industrial system that all too often treated human beings as expendable. Public outrage led to sweeping workplace reforms and helped launch modern labor protections.
Now, 115 years later, those hard-won safeguards are eroding.
Across the country, child labor violations are rising. Teenagers are working longer hours and, in some cases, dangerous jobs like working in industrial freezers, on construction sites, and in meat-processing facilities. According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division, the number of children employed illegally nearly quadrupled between 2015 and 2024; meanwhile, the companies that hire them often face minimal penalties.
The lesson of Triangle was clear — when economic pressure meets diminished regulations, minors become the most vulnerable workers. Today’s legislative rollbacks and declining enforcement risk recreating the very conditions reformers fought to eliminate.
Few understood those stakes better than Pauline Newman, one of the most influential labor organizers of the early U.S. labor movement. Born in Lithuania, Newman immigrated to the United States with her mother and sisters after her father’s death. By age nine, she was climbing dark factory stairs to work in a hairbrush factory. Later, she rolled cigars, and by 12, she found work at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, laboring 14 hours a day in what workers called the “kindergarten,” trimming loose threads from finished garments. Shirtwaists arrived piled in cases taller than some of the children themselves.
“We were too young to do anything else,” Newman later recalled.
In one of several pieces she wrote for The Forward, she chronicled her experience working at The Triangle and what she described as her “own drab existence,” wondering “dear God will it ever be different?”
Although Newman had left Triangle before the fire, the disaster changed her life. The deaths of former coworkers propelled her into a lifetime of labor organizing and fighting to protect workers, especially minors, from exploitation. Her activism helped reshape public understanding of workplace safety and child labor, showing that reform comes only when society decides certain risks are unacceptable.
Throughout the 19th century, reformers had pursued piecemeal protections. Religious leaders fretted over working children who couldn’t read scripture, while secular advocates argued democracy required an educated citizenry. Early laws limited hours or required factory owners to provide basic education, but enforcement was inconsistent and protections varied state-by-state. When Newman arrived in New York City in 1901, meaningful safeguards were largely absent.
The Triangle fire changed that calculus. By 1913, Newman and her fellow organizers, including Rose Schneiderman, Clara Lemlich and Frances Perkins, helped push legislation that moved thousands of children from factory floors into classrooms and introduced workplace safety standards. The culmination came in 1938 with the Fair Labor Standards Act, establishing nationwide rules governing wages, hours and child labor.
Now many of these protections are being undermined. Since 2021, at least 17 states have rolled back child labor protections, while others have introduced legislation to diminish existing safeguards.
In Florida, proposed legislation would remove limits on working hours for 16- and 17-year-olds, potentially allowing overnight shifts during the school year. In 2023, Iowa passed laws permitting minors to work in previously restricted environments, including meat coolers. Arkansas, Missouri, Ohio and other states have pursued similar measures.
Supporters argue the changes provide flexibility for families and help businesses facing labor shortages. Opponents warn they expose minors to injury and undermine education.
Many young workers entering hazardous jobs today come from immigrant families struggling with rising living costs. Some are recent arrivals, including unaccompanied minors particularly vulnerable to exploitation. For these families, work isn’t an extracurricular activity; it means economic survival. But hardship does not make dangerous labor safe, nor should it justify dismantling protections.
Families facing financial instability often feel they have little choice but to send children into the workforce. But no family, however, should face the choice Pauline Newman once did: education or survival.
Nostalgia often shapes today’s political arguments. Lawmakers recall babysitting, shoveling snow, or scooping ice cream as teenagers. But many modern violations occur not in safe, supervised settings but in industrial workplaces where injuries can be life-altering or fatal; as was the case when in 2023 a 16-year-old Wisconsin boy died in a cotton-packing machine.
Weakening protections risks reversing more than a century of progress, undermining not only individual futures but an economy and democracy that depend on an educated workforce.
Preventing a return to early industrial exploitation doesn’t require reinventing labor law. It requires enforcing and modernizing protections already proven to work.
States can strengthen work-permit systems, as Illinois did in 2024, improving oversight and reducing violations. Civil and criminal penalties must increase so illegal child labor is not treated as a routine business expense. For example, New York has expanded enforcement authority and centralized employment records for minors, enabling fines upwards of $50,000 for serious and repeat violations. Policymakers should eliminate subminimum wages for young workers and tighten prohibitions on hazardous work, particularly in agriculture and manufacturing. Colorado has taken steps allowing injured minors to pursue private legal action, strengthening employer accountability.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire compelled Americans to confront what happens when profit outweighs protection. Reformers like Pauline Newman spent decades ensuring children would no longer bear the cost of unsafe workplaces. Reform was hard-won, and progress is never inevitable. More than a century later we ought to remember why those protections exist.
The post We’re forgetting the lessons of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire appeared first on The Forward.
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Roald Dahl’s monstrous views have a seat at the table today
Roald Dahl’s house is falling down.
It’s 1983, and the children’s author’s Buckinghamshire estate is undergoing a gut renovation. Its exposed plumbing and naked beams bespeak an unseemly core behind the author’s facade of prickly charm, cracking after publication of his incendiary review of the book God Cried, about the 1982 Lebanon War. The article, which ran in the magazine Literary Review, crossed a then-clear line from legitimate critique of Israel into antisemitic tropes of the most noxious variety.
The play Giant, now on Broadway after an Olivier Award-winning run on the West End, imagines an afternoon in which Dahl’s publishers try to cajole him into an apology he’s determined not to make.
For the greater part of the first act in Mark Rosenblatt’s crackling script, the precise nature of Dahl’s comments remains obscure. We’re told that they were condemned in the press as “the most disgraceful thing to be written in the English language in a very long time.” They were so bad as to inspire a death threat credible enough to station a police constable outside Dahl’s home.
Finally, a Jewish-American sales director from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, who has arrived to do damage control, quotes Dahl’s remarks at length following a tense lunch of salad niçoise.
“Never before in the history of man has a race of people switched so rapidly from being much-pitied victims to barbarous murderers,” Dahl wrote of Israelis — or was it simply Jews? “Never before has a race of people generated so much sympathy around the world and then, in the space of a lifetime, succeeded in turning that sympathy into hatred and revulsion. It is as though a group of much-loved nuns in charge of an orphanage had suddenly turned around and started murdering all the children.”
Is it bad to say I’ve heard worse?
Were Dahl still with us, he would have an ideological home with certain members of Corbynite Labour and the Greens, to say nothing of Roger Waters. He would not run afoul of the “Zionists in Publishing” X account that tells consumers which authors are insufficiently critical of Israel; perhaps he would be marked on reading lists as an acceptable, pro-Palestinian alternative to J.K. Rowling.
Even the context of war in Lebanon that Dahl decried has currency, as Israel now trades fire with the remnants of Hezbollah and videos of demolished apartment blocks in Beirut proliferate online. More than 1,000 have died in airstrikes, more than 1 million are displaced and a possible ground invasion looms. (The play, written well before Oct. 7, and certainly before the latest offensive in Iran, suffers from a poignant prescience.)
Can a drama built around Dahl’s screed still work with the shift of the Overton Window toward a strident, existential questioning of Israel and its influence? Remarkably, it does.
The credit is shared. John Lithgow, playing his whole repertoire from Churchill and avuncular alien to Dexter’s Ice Truck Killer, is a rangy stick of dynamite. He pivots from boyish jokes to cruel barbs that catch on his victims like nettles.
Also in the cagey chess game are Aya Cash — as the invented American FSG envoy Jessie Stone — and Elliot Levey’s Tom Maschler, Dahl’s real-life British publisher, who was a Kindertransport child from Germany.
Maschler embodies a certain Jewish-English self-effacement, angling to keep the peace and resenting Israel as an impediment to his full acceptance as an Englishman — he thinks of the country as something he’s made to defend at parties.
Stone’s more forceful, American approach — calling out Dahl for lumping all Jews together as a “single organism” — rankles her host.
Dahl waxes Goebellsian, calling her “Stein,” and has her take dictation to a Holocaust survivor bookseller in the Hudson Valley who refuses to stock his work: “The kinder of his shtetl in upstate Noo Yoik will have to make do – no, survive on a strictly kosher diet of Laura Ingalls Wilder.”
Director Nicholas Hytner has staged a boxing match for today’s discourse, without changing a line from a pre-Oct. 7 script. What makes the work sing is its refusal to resort to caricature, humanizing Dahl through his fiancée Liccy Crossland (Rachael Stirling), the tragedies of his dead daughter and disabled son and, yes, his genuine concern and justified anguish for the Lebanese and Palestinians, particularly the children.
In a quieter moment, Dahl asks Stone if she read God Cried. She tells him she was moved by an image of a legless boy with crutches. (Dahl identifies him with ease, the victim of a penetration bomb near his school, and describes in typically gruesome fashion how “his arterial blood must have sprayed everywhere like a rogue garden hose.”)
“Why is that image not enough, on its own, for you to demand a halt?” he presses Stone. “And what’s wrong with insisting Jewish people, whose country it surely is, say ‘not in my name’? Surely it’s your voice we need above all?”
This cri de coeur is common now even in Jewish circles, but the sentiment is slippery when it hints at collective blame. After his encounter with Stone, Dahl clarifies his position in a verbatim interview, infamously opining that, when it comes to Jews, “even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”
That draws a gasp from the audience and a gobsmacked expression from Dahl’s housekeeper Hallie (Stella Everett).
But just how different is this claim to Ana Kasparian saying the goyim are waking up, Candace Owens claiming Satanic pedophile “Frankists” control the world, Young Republicans praising Hitler in group chats, Tucker Carlson platforming Holocaust deniers who suggest Winston Churchill was the real villain of World War II or Joe Kent writing in his resignation letter that the U.S. is continually drawn into wars “manufactured by Israel”? At a point, the figleaf of anti-Zionism proves flimsy. Older innuendos peek out from behind.
In the literary world of today, an audiobook narrator’s call for Zionists to kill themselves is not a cancellable offense — a Zionist moderating a book talk is. (But then, being a Palestinian critic of Israel can lead to a disinvitation to a book festival or reading series — that may be cancelled when other authors withdraw in solidarity.)
Now that we are further from the Holocaust, the carnage in Gaza was broadcast to our phones and the monoculture has atomized into internet echo chambers, Dahl’s review seems pedestrian if not quite mainstream. A cause célèbre in 1983 is now a viral retweet or a chart-topping podcast. His claim that “ancient wounds” didn’t make Jews wiser, but gave them a “partial sight” of their own trespasses sounds a lot like the thesis of Peter Beinart’s last book.
With Giant’s move to Broadway, a local analogy may be in order.
Earlier this month, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji, was revealed to have contributed freelance illustrations to a book of stories by young people in Gaza compiled by the Palestinian-American writer Susan Abulhawa. Abulhawa’s social media posts, which called Israelis “vampires” and “cockroaches” and refused to distinguish between Jews and Zionists, prompted Mamdani to call her words “reprehensible,” earning him grief from pro-Palestinian quarters.
What would the response be, had the First Lady of New York provided artwork on a book of Dahl’s and his comments came to light? Abulhawa cuts a different figure: She is the daughter of Palestinian refugees and writes movingly of her people’s suffering. Yet I suspect, like her, Dahl, would have his defenders.
Just as Dahl doubled down when reached for comment on his review — the occasion of his “Hitler stinker” quote — Abulhawa responded to Mayor Mamdani’s censure in an interview by claiming American Jews were the “most privileged demographic in this country” and “the resentment that they are seeing now is stemming from the world watching the so-called Jewish State commit a genocide.”
In other words, the logic follows, the world isn’t picking on Jews for no reason. The sleeping giant of this rationale — a proverbial light sleeper — has been awakened. Dahl, it seems, was just too early to rouse it.
The play Giant is now playing at the Music Box Theatre on Broadway. Tickets and more information can be found here.
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