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The Overton Window and Zohran Mamdani: How Antisemitism Became Respectable Again
Democratic candidate for New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani reacts after winning the 2025 New York City Mayoral race, at an election night rally in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, New York, US, Nov. 4, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Jeenah Moon
In politics, people talk about the Overton Window — the range of ideas society deems acceptable to discuss in public. It shifts with time. And over the past 15 years, no form of hate has moved more dramatically from taboo to tolerance than antisemitism.
After World War II, antisemitic tropes in the United States largely lived on the margins — muttered in extremist circles, scribbled in pamphlets, and later echoed in chatrooms on the Dark Web. But somewhere between the rise of “The Squad,” the mainstreaming of anti-Zionism, and the transformation of identity politics into a hierarchy of victimhood on the left and a mirror-image grievance culture on parts of the populist right, the world’s oldest hatred has been repackaged for the modern age.
What once cost you credibility in public life now earns applause, retweets, and primetime airtime.
Antisemitism didn’t vanish — it adapted.
From the Margins to the Megaphone
The shift began before “The Squad,” but the rise of these antisemitic and anti-Israel members of Congress marked a turning point — the first-time open hostility toward Israel, and by extension the vast majority of Jews, could be celebrated as moral courage from the House floor.
When Ilhan Omar (D-MN) tweeted that Israel had “hypnotized the world” and that support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins,” she didn’t face moral reckoning. In 2019, Congress responded with a diluted resolution condemning all hatred — an “all lives matter” moment for antisemitism.
Rather than directly condemning antisemitism, Democratic Party leaders blurred it into abstraction — because calling it out was politically inconvenient. It was a watershed: the moment the Democratic Party signaled that antisemitic rhetoric, if veiled as “anti-Zionism,” was tolerable.
When Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and others began claiming that Jewish sovereignty itself was oppression, they weren’t shunned — they were lionized as purported truth-tellers. The moral vocabulary of the left, once rooted in universal rights, morphed into a simplistic hierarchy of oppressor and oppressed.
Within that framework, Jews — a historically persecuted people — were recast as “white colonizers.” It was an ideological coup: turning the survivors of genocide and mass expulsions from Arab lands into the villains of the story.
The Far Right Joins the Chorus
As the progressive left mainstreamed antisemitism in the name of “justice,” the “anti-woke” right embraced its own version in the name of “nationalism” and “America First.” The parallels to the antisemitic 1930s isolationists — Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and Father Coughlin — are unmistakable.
Conspiracy theories that merely a decade ago belonged largely to the far-left now circulate freely among populist conservatives. Tucker Carlson, once a self-styled defender of Israel, now amplifies Holocaust minimizers and open antisemites, people praising figures who idolize Hitler and Stalin, while blaming “Jewish influence” for Western decline.
They aren’t alone. Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), and Candace Owens have trafficked in antisemitic memes, “globalist” conspiracies, and blood-libel tropes that would have ended political careers a decade ago.
And on the other side, far-left pundits like Mehdi Hasan — apparently unaware of the horseshoe theory — find themselves surprised to be sharing these same figures’ social media talking points. In their mirror-image hatreds, the far right and far left converge, using the same ancient scapegoat to explain modern grievances.
Enter Mamdani: The Product of a Shifted Window
This moral drift explains how someone like Zohran Mamdani could become mayor of New York City — a city that is 12% Jewish.
Mamdani blames police brutality on Israel, claiming “the laces of the NYPD’s boots are tied by the IDF.” He instructs fellow socialists to link every domestic “austerity issue” to the US–Israel alliance — as if the 0.04 percent of the Federal budget connected to Israel explains rent prices in Brooklyn.
That isn’t criticism. It’s scapegoating — the oldest antisemitic reflex, wrapped in today’s language of social justice.
And the most revealing part is that it doesn’t hurt him politically. The use of antisemitic tropes no longer disqualifies candidates; it energizes them. The Overton Window has moved so far that such rhetoric isn’t scandalous — it’s strategy.
We’ve Seen This Movie Before
For Jews, this moment carries an echo. We’ve seen it before — in Warsaw, Minsk, Baghdad, and Tripoli — cities that were once over 30% Jewish and home to flourishing Jewish life. In each, the pattern was the same: what was once unspeakable became debatable; what was debatable became acceptable.
Within a generation, those cities became Judenrein — emptied of Jews — not by accident but by political design. It always began with talk: the idea that the Jews were powerful, disloyal, manipulative. That “the people” were suffering because of them. Then talk became action.
Americans flatter themselves that it can’t happen in the USA — that its institutions and pluralism are too strong. But Overton Windows don’t move because of evil people; they move because of complacent or cowardly ones.
The Moral Drift
Today, antisemitism doesn’t always come in jackboots. It travels in hashtags and soundbites. It calls itself “humanitarian,” “anti-imperialist,” “decolonial.” It thrives in elite universities, “progressive” city councils, and digital echo chambers — and on the identitarian right, where “replacement theory” and “globalist” conspiracies recycle the same poison in a different accent.
It comes dressed as virtue and camouflaged in the moral language of the age.
That’s why the 2019 “all hate” resolution mattered. It wasn’t merely a procedural dodge — it was a moral surrender. It told every rising activist and politician: if your antisemitism is ideological enough, you can survive it — even thrive. And thrive, they have.
Drawing the Line
There’s a Jewish lesson older than America itself: when societies decide antisemitism is acceptable — even in coded form — they do not remain moral or safe for long.
Yes, the Overton Window has shifted. But it can shift back — if we make antisemitism, in every form, politically toxic again. That means calling out the right’s conspiracies and the left’s moral inversions with equal force.
History has already shown us where silence leads. The only question is whether we recognize the warning signs — or once again pretend the rhetoric is “complicated.”
Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, antisemitism, and Jewish history and serves on the board of Herut North America.
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Debating Zionism is good for Jews, actually
A group of Jewish Theological Seminary students were furious with the chancellor’s position on Jewish statehood. In protest, they draped flags around campus before graduation, which the administration removed before the ceremony.
The year was 1948. The flags were Israeli. And the dissenting students were protesting Chancellor Louis Finkelstein’s refusal to make support for Jewish statehood part of academic commencement. Some students even arranged for the bells at nearby Union Theological Seminary to play “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem, after JTS officials declined to include it in commencement.
As a historian of American Zionism, I have been thinking about that episode while reading the many vitriolic reactions to a few JTS undergraduates who spoke out in opposition to the seminary’s decision to welcome Israeli President Isaac Herzog as this year’s graduation speaker. Once again, a JTS commencement has become a battleground over Israel, but the sides are now reversed.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether this was the right moment to extend an invitation to Herzog to speak at commencement. What deserves attention is the outraged reaction to a group of students raising objections, and the speed with which those students’ concerns have been cast as a deviation from the historical contours of mainstream American Jewish politics.
A recent Times of Israel blog post, for example, argued that the mere fact that JTS students raised concerns about Herzog was a rupture with Judaism. “Jewish survival without sovereignty is fragile,” wrote the author, Menachem Creditor, adding that “the founders of JTS did not need to debate the necessity of Jewish self-determination,” and that Herzog “represents the state of Israel and the Jewish people.”
These claims erase JTS’s long and sophisticated engagement with Jewish nationalism and the conception of Jewish peoplehood. Reading American Zionism backward risks collapsing peoplehood and statehood, and creating traditions to ratify present assumptions out of a past that never existed.
The relationship between Zionism and JTS was nuanced from the start. Both founding president Sabato Morais and the seminary’s third chancellor, Cyrus Adler, opposed Zionism on religious grounds. Morais believed the restoration of Jewish sovereignty could only come through divine intervention at the dawn of a messianic era. Adler thought of the growth of a non-religious community in the land of Israel “as the greatest misfortune that has happened to the Jews in modern times.”
Solomon Schechter, as chancellor, brought a measure of support for the Zionist movement to JTS; shaped by the cultural Zionism of Ahad Ha-am, Schechter insisted that Zionism transcended statehood. Its primary aim, he argued, was the national regeneration of global Judaism, not the creation of a secular state that would hollow out Jewish life from within.
And the controversies over the 1948 graduation exercises revealed how far Louis Finkelstein stood from political Zionism, even after the establishment of Israel. Where some Zionists celebrated sovereignty, Finkelstein remained focused on the Jewish character of the land and its people. That orientation drew him toward Judah Magnes’s binational vision — that of a federated framework in which Jews and Arabs would each hold recognized rights and a measure of national autonomy within a single shared political entity.
This reticence to conflate Judaism, Zionism and Jewish sovereignty was not limited to the seminary’s chancellors.
Henrietta Szold, JTS’s first female student, a central figure in its intellectual orbit, and the founder of Hadassah, similarly supported a binational vision from her new home in Jerusalem. Mordecai Kaplan — a longtime JTS faculty member, committed Zionist, and one of the most influential American Jewish thinkers of the 20th century — expressed concern throughout his career about the mistake of equating Jewish nationhood with Jewish statehood. In Judaism as a Civilization, he called for a “more ethical conception of nationhood fundamentally as a cultural rather than as a political relationship.”
After Israel’s founding, Kaplan went further, arguing to David Ben-Gurion in 1958 that “the basic assumption that the state of Israel is a Jewish state is itself open to question.” The Israeli government’s task, he insisted, was to establish “a modern state, not a Jewish state, an Israeli state, not a Jewish state.”
These questions did not disappear even as JTS evolved under new leadership.
Gerson Cohen, whose chancellorship beginning in 1972 marked a shift toward a more pro-statist posture, embraced the state’s significance for Jewish life and identity in ways his predecessors had not. Yet even Cohen insisted that commitment to Judaism must rest “not on political statehood or upon geography but solely on the idea of covenant and commitment to ethos.” He argued that a flourishing diaspora was a necessity for Jewish civilization as a whole, not adjunct to Israeli interests.
His successor, Chancellor Emeritus Ismar Schorsch, was more direct, saying in a recent warning that Jews must ensure that “Judaism qua religion is not submerged and shredded by the power of the Jewish state.”
One can disagree with any of these perspectives. In fact, the disagreement itself is the point.
The leaders who built JTS debated Jewish self-determination, Zionism and statehood while living through the Holocaust, the collapse of European Jewish life, existential danger in Palestine, and the precarious birth of the state of Israel. They were not naïve about antisemitism, indifferent to Jewish survival, or ignorant of Jewish sources. Nor were they unsophisticated about Zionism.
Instead, they offered a more demanding account of Zionism: one that affirmed a Jewish homeland and insisted that Jewish power remain answerable to Jewish ethics, all without diminishing Jewish life in the diaspora.
This is precisely the perspective that has been crowded out of our contemporary discourse, not because these questions were answered, but because the space to ask them has collapsed. As the boundaries of acceptable Zionist discourse have narrowed, issues that arose from within Zionism itself — the potential dangers of equating the Israeli state with the Jewish people, the risks of elevating political statehood above other ethical and communal commitments, and the need to have diaspora Jewish life be seen as carrying independent religious and moral weight — have come to be treated as anti-Zionist rather than part of a living internal debate.
The furor over the JTS undergraduates’ letter objecting to Herzog is a troubling sign that, across American Jewish life, it has become harder to think honestly about the risks of treating support for the state of Israel not merely as a Jewish commitment, but as one that takes precedence over other all other Jewish commitments. When the past is rewritten so that the equation of peoplehood and statehood appears inevitable, American Jews are left with a false choice: either embrace the state as an unquestioned and unquestionable expression of Jewish identity, or abandon Jewish life altogether.
JTS has offered its students a richer education because, in its halls, the relationship between the Jewish people and the Jewish state has been debated and contested. That discourse is not a failure of Jewish commitment, but an expression of it. The sustained engagement with the hardest questions of Zionism is one of the best things JTS has given American Jewish life, and one of the most important gifts it still has to offer.
The post Debating Zionism is good for Jews, actually appeared first on The Forward.
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ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan Sidesteps ‘Genocide’ Accusations Against Israel
International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan speaks during an interview with Reuters in The Hague, Netherlands, Feb. 12, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Piroschka van de Wouw
Karim Khan, the embattled chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), has cast fresh doubt on accusations that Israel committed “genocide” in Gaza, arguing in a new interview that no legal conclusion has yet been reached in the ongoing legal battle.
In a lengthy interview with anti-Israel journalist Medhi Hasan this week, Khan refused to engage in the popularized rhetoric labeling Israel’s military campaign against Hamas terrorists in Gaza as genocidal, even as pressure mounts on the ICC by activists to pursue more sweeping charges against Israeli officials.
When asked directly whether Israel’s conduct amounted to genocide, Khan emphasized the need for sufficient evidence to level charges against Israeli officials and that prosecutors must follow evidence and legal standards rather than political narratives.
“So, you’re not ruling out that there could be a warrant in the future?” Hasan asked.
“Everything is a function of evidence,” Khan responded, arguing that accusing Israel of genocide for political purposes would be “reckless.”
“You’re saying in the past three years there hasn’t been evidence of genocide in Gaza?” Hasan asked, visibly flummoxed.
Khan lamented the “suffering” in Gaza but reaffirmed that the ICC could not proceed in making final judgements about the nature of Israel’s military operations in Gaza without sufficient evidence. He asserted that officials within the ICC are vigorously analyzing the case and that he cannot reveal more about the nature of the investigation.
“So, genocide is not off limits?” Hasan pressed.
“No crime is off limits if the evidence is there,” Khan responded.
Khan has come under fire for making his initial surprise demand for arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, on the same day in May 2024 that he suddenly canceled a long-planned visit to both Gaza and Israel to collect evidence of alleged war crimes. The last-second cancellation reportedly infuriated US and British leaders, as the trip would have offered Israeli leaders a first opportunity to present their position and outline any action they were taking to respond to the war crime allegations.
Nonetheless, Khan’s latest remarks are likely to reverberate through international legal and diplomatic circles, where the genocide accusation has become one of the most contentious aspects of the war between Israel and Hamas. Over the past two years, an array of humanitarian organizations and human rights experts have accused Israel of “genocide” in Gaza. These accusations have been controversial and widely contested, with critics alleging these groups and individuals lack sufficient evidence.
Khan’s comments come as the ICC faces intense scrutiny over its investigation into the conflict. In November, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and now-deceased Hamas terror leader Ibrahim al-Masri (better known as Mohammed Deif) for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict. The ICC said there were reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and Gallant were criminally responsible for starvation in Gaza and the persecution of Palestinians — charges vehemently denied by Israel, which has provided significant humanitarian aid into the war-torn enclave throughout the war.
US and Israeli officials issued blistering condemnations of the ICC move, decrying the court for drawing a moral equivalence between Israel’s democratically elected leaders and the heads of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that launched the war in Gaza with its massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Israel says it has gone to unprecedented lengths to try and avoid civilian casualties, noting its efforts to evacuate areas before it targets them and to warn residents of impending military operations with leaflets, text messages, and other forms of communication.
Another challenge for Israel is Hamas’s widely recognized military strategy of embedding its terrorists within Gaza’s civilian population and commandeering civilian facilities like hospitals, schools, and mosques to run operations and direct attacks.
The ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel as it is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, which established the court. Other countries including the US have similarly not signed the ICC charter. However, the ICC has asserted jurisdiction by accepting “Palestine” as a signatory in 2015, despite no such state being recognized under international law.
Genocide is among the most difficult crimes to prove under international law because prosecutors must establish specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
Hasan, one of the most prominent anti-Israel critics in media, has spent the past two years unleashing an unrelenting barrage of criticism against the Jewish state, repeatedly accusing the Israeli military of pursuing a “genocide” in Gaza.
In the interview, Khan also forcefully denied allegations of sexual misconduct that have engulfed his office in recent months, accusing critics of politicizing the claims amid the ICC’s high-profile investigations into Israel, Russia, and other global conflicts. He dismissed suggestions that his pursuit of Israeli leaders was intended to distract from the allegations against him, saying that he did not have evidence to substantiate the claim.
Khan further alleged that senior Western officials attempted to pressure the ICC over its investigation, including what he described as warnings from prominent American and British political figures about the geopolitical consequences of targeting Israeli officials.
The ICC’s investigation has placed the court at the center of an increasingly bitter international divide over the Gaza war. Khan’s comments won’t settle the debate, but the ICC prosecutor appeared to signal a more cautious legal approach than some of Israel’s fiercest critics have demanded.
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UK Police Charge Two Men in Connection with Filming Antisemitic TikTok Videos
The TikTok logo is pictured outside the company’s US head office in Culver City, California, US, Sep. 15, 2020. Photo: REUTERS
British police have charged two men with religiously aggravated harassment offenses after they were alleged to have traveled to a Jewish area of north London to film antisemitic social media videos.
The two men, Adam Bedoui, 20, and Abdelkader Amir Bousloub, 21, are due to appear at Thames Magistrates’ Court, a statement from the Crown Prosecution Service said on Saturday.