The election of antisemitic Mayor Zohran Mamdani in New York, a Jewish fortress since the early 20th century, raises alarm. Many recognize similarities between the current situation of Jews and Israel in the world and the severe crisis of the Jewish people in the first half of the 20th century. The differences for the better are enormous.
The most important among them – a Jewish nation-state established itself in the land, Jews of Islamic lands were rescued from oppression and danger, and American Jews became full and prosperous members of the American nation. All these developments and advances in Jewish centers empowered Jews personally and collectively to the point where the fateful helplessness that afflicted Jews in the 1930s seemed, until recently, like a distant past. But is this past so distant and irrelevant?
No, when considering a very important characteristic of the death trap that European Jews fell into after World War I – it was then a trap from the right and from the left, and also from the center. Jews then faced fascist, Nazi, and communist enemies, and antisemitism even influenced wide circles on the right and left.
Already in the 1920s, European Jews fell into a trap – in the new antisemitic states founded in Europe after World War I, in the antisemitic turn that occurred afterward in Communist Russia in the 1930s, and in the spread of fascism and Nazism in Western and Central Europe.
If the victors in World War II had been Stalin and Hitler, and not Stalin and the West – the Holocaust would have been, God forbid, only a prelude to the complete extermination of Jews and Judaism. We have some understanding of this vision, which didn't materialize, from the fact that several years after the war, in the 1950s, Stalin planned to send Jews to extermination again – this time in Siberia, not Auschwitz. Only his death at age 74 thwarted the plot.
One must not ignore the disturbing connections between the antisemitic coalitions then and now. An alliance between Islamic antisemitism and Nazism occurred even before World War II, in Iraq and Egypt as well, not just through Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the Arab leader in the land who was Hitler's agent. And it was preceded by an alliance of communist Arabs and Jews in the land with the Arab murder campaign in 1929, shortly before Stalin launched an antisemitic campaign in Russia.
Communist antisemitism experienced a hiatus during World War II and afterward. But the hiatus ended in 1950, and communism returned and became an enemy of the State of Israel and the Jewish people in Russia and the communist bloc. Since then, there has been historical continuity in leftist antisemitism in Europe and the US, sometimes disguised as anti-Zionism "only" and sometimes as "just criticism" of Israel. The connection between the self-hating Jewish Senator Bernie Sanders and the antisemitic mayor elected in New York is a link in this chain.
"Historical pedigree" also exists for Islamic antisemitism, which fundamentally denies Jewish sovereignty or their connection to the Land of Israel, and also for the alliance between it and fascist forces in the world. Since the 1980s, it has ridden the waves of Muslim immigration to the West. But what's new now, together with the intensification of immigration, is an alliance between left and right on the basis of antisemitic propaganda and the dominance of Muslim antisemitism.
Mamdani's socialists are not embarrassed when his election is celebrated with swastikas on synagogues, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon's socialists in France lean on Muslim antisemitism. This is fundamentally different from the situation in the 1930s. Then, communists and fascists were declared enemies, and communists concealed their antisemitism. Today, our enemies unite around antisemitic propaganda – socialists and social-libertarian rightists, Islamists and fascists, radical progressives and those close to power.
Therefore, the left and right here must not sink into mutual accusations regarding antisemitism, but rather understand that the enemy is multi-armed, and that we must go out against the antisemites "from our side" – the Israeli left against the Sanderses and Mélenchons of all varieties, and the right against antisemites from the circle of US Vice President JD Vance, or for example, Germany's Alternative for Germany party.
